The Mandelbear's Musings

02:14 pm - Steampunk in the NY Times

Steampunk Moves Between Two Worlds - New York Times

It is also the vision of steampunk, a subculture that is the aesthetic expression of a time-traveling fantasy world, one that embraces music, film, design and now fashion, all inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives, brass diving bells and jar-shaped protosubmarines. First appearing in the late 1980s and early ’90s, steampunk has picked up momentum in recent months, making a transition from what used to be mainly a literary taste to a Web-propagated way of life.

12:29 pm - What is friendship?

One of these days there's going to be a Defining My Terms post on friendship. This isn't it -- right now I'm still in the early phases of gathering data.

But here is A Thought On The Nature Of Friendship by theferret just to get that data-gathering process out in the open. Note that I don't really agree with it. He says, "I think that, by and large, there are two types of close friends: Those who are committed to being a net bonus in your life, and those who want you to be where they're comfortable."

That's his definition of "close friendship". Or two. I've seen others recently, even more widely separated, ranging between "someone I can tell anything to" to "someone who calls me up every day to see if they can help". In my mind, the term covers such a broad range that it seems to be as much a barrier as a bridge to understanding. Like limits, it's probably something you have to negotiate up front once a relationship gets to a certain point. I've seen all sorts of havoc caused by people working from different definitions of "friendship" and "closeness". Caused some of it, too.

Something I haven't seen in anyone else's definition so far, but that's definitely part of mine and Colleen's, is the sense that the friendship itself is important to both parties. That it's something worth almost any amount of struggle, and compromise if necessary, to preserve. Worth fighting for. We work out our problems and our differences, sometimes too loudly and sometimes too long, because we're friends -- perhaps by totally different definitions -- and intend to stay that way.

10:49 am - I'm wondering...

...what effect andropause might have on Asperger syndrome. I couldn't find any obvious references on Google; anybody know of one? It seems relevant to me these days.

10:47 am - My son-in-law is job hunting

Resume: Sean Stirling. I'm guessing that something in Western Canada or the US Pacific Northwest would be preferable.

From this post by chaoswolf.

07:55 am - I'm just visiting this planet

The cover article in April 2nd's Computerworld was titled Asperger's and IT: Dark secret or open secret? OK, if you have to ask you haven't been paying attention. It does raise the very legitimate question of "If Aspies are everywhere among us, why isn't the IT industry doing more to support them or even to simply acknowledge their existence?"

High-tech companies, after all, have been at the forefront of supporting workers with nearly every type of social, ethnic, physical or developmental identification. Microsoft, to take just one example, sponsors at least 20 affinity groups -- for African Americans, dads, deaf and hard of hearing, visually impaired, Singaporeans, single parents, and gay/lesbian/bisexual and transgendered employees, to name a few. Just nothing for autistics.

But this isn't a song about Alice Microsoft, or even about IT.

I've noticed that I tend to approach people and relationships almost exactly the same way I approach any other technical problem, for example an unfamiliar piece of software. I don't have the automatic understanding of other people that ordinary humans seem to have: I have to treat each problem analytically.

And, of course, since another symptom of Asperger's is an ability to concentrate on one problem, and a corresponding inability to multitask, this can come across either as a possibly-disturbing intensity of focus, or an annoying inability to drop a subject. Sorry about that; I'm working on it. As a technical problem, of course.

06:52 am - Hmm...

I wonder whether this explains a few things...

01:56 pm - TANSTAAFL

Went out for a business lunch at the Bombay Oven -- tasty, inexpensive Indian buffet. Unfortunately the company isn't paying for the parking ticket...

The really stupid part is that I saw the sign, it just didn't register that today was the first Wednesday of the month, and therefore one of the two days when I couldn't park on that side of the street.

08:43 am - That's better

Finally found the time this morning to reboot Nova, the main household fileserver -- it needed doing now because I'd just upgraded the kernel yesterday. While it was down, I moved it onto the APC SmartUPS 420 that had been sitting around since I bought the 1300 for the bedroom, and swapped cables accordingly. This gets me from an uptime of 30 minutes for the rack, to 53 minutes for Nova and 70 minutes for everything else, including the routers and switches. This makes me a happy geek.

06:12 am - Note to self

Hey, Self!

Waking up at 4am for snuggles and sex certainly helps her get back to sleep... Maybe plan on a nap after lunch?

08:17 pm - ...but not very productive

This past weekend was a heck of a lot of fun, but not much actual work got done around the house. Worth it.

