I had watched the "SliMP3" hardware player for quite a while, but it's cost and my unfamiliarity with it prevented me from ever getting one. Back in April, they had a sale on the "next generation" verion, the squeezebox, at slimdevices.com, and have since lowered their prices.
I got several of tem when they were on sale, and I've been totally happy with it. They have wifi and ethernet versions, and the best part is that it just worked. I was worried that since I have my music in FLAC format it would be a problem, but their software detected it and just did the right thing. It was super easy to set up.
Want to try it out without buying a device? There are several software projects that can use a regular Linux machine to act as a client. SoftSqueeze, IIRC, is a Java program that accurately emulates the squeezebox.
The hardware devices can be synced together, so they play the same music in sync. That's pretty neat. Or you can unsync them and have different music in different rooms.
The problem is not that Bush is taking post-9/11 intelligence too seriously. I don't believe he is, with all the cuts in the intelligence departments, but that's a different matter. The problem is that he's taking the intelligence, which says the tubes are not the right stuff for nuclear WMDs, and telling we the people that they are for WMDs.
Don't just blame this on Democrats, either. I'm a registered Republican, and I'm not at all happy with how Bush and his administration are running the country.
As far as boycotting Slashdot subscriptions, I think I'll pass. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and get a subscription because of your suggestion.
I first heard about the rockets and the yellowcake shortly after I finished reading Daniel Ellsberg's book "The Pentagon Papers". I found many parallels to what may be going on here in the current administration. For example, in the book we learn that McNamera was talking to Ellsberg about whether things were better in Vietnam over the last year, and came up with the answer that they were worse. At the end of the flight, McNamera got off the plane and told reporters that things were far better than a year ago.
In another location he tells the story of one of the guy in Vietnam who was one of the few people who actually visited most of the locations in South Vietnam. He had a meeting with the President, but before that was meeting with the Cheif of Staff. The CoS was saying "I think the war will be over within the year. The guy from Vietnam (sorry, bad with names, Paul someone?) said "Oh, I think we can hold out at least TWO years." His meeting with the President was canceled on the spot.
The point I'm trying to make is that information doesn't necessarily flow as it should. In the case of Vietnam, the President wanted a victory. Just like the current administration, from their first National Security meeting was talking about what they had to do to attack Iraq. It seems that that and the tax cut were the two largest "no negotiation" points with the administration.
I'm forced to wonder if the same thing is happening in this administration. The second-tier staff are insulating the President from some of the evidence, because of his drive to attack Iraq.
I also just recently finished Paul O'Neil's book about his time as Secretary of the Treasury. It goes into details about how the President was ignoring the evidence and recommendations from O'Neil and Alan Greenspan that the numbers behind the tax cut were not realistic, and rejected their recommendations to put in triggers so that if the budget did not meet the expectations the government wouldn't be stuck in a shortfall. As we've seen since then, Greenspan and O'Neil were right.
So, did the same thing happen with Iraq? Well, we've already seen that the government had intelligence that the Weapons of Mass Destruction weren't there, and they were telling the public otherwise. So, what can we assume about the other intelligence?
My wife pointed out that ebay is one of the most powerful resources in recycling that we have today. I'd have to agree. I don't know what Office Depot is doing with these machines, but wouldn't you rather have your old gear to go someone that can make use of it?
For example, I recently got a "new" used car. It came with tired I didn't particularly like. I replaced the tires in fairly short order, and sold the old ones on ebay. They were a mis-matched pair. One pair I sold and because of shipping difficulties I ended up losing about $5 on it. That's less than the $20 I would have paid to take them to the dump, which is probably what would have happened if not for ebay. And now someone has a pair of tires in good shape that they can make use of.
The other pair I sold for $90, because they were not an "off brand".
I've been putting a bunch of my junk up for sale. Things that aren't really useful to me, but are to other folks. Plus, once in a while you come across the rare things like the Dreamcast Ethernet adapter that I sold for twice what I paid for it, or my classic HP calculator which looks like it will sell for almost twice what I paid for it.
Usually, I first offer it to local folks in my Linux Users Group. Selling is much easier that way, and you don't tend to have to muck around with shipping. ebay makes shipping pretty easy though.
So, remember that recycling isn't just about giving things to the "recycling centers". If you can get it to someone who can use it, all the better. If you can recover a few bucks in the process, all the better.
As the owner of a small Linux company, we often speak to people in a similar position to the original poster. One thing that we see over and over is people who don't have jobs, yet they don't seem to be doing anything related to what their job might be. If you love programming, why aren't you working on open source projects?
Another way to get some experience for your job-seeking is volunteering. Two examples that come to mind are, our local Humane Society always seems to be looking for people with computer experience. We also have an Internet Cooperative which is run by volunteers and could severely do with some additional help. Don't worry it might be "desktop router" experience, we have a DS-3 and a 100mbps long-haul ethernet over fiber, BGP, ATM, and other toys to play with.
Either of these would be good ways of getting experience and would look great on a resume.
Quoting: "the best implementations are written by those who've mastered assembly language".
I haven't read this book, but I'd hope that there would be some pretty good justification of the above statement. I suspect that it's not, though. First of all, who defines what the "best implementation" is?
As Knuth says, the first rule of program optimization is: "Don't do it". Trying to optimize a program when you're writing it leads to all sorts of problems including difficult to maintain code, increated time and budget required for the project, and often it's not even a hot spot anyway.
I used to be very concerned about using making my code fast, but have (over the decades) decided that making it obvious is much more important than speed, particularly in the initial implementation. Profiling allows you to concentrate on the 20% of the code that the program is actually spending 80% of it's time in, instead of guessing where the hot spots are going to be.
