Seongbae's random thoughts on ...nearly anything... (박성배)

WTF of the day

2010-09-13T15:33:00.001-07:00

I showed this to a co-worker of mine and he said I should record a song and send it to him in reply, which I'm tempted to.

INMAIL: YOU HAVE A NEW MESSAGE

From: ...

Date: ...

Subject: Linux/Unix Rockers Wanted! - SE

Greetings Seongbae,

ROCK OUT! with Yahoo's Service Engineer and Operations!!!

We have some amazing opportunities for guitarist, drummers and even lead singers! And of course we're looking for the best band managers the world has ever known!

Send me a demo and let's ROCK This!

Take a peek at some of our new products and initiatives:

http://ycorpblog.com/

Rock ON, & Thanks!

....
Senior Recruiter Sorcerer

....@yahoo-inc.com
Office (408) ...-....

View/reply to this message

Fine print

2010-08-02T22:11:00.000-07:00

Can you spot what's wrong with the coupon offer l I received from Expedia below ?

From: Expedia Service Center
Date: Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 10:00 PM
Subject: Thanks for planning your trip to Seoul on Expedia
To: ....

Vacation Packages | Hotels | Cars | Flights | Cruises | Activities
Dear Seongbae,

Thanks for planning your trip to .... on Expedia. We hope your trip went well and that you had a good experience--both with Expedia and the companies that provided your travel.

Just to make sure, we hope you'll share your thoughts by completing a short satisfaction survey. It takes only a few minutes and your comments help us improve your future travel experiences, our service, and our site.

As a "thank you" for your time, we will email you a coupon for $10 off each night of your next hotel stay*.

Rest assured your identity and information will be kept confidential and will never be sold or rented to any third party.

Take the survey now

We appreciate your time and business.
Expedia Travel Team
*This single-use coupon is valid only for a discount of $10 per night towards the new booking on Expedia.com of a room at an Expedia® Special Rate hotel for two (2) nights or longer. The cost per night of the booking must be at least $75 before taxes and fees. Coupon must be used by 11:59 PM (Pacific Time) on July 31, 2010. Travel must be completed by August 31, 2010.

You are receiving this survey as a customer of Expedia.com.
CONTACT US
Please do not reply to this e-mail as we are not able to respond to messages sent to this e-mail address. To contact us or send feedback, please click here or contact us via postal mail at: Expedia, Inc., attn: EMC Team, 333 108th Avenue NE, Bellevue, WA 98004. For additional assistance, visit the Customer Support Center, or call 1-800-Expedia.
CST# 2029030-50
© 2010 Expedia, Inc. All rights reserved. Expedia, Expedia Extras, Best Price Guarantee, and the Airplane logos are registered trademarks, or trademarks, of Expedia, Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
(EMID: SUR_PSTEP_01_C)(MD: 20100802110059)(EPID: 131962498)(ETID: 177120)

The fine print says the coupon must be used before July 31, but guess when it was sent ? :)

This time, Intel is coming down the microprocess ladder.

2010-05-04T23:14:00.000-07:00

One of the key reasons in x86's rise in laptop, desktop and server market can be summed up in one sentence: climbing up the performance ladder. Intel and AMD were able to improve the performance and the performance/$ of x86, to catch up with the competitors and they eventually exceeded most of their competitors. No matter how you look at it, x86 chips are extremely competitive, boasting either the best performance or the best performance/$, or both.

Now, I wonder if the history will repeat itself at the opposite end of the performance spectrum. The news of Intel's Moorsetown might just be the beginning of another repetition. Various ARM implementations have been the choice for mobile phones, but if I were to believe Intel's announcement (there's no reason not to believe it - in actuality, ARM is not exactly the best ISA if you care about performance), Intel's new Moorestown might just start the x86's expansion into mobile phones, this time by providing the best performance/watt. In fact, in my opinion, there's just no doubt that Intel with its best process technology and design prowess will either match or exceed most of its competitors. Clearly they are capable of producing the best, and x86 isn't much more complicated compared to the ARM which is a hodge-podge collection of oddities.

That said, just as the 90's ISA (instruction set architecture) survival game, the software will play an important role in deciding which ISA will survive, but this time software might actually slow down the expansion of x86 into mobile phone. Why? Apple and iPhone. Having lost the microprocessor war in the desktop era (remember PowerPC?), Apple looks determined to win the processor for mobile device - its acquisition of two processor startups and producing their own SoC testifies its resolve to control their own processor. And iPhone and, more importantly, Apps on iPhone are, just like DOS/Windows of the day, completely tied to ARM. All iPhone apps are native apps, meaning they are compiled to the machine code that is ARM. While it's not impossible for Apple to pull off an ISA switch for iPhone, similar to what they did with Mac, there are considerable costs with that approach and it looks like Apple will try its best to push for their own processor. This means ARM will have a non-trivial software platform that will stick around.

On the other hand, iPhone's primary competitor, Android, practically doesn't have this native code problem. That's because almost all android apps are written in Java the language, and compiled to bytecode for Dalvik VM. The bytecode is inherently ISA-neutral, so it is nearly trivial to switch the processor ISA of an android phone - all apps will just work, assuming Android OS itself is ported to the ISA, which already happened since android already runs on x86. Give this, I fully expect handset manufacturers to start selling Moorsetown-based handset running Android. They will start claiming huge performance advantage. Of course, Apple will respond just the same way it did when PowerPC lagged behind x86.

In the next few years, we'll see if the history will repeat itself, and what kind of twists there will be if any. Fun and exciting time indeed.

Leica X1 and Panasonic GF1 - somebody swapped their LCDs ?

2009-10-06T09:13:00.003-07:00

DPReview's Leica X1 preview says:

Curiously, the X1 uses a 4:3 LCD to view images from its 3:2 sensor, while the GF1 employs a 3:2 LCD and a 4:3 sensor. The GF1's control layout is again much more 'electronic'; the X1 will appeal to those looking for a more straightforward, traditional design.

What's up with that ? Did Leica and Panasonic exchange their designers in the middle of development ? It's even more perculiar, that X1 body is wider than GF1, so wider 3:2 screen would fit better with X1.