I did, however, get to a minor bit of system administration that's been in my queue for a while: I took down my office workstation (Harmony), put it on the newer of the two BackUPS Pro 600's (the old one, which I rescued from work, doesn't provide as much information over the serial line), and moved the mirror drive from an external case to an internal tray.

There are still some oddities on that machine -- it really needs a new motherboard and CPU. It's pretty far down on the queue, though.

I also uploaded artbeco's wedding pictures; it's up to the Wolfling to wrap something useful around those. Took several hours; our upload speed sucks. Fortunately there were plenty of other things to do.

08:46 am - A pleasant weekend

We spent a delightful, relaxing weekend with the jenkitty. She got up at some ridiculous hour to fly down from Seattle Saturday morning, and left Sunday evening. We (me, the flower_cat, and the chaoswolf -- the Y.D. wasn't interested in the kinds of things we had partially planned) piled into the van with Colleen's wheelchair and spent all day Saturday driving back from the Oakland airport (which has been extensively renovated since I was last there, and had surprisingly little traffic) by way of San Francisco.

The entire weekend was an exercise in real-time scheduling. We drove along the waterfront, passing up the food paradise of the Ferry Building because of large crowds and a lack of parking, past the tourist traps of Fisherman's Wharf, South on Van Ness, West on Geary past Japantown, and had a late breakfast at the Cliff House. Crab is a house specialty. Yum.

South on the Great Highway to Golden Gate Park, and parked under the de Young Museum. We need more museum time. The textile gallery was showing Turkmen weaving -- wow! The pace and interaction are vastly different when I'm wheeling Colleen around, but it wasn't unpleasant by any means.

After the museum we went next door to the Japanese Tea Garden. This was mostly a matter of Jen and Kat exploring widely while I tried to figure out how to get around with Colleen and the chair. On occasion I failed miserably; fortunately the Cat is still fairly mobile under her own power. No disasters.

Finally, we drove down to San Jose via Skyline Boulevard (as far as Woodside), took a turn past $WORK on Sand Hill Road, and tried to figure out where to have dinner. We'd originally identified a couple of places in Menlo Park and Palo Alto, but it was still too early and the Wolfling really didn't want her sister to be entirely left out, so we went home, let the Kitty take a nap, and headed out to Kobe, our favorite sushi boat place.

The evening was a combination of filking, conversation, and looking at the proofs of the wedding pictures, which artbeco brought over for us to sort through.

Sunday the Kitty slept in while I went out for bagels and Scottish lox, then a walk to the Rose Garden. There was time for Jen to have a bagel before going out "silly food shopping" to Cosentino's with Colleen. Colleen's been shopping there for nearly three decades; most of the staff are old friends. Dinner was huge pieces of lamb (which Colleen pan-broiled with Greek seasoning) with saffron rice and caprese (which I made). Quick, simple, and delicious.

All too soon it was time for Jen to leave. I combined the trip to the airport with dropping the kids off at their gaming session a couple of blocks down Coleman Avenue. All-in-all a delightful weekend; I just wish there was some way to do it more often.

Capped the weekend with a pleasant drive with the Cat.

11:05 pm - Defining my terms: Openness

It occurs to me that, in a series of posts about mental states and relationships, I probably ought to define my terms. It's only fair, especially in an area where peoples' personal definitions are both vitally important to them and in some cases appear to have very little overlap.

Since this is an exercise in information sharing, it seems only right to start off with my definition for openness.

Openness:

Openness is, fundamentally, willingness to share information. In both directions. One might call the receiving direction "open-mindedness", though that's probably only part of it; I can't think of a good word for the sending direction. Anyone?

So let's take the sending direction first. Openness, in that direction, is a willingness to share information about yourself with others. There are degrees, of course, both in who one shares with and how -- and exactly what -- much one is willing to share. Some people share their most intimate feelings only with their closes friends; others (like me) "publish and be damned" almost everything on the open web.

In the other direction, openness is most of all a willingness to listen. It implies both interest in what the other person is saying, and (where applicable) a willingness to consider new information and possibly change one's own mind.

There's a lot of similarity between openness in relationships and in software; a good open-source software project not only shares its code freely, but accepts bug reports and patches for that code. It's not exact; there is, unfortunately, no revision-control system for relationships.

Most of the time I'm pretty far out on the openness side of the scale, by my own measure. There's very little about my own emotional life that I wouldn't publish here in my LJ, or put into a song. There have been a couple of times when I've suddenly thought "did I just say that to the entire damned Internet?" and friends-locked a post, but it feels wrong when I do it. As if there was something I needed to hide.