I've found that another benefit of using simpler code is that I'm more likely to throw away whole sections of simpler code and try radically different algorithms or mechanisms. More complicated code I find I'll try to just tweek instead of dumping wholesale. Randically different approaches can lead to 10x speedups where tweeks of existing code may give you 2x speedups, if you're lucky.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for trying different approaches. I'm not sure I would have come to the same conclusion I have now if I hadn't spent quite a long time trying to write optimized code. It was a very different world back then, but I know I wasted a lot of time optimizing code that didn't at all need it. It was an experience though.
The problem with POTS is that some people DO NOT LIKE TALKING ON THE PHONE. It actually took me quite a long time to realize that you have to be careful to communicate with people in the way in which they are most comfortable.
I'm one of these people who absolutely hates talking on the phone. Which is a challenge, becaues we have clients who absolutely hate communicating in e-mail. We've realized that we were losing business because we weren't communicating in the right way with certain of our clients.
Switching over to only POTS communication, even with us having an 800 toll-free number, just isn't an absolute solution. Particularly as I really like working in coffee shops and other locations, to get out of the office.
Don't suggest "Get a cell phone", I hate talking on the cell phone more than on a landline, because of the whole "Hello? Hello?" shite. I carry a cell phone to let clients contact me in emergencies, but I always try to conduct non-urgent business on a landline because I always seem to end up in crappy coverage areas.
I'm moving in a direction of becoming much more anal about what e-mail is allowed through. Changing the default from "allow mail in" to "block mail" and then whitelisting clients, addresses we send to, mailing lists, etc. Others can contact us by phone or through a web form.
I need to think about that more, but something needs to be done. It's just impossible for us to deal with an average of 2,000 or more spams per day per person AND get our job done.
The spam problem is unlikely to go away until people start treating it like the attack on the Internet that it is.
I've noticed an annoying trend lately that e-mail sent to businesses is frequently getting just ignored. Certainly it seems much more frequent this year than in the past. I've wondered if this is simply because so many e-mail boxes are getting filled up as fast as the spammers can send.
I'd suspect that the city of Baltimore wouldn't be having any problems if spam weren't such a problem. If the number of messages they had to deal with dropped by 5 to 20 times (depending on which estimates of current spam levels you believe), they could probably just leave the mail where it is.
This is all something I've been struggling with, being a small business owner doing business on the net. My company of 5 people gets between 4,000 and 20,000 borderline spams per day. By borderline, I mean that we throw away obvious viruses and things which score above a certain score in SpamAssasin (I think it's 9). So, that doesn't count the super spammy messages.
If it weren't for our fairly strict and complicated spam blocker setup, and a very powerful machine, we couldn't get the few hundred messages per day that are of interest to us. Spam is killing e-mail. I'm not sure why more people aren't treating it as an attack, but it's really hard to get anyone's interest to take some action. Canceling accounts doesn't even begin to solve the problem.
In the mean time, the City of Baltimore is suffering...
I haven't worked with it yet, but I keep threatening to set up Argus. Argus is nice because it logs packet headers so it can answer questions like "How long was it taking to get SYN ACKs back last Friday between 5:02 and 5:05am", "What was all this traffic yesterday morning at 8am", etc.
SmokePing, which uses rrdtool as a backend, is a great tool for graphically displaying ping informaiton.
Netsaint is very good for monitoring systems and networks and letting you know ASAP when there's a problem. It can also use rrdtool to generate graphs of packet loss and ping latency.
All of the above are things that will give you current as well as historic information. Current information is good, but historic information is incredibly important. Trending is the obvious thing, allowing you to predict future use to some extent. More importantly, it lets you examine things that happened recently but aren't currently happening, and to see recurring issues.
Recently, our local Internet cooperative was having problems where one of the upstream connections was going into very high packet loss and dropping it's BGP peer. We keep fairly high resolution traffic statistics through ganglia, another rrdtool based network system. That along with the RRD CGI grapher allowed us to create custom graphs of traffic with very high resolution, for days and weeks past, overlaying multiple sources.
Once we did that, it became obvious that every time we ran into these problems, one of our members was hitting the line somewhat hard. It wasn't hard enough that it pegged the line from a bandwidth standpoint, but it apparently was hard enough that it caused some part of the network to experience extremely high packet loss.
That was definitely a case where having the right tool allowed us to track down a fairly hard to see problem. Because our line was not at all saturated, we spent a lot of time looking for things like bad cables, ports with lots of accumulating errors, etc...
My experience with hiring and business would steer me away from hiring family in most cases. We've found, after quite a bit of experimenting, that sometimes things just don't work out, and when that happens it's best to just cut the ties and try something else. While it's usually best for everyone involved, there can definitely be hurt feelings from the fired employee.
We try very hard to make sure that the person we're hiring is a good fit before hiring, but you just can't really tell until they're in place. Much of it is our work environment, which is rather self-directed. It's also kind of isolating, just because of us all working on computers. So, it's fairly easy for people not to fit in to the environment.
For example. At one point we hired the ex-girlfriend of a good friend of ours. She hated our work environment, and left within two weeks. She was quite bitter about it, for reasons I don't fully understand. She ended up giving our mutual friend an ear-full, apparently, and we've hardly spoken since.
If everything works out well, hiring a relative could work out great. In most cases you know a relative better than you know random other people you will hire. However, our experience has been that it's much more likely not to work out.
We've found it's important to be able to easily stop the relationship as early as possible when it's not working out. It's hard enough doing this with just random people or aquaintances. With relatives, I can only imagine it's harder and may cause even more problems if there are hard feelings.
Take, for example, a business associate of ours. They hired a person to do sales a year ago. They've been paying his salary during that time, and he hasn't actually sold anything. Literally nothing. The contacts he said he had were all the wrong kinds of contacts, and in the mean-time he's spent a lot of time spinning his wheels trying to sell this particularly specialized ASP service.