Turning pogoplug into a TimeMachine

2009-09-12T19:09:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer first: this is not really fully tested - I haven't tried restoring from TimeMachine backup yet. So there's a chance that this won't really work in the end.

Described below is the (somewhat convoluted) steps I did to get this working. It would be really nice if someone can clean this up, submit the patch to netatalk, create an Optware netatalk package with proper configuration, and another Optware package for pogoplug/timemachine configuration example files... In theory, it should be possible to make "ipkg install pogoplug-timemachine" just "Do The Right Thing". Anyway, here goes the steps:

1) Install gcc, autoconf, automake, dbus, openssl, avahi, libgcrypt from Optware ipkg (it's possible I might have missed a few packages though).

2) Download berkeleydb source from here, unzip/untar, and then build/install by:

$ cd db-4.7.25/build_unix
$ ./dist/configure --prefix=/opt --with-gnu-ld
$ make
$ make install

3) Download netatalk source package somehow. I used CVS following this instruction but it looks like you can download the tarball from sourceforge as well. Once you download/untar it, you can build/install it by:

$ cd netatalk
$ CFLAGS="-O -DSHADOWPW" CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/include" LDFLAGS="-L/opt/lib -Wl,-rpath,/opt/lib" ./configure --prefix=/opt --with-ssl-dir=/opt/ --with-bdb=/opt/ --with-shadow --with-cnid-cdb-backend --enable-afp3
$ make
$ make install

3-1) If your pogoplug mounted disk is formatted in FAT or NTFS, those disks are mounted as root by pogoplug's daemon (hbplug). So you need afpd to be able to run as root. By default, afpd does not allow this to happen. The patch below fixes that - by adding a new option "-[no]allowroot". If you want that, apply the following patch before doing "make" above (if you don't know what patch is, or what to do with the following file, you probably don't want to do this anyway), but understand that this increases the security exposure:

Index: afp_options.c
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvsroot/netatalk/netatalk/etc/afpd/afp_options.c,v
retrieving revision 1.45
diff -r1.45 afp_options.c
212a213,216
> if (strstr(buf, " -noallowroot"))
> options->flags &= ~OPTION_ALLOW_ROOT;
> if (strstr(buf, " -allowroot"))
> options->flags |= OPTION_ALLOW_ROOT;
Index: auth.c
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvsroot/netatalk/netatalk/etc/afpd/auth.c,v
retrieving revision 1.63
diff -r1.63 auth.c
255c255,256
< if ( pwd->pw_uid == 0 ) { /* don't allow root login */
---
> if (!(obj->options.flags & OPTION_ALLOW_ROOT)
> && pwd->pw_uid == 0 ) { /* don't allow root login */
Index: globals.h
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvsroot/netatalk/netatalk/etc/afpd/globals.h,v
retrieving revision 1.26
diff -r1.26 globals.h
39a40
> #define OPTION_ALLOW_ROOT (1 << 8)
cvs diff: Diffing nls

4) Set up dbus to use avahi, by creating a file /opt/etc/dbus-1/system.d/avahi-dbus.conf with the following content:

<!DOCTYPE busconfig PUBLIC
"-//freedesktop//DTD D-BUS Bus Configuration 1.0//EN"
"http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/dbus/1.0/busconfig.dtd">
<busconfig>


<policy user="avahi">
<allow own="org.freedesktop.Avahi"/>
</policy>
<policy user="root">
<allow own="org.freedesktop.Avahi"/>
</policy>


<policy context="default">
<allow send_destination="org.freedesktop.Avahi"/>
<allow receive_sender="org.freedesktop.Avahi"/>

<deny send_interface="org.freedesktop.Avahi.Server" send_member="SetHostName"/>
</policy>


</busconfig>

5) Setup avahi to find aftpd by creating a file /opt/etc/avahi/services/aftpd.service with:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'?>
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd">
<service-group>
<name replace-wildcards="yes">%h</name>
<service>
<type>_afpovertcp._tcp</type>
<port>548</port>
</service>
<service>
<type>_device-info._tcp</type>
<port>0</port>
<txt-record>model=Xserve</txt-record>
</service>
</service-group>

And edit /opt/etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf and set "host-name" to what you want (you probably want to use a different name than the hostname of pogoplug itself, as using the same would make it a bit more cubersome to use samba and afp simultanenously).

6) Now it's time to configure afpd. Edit /opt/etc/netatalk/afpd.conf and add the following line:

- -transall -uamlist uams_dhx2.so -nosavepassword -allowroot

The key part is "uams_dhx2.so" - as far as I tried, this and uams_guest.so were the only UAMS modules that worked with OSX 10.5.8. "-allowroot" would only work if you applied my patch above.

7) You need to set up with "directory" to be exported. Edit /opt/etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default, and add a line like (it's supposed to be in a single line):

/tmp/.cemnt/mnt_sda1/TimeMachine TimeMachine allow:root rwlist:root dbpath:/tmp/cdb.db cnidscheme:cdb options:usedots

This would export /tmp/.cemnt/mnt_sda1/TimeMachine directory as a volume named TimeMachine.

8) Create an empty file named ".com.apple.timemachine.supported" in the top directory of the exported volume you want to use as timemachine. e.g.:

$ touch /tmp/.cemnt/mnt_sda1/TimeMachine/.com.apple.timemachine.supported

9) Start all daemons if they haven't started yet.

$ /opt/etc/init.d/S20dbus start

$ /opt/etc/init.d/afpd start

10) Now you should see a Xserve icon in Finder's network view (Shared -> All). Click it, and it will ask for a login and a password - give it the login and the password for pogoplug. You can use root (if you used the patch above), or you can create your own user but in that case you need that user be able to write to the volume. Once you have mounted the TimeMachine volume (that has .com.apple.timemachine.supported file at the root), the system preference -> TimeMachine -> Change disk should display the pogoplug as a TimeMachine disk:

Now the TimeMachine backup should work, though no guarantee it will restore - my backup is still in progress :)

PS. I used the information from following pages:

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-347019.html

http://holyarmy.org/benjamin/2008/01/time-machine-backup-to-linux-via-netatalk/

http://www.anders.com/projects/netatalk/

and possibly some others which I forget.