Sometimes I do need to hide things, though. I won't share anything I understand to have been told to me in confidence, and I won't share anything I understand will hurt someone else or reveal information they don't regard as private. The key word here is understand -- I'm all too likely to default to my own standards of openness; feel free to whap me with a cluestick if I blunder and cross one of your boundaries.

I've run across other peoples' boundaries enough lately that I'm setting up a private journal that's just for myself, finally. I haven't had a private journal in nearly four decades, but I have to write about things if I expect to understand them, and I need to be open with myself even if I can't necessarily share those particular thoughts with anyone else. It still feels wrong.

So, just as a reminder: this is my definition. You can tell me how it differs from your definition -- I really hope you do, in fact, since one of the motivations for this is to find out how my use of language differs from everyone else's -- and I'll be glad if you point out obvious inconsistencies or mistakes, or places where I could be more precise. You don't get to tell me that my definition is wrong. (edit 5/4) You can tell me why it doesn't really appear to be the definition I'm actually using. And you can tell me why you think I should be using a different one.

Similarly, you can tell me where you are on the scale, but you don't get to tell me I'm in the wrong place.

07:07 pm - ...stranger than we *can* imagine...

'Sex pest' seal attacks penguin (BBC).

An Antarctic fur seal has been observed trying to have sex with a king penguin.

The South African-based scientists who witnessed the incident say it is the most unusual case of mammal mating behaviour yet known.

The incident, which lasted for 45 minutes and was caught on camera, is reported in the Journal of Ethology.

The bizarre event took place on a beach on Marion Island, a sub-Antarctic island that is home to both fur seals and king penguins.

Why the seal attempted to have sex with the penguin is unclear. But the scientists who photographed the event speculate that it was the behaviour of a frustrated, sexually inexperienced young male seal.

Equally, it might be been an aggressive, predatory act; or even a playful one that turned sexual.

A commenter on wcg's post points out that the second paragraph needs to be edited to read "...most unusual case of non-human mammal mating behavior..."

Also noted recently in this post by snobahr and this post by thnidu (who has by far the better icon for it).

I couldn't possibly make this stuff up.

08:13 am - TSA: Travelers with Disabilities and Medical Conditions

Here, courtesy of cpap.com's mailing list, is the TSA's official web page on Travelers with Disabilities and Medical Conditions.

[...] TSA has established a program for screening of persons with disabilities and their associated equipment, mobility aids, and devices. Our program covers all categories of disabilities (mobility, hearing, visual, and hidden). As part of that program, we established a coalition of over 70 disability-related groups and organizations to help us understand the concerns of persons with disabilities and medical conditions. These groups have assisted TSA with integrating the unique needs of persons with disabilities into our airport operations.

Includes pages about CPAP machines, wheelchairs, Assistive Devices and Mobility Aids, and quite a lot more. Think they've taken a bit of flak over this stuff? Take advantage of it if you need to.

11:00 pm - The fires of Beltane

Note to my friends: this is a much happier post than the one I'm glad I didn't finish this morning. Things are well with me. Thank you for your patience. (/me waves cheerfully at those who have had the most to put up with from me over the last couple of weeks.)

Yesterday and today had a distinct feeling of transition; many things have become clearer in my mind, and I've started putting them into practice. Events have converged, and emotional uphevals have been processed. Things are different. The ghosts are gone, as they should be, and a few hours after the April finally left the planet by way of the International Date Line I felt as though a weight had lifted from my heart. The fires of Beltane have done their work, burning away the last of the old year's dead leaves and fallen branches.

Spring is here, and by some ways of reckoning it's the New Year. Wherever you place that mark on the calendar, I hope that the fires of this Beltane have burned away your sorrows, and that the year to come brings you joy and contentment.

07:39 pm - Modified rapture!

Colleen's wheelchair arrived this morning. It's very heavy -- no way she can get it in and out of the van herself. We may have to see about a crane. It also remains to be seen whether it fits in the trunk of my Honda Civic. (It'll almost certainly fit upright in front of the back seat, but that only works if we have no passengers.)

It marks the start of a transition that I hadn't fully realized was coming up. I should have, but bears are not very perceptive creatures. Luckily they're somewhat adaptable.

03:48 pm - Java 6 now GPLv2 and included in Ubuntu 8.04

Open Source Java Technology Debuts In GNU/Linux Distributions

Latest Releases of Fedora and Ubuntu Feature OpenJDK-based Implementations

SANTA CLARA, CA April 30, 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA), Canonical Ltd. and Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), today announced the inclusion of OpenJDK-based (http://openjdk.java.net) implementations in Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support (LTS) Server and Desktop editions, furthering the promise of Sun's open source Java technology initiative.