I'm also a fair bit of a Road Warrior, but with a slightly different feel. I work at home, and most of my time spent away from the office is to local coffee shops or geek gatherings around town, with occasional trips to the next town or out of town. I make these trips probably an average of once a day, though, and carry my laptop with me everywhere.
So, here's some information about what I carry in my "kits":
In my pockets:
An LG-5350 cell phone. I like that it's a flip-phone, which reduces the opportunity for breaking the display as I did with my previous Nokia phone. I bought it largely because it has a charging cradle that can be used with the USB cable to provide long-term net access if necessary.
Casio Exilim EX-Z4 4 megapixel camera. I carry this literally everywhere with me. It's an amazingly capable camera that is no bother to carry everywhere. I selected it over the Optio S because of the much larger display.
Photon Micro Light 2. I prefer this over the 3 because I've experienced much longer battery life and I think the user interface is better on the 2.
In my computer bag, which I carry 90% of the time I go anywhere. My computer bag is an Eagle Creek small shoulder bag with upgraded padded shoulder strap that includes a sticky ruberized side to reduce sliping off your shoulder.
IBM ThinkPad X30. This is my primary computer, and I think it's a great mix of portable and useable. It's small, less than 4 pounds, but has a totally functional keyboard. People are amazed that I can carry a full computer in such a small bag. In fact, my bag's main compartment can carry two of these.
Sennheiser PX-100 headphones. These aren't the smallest headphones, but they're very comfortable, sound fantastic for a $35 pair of headphones, and fold up into a small "eye glasses" carry case. These replaced some in-the-ear Sony headphones that were much smaller, but less comfortable and sounded dramatically worse.
Knoppix. Fantastic for checking out hardware or "fixing" the public terminal at the coffee shop when it gets too infected with Windows viruses. Or when someone asks "What is Linux like?"
Merlin C-201 CDMA card. This gives me net access in places where there's no net access.
Prism-based Mini-PCI card in my laptop. I love this card because I can easily set it up to run in Access Point mode, and so for free I carry an Access Point with me everywhere. Great for allowing my SO to get net access via my laptop and the CDMA card. I have the laptop configured so when I insert the CDMA card it sets up as an AP and does NAT, with a DHCP server running on the WiFi network.
USB cable for connecting my cell phone to my laptop. I almost never use this, unless the CDMA card is acting up.
Slim AC power adapter. Even with my second battery, eventually I'll often need to charge up. Also useful since my SO carries so many books with her, that she's stopped carrying her own power.
A Sharpie pen. Writes on nearly anything.
A backup Sharpie pen. Yes, dual redundant Sharpies.
Screen Wipes for when my display or glasses get too dirty. I currently use Techspray "zero charge screen and keyboard cleaners", which come individually packaged, but tend to leave an annoying residue behind unless you use some other dry wipe immediately (or sooner) after cleaning. Not entirely happy with the residue, but the packaging is great.
Individually package hand wipes. Handy to have around.
Finally, I periodically have another larger bag which I carry in my car for our weekly Hacking Society or other geek meetings. It has a pile of stuff in it:
HP 8-port switch (donated to Hacking Society by HP). Auto-MDIX so we don't have to worry about cross over cables.
25 foot extension cable.
6 different power strips. Handy for LUG meetings and at hotels where they often don't have enough power
Comcast is running commercials about how easy it is to lose a satellite connection? I find that amusing because I just canceled my cablemodem net service because I was fed up with all the outages on it. We didn't have cable TV, so maybe that was never impacted when we had the problems, but I never found Comcast to be overly concerned about uptime.
When we first got the cablemodem it was great. That was when it was Excite@Home. The first year we had no outages at all, it was rock solid. Then after AT&T bought it out, it was still ok, but IIRC we had an outage or two during the next year. The last 8 months of Comcast has just been horrible though.
Anyway, I know you're not looking for cablemodem information. It's just that I choked on my lunch when I saw the thing about Comcast saying the satellite systems suffered from severe outages.
The people I know with satellite don't complain about having problems, and haven't switched to other technology over the the years they've had them, so I'm wondering if it's really anywhere near that bad.
You clearly want to look at the Soekris small form factor computer like the 4801, mini-PCI WiFi cards such as the kits available for the Soekris at NetGate, and set them up with a 128MB CF card instead of a hard drive and install Pebble Linux on it.
The end result of this is a small integrated PC with no moving parts, and mounts it's file-system read-only so no worries about corruption, with a built-in access point. These work great, and are a bit larger than the size of a VHS casette.
I've deployed a number of these, and they are rock solid. Plus, they have advanced routing capabilities thanks to Linux, and the ability to block infected or abusive users from re-associating with the AP.
As far as going with 802.11 a or g... You must be pulling in some pretty mighty bandwidth to need to use something faster than 802.11g. Pebble includes "MadWiFi", a driver for some a/g cards, but I haven't used it.
I have mine set up ceiling-mount, upside down, with no keystone correction. My screen is a Da-Lite model Video "B". The screen is 75" diag, or 58"x48". At 88" from the screen, the image is 49" to 57", depending on the "zoom" setting.
I have a friend that does A/V for a local hotel, and gave me a screen. They had a whole pile of them that had various defects that they wanted to get rid of, and we were able to locate one that didn't have any problems in the viewable area. They're fairly huge screens. We're considering getting a new screen one of these days, but this does a great job.
Other friends of mine who got projectors after we did (we kind of started a trend here) are just projecting on the wall. We were considering just painting a flat white square on the wall, but the free screen put an end to that.
I think we're projecting it at around 60", but I'm thinking about moving it back some. This size works well for viewing during the day and the night (we don't have curtains on a few windows, so we don't have as much control of lighting as would be ideal). We always leave it at the "fully expanded" setting for zoom, so I think we'd be fine to move it back another 2 to 4 feet, but that would require re-cabling and moving the ceiling mount... So, I haven't done it yet...