PS2. I should also mention http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/index.html.

There was one website that explained setting up avahi/netatalk very well (where I took some of the config files), but I can't remember or find that site now. So I might be missing a few things related to avahi above :(

Pogoplug performance through AFP

2009-09-05T20:59:00.000-07:00

Apparently, netatalk/afpd can push files much more efficiently than samba - I get roughly 20MB/s over gigabit ethernet, compared to roughly 10MB/s with samba. Pogoplug keeps getting better :)

Pogoplug and AFPD, some progress, some roadblock

2009-09-05T13:48:00.000-07:00

It turns out it's relatively straightforward to get afpd (in netatalk package from ipkg) running and have OSX talk to pogoplug through AFP as Guest user (this How-To turns out to be quite useful) - you need to set uam_guest.so as uam module, and use usedots option (I'll post my config later). However, I can't seem to get the authentication working yet. Since I can control the guest user id on pogoplug side, this wouldn't be such a big problem, except I have my disk formatted as NTFS and hbplug mounts the disk as root with default umask 755 AND afpd doesn't allow me to set uid 0 as the guest user. :( Hence, currently I can only read from pogoplug, but not write and thus I can't get this working as timemachine yet.

For proper authentication, I'm guessing I'd need to recompile netatalk package with ssl support as the How-To says (though I couldn't verify whether ipkg netatalk has that support included, I'm guessing it doesn't based on syslog output). Well, I tried to download the source from here, but somehow cvs anon login fails for me. Oh well. Till my next spare time...

Pogoplug/samba/OSX/time machine

2009-09-03T22:28:00.000-07:00

I copied a bunch of video files from Pogoplug to my MBP using Samba. And it could do slightly better than 10MB/s when connected through the gigabit. This is more than acceptable performance - at this speed, I don't need/want to install pogoplug kernel driver on OSX. Another happy combination. But this got me thinking... if Pogoplug can act as a native Windows storage system, why not native Apple storage ? So I've started working on turning Pogoplug into a time machine using avahi and netatalk. I haven't got it working but at least pogoplug shows up on Finder's Network view as if it's an Xserve :) Hopefully I'll get some spare time to dig this more and get it working soon...

MBP, why I still use it

2009-08-23T19:51:00.000-07:00

Despite the fact that I've been suffering quite a bit from OSX, I'll probably continue to use it at this point, because:

Fantastic keys in the keyboard. I really liked Thinkpad keyboards (my first laptop was Thinkpad 560, and I've been a user of T-series, including T43p). However, I really get to like MBP's keyboard keys. It has just the right amount of key travel distance, and spaced just right, and can be pressed small amount of force, unlike some other keyboards, yet it's not overly soft. In other words, it's the goldilocks of the laptop keyboard for me.
Battery life. T43p lasted barely 2 hours, and I used to carry extra battery. MBP lasts easily 4 hours, and more like 5 hours. Practically I can carry around all workday without charging.
Performance. Whatever I can say, MBP is fast enough for what I used it for. It's almost never a bottleneck for my use.

I'd guess #3 will be similar in other laptops with similar hardware. So it's not really MBP's advantage. That said, things I wish the most:

Page up/down, home/end keys. Out of all keys, I miss those four keys the most.
Fast way to cycle through the windows, instead of applications, without touching the mouse.
Less awkward keyboard shortcut for copy and paste (I guess I'll have to practice two-handed copy-and-paste - pressing c/v with left hand and right-command with right hand). If only left command key was slightly moved toward right, by reducing the space key a bit - as is, either I have to move my whole left hand/palm to press left command key with my left thumb, or my left thumb has to bend a lot to press it. Awkward either way.
Consistent keyboard shortcuts between applications. I'm still quite confused of shortcuts in many applications. Not the app specific ones, but more basic ones like beginning-of-the-line and end-of-the-line, page-down and page-up, beginning-of-the-page and end-of-the-page. And also how certain shortcut combos are treated differently depending on whether a textbox has a focus or not. It's all confusing and annoying. e.g. I mapped ^-T to be "New Tab" in Safari, but if the focus is in the text area, it doesn't open a new tab. Instead, I think it does "transpose" of the last two characters. :(

OSX pain continues...

2009-08-23T19:24:00.000-07:00

Skype crashes on the startup. I tried deleting plist files (system default and personal), no success. Disabled firewall, no success. System is up-to-date and yet, Skype continues to crash upon login to Skype.

Then, Open Office didn't start up upon the first use. Had to force-kill it, then open up an existing file. Now it can start up without opening an existing file. But nonetheless very weird.

I tried mapping ^-C and ^-V as copy and paste for all applications, but it didn't work on Terminal. Then I removed the mapping for all applications, but the terminal application continued to show ^-C and ^-V as the shortcut and it didn't work. So, in that state, all applications except Terminal used %-C and %-V, but Terminal had no functional shortcut for cut and paste. Eventually restarting the terminal removed this annoyance, but it again shows the keyboard shortcuts (and its customization) are a very sore thumb in OSX.

Not all keyboard shortcuts are equal, part 2

2009-08-18T23:05:00.000-07:00

I tried mapping ^-L to "open location..." menu item in Safari. And guess what? It doesn't work, despite the fact that the menu shows ^-L next to "open location..." item. I don't know what Safari does with my ^-L stroke. Of course, clicking a menu item "open location..." works. So it must be that something eats my ^-L in Safari. Arg :(

Chrome works fine, but Chrome-on-OSX isn't quite ready for prime time (it's already much faster than Safari, but there are enough things that don't work yet on Chrome, and it's also not quite as stable). So until Chrome becomes stable enough, I guess I'll have to suffer...

In OSX land, not all keyboard shortcuts are equal...

2009-08-18T09:12:00.000-07:00

I think I'm giving up on using command key as the shortcut - it's just too awkward to use everyday. So I've ended up overriding a lot of shortcuts using control- combo. ^-C ^-V ^-X ^-T ^-N all know works as everywhere else, and with caps lock mapped to control, my thumb doesn't have to bend to press command and something else.