In addition, the NetBeans 6.0 Integrated Development Environment (IDE) (http://www.netbeans.org) is being delivered as part of the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS release and Canonical has certified Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition on several Sun x86 systems.

Current Mood: geeky

08:14 am - Crystallography in the kitchen

The Physics of Chocolate (from this post by gmcdavid.)

Includes an actual cooking tip, down in the last two paragraphs, for tempering chocolate more reliably.

08:25 pm - Ghosts

Since it's come up in comments to a couple of recent downwhen posts, yes, there were ghosts in the bed with us last night. They made it hard to sleep.

These weren't nearly as palpable as the old woman Colleen claims to have seen on the back stairs from time to time. I haven't seen her myself, but wouldn't be too surprised to learn that Sarah Winchester has been walking her old estate, wondering where her lovely orchards have gone. The old almond tree in our back yard died years ago.

These are memories, mostly, I think. It's a little hard to tell in the cold hours after midnight. Insubstantial, but real enough. Not all were of dead people.

Yes, of course: one was a dead, close friend. Parents: her mother, my father, closer than they've been in several years. Crying calls them. One was a stillborn child, another a stillborn friendship. Some were more insubstantial: dreams and illusions. The ghost of a lost illusion is a tenuous thing indeed. One of them might have become a song, if it had lived.

I've written before of the veil between the worlds. Sometimes, on a night in early August, it's so thin that I can almost reach through and touch whatever is not quite there. Last night it was thicker and less transparent; the ghosts were fuzzy with distance and sleep, and silent.

They never speak plainly, the ghosts; last night they made no sound at all, but seemed to have something to say. I'm never certain whether to try to listen, or simply to wave them off. They'll be back, I'm sure, until we've learned whatever they have to tell us.

We lay in one another's arms and took turns, sleeping, and waiting for the ghosts to speak. They never said anything that I remember. They rarely do.

07:07 pm - 2,000 Wikipedias per year

The title comes from "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus" by Clay Shirky. Somebody asked him "where do people find the time?" to create something like Wikipedia. Wikipedia -- the whole thing, articles and edits and talk pages and translations -- represents some 100 million hours of human thought. TV watching, in the US alone, amounts to some 200 billion hours every year. That's 2,000 Wikipedia projects every year.

Shirky points out that, in the years spanned by the Industrial Revolution, "The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation." Gin, and more gin. "And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today."

The equivalent, in the latter half of the 20th Century, was television. Society is only now waking up from that collective bender. What are you doing with your free time?

I'm not watching TV much these days. Nor movies. Nor listening to radio, even during my commute. Nor even reading books and magazines. I am still drugging myself -- I'm a product of my generation, not yet completely adapted to life in the 21st Century -- but my drug of choice these days is mostly LJ. A decade ago it was Usenet. At least my current drugs are interactive.

Sometimes, my current drugs create things that last. Some of my LJ content finds its way onto my website; my songs and essays are already there. I'm working on it. I came out with a CD over the course of two or three years in, basically, the time I saved by not watching TV. I ought to try not reading LJ so much.

(First brought to my attention in this post by catsittingstill; recently seen on techdirt as well.)

02:03 pm - Just in case you thought Windows was secure...

It isn't (Seattle Times)

Microsoft has developed a small plug-in device that investigators can use to quickly extract forensic data from computers that may have been used in crimes.

The COFEE, which stands for Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, is a USB "thumb drive" that was quietly distributed to a handful of law-enforcement agencies last June. Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith described its use to the 350 law-enforcement experts attending a company conference Monday.

The device contains 150 commands that can dramatically cut the time it takes to gather digital evidence, which is becoming more important in real-world crime, as well as cybercrime. It can decrypt passwords and analyze a computer's Internet activity, as well as data stored in the computer.

It also eliminates the need to seize a computer itself, which typically involves disconnecting from a network, turning off the power and potentially losing data. Instead, the investigator can scan for evidence on site.

More than 2,000 officers in 15 countries, including Poland, the Philippines, Germany, New Zealand and the United States, are using the device, which Microsoft provides free.

Not surprisingly, there is discussion on slashdot and techdirt. Fortunately, an easy-to-install upgrade has just been released that fixes the problem.

08:16 am - Sleepless in San Jose

Woke at maybe 2am and had trouble getting back to sleep. Brain wouldn't shut up. I'm reassessing some things, mainly about travel. (The flower_cat told her doctor about our zoo trip and he immediately wrote out a prescription for a wheelchair. His only questions were height, weight, and folding. But that's just part of it, and not even the hard part.)