I find it kind of hard to imagine playing the Playstation on a computer display.
Back in the late <gasp> '80s, I bought a 27" Sony TV, and declared that I wasn't going to do anything but replace broken video gear until HDTV came out. 15 years later, I've finally broken down and replaced the (still functional) altar to the entertainment gods.
Nearly a year ago, we finally fell to the temptation of getting a projector. The thing that finally made this happen was the InFocus X1. This is a Not only is the price of the projector quite reasonable, the operating cost is down from $1 per hour (many projectors have $300 bulbs that last around 300 hours) to under $0.10 per hour (the X1 bulb is still around $300, but it lasts 10 times as long).
So, while it's not a TV tuner card, I just had to provide some feedback. We love the projector, it doesn't take up much space, it's easily portable, it makes a 45" TV seem small.
That said, I've heard good things about the Haupage tuner cards using the Brooktree chipset. I haven't tried any of them in over 5 years, so they've surely changed. However, they seemed to work great using Video 4 Linux drivers.
Several of our local users groups got copies of this message. The message in part says that their goals are to find out where "Microsoft should be focusing on to help our customers over the next".
This makes me wonder about the integrity of their claims, because it's hard to imagine that anyone at Microsoft believes that the best way to reach their customers is via Linux Users Groups. So, if that's not really their intention, what ARE they trying to do?
One of the guys in our local user's group, Anthony Earl, suggested that we give them some ideas that will slow them down, like strict security on the desktop. James DeWitt suggested "Clippy, only MUCH BIGGER!"
Sean
You're only dropping obvious jokes on one end though. I'm not sure if people are just being silly, or aren't understanding the time_t entry, but there are a lot of super optimistic entries.
For example, in the new pool there are a dozen or so entries within the next month. Do they think we're talking about 2.7?
First of all, starting from the end of the post, out-sourcing and off-shoring are two fairly different things. Perhaps not to someone who's just lost their job to one of them, but they do provide different sets of challenges (scheduling and language barriers, for example).
Now, on to the meat of it. I work at a company that provides outsourced system and network administration and occasional programming services. Here's my take on it.
The manouvers that the outsourcing company in the post made were, IMHO, bad business. Unfortunately, those are the sort of business deals that tend to separate the big, profitable shops from the smaller shops. Where I work, we've never gotten anyone fired in order to get more work, and in fact once had a significant client hire one of our employees away from us.
In general, we always try to work with a company to augment their existing staff. Working together to provide the optimum solution, instead of trying to force-feed the most profitable solution. That approach has worked well for us, resulting in a stable client list that is very happy with our work.
One of the things that we've found, however, is that we can often provide results similar to hiring a staff of two experienced admins for what it would cost to hire a very junior admin. The benefits being that we have multiple perspectives that can be used to help provide a solid solution to problems, with an average of around 15 years of industry experience each. Experienced folks tend to get more done faster, so in the few hours a day or week we help one client, we can often get as much done as a Junior person, particularly if they're the only one handling sys admin (not uncommon for a small company).
It does sound like this company acted in a way that I don't think is very honorable (selling marketing in the disguise of an audit). I'm not sure it's fair to paint all outsourcing companies with that same brush, however.
Sean
Most of us in my company have been working from home since we began back in 1995. We do Linux consulting and programming, for reference.
The freedom is great, as you mention, but if done wrong it can definitely lead to problems. None of us have children around the house, which I suspect can change things drastically. I've heard others say that if you have children, you pretty much HAVE to have an office and make it well known that you can't be bothered there except for an emergency.
Anyway, back to my story. We've found that having an office can really help. With more than one person working from home, we found it was required, otherwise it was too easy to get distracted by other people. If you're home alone, this may not help as much, but some people find that "going in to the office", even if it's just down the hall, helps you concentrate.
As far as the lack of human contact... I've found several things that help this. About 2 years ago we found a coffee shop that claimed to be wired. We ended up bringing an AP with a modem to dial in to get some net. About 8 months after we started going there about once a week, they put in a high speed line and their own AP. We now go 2 to 4 times a week and call it "our office away from the office".
The coffee shop is interesting because you can develop friends there, often with much more diversity than in your office, but in general people also leave you alone because they don't know you, or they came to do something as well. Even a few high-priced beverages cost far less than a dedicated office. For a change of scene, try a different coffee shop. You can hardly throw a stone without hitting a coffee shop with an AP in it these days.
Another thing we've done is started hanging out more with our identified communities. In our case, that's largely other geeks, but you get the idea. Going to more LUG meetings, including meetings that we probably wouldn't normally drive to after a day in the office.
Also, I started a meat-space group called Hacking Society 2 years ago and we now have several regular chapters. The idea is that we meet once a week in a regular place to work on various topics. The Boulder, Colorado chapter meets in a coffee shop, we meet in an office here. It's a good way to spend some time with a bunch of good folks. You should start a chapter in your area.;-)
As far as the question of an office. We had office space at one point. It was a nice change of pace, going to the office, but we had really nice space. My office looked out down main-street in our town and everyone walked by. It was fantastic, but cost $1400/month. We made good use of it, but it was way too expensive. I've often thought of getting some part time office space, but it's never been a high priority for me.
Also, it should be noted that we have developed rather good communication skills. We have an IRC channel open for the company which we use for a lot of the "office chatter" stuff. We also heavily use e-mail. We have phones as well, but mostly that's used for client contact. We all prefer the electronic, less intrusive mechanisms.
We did have problems with one employee we hired who quit because she couldn't "stand sending e-mail or IRC messages to someone in the same room". The rest of us couldn't stand being interrupted in mid-thought because she came up to us, for something that could wait 5 minutes until we checked IRC or e-mail. That just didn't work out.