However, one inconsistency in Safari and Chrome still bugs me. I've remapped tab movements to be control-up/down both for Chrome and Safari. The problem is, in Safari, if the focus is in a text box inside a page, the new shortcuts don't work. What's funny is that the original shortcuts (control-tab and shift-control-tab) work fine even when the focus is in a text area.

*sigh*

So, on Mac, not all keyboard shortcuts are equal :(

Mac OS X: "Not enough disk space can cause directory corruption"

2009-08-10T21:22:00.000-07:00

...at least according to one Apple employee named Carolyn Samit:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2086575&tstart=0

I was just looking for a solution to my MBP hanging problem, and encountered this particular post. I'm just hoping that this is just a clueless tech support type person perpetuating unsubstantiated personal opinion (which flies in the face of the basic principles of the operating system/file system design, and I'd almost interpret it as a slander/libel against OS X), but since I can't know if this "Carolyn" is a lowly tech support or Apple's filesystem engineer, I'll have to assume that this is Apple's position.

I tried to post a reply asking for clarification, and Apple rejected it. Below is the email Apple sent me about the removal.

Dear Seongbae (S. Park),

Apple removed your post on Apple Discussions titled "Re: Random freeze/not-responding in 10.5.7" because it contained the following:

Rude or inappropriate language
Non-constructive rants or complaints

We are including a copy of your post at the end of this email for your reference.

Our terms of use, which include helpful information about using Apple Discussions, is located here: http://discussions.apple.com/help.jspa We encourage you to continue using the Apple Discussions while abiding by our terms of use.

If you would like to send feedback to Apple about a product, please use the appropriate selection here:http://www.apple.com/feedback

As part of submitting feedback, please read the Unsolicited Idea Submission Policy linked to the feedback page.

Kind regards,
Apple Discussions staff

++++++++++

This message is sent from a send-only email account. Any replies sent to this address are deleted automatically by the system.

----------

A copy of your message for reference:

I'm suffering from this same problem, and this makes my new MBP 15" one of the worst systems I've ever owned in my past 10 years (the last time I remember having this kind of random instability issue is Windows 98).

I hope you're either joking or hopefully just half-informed when you said "Make sure there is always 15% free disk space. Not enough disk space can cause directory corruption".
What you're saying is essentially Mac OS filesystem can not function correctly with less than 15% free disk space. Can you substantiate this claim ? Since you're an Apple employee, can I take your word as an official Apple advice and publish this ?

Mac convert, another focus oddity

2009-08-04T23:16:00.000-07:00

Try this with your Mac:

Fire up any application and have a window that has a scroll bar.

Then using Expose, switch to any other window that's smaller than the first window, so that at least part of the first window can be seen. Then move your mouse cursor on top of the first window (i.e the one that doesn't have focus), and try scrolling. The scrolling would work - even though the application itself is not in focus. It's as if scroll event uses "focus-follows-mouse" principle. Confusing? Hell, yeah. However, I'd still call this useful. If only I can type as well...

Mac convert, sync between Address book and Google Contacts

2009-08-01T00:08:00.000-07:00

This article shows a complicated workaround - if you want to try this, make sure you read all the comments as well - to enable Address book and Google contacts sync. Why on earth Apple hides the Google sync option from Address Book's preference is anyone's guess. I find it incredulous that I have to edit plist to fake, and go through manually invoking a command on the terminal to get this working... Clearly this isn't something Apple wants to make users happy about.

Mac convert, week 2 - necessary customizations

2009-07-28T00:06:00.000-07:00

I've ended up doing a few "jumping-over-the-hoop" type of customization to make this box more useable for me, and the following is the list so far:

Caps Lock as Control.

It's indispensable. However, this isn't as good as on Windows or Linux, because of Command-vs-Control split on Mac - on Windows or Linux, control key is the most frequently used modifier for keyboard shortcuts, hence having caps lock mapped to control naturally makes the most frequently access modifier key more accessible. That benefit is only half on Mac, because a lot of shortcuts use Command key instead of Control. While some of the key mappings can be changed to use control, not everything can (i.e. if there's no corresponding menu item). So I still have to press the awkwardly located Command key.

Auto-hide the menu bar.

When I run Chrome or Terminal, I rarely need the menu bar because 99% of things I want daily can be done through the keyboard shortcut or mouse gesture or anything already in the window that I don't want that precious vertical screen real estate wasted (especially given the vertically-short screen of MBP, the top is much more useful than the bottom - after all, at least the bottom third of the screen is outside the ergonomically comfortable viewing area, even when the MBP is sitting on a desk). I don't want the menu bar always hanging there. Thankfully, at least there's a way to change this through editing info.plist for each application. So now I have Terminal, Chrome, Safari and Picasa with menu bar hiding. This gives me back the nice, clean look of each application with more vertical real estate (if you haven't guessed yet, I have Doc also set to auto-hide). This isn't all happy news BTW. If you use Spaces to move windows to a different space, auto-hide menu bar sometimes breaks. I haven't figured out exactly when this happens, but when this happens, the menu bar will not hide even though you have set the property. So a workaround brings another annoyance by itself. Guh.

Terminal with FFM.

This only works between terminals. So it's not that big of a difference, but at least it's better than nothing. If only Terminals can get focus under mouse without getting raised...

Mac convert, what's broken in Mac OS X.