About 4am the Cat woke as well; we took turns sleeping in a close embrace until the alarm went off at 6:30. Normally we can't sleep that way; I think it was just the exhaustion that made it possible. She said as I got up that I didn't even snore. She's sleeping soundly now.

Got up with my nose congested and my throat dry; I'm probably coming down with something. Make that have come down with something.

There are dry-runs all this week at work for a major technical review next week; today's is at 9am, which is an unusual starting hour for our normally laid-back California Research Center. They've also completed the process of moving the administrative staff into the offices next door, and swapping suite numbers. Starting today they'll be keeping our door locked, since there's nobody to watch it.

It'll be a little good deal less convenient, but since my office is only a few steps from the door, I was always the one who got tapped when nobody was at the front desk. So that's a win.

Every silver lining has a cloud around it, though, and right now my life is distinctly overcast.

10:46 pm - Blink.

Scrabble with the flower_cat and the Younger Daughter. Fun; 462 total score. I won, which isn't unusual -- I'm the only one in the family who's a good speller.

But I'm sleepy. Very sleepy.

07:33 pm - Through the wringer

I've been feeling vague all day; detached, fuzzy; the world seems subdued, and looks as if much of the color had been washed out of it. Grief? Depression? The fact that I didn't have breakfast this morning? Quite possibly the latter, as I'm feeling much better now.

Hadn't realized that my wife's grieving (mainly over the friend she lost just before Consonance, though there's more) could trigger as much of a reaction in me as it seems to have done. My Dad and Amy are coming in out of my past to haunt me again. Well, they're familiar ghosts, at least.

Zyrtec seems to have a substantial bounce-back, even after a single dose. I'll skip it, thanks; then I can have my glass of gin in the evening. Cyclobenzaprine, on the other hand, is wonderful stuff: stopped the back cramps dead, and got me a good night's sleep. Note to self: don't take it in the morning unless you intend to stay in bed all day.

For some reason I find the long, last phase of the grieving process -- acceptance, or reorganization depending on your source -- to be creatively very productive. There will be ghosts in the song, I think.

06:38 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to patoadam!! Have a good one!

11:42 pm - Grieving: The Child on the Train

( The linked article is about grieving after a miscarriage. It's beautiful, but sad. )

10:58 pm - Tres Gique at Baycon 2008

Went to Dave and Joyce's for a Tres Gique rehearsal tonight, with the chaoswolf and flower_cat in tow. Yes, Tres Gique has two drummers: Kat and Jordan. Kat does occasional vocals. Not every gig, of course.

Getting there, but I'm sleepy. Possibly an effect of the Zyrtec I took ~3:30pm to ensure that my throat didn't dry out. It didn't; but whether because of the zyrtec or the extra nose-watering is hard to tell. I'm not sure it was worth it; I was noticeably drowsy on parts of the drive home.

Current Mood: drained

04:25 pm - An afternoon at the zoo

Following chaoswolf's suggestion of a couple of days ago, we went to the zoo this morning. Got there a little before noon, and got home about 3:30.

By the time we got there, the main lot was full to the brim, but the handicapped spots around the corner on Sloat were still available. Long walk, though. I hadn't wanted to drop off Colleen and the girls because I didn't know at the time whether there would be parking at all. Next time, I think, we'll leave after lunch and plan on arriving around 2:00 -- there were plenty of places in the main lot by then, and it'll be cheaper if we don't have to buy lunch.

I grumped about the lack of adequate handicapped parking in Member Services, and they gave me a parking ticket so I could drive around and pick up Colleen on the way home. We rented a wheelchair, having discovered on the trip home from FKO what a difference it makes.

Colleen kept apologizing for the extra work she was putting me through, but I was enjoying myself thoroughly. Not only was I able to stay with her the whole time without any extra effort (it's a real strain to slow myself down to her walking pace, and frustrating for both of us), I got a pretty darned good workout to boot.

The zoo was full of "respect the animals" and "please be quiet" signs, and the large cat and bear enclosures all had new glass fences. For obvious reasons. The new fences replace what used to be a pair of railings with a strip of plants in between; they'll be lower maintenance and let you get right up to the edge of the moat and look down. Cool! There's also a little bench built into the concrete footing; probably intended for kids to stand on, but a tired grown-up can sit there, and I saw several doing just that.

I miss the elephants and the pigmy hippo. *sigh* The baby giraffe was cute, though. And it was the first time in the more than three decades I've been going that I saw a warthog standing up where I could see it clearly. I hadn't realized how shaggy they are. And the two grizzly bears sleepily snuggled up next to the window were cute as heck, too.