There are all kinds of different people, and the above works well for us, but obviously didn't work well for at least one of the people we hired. It's important to find out what works for you, but those are some of the things I've found.
The obvious problem with this is that it provides the senders with more information. Using URLs that are unique per recipient, it allows them to track who is likely using these filters, that the address is valid, what IP address is associated with the e-mail address, etc...
In particular, you may be telling the spammer that you are more likely to see their message if they work hard at getting it through this particular filter (say, by not using a URL, or slightly mangling the URL).
I really wouldn't want the spammers to be able to build up a database of what IP addresses I frequently use for reading my e-mail. I would implement the scanning on a central server, but many people do not have that option.
Regulation may or may not work. What would really work would be if the government (Microsoft's biggest customer, I've heard) stopped buying their products in favor of others that are more secure. Re-evaluate that when Microsoft's products have less of an issue.
I know that all systems have some security problems or another. I don't recall any of them having sent me a thousand e-mail messages every day, though. And it's not like this is the first time.
Let the government talk with it's money and people will listen.
Personally, I don't really like my tax money going so much to Microsoft. For one thing, I don't like that the privacy of my information and security of the systems relies on something that seems to have so many problems.
Using the number of web-site defacements probably isn't a very good metric of how secure an OS is. Windows runs more desktops where Linux runs more servers (as a vast generalization). Also, compromising a server running virtual hosting for 200 clients may count as 200 sites defaced due to one insecure server. You get the idea.
The reason Windows gets so much scorn about security is that it has this whole class of security issues that are much less an issue under Linux. Linux people don't tend to send around binaries for people to execute. In Windows it's very common to send executable attachments, but they implemented that while shunning safe ways of doing it.
For example, if Microsoft hadn't scorned Java, in favor of their in-house technology which has huge security issues, they could have been using sandboxes to limit the access this arbitrary code has to your system.
All systems have problems if you don't regularly update the software. There are things that can help that, but in general I think it's safe to assume that all systems need to be regularly updated to be secure.
There are a whole different class of problems that Windows seems to suffer from, which Microsoft hasn't really addressed. Obivously, they need to.
Slashdot Mirror
I got several of tem when they were on sale, and I've been totally happy with it. They have wifi and ethernet versions, and the best part is that it just worked. I was worried that since I have my music in FLAC format it would be a problem, but their software detected it and just did the right thing. It was super easy to set up.
Want to try it out without buying a device? There are several software projects that can use a regular Linux machine to act as a client. SoftSqueeze, IIRC, is a Java program that accurately emulates the squeezebox.
The hardware devices can be synced together, so they play the same music in sync. That's pretty neat. Or you can unsync them and have different music in different rooms.
I am so happy with the Squeezebox.
Sean
The problem is not that Bush is taking post-9/11 intelligence too seriously. I don't believe he is, with all the cuts in the intelligence departments, but that's a different matter. The problem is that he's taking the intelligence, which says the tubes are not the right stuff for nuclear WMDs, and telling we the people that they are for WMDs.
Don't just blame this on Democrats, either. I'm a registered Republican, and I'm not at all happy with how Bush and his administration are running the country.
As far as boycotting Slashdot subscriptions, I think I'll pass. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and get a subscription because of your suggestion.
Sean
I first heard about the rockets and the yellowcake shortly after I finished reading Daniel Ellsberg's book "The Pentagon Papers". I found many parallels to what may be going on here in the current administration. For example, in the book we learn that McNamera was talking to Ellsberg about whether things were better in Vietnam over the last year, and came up with the answer that they were worse. At the end of the flight, McNamera got off the plane and told reporters that things were far better than a year ago.
In another location he tells the story of one of the guy in Vietnam who was one of the few people who actually visited most of the locations in South Vietnam. He had a meeting with the President, but before that was meeting with the Cheif of Staff. The CoS was saying "I think the war will be over within the year. The guy from Vietnam (sorry, bad with names, Paul someone?) said "Oh, I think we can hold out at least TWO years." His meeting with the President was canceled on the spot.
The point I'm trying to make is that information doesn't necessarily flow as it should. In the case of Vietnam, the President wanted a victory. Just like the current administration, from their first National Security meeting was talking about what they had to do to attack Iraq. It seems that that and the tax cut were the two largest "no negotiation" points with the administration.
I'm forced to wonder if the same thing is happening in this administration. The second-tier staff are insulating the President from some of the evidence, because of his drive to attack Iraq.
I also just recently finished Paul O'Neil's book about his time as Secretary of the Treasury. It goes into details about how the President was ignoring the evidence and recommendations from O'Neil and Alan Greenspan that the numbers behind the tax cut were not realistic, and rejected their recommendations to put in triggers so that if the budget did not meet the expectations the government wouldn't be stuck in a shortfall. As we've seen since then, Greenspan and O'Neil were right.
So, did the same thing happen with Iraq? Well, we've already seen that the government had intelligence that the Weapons of Mass Destruction weren't there, and they were telling the public otherwise. So, what can we assume about the other intelligence?
Sean
My wife pointed out that ebay is one of the most powerful resources in recycling that we have today. I'd have to agree. I don't know what Office Depot is doing with these machines, but wouldn't you rather have your old gear to go someone that can make use of it?
For example, I recently got a "new" used car. It came with tired I didn't particularly like. I replaced the tires in fairly short order, and sold the old ones on ebay. They were a mis-matched pair. One pair I sold and because of shipping difficulties I ended up losing about $5 on it. That's less than the $20 I would have paid to take them to the dump, which is probably what would have happened if not for ebay. And now someone has a pair of tires in good shape that they can make use of.
The other pair I sold for $90, because they were not an "off brand".
I've been putting a bunch of my junk up for sale. Things that aren't really useful to me, but are to other folks. Plus, once in a while you come across the rare things like the Dreamcast Ethernet adapter that I sold for twice what I paid for it, or my classic HP calculator which looks like it will sell for almost twice what I paid for it.