2009-07-26T19:21:00.000-07:00

Now I've used MBP over a weekend. And I've decided there are a few things that are plain broken - that seriously prevents me from doing something or there's no good workaround - in OS X:

The brokenness #1: there's no support for "focus-follows-mouse" or FFM. Steve Yegge has a comprehensive post and I totally agree with him. Apple must be aware of this issue, since they provide a way to have FFM between Terminal windows (only between Terminal.app, not anything else). However, even ignoring the lack of FFM, I think the window focus system is broken because of the #2:

The brokenness #2: the false "application vs window" dichotomy. When I run a terminal, and launch an app (let's say a graphical diff tool), and then quit the app, the focus does not return to the terminal. Instead, X11 application (with no window at all, hence essentially useless) remains to have the focus, and I have to click the terminal to get back to my terminal. Same is true for any other app - if I launch a Finder window to do something quick in the middle of other app, and then close the Finder window, the focus doesn't return to whatever app that launched the Finder. Instead, the focus remains on the Finder app with no widow left. When is an app useful *immediately* after its last window is closed ? At least in my typical usage, 99% of the time I have the last window of an app closed, I don't need that app for a while. Otherwise, I wouldn't have closed it. If I closed all windows of Terminal.app, that means I don't need the terminal now. Ditto for web browser, and Finder. Or even for applications like Picasa,

if I closed its main window, it usually means I don't want that app for now. Rarely, I'd like to close the window, and open another one of the same app (Photoshop might be about the only exception to this rule). So why the heck Mac OS X keeps the focus on the application with no windows ?

#2 issue is also what makes the command-tab less useful than Expose. Expose treats all windows equally (regardless of which one belongs to which application) whereas command-tab is a list of applications, instead of list of windows - the chance of me wanting to switch to an app that doesn't have any window open through a keyboard shortcut is nearly zero.

The brokenness #3: the modal green + button. The button is actually a toggle button, that switches back and forth between pseudo-maximum mode vs normal mode. It's "pseudo-maximum" because the maximum is what the app decides is the maximum. Combine this with multiple tabs in a window (e.g. web browser), it becomes a trainwreck. It would be much more useful and straightforward if it were simply "maximize the window to fill the screen" or "maximize the window to fill the vertical screen" button. I *know* a lot of Mac users who don't grok this, cause I've seen many people using Mac laptop to do a presentation press the green button and get puzzled (I was equally puzzled every time I watched this, and now I at least understand what's happening but understanding doesn't make it less messy).

I have no doubt I can live with all these warts (after all, I have lived with Windows/Linux/Solaris warts for years), but I'm sure my annoyance won't stop. This isn't to say the other platforms are perfect, but it just shows that Mac isn't panacea and isn't THAT much better, if it's better at all.

Mac convert, day 3.5

2009-07-24T23:28:00.001-07:00

Forgot one more annoyance. When I login to a remote machine using ssh with X forwarding, and I run some X program (e.g. diff or merge tools) from the shell. Then, the focus moves to the newly popped up X program (which is good). But when I'm done with that program and quit it, the focus doesn't return to my terminal. Instead, X application, without any application window, stays and eats my keys. Is there any way not to have this stupid behavior ?

Mac convert, day 3

2009-07-24T10:51:00.000-07:00

Thanks to various people who pointed out how to remap the keyboard shortcut, I thought I was much closer to the keyboard shortcut nirvana than I was, but alas, the road to nirvana seems more elusive. For various reasons, I have to use two browsers, Chrome and Firefox. Anyway, I mapped "New Tab" to ^-T for all application, hoping that it will do the Right Thing, but alas, it does work for Chrome but not for Firefox. Firefox, for whatever reason, doesn't obey the new mapping - if I press ^-T, "File" menu gets highlighted, indicating that the OS X sends the some event to the firefox. However, Firefox doesn't do anything - even though menu bar shows the new mapping for "New Tab" command. Then, if I press command-T, it opens a new tab. Guh. This got to be a bug in Firefox, but it basically prevents me from using this new mapping (different shortcut for two very similar apps would be even worse than having no shortcut).

Now I'm using Safari and Chrome, except when I absolutely have to use Firefox (I need its proxy extension - where's the extension support for Safari or Chrome ?). I've remapped "Search Google..." menu to command-k, so now I can jump to the search box quickly in Safari (though I prefer Chrome's omnibox).

Anyway, I'm getting more used to the keyboard shortcuts, thing like home/end, page up/down, delete-word, and things of that sort. But I still feel like it's more clunky than laptops with dedicated page up/down and home/end buttons - I have to remember and switch between too many different modifiers keys. It's not a deal breaker but I wonder if all my efforts to deal with this conversion is worth the effort...

BTW, I've also realized that the MBP's keyboard doesn't travel as much as Thinkpad's - while the spacing is good, the short travel distance is something I'll have to get used to.

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The system has been stable so far, so that's an improvement. I hope it stays this way.

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One good thing about MBP: the screen is awesome. I didn't think much about Apple's claim of better color gamut, until I started copying back my family pictures. The MBP screen is orders of magnitude better than Thinkpad's when it comes to the color reproduction. This makes pictures and videos to be much more enjoyable.

Did I mention the machine is silent? Even when I'm copying gigabytes of my family pictures, I can barely hear seek noise and it's only because my bedroom is completely silent. I didn't hear anything during daytime with normal ambient noise.

Mac convert, day 2

2009-07-23T10:19:00.000-07:00

This morning, I put the laptop into sleep before the commute. At work, I opened the lid, and the mouse pointer was hanging there with nothing - no dialog box to unlock screen, no progress bar, nothing, nada. *sigh*

I brought it to our tech support, and we ended up force shutoff again. This is bad. Very bad.

He updated the system to the latest. I hope it will fix the instability, but I'll have to see. I'm willing to give MBP some chance but it's not looking very good so far.

Another new downer: the edge of the unibody is just too sharp - it hurts my arm/wrist/palm occasionally. I hope this is something I can get used to, but clearly this little box is designed for better look than better tactile comfort (same for the Aluminum surface - it's not as comfortable to the touch as the hard plastic shell of Thinkpad).

I also found why big touchpad gets in the way - if I put my palm down from the normal typing position, the parts of my palms touch the upper corners of the touchpad. And then if I try to tap using right thumb, my left palm is still touching the upper left corner, making it a secondary click. So I have to consciously move my hands slightly apart (or rather, rotate slightly outward).