We'll probably get the flower_cat a wheelchair -- it'll come in handy. It cost us $10 to rent; that will add up, and of course there are plenty of places where you simply can't rent one. The San Jose Municipal Rose Garden, for example, and the Los Gatos Creek bike trail.

06:55 am - Observations before dawn

The half-moon shines through my kitchen window, wrapped in a gentle hazy glow. I imagine ragged clouds, a high haze of cirrus; it's only that I haven't put on my glasses. Outside, the moon and one bright planet disentangle themselves from the sharp fronds of the dragon-tree; the gray sky is lightening toward blue to Eastward, and a lone bird tentatively warms up its voice for the morning chorus.

Once again I set out to write about something specific and recent; older memories persisted in taking over. Are you trying to tell me something, Amy? Am I being stupid? Maybe. Yes.

The roses beside the driveway fence have started blooming, struggling free of a sea of grass and weeds to preen themselves for anyone who might be watching.

Everything I touch seems to fall apart these days.

I seem to be unable to start things. Work, home, wherever; I putter around the edges of my to-do lists without getting very much done. A house full of unfinished projects mocks me wherever I look. A year into my seventh decade, I've lived in this house half my life. The back yard desperately wants weeding.

There are worse things than growing old together. Thank you, Love.

The birds are quiet now, and sunlight brushes golden highlights onto the curtains.

11:01 pm - Poem: Not a bridge

Can one mourn for something that never was
    never will be
        might have been?

This path is broad and smooth
    here beside the river.
        Brambles hide the other bank.

See that dead tree, leaning there?
    Soon it will fall and block the way,
        have to be cut apart and carried off.

Someone could have felled it,
    pushed it the other way,
        made a bridge.

Never mind the path not taken;
    here there was never a path,
        only a place where a bridge that never was

never will be,
    might have been.
        Yes, one can.

			-- Stephen Savitzky, 2008-04-25

I don't write poetry very often these days. This one just fell into my lap. I'm not sure I wanted it there, but muses are fickle creatures, and I suppose one must take their gifts as one finds them.

Current Mood: contemplative

03:09 pm - Low-cost ultraportable computing roundup

Liliputing: Comprehensive list of low-cost ultraportables

Over the past six months or so, Asus, Everex, and HP have managed to bring low-cost ultraportable notebooks to market. But dozens of other computer makers have promised to bring out their own mini-notebooks. Some will run Linux, while others will be preloaded with Windows XP or Vista. Some will have flash memory, while others will have hard drives. But every one will be smaller, lighter, and cheaper than most existing laptop computers. Here's a roundup of some of the computers that have been announced or are already available.

02:58 pm - Life imitates science fiction. As usual.

Military: DARPA Developing Weapon Inspired by Arthur C. Clarke Idea From 1955

Those of you who are familiar with Arthur C. Clarke's 1955 novel Earthlight may recognize a new weapon from DARPA dubbed the Magneto Hydrodynamic Explosive Munition (MAHEM). In the novel, a commander unleashes "The Stiletto"—a weapon consisting of a jet of molten metal hurled through space by an electro-magnet. The MAHEM concept works in much the same way, using a magnetic field to propel a chunk of molten metal that will morph into an aerodynamic slug in flight.

Current Mood: discontent

05:28 pm - Thank you, Micro$oft!

Techdirt: Microsoft's Final 'Up Yours' To Those Who Bought Into Its DRM Story

Remember a few years back when Microsoft launched a new type of DRM under the name "PlaysForSure"? The idea was to create a standard DRM that a bunch of different online music download stores could use, and which makers of digital music devices could build for. Except... like any DRM, it had its problems. And, like any DRM, its real purpose was to take away features, not add them, making all of the content hindered by it less valuable. Yet, because Microsoft was behind it, many people assumed that at least Microsoft would keep supporting it. Well, you've now learned your lesson. Playsforsure was so bad that Microsoft didn't even use it for its own Zune digital media device. Along with that, Microsoft shut down its failed online music store, and now for the kicker, it's telling anyone who was suckered into buying that DRM'd content that it's about to nuke the DRM approval servers that let you transfer the music to new machines.

05:25 pm - Death of security industry predicted...

... encrypted PDFs at 11.

Bruce Schneier's Security Matters: Prediction -- RSA Conference Will Shrink Like a Punctured Balloon

For a while now I have predicted the death of the security industry. Not the death of information security as a vital requirement, of course, but the death of the end-user security industry that gathers at the RSA Conference. When something becomes infrastructure -- power, water, cleaning service, tax preparation -- customers care less about details and more about results. Technological innovations become something the infrastructure providers pay attention to, and they package it for their customers.