Usually, I first offer it to local folks in my Linux Users Group. Selling is much easier that way, and you don't tend to have to muck around with shipping. ebay makes shipping pretty easy though.
So, remember that recycling isn't just about giving things to the "recycling centers". If you can get it to someone who can use it, all the better. If you can recover a few bucks in the process, all the better.
Sean
As the owner of a small Linux company, we often speak to people in a similar position to the original poster. One thing that we see over and over is people who don't have jobs, yet they don't seem to be doing anything related to what their job might be. If you love programming, why aren't you working on open source projects?
Another way to get some experience for your job-seeking is volunteering. Two examples that come to mind are, our local Humane Society always seems to be looking for people with computer experience. We also have an Internet Cooperative which is run by volunteers and could severely do with some additional help. Don't worry it might be "desktop router" experience, we have a DS-3 and a 100mbps long-haul ethernet over fiber, BGP, ATM, and other toys to play with.
Either of these would be good ways of getting experience and would look great on a resume.
Sean
Quoting: "the best implementations are written by those who've mastered assembly language".
I haven't read this book, but I'd hope that there would be some pretty good justification of the above statement. I suspect that it's not, though. First of all, who defines what the "best implementation" is?
As Knuth says, the first rule of program optimization is: "Don't do it". Trying to optimize a program when you're writing it leads to all sorts of problems including difficult to maintain code, increated time and budget required for the project, and often it's not even a hot spot anyway.
I used to be very concerned about using making my code fast, but have (over the decades) decided that making it obvious is much more important than speed, particularly in the initial implementation. Profiling allows you to concentrate on the 20% of the code that the program is actually spending 80% of it's time in, instead of guessing where the hot spots are going to be.
I've found that another benefit of using simpler code is that I'm more likely to throw away whole sections of simpler code and try radically different algorithms or mechanisms. More complicated code I find I'll try to just tweek instead of dumping wholesale. Randically different approaches can lead to 10x speedups where tweeks of existing code may give you 2x speedups, if you're lucky.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for trying different approaches. I'm not sure I would have come to the same conclusion I have now if I hadn't spent quite a long time trying to write optimized code. It was a very different world back then, but I know I wasted a lot of time optimizing code that didn't at all need it. It was an experience though.
Sean
The problem with POTS is that some people DO NOT LIKE TALKING ON THE PHONE. It actually took me quite a long time to realize that you have to be careful to communicate with people in the way in which they are most comfortable.
I'm one of these people who absolutely hates talking on the phone. Which is a challenge, becaues we have clients who absolutely hate communicating in e-mail. We've realized that we were losing business because we weren't communicating in the right way with certain of our clients.
Switching over to only POTS communication, even with us having an 800 toll-free number, just isn't an absolute solution. Particularly as I really like working in coffee shops and other locations, to get out of the office.
Don't suggest "Get a cell phone", I hate talking on the cell phone more than on a landline, because of the whole "Hello? Hello?" shite. I carry a cell phone to let clients contact me in emergencies, but I always try to conduct non-urgent business on a landline because I always seem to end up in crappy coverage areas.
I'm moving in a direction of becoming much more anal about what e-mail is allowed through. Changing the default from "allow mail in" to "block mail" and then whitelisting clients, addresses we send to, mailing lists, etc. Others can contact us by phone or through a web form.
I need to think about that more, but something needs to be done. It's just impossible for us to deal with an average of 2,000 or more spams per day per person AND get our job done.
Sean
The spam problem is unlikely to go away until people start treating it like the attack on the Internet that it is.
I've noticed an annoying trend lately that e-mail sent to businesses is frequently getting just ignored. Certainly it seems much more frequent this year than in the past. I've wondered if this is simply because so many e-mail boxes are getting filled up as fast as the spammers can send.
I'd suspect that the city of Baltimore wouldn't be having any problems if spam weren't such a problem. If the number of messages they had to deal with dropped by 5 to 20 times (depending on which estimates of current spam levels you believe), they could probably just leave the mail where it is.
This is all something I've been struggling with, being a small business owner doing business on the net. My company of 5 people gets between 4,000 and 20,000 borderline spams per day. By borderline, I mean that we throw away obvious viruses and things which score above a certain score in SpamAssasin (I think it's 9). So, that doesn't count the super spammy messages.
If it weren't for our fairly strict and complicated spam blocker setup, and a very powerful machine, we couldn't get the few hundred messages per day that are of interest to us. Spam is killing e-mail. I'm not sure why more people aren't treating it as an attack, but it's really hard to get anyone's interest to take some action. Canceling accounts doesn't even begin to solve the problem.
In the mean time, the City of Baltimore is suffering...
Sean
This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, by Gordon Moore: "If everything you try works, you're not trying hard enough."
Sean
SmokePing, which uses rrdtool as a backend, is a great tool for graphically displaying ping informaiton.
Netsaint is very good for monitoring systems and networks and letting you know ASAP when there's a problem. It can also use rrdtool to generate graphs of packet loss and ping latency.
All of the above are things that will give you current as well as historic information. Current information is good, but historic information is incredibly important. Trending is the obvious thing, allowing you to predict future use to some extent. More importantly, it lets you examine things that happened recently but aren't currently happening, and to see recurring issues.
Recently, our local Internet cooperative was having problems where one of the upstream connections was going into very high packet loss and dropping it's BGP peer. We keep fairly high resolution traffic statistics through ganglia, another rrdtool based network system. That along with the RRD CGI grapher allowed us to create custom graphs of traffic with very high resolution, for days and weeks past, overlaying multiple sources.
Once we did that, it became obvious that every time we ran into these problems, one of our members was hitting the line somewhat hard. It wasn't hard enough that it pegged the line from a bandwidth standpoint, but it apparently was hard enough that it caused some part of the network to experience extremely high packet loss.