A few things I found out that helps me a bit: command-left/right are home/end, and option-left/right are move-word-left/right. Also command-up/down are page up/down. So at least I got my basic keyboard navigation back. But I still don't know how to move between tabs in Firefox or Chrome through keyboard shortcut...guess I'll have to search for it :)

Not everything's gloom and doom though. A few good things I can say about MBP:

It's fast. And having 4GB of memory is awesome. There's just no comparison how much more responsive the machine is - especially when I'm working full blast and have multiple browsers open with lots of tabs with lots of graphs, there's no "swapping" that used to make the performance suck on my poor T43p with only 1GB of memory. It also wakes up fast (of course, *if* it wakes up, that is) - from a regular sleep, it's quite fast to wake up. Not "instantaneous" but nearly so.

Also, it is silent - I haven't noticed any fan noise or hard disk seek sounds so far. I can vaguely hear it if I pay attention to it in a silent room, and it just is plain silent with normal ambient noise around me. Moving it around a few times today, I think I can hear small clicking noise, typically when the disk puts its head somewhere "safe" - I suspect the machine detects my lifting it up and moves the disk head somewhere safe, but I could be wrong.

Compared to T43p, the machine is less hot. It's probably because most of my daily tasks (lots of browser windows/tabs, and one terminal, and a few Finder windows, and a chat client) are not taxing its cpu much, but still the bottom becomes a bit warm during usage and that's it. I don't feel uncomfortable at all, and there's no hot air blowing out to the side either.

Mac convert, day 1

2009-07-22T23:45:00.001-07:00

After 3.5 years with IBM T43p, I upgraded my work laptop to 15inch MacBookPro, largely because that was the model that had 4GB in our inventory. It's been almost 13 years since I've last used NeXTSTEP as my day-to-day OS, and during that 13 years, I've been mostly using Windows, Solaris or Linux as my primary desktop. My carpool buddy, who is an avid Mac user, recommended me to write down the things I ran into during my "conversion", so here's my first entry.

Day 1

Jumping from a single core 1GB ram box to a dual core 4GB box, MBP (MacBookPro) feels fast. But that's largely expected.

The first stumbling block: tap is not a click. The button is just too heavy to press every time I want to click something. Quickly solved by finding the system preference - I just do not understand why this isn't default. Then I kept seeing "secondary click" aka "right mouse button" click when I wasn't trying to do that. Turns out the pad is simply too big and very often part of my right palm (near the thumb) touches the pad when I try to tap the pad with the right thumb. Once I realized that, I get less of it, so it's not a total annoyance.

Then my great puzzling moment came when I pressed the green "+" button on the window, only to see my browser resize into a weird proportion. I couldn't figure out what's going on - I was totally expecting it to be just "maximize" button and it's apparently not as simple as that. My friend explained it to me on the way home, and now it makes sense, though I still think it's a bad design (the button is modal, but there's no sign of which mode it is in).

Fired up a terminal, and realized that I needed to remap the caps lock key. At least this is provided directly by the system preference, unlike Windows, which needs registry editing. Nice. However, my joy didn't last long, as I soon realized that control-L doesn't highlight the location bar in the browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) but command-L does. Ditto for control-T vs command-T. Copy and paste is the same. And there's no separate home/end key nor page up/down keys. And there's no proper "delete" key - the delete key does backspace. Arg. I think this is going to be one of the biggest huddles - the finger habits :(

After playing for a while, also realized that I can't do double-tap-and-hold-and-drag. Turns out the system preference has a setting for this. Whew.

Then came another puzzling moment, with command-tab - where is my "other" chrome window in command-tab list ? Turns out command-tab lists "applications", not "windows". OTOH, Expose does display all windows. Why they don't display the same list is beyond me. Then my friend tells me of command-` which is useful, but not quite as useful. This is another keyboard finger habit that I'll have to suffer through :( Setting upper-left corner as Expose trigger makes it a bit more tolerable, but still it sucks that I have to use touchpad for one more thing.

The biggest downer came late in the night - the spinning beach ball of death. I didn't expect to see it on my first day of the use, but I did. The network stack became completely wedged. I've tried ethernet, wifi, and 3G, all of the individually on and off but to no avail. So I decided to use the last tactic - reboot, but alas, the machine decided to go to the beach, and kept showing me the spinning beach ball for like eternity. I couldn't wait for long, so I had to power switch it off. I have no idea what kind of filesystem this box has (OS X 10.5.7) but I hope it's journaling.

I suspect 3G modem driver might not be up to the snuff, so I'll try not to use that thing unless absolutely necessary. Anyway, wifi was a bit finicky as well - though this might be more likely due to my wireless router than anything else.

There are a few other issues with applications. All in all, not a great day 1 experience :(

If this doesn't improve over the next month or so, I might have to return this and get a different box and get Windows or Linux.

A programmer is...

2009-07-22T10:43:00.000-07:00

"A programmer is a person who passes as an exacting expert on the basis

of being able to turn out, after innumerable punching, an infinite

series of incomprehensive answers calculated with micrometric

precisions from vague assumptions based on debatable figures taken from

inconclusive documents and carried out on instruments of problematical

accuracy by persons of dubious reliability and questionable mentality

for the avowed purpose of annoying and confounding a hopelessly

defenseless department that was unfortunate enough to ask for the

information in the first place."

-- IEEE Grid news magazine

PS. Thanks to mjw :)

Dansguardian and pogoplug

2009-06-15T23:12:00.001-07:00

I have two kids, 9 year old girl and 7 year old boy, and I've always felt somewhat unsafe whenever kids used the internet. Increasingly, my son seems to access more and more online contents, mostly to play online games and read pokemon tips.

The recent Chinese "Green Dam" filtering fiasco reminded me that I should do something about it sooner than later, so I decided to do it tonight. After a quick research, I've installed squid and dansguardian on pogoplug through ipkg, and downloaded the blacklists from URLblacklist.com. After that, I've changed the proxy setting on computers my kids use, to point to dansguardian, and it seems to work well.