No one wants to buy security. They want to buy something truly useful -- database management systems, Web 2.0 collaboration tools, a company-wide network -- and they want it to be secure. They don't want to have to become IT security experts. They don't want to have to go to the RSA Conference. This is the future of IT security.

You can see it in the large IT outsourcing contracts that companies are signing -- not security outsourcing contracts, but more general IT contracts that include security. You can see it in the current wave of industry consolidation: not large security companies buying small security companies, but non-security companies buying security companies. And you can see it in the new popularity of software as a service: Customers want solutions; who cares about the details?

12:23 pm - More lessons learned

More things I've learned over the last few days:

• I can get through the morning and afternoon on five hours' sleep, five cups of coffee, and a late breakfast consisting of half a block of tofu. Just barely. Probably not twice in a row. I was feeling a little weak and dizzy by the time we started dinner around 5:45; Another 15 minutes and I'd probably have been on the floor. Thank goodness for tortilla chips and salsa!
• I don't need to keep my physical cancelled checks, do I? How many times have I looked at one? Maybe twice in 40 years? I can just download images from the bank and I'll be fine.
• I don't need to keep detailed records of closed-out accounts, either. Maybe a year-end statement and the 1099's which get filed separately, with the tax records, anyway.
• If I have a close friend whose relationship to me is best described as "sister", that makes her and my wife "sisters-in-law". Good place to start from. Works for all gender permutations, obviously. Wish I'd known that three months ago, but if wishes were horses I'd have been buried in horse exhaust several decades ago.
• My time machine is stuck in "play".

08:56 am - Learning

There was a gentle rain early this morning; when I went outside the air was washed clean and sunlight was sparkling on the lingering raindrops. It felt remarkably appropriate.

I have learned many things over the last, oh, 36 hours. Here, in no particular order, are some of them:

• "Never let the sun set on your anger" is good advice. So is "never go to bed with your anger." I'll settle for "never go to sleep with your anger" -- that works, too. I know damned well who I'd rather sleep with.
• Some things are better than sex. Long, close cuddles and deep, loving conversation are in that set. Especially when combined.
• I can still cry from missing my Dad.
• There are many things to value in a relationship, and peoples' ranking of them can differ. Love, loyalty, passion, honesty... Friendship, understanding, and working through problems are high on my list. Anyone have a good single word for that last one? It may be the most important for me.
• You get higher social security payments if you keep working until you're 70. Not that I have much choice.
• A long-term intense relationship, whether physical or platonic, is time-consuming. I need to manage my time and my priorities better.

06:42 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

...to blaurentnv and xthelonegunmanx!! Have a great one!

12:28 pm - EeeP(c)

Asus Eee PC 900 hits the US on May 12th - Engadget

We're serious this time, people. No more kidding around with those international ship dates, we've got ourselves a real live release date from Asus: May 12th. The hotly-anticipated Eee PC 900 with that relatively bountiful 8.9-inch screen is going to sell for a starting price of $549, with Linux and XP versions available at launch.

12:20 pm - It isn't rocket science any more...

...so could somebody please explain to me why there are still applications that allow you to lose your work due to a power glitch or a wrong keystroke?

A little history. When I was at the Stanford AI lab in 1970, there was a text editor that had a number of innovative features. One of those was the ability to automatically save your file after some number of keystrokes. The number was normally 100, but you could set it. The day that the computer was going down every 5 minutes, I set the save count down to 5 and got useful work done.

A little later I was working at Xerox PARC. There was a programming system called Interlisp that had an automatic spelling corrector and infinite undo (including both the ability to undo the spelling "corrections" that turned out to be wrong, and the ability to select which operations you wanted to undo.

That was nearly four decades ago, folks! Right now, the only editor I know of with a keystroke save-count, infinite undo, and good crash recovery is Emacs, and it's very picky about which users it's friendly with. Firefox at least lets you undo closing a tab and saves your bookmarks and configuration automatically without asking.

No app that I know of keeps track of operations and gives you fine-grained selective undo (at, say, the word or paragraph level in a text editor).

Anyone know of a widely-available, open source, cross-platform, simple text editor that at least has auto-save, infinite undo, reliable crash recovery, and is user-friendly enough that a non-geek or a kid can use it to compose email or web pages? Even better if you can actually send email with it, but cut and paste works almost well enough. It's essential that it not be part of a dedicated email program, and it would be useful if when it's used for composing HTML it's possible to flip back and forth between a WYSIWYG and plain text view. (The way you can when composing an LJ post.)