That was definitely a case where having the right tool allowed us to track down a fairly hard to see problem. Because our line was not at all saturated, we spent a lot of time looking for things like bad cables, ports with lots of accumulating errors, etc...
Sean
I wrote a lengthy reply to this on my journal. Sean
We try very hard to make sure that the person we're hiring is a good fit before hiring, but you just can't really tell until they're in place. Much of it is our work environment, which is rather self-directed. It's also kind of isolating, just because of us all working on computers. So, it's fairly easy for people not to fit in to the environment.
For example. At one point we hired the ex-girlfriend of a good friend of ours. She hated our work environment, and left within two weeks. She was quite bitter about it, for reasons I don't fully understand. She ended up giving our mutual friend an ear-full, apparently, and we've hardly spoken since.
If everything works out well, hiring a relative could work out great. In most cases you know a relative better than you know random other people you will hire. However, our experience has been that it's much more likely not to work out.
We've found it's important to be able to easily stop the relationship as early as possible when it's not working out. It's hard enough doing this with just random people or aquaintances. With relatives, I can only imagine it's harder and may cause even more problems if there are hard feelings.
Take, for example, a business associate of ours. They hired a person to do sales a year ago. They've been paying his salary during that time, and he hasn't actually sold anything. Literally nothing. The contacts he said he had were all the wrong kinds of contacts, and in the mean-time he's spent a lot of time spinning his wheels trying to sell this particularly specialized ASP service.
You probably don't want this to happen to you.
Sean
So, here's some information about what I carry in my "kits":
In my pockets:
In my computer bag, which I carry 90% of the time I go anywhere. My computer bag is an Eagle Creek small shoulder bag with upgraded padded shoulder strap that includes a sticky ruberized side to reduce sliping off your shoulder.
Finally, I periodically have another larger bag which I carry in my car for our weekly Hacking Society or other geek meetings. It has a pile of stuff in it:
Comcast is running commercials about how easy it is to lose a satellite connection? I find that amusing because I just canceled my cablemodem net service because I was fed up with all the outages on it. We didn't have cable TV, so maybe that was never impacted when we had the problems, but I never found Comcast to be overly concerned about uptime.
When we first got the cablemodem it was great. That was when it was Excite@Home. The first year we had no outages at all, it was rock solid. Then after AT&T bought it out, it was still ok, but IIRC we had an outage or two during the next year. The last 8 months of Comcast has just been horrible though.
Anyway, I know you're not looking for cablemodem information. It's just that I choked on my lunch when I saw the thing about Comcast saying the satellite systems suffered from severe outages.
The people I know with satellite don't complain about having problems, and haven't switched to other technology over the the years they've had them, so I'm wondering if it's really anywhere near that bad.
Sean
The end result of this is a small integrated PC with no moving parts, and mounts it's file-system read-only so no worries about corruption, with a built-in access point. These work great, and are a bit larger than the size of a VHS casette.
I've deployed a number of these, and they are rock solid. Plus, they have advanced routing capabilities thanks to Linux, and the ability to block infected or abusive users from re-associating with the AP.
As far as going with 802.11 a or g... You must be pulling in some pretty mighty bandwidth to need to use something faster than 802.11g. Pebble includes "MadWiFi", a driver for some a/g cards, but I haven't used it.
Sean
I have mine set up ceiling-mount, upside down, with no keystone correction. My screen is a Da-Lite model Video "B". The screen is 75" diag, or 58"x48". At 88" from the screen, the image is 49" to 57", depending on the "zoom" setting.
Sean
Other friends of mine who got projectors after we did (we kind of started a trend here) are just projecting on the wall. We were considering just painting a flat white square on the wall, but the free screen put an end to that.
I think we're projecting it at around 60", but I'm thinking about moving it back some. This size works well for viewing during the day and the night (we don't have curtains on a few windows, so we don't have as much control of lighting as would be ideal). We always leave it at the "fully expanded" setting for zoom, so I think we'd be fine to move it back another 2 to 4 feet, but that would require re-cabling and moving the ceiling mount... So, I haven't done it yet...
Sean
Back in the late <gasp> '80s, I bought a 27" Sony TV, and declared that I wasn't going to do anything but replace broken video gear until HDTV came out. 15 years later, I've finally broken down and replaced the (still functional) altar to the entertainment gods.
Nearly a year ago, we finally fell to the temptation of getting a projector. The thing that finally made this happen was the InFocus X1. This is a Not only is the price of the projector quite reasonable, the operating cost is down from $1 per hour (many projectors have $300 bulbs that last around 300 hours) to under $0.10 per hour (the X1 bulb is still around $300, but it lasts 10 times as long).
So, while it's not a TV tuner card, I just had to provide some feedback. We love the projector, it doesn't take up much space, it's easily portable, it makes a 45" TV seem small.
That said, I've heard good things about the Haupage tuner cards using the Brooktree chipset. I haven't tried any of them in over 5 years, so they've surely changed. However, they seemed to work great using Video 4 Linux drivers.
Sean
This makes me wonder about the integrity of their claims, because it's hard to imagine that anyone at Microsoft believes that the best way to reach their customers is via Linux Users Groups. So, if that's not really their intention, what ARE they trying to do?
One of the guys in our local user's group, Anthony Earl, suggested that we give them some ideas that will slow them down, like strict security on the desktop. James DeWitt suggested "Clippy, only MUCH BIGGER!" Sean
You're only dropping obvious jokes on one end though. I'm not sure if people are just being silly, or aren't understanding the time_t entry, but there are a lot of super optimistic entries.
For example, in the new pool there are a dozen or so entries within the next month. Do they think we're talking about 2.7?
Sean
Now, on to the meat of it. I work at a company that provides outsourced system and network administration and occasional programming services. Here's my take on it.