My kids don't have great motivation to "defeat" any content filtering yet (they are not even aware of it), and given that it's more of a safeguard from accidents and malicious sites, I'm quite happy with the current setup. In a few years when my son becomes old enough (he's "only" 7), I'll have to set up a transparent proxy if I really want to enforce filtering, but untill then, this will be good enough. I suspect that when he's old enough, he would most likely have the internet access from his cell phone which I won't be able to easily filter. So by that time, "enforcement" won't really be effective or viable anyway (come to think of it, maybe I can try setting dansguardian and squid on android - how's that as an idea for a new android app - parental website filtering software for your young'uns :)

Putting my hard disk to sleep on Pogoplug

2009-05-18T23:16:00.000-07:00

Out of the box, pogoplug doesn't spin down my Maxtor OneTouch Plus hard disk. Like most other hard disk drives out there, my disk is used for relatively short period of time every day. This means keeping it running wastes the electricity and produces unnecessary heat.

That situation changed with Spindown - I just installed it using the source. It requires "sg3-utils" but that's already included in Optware, so a quick "ipkg install sg3-utils" took care of that dependency. Once I've installed spindown, and edited /opt/etc/spindown.conf to manage sda and sdb (I have two disks plugged onto pogoplug), my disk stays cool and silent all day. As is, it's almost perfect - all important bases are covered.

Of course, there's always something more, and in this case, I'd like to get software RAID 1 working - which would be really awesome. It would be even more awesome if somehow there's a way to get ZFS working but I know that won't happen anytime soon, if ever. Probably it will take less time (and work) to get BTRFS working on my pogoplug :)

Fan Club

2009-05-15T09:36:00.000-07:00

Found this through Digg.com:

Finally, the working combo of cups and pogoplug

2009-05-06T20:39:00.000-07:00

Finally I got the remote printing working with pogoplug.

As I explained in my previous post, I've installed cups and splix, and created a "raw" printer with the usb printer as the device. However, I couldn't get it working only with those.

Then Google pointed me to http://www.owlfish.com/thoughts/winipp-cups-2003-07-20.html. I've basically followed this all the way, but STILL it didn't work. It turns out the last trick was to use the specific driver for ML1740 instead of Samsung's universal driver. Somehow Samsung Universal driver didn't work on top of cups IPP printer.

I suspect I don't even need splix, since the printer is raw and the driver is on windows side. This probably means any USB printer will work, as long as there's a driver on the client side. All in all, I'm very happy that both samba and cups work now.

Pogoplug performance

2009-05-02T22:41:00.000-07:00

Now that I've hooked pogoplug onto a fully non-blocking gigabit switch, the network shouldn't be the bottleneck anymore (or if it still is, I'd be really happy) and so finally I have the setup to test pogoplug's performance. Feeling lazy about it, I decided to just run some file copy operations :)

Here's what I got:

First, I wanted to see pogoplug + Maxtor OneTouchPlus 750GB disk performance. The disk is formatted in NTFS, and is hooked up to pogoplug through a USB2 hub.

I first ran a file copy inside pogoplug, that copies a single 1GB file onto the same disk (hence there's 1GB of read traffic and 1GB of write traffic onto the same disk). It took 232 seconds - this is sooooooo slow (only 2GB/232 ~= 8MB/sec). So I measured only the read speed by running "cat file > /dev/null" with the same 1GB file, and it only took 44s -- 1GB/44 > 20MB/s. 20MB/s read speed is quite reasonable :)

Now across the network, I ran "scp" from a windows box - this doesn't really test the pure network copy performance, as scp would require quite a bit of CPU power to encrypt the traffic. With scp, I got only about 2.2MB/s which I thought is somewhat abyssmal (this is on a gigabit network). However, it turns out it isn't that bad, compared to samba.

I tried copying over samba and gave up after waiting about a minute (at that point, the copy progress bar said 15 minutes left - this would mean nearly 1MB/s). So I tried pogoplug device (you know, the pogoplug's software that makes any drives on pogoplug show up as windows' local disk). It took 146 seconds to copy 1GB file from pogoplug to a Windows box - that's about 7MB/s. When I asked about samba to pogoplug support, they mentioned that their software is much faster than samba, and now I can believe that :)

While it's still not fast enough to hit 20MB/s disk speed bottleneck, 7MB/s is fast enough to saturate my 802.11g wireless network and probably fast enough to stream HD contents - I'll have to try that later to confirm. So all in all, I'm reasonably happy about the performance - when using pogoplug device directly at least - and looking forward to using it as a media streaming box :)

One good news and one bad news about pogoplug and cups

2009-05-02T21:57:00.000-07:00

I've made some progress setting up cups on pogoplug. It's not working yet, but I feel like it's sooooo close.

I first tried cups in optware packages, but somehow all binaries in the package gave me segfault.

So I downloaded cups-1.3.10 source, and compiled/installed it myself (after installing optware development tools - gcc, make, etc). Then I realized that the kernel has usblp driver, but somehow /dev/usblp0 isn't there (even when the printer is plugged in, and dmesg shows kernel recognizing it as a usb printer). So I created a device myself "mknod /dev/usblp0 c 180 0" - the major number and the minor number was taken from:

bash-3.2# cat /sys/bus/usb/devices/1-1.3/1-1.3\:1.0/usb\:lp0/dev
180:0
bash-3.2#

After this, cups backend recognizes the printer:

bash-3.2# /opt/lib/cups/backend/usb
direct usb://Samsung/ML-1740 "Samsung ML-1740" "Samsung ML-1740 USB #1" "MFG:Samsung;CMD:GDI;MDL:ML-1740;CLS:PRINTER;MODE:GDI;STATUS:IDLE;CODE:10001;"
bash-3.2#

I've installed splix as well. However, I've never setup cups manually before, and I was lost in setting up cups. After many trials and errors, I still don't have successful cups setup - I've tried two different paths, one setting up the printer as "raw", and have my windows box to install the printer driver on its side. And the other was to use splix and have windows recognize it as generic postscript printer. However, I couldn't get either of them working - generic postscript setup didn't work because cups was giving client-error-document-format-not-supported error with a message "unsupported format: application/postscript" or something like that. I don't understand why this is happening, as seemingly correct .ppd file is installed and configured for the printer... Then the raw mode somehow never worked either and I couldn't figure out why, and by the time I got to that stage, it was waaaay to late so had to sleep :/

If you're a cups hacker who can give some advice in this sitation, it would be awesome. It's so close to pogoplug nirvana....