Anyone know of such an editor that understands common version control systems like CVS and Subversion, and uses them to keep track of changes between sessions without asking?

It's not like these are new ideas...

07:16 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to the lovely and talented marypcb. Have a great one!

10:20 pm - Getting ready for Baycon

Just got back from a Tres Gique rehearsal at Joyce's. I think I may be allergic to something in that house; my throat got very dry and constricted, so we didn't get through even the songs I had on the list. There's still room for a few more, and suggestions (waves at cflute and pocketnaomi) are welcome.

Current Mood: productive

01:56 pm - !@#$%^ networking !#$#%

No, I have NO FSCKING IDEA why my linux-based router won't route packets from the DMZ port to anywhere else. I'm guessing it's some piece of Shorewall misconfiguration that's been lingering around since the last time I tried banging my head against this particular problem.

However, my head is very damned sore now, and it at least continues to route from the internal network, so I was able to put the wireless router there where it used to be. At least it works now, even if it isn't as secure as I would like it to be. What's more, the WAP now seems willing to route to the internal network (it had damned-well better, since it's a host on it), so users of my internal web pages should be happy now.

I'm not happy. But it's less broken than it's been for several months, so I'm going to move on for now.

Note to self: any hostnames used in the firewall rules had better be in /etc/hosts, because you can't get to any DNS servers while the firewall is busy configuring itself.

Duh! It helps to enable masquerading for the interface. It helps to read the useful comment I left for myself in /etc/shorewall/masq. It would help even more if that solved the whole problem: it still doesn't route to the internal network. Grump.

07:51 pm - People who love the English language...

( ... should probably just skip this post. )

Current Mood: indescribable

05:40 pm - Puttering about

After a nice walk this morning (Rose Garden) and a short shopping trip with the Cat and Wolfling (BevMo, Barefoot Coffee Roasters, and the bank), I've spent most of the afternoon puttering around the house, mostly in the office. This is basically what I do when the list of things that ought to get done is totally overwhelming. I can either sit around admiring the problem, or nibble away at the edges. It's marginally more productive to nibble.

The main task for the weekend is getting all of last year's banking and investment records put away, along with tracking down a couple of missing pieces that Colleen will find useful. This will eventually result in substantially less clutter, and a nearly-full paper recycling bin.

There are system administration tasks in the queue, too, but those will mostly wait until tomorrow when the main WiFi users are out of the house, or at least otherwise occupied.

09:57 am - QOTD

mdlbear: "Pay no attention to the mess behind the curtain."

(Referring to the curtains blocking off the view of the part of the living room that has the Wolfling's hoard of wedding presents...)

09:36 am - Household notes

I'm feeling very proud of my chaoswolf and flower_cat this weekend, for different reasons.

The Wolfling improvised dinner last night out of what was in the house needing to be used up: chicken with redeye gravy; and a potato, carrot, cucumber, and cheese casserole. Yes, you can cook cucumber (it's in the squash family, after all), but I've rarely seen it done. Tasty, in spite of timing glitches on both items. Both kids liked it, so that's a win.

The Cat is in the process of taking over control of the household investments and budget, as well as most of the marketing for my CDs. Makes good use of her phone and people skills, doesn't require standing up for long periods of time, and can be done at home. It's also essential for getting control of the credit cards, which have been bleeding money for years.

08:35 am - To Fry's, or not to Fry's?

Fry's has a combination CPU, Abit motherboard, and Antec Aria cube case on sale this weekend. $160; figure about $200 with RAM. I could move Dorsai (the bedroom/recording box) into the case, which would be a better fit with the cart it's on, and use the MB/CPU in the office. It would be quieter, and I could use the current box (Harmony) as the guest machine.

OTOH, that's $200 I don't really have right now -- the finances are pretty marginal, and we haven't done a proper budget yet. I'm trying to set a good example here. For that matter, it's time I ought to be spending on more productive things, and there's already a lot to do this weekend. I should wait for the deal to come around again, or buy it in pieces.

Grump.

07:25 pm - My reality check?

It bounced.

OK: Earthquake in the Midwest? Unseasonable snow in Seattle? Supreme Court justice renounces capital punishment?

Some days it's not worthwhile getting out of bed. Other days you wonder whether you actually did.

08:23 am - QOTD

flower_cat: "I think I just need holding."

mdlbear: "Does that make you an old bag of holding?"

(No, she didn't hit me.)

07:41 am - Good morning, Midwest!

This morning's earthquake was brought to you by the California TeleTourism Board. TeleTourism: the next best thing to being there.