The manouvers that the outsourcing company in the post made were, IMHO, bad business. Unfortunately, those are the sort of business deals that tend to separate the big, profitable shops from the smaller shops. Where I work, we've never gotten anyone fired in order to get more work, and in fact once had a significant client hire one of our employees away from us.
In general, we always try to work with a company to augment their existing staff. Working together to provide the optimum solution, instead of trying to force-feed the most profitable solution. That approach has worked well for us, resulting in a stable client list that is very happy with our work.
One of the things that we've found, however, is that we can often provide results similar to hiring a staff of two experienced admins for what it would cost to hire a very junior admin. The benefits being that we have multiple perspectives that can be used to help provide a solid solution to problems, with an average of around 15 years of industry experience each. Experienced folks tend to get more done faster, so in the few hours a day or week we help one client, we can often get as much done as a Junior person, particularly if they're the only one handling sys admin (not uncommon for a small company).
It does sound like this company acted in a way that I don't think is very honorable (selling marketing in the disguise of an audit). I'm not sure it's fair to paint all outsourcing companies with that same brush, however. Sean
Most of us in my company have been working from home since we began back in 1995. We do Linux consulting and programming, for reference.
The freedom is great, as you mention, but if done wrong it can definitely lead to problems. None of us have children around the house, which I suspect can change things drastically. I've heard others say that if you have children, you pretty much HAVE to have an office and make it well known that you can't be bothered there except for an emergency.
Anyway, back to my story. We've found that having an office can really help. With more than one person working from home, we found it was required, otherwise it was too easy to get distracted by other people. If you're home alone, this may not help as much, but some people find that "going in to the office", even if it's just down the hall, helps you concentrate.
As far as the lack of human contact... I've found several things that help this. About 2 years ago we found a coffee shop that claimed to be wired. We ended up bringing an AP with a modem to dial in to get some net. About 8 months after we started going there about once a week, they put in a high speed line and their own AP. We now go 2 to 4 times a week and call it "our office away from the office".
The coffee shop is interesting because you can develop friends there, often with much more diversity than in your office, but in general people also leave you alone because they don't know you, or they came to do something as well. Even a few high-priced beverages cost far less than a dedicated office. For a change of scene, try a different coffee shop. You can hardly throw a stone without hitting a coffee shop with an AP in it these days.
Another thing we've done is started hanging out more with our identified communities. In our case, that's largely other geeks, but you get the idea. Going to more LUG meetings, including meetings that we probably wouldn't normally drive to after a day in the office.
Also, I started a meat-space group called Hacking Society 2 years ago and we now have several regular chapters. The idea is that we meet once a week in a regular place to work on various topics. The Boulder, Colorado chapter meets in a coffee shop, we meet in an office here. It's a good way to spend some time with a bunch of good folks. You should start a chapter in your area. ;-)
As far as the question of an office. We had office space at one point. It was a nice change of pace, going to the office, but we had really nice space. My office looked out down main-street in our town and everyone walked by. It was fantastic, but cost $1400/month. We made good use of it, but it was way too expensive. I've often thought of getting some part time office space, but it's never been a high priority for me.
Also, it should be noted that we have developed rather good communication skills. We have an IRC channel open for the company which we use for a lot of the "office chatter" stuff. We also heavily use e-mail. We have phones as well, but mostly that's used for client contact. We all prefer the electronic, less intrusive mechanisms.
We did have problems with one employee we hired who quit because she couldn't "stand sending e-mail or IRC messages to someone in the same room". The rest of us couldn't stand being interrupted in mid-thought because she came up to us, for something that could wait 5 minutes until we checked IRC or e-mail. That just didn't work out.
There are all kinds of different people, and the above works well for us, but obviously didn't work well for at least one of the people we hired. It's important to find out what works for you, but those are some of the things I've found.
Sean
The obvious problem with this is that it provides the senders with more information. Using URLs that are unique per recipient, it allows them to track who is likely using these filters, that the address is valid, what IP address is associated with the e-mail address, etc...
In particular, you may be telling the spammer that you are more likely to see their message if they work hard at getting it through this particular filter (say, by not using a URL, or slightly mangling the URL).
I really wouldn't want the spammers to be able to build up a database of what IP addresses I frequently use for reading my e-mail. I would implement the scanning on a central server, but many people do not have that option.
Sean
Regulation may or may not work. What would really work would be if the government (Microsoft's biggest customer, I've heard) stopped buying their products in favor of others that are more secure. Re-evaluate that when Microsoft's products have less of an issue.
I know that all systems have some security problems or another. I don't recall any of them having sent me a thousand e-mail messages every day, though. And it's not like this is the first time.
Let the government talk with it's money and people will listen.
Personally, I don't really like my tax money going so much to Microsoft. For one thing, I don't like that the privacy of my information and security of the systems relies on something that seems to have so many problems.
Sean
Using the number of web-site defacements probably isn't a very good metric of how secure an OS is. Windows runs more desktops where Linux runs more servers (as a vast generalization). Also, compromising a server running virtual hosting for 200 clients may count as 200 sites defaced due to one insecure server. You get the idea.
The reason Windows gets so much scorn about security is that it has this whole class of security issues that are much less an issue under Linux. Linux people don't tend to send around binaries for people to execute. In Windows it's very common to send executable attachments, but they implemented that while shunning safe ways of doing it.
For example, if Microsoft hadn't scorned Java, in favor of their in-house technology which has huge security issues, they could have been using sandboxes to limit the access this arbitrary code has to your system.
All systems have problems if you don't regularly update the software. There are things that can help that, but in general I think it's safe to assume that all systems need to be regularly updated to be secure.
There are a whole different class of problems that Windows seems to suffer from, which Microsoft hasn't really addressed. Obivously, they need to.
Sean