My samba config for pogoplug

2009-04-30T19:36:00.000-07:00

Below is my samba config (for samba 2.2). No password, nor any protection other than IP address filter (see "hosts allow") so use with caution :)

[global]
workgroup = PARKNET
server string = Pogoplug Samba2 Server
hosts allow = 192.168.3. 127.
null passwords = yes
guest account = root
log file = /opt/var/log/samba/log.%m
max log size = 50
security = share
encrypt passwords = no
smb passwd file = /opt/etc/samba/smbpasswd
dns proxy = no
preserve case = yes

[ShareAll]
comment = Test share
path = /tmp/.cemnt
available = yes
public = yes
writable = yes
printable = no
create mask = 0777
guest ok = yes
browseable = yes

I know this is somewhat gross as far as samba configurations go, but hopefully it will be a working start :)

PS. Turns out "encrypt passwords = no" doesn't actually help, but prevents non-workgroup machines to connect without passwords (at least from a Windows XP machine). I've now set it to "yes".

대한민국은 미친공화국이다

2009-04-24T22:59:00.000-07:00

한겨레 신문에 "교과부 심야학원 10시까지 법제화"라는 기사를 읽자니, 기가 막혀서 말이 안나온다. 이런 황당한 법을 만들겠다는 넘들이나, 그걸 지지하는 넘들, 내 블로그를 읽을리 절대 없겠지만, 혹시라도 읽는다면 잘 들어라.

도.대.체. 다른사람들이 자기 애들을 11시에 학원에 보내건, 12시에 보내건, 새벽 3시에 보내건, 그게 니들 사는데 무슨 방해가 되냐? 뭐가 "올바른" 행동인지 아닌지, 몇사람들이 정해서 법으로 만들어 다른사람들에게 강제시키겠다는 이런 발상은...계몽주의적을 넘어 국민을 애들 취급하겠다는 발상 이쟈너. 니덜은 미친놈들이다. 10시넘에 운영하는 학원을 문제라고 생각하는 것 까지는 그렇다고 치자. 그걸 강제적으로 이런식으로 해결하겠다는, 위에서 아래로 내려오는 상명하달식으로 밖에는 해결이 안될거라고 믿는, 그래서 거기에 회의 시간들 들여가며 돌아가지 않는 머리통들을 부딪히고 있는 니덜은 ... 미친넘들이다.

밤늦게 학원에 보내려는 부모들이 보내고 싶지 않게, 보낼 필요가 없게 만들어서, 수요가 없어지게 하지 않는 이상, 아무리 단속을 하더라도 원하는 사람들은 하게 마련이다. 어떻게 하면 근본적인 문제부터 해결할까는 생각하지도 않으면서 이딴 쓸데없는데다가 시간을 쓰고있으니.... 혹시라도 이거 읽고 제정신이 돌아오거든 이 형님한테 감사하다고 인사나 해라.

About /dev/mtdblock3 on pogoplug

2009-04-24T22:24:00.001-07:00

I've asked pogoplug support if they have any plan to use that extra partition, and the below was the answer:

We have left mtdblock3 for linux users to use at their discression. We have reserved mtd0 for bootloader, mtd1 for kernel, mtd2 for root file system (and it is all we firmware update). mtd3 and mtdblock3 are the majority of the NAND flash (~450MB) and we currently have no plans to use it at all.

One word: awesome! I'm feeling a lot better about buying pogoplug. Now if only I can get cups working. I haven't had time to fight with cups yet, but it seems that it's not the cups but something at the kernel level that's not working...

How to install samba on pogoplug

2009-04-24T22:18:00.001-07:00

Below is roughly what I did to get samba running on pogoplug.

# remount the root partition for writing

mount -o remount,rw /

# mount the extra partition for the space

mkdir /opt

mount /dev/mtdblock3 /opt

cd /opt

# get the optware ipkg system

wget http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/cs08q1armel/cross/unstable/ipkg-

opt_0.99.163-10_arm.ipk

# set it up

tar -xOvzf ipkg-opt_*_arm.ipk ./data.tar.gz | tar -C / -xzvf -

mkdir -p /opt/etc/ipkg

echo "src cross http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/cs08q1armel/cross/uns

table" > /opt/etc/ipkg/armel-feed.conf

echo "src native http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/cs08q1armel/native/u

nstable" >> /opt/etc/ipkg/armel-feed.conf

# first update

/opt/bin/ipkg update

# install samba!

/opt/bin/ipkg install samba2

# edit samba config

vi /opt/etc/samba/smb.conf

# run it!

/opt/etc/init.d/S80samba start

Pogoplug, and lots of images

2009-04-19T17:24:00.000-07:00

If you have a disk that contains large number of image and video files, you may not want to attach it to pogoplug, at least yet. It seems that pogoplug wants to generate thumbnails for all video and image files on the disk (/tmp/hbplug.log shows invocation of ffmpeg), and since I attached the disk that contains all digital pictures I've ever took in the past 10 years or so - especially with two kids, I easily take thousands of pictures a year - it looks like the pogoplug is taking forever to process them all.

Looking at .cedata/tn directory pogoplug created (which seems to be the directory for thumbnails), I see 3k immediate subdirectories under .cedata/tn, and total 23k files and directories recursively. *arg*. Life is never simple :(
I don't remember whether I formatted this disk in NTFS or FAT, but regardless, it seems like a bad design on pogoplug's part to use this many directories - you want to keep the number of directories reasonable, especially when the underlying filesystem is badly designed, like FAT.

Anyway, I've stopped "hbplug" process by "kill -STOP", so the disk is not thrashing. I should remember to re-enable hbplug process again.

Pogoplug, optware, samba

2009-04-19T00:16:00.001-07:00

Finally I had a bit of extra time to play with Pogoplug. I've set up Optware ipkg on pogoplug, installed samba, configured it and it works beautifully :)
Optware comes with CUPS, so it shouldn't be too difficult to set the print server as well - though I first need aUSB2 hub to try hooking up the printer :)
Now it's time to sleep - if I get more time, I'll try to write down more details on Optware setup.

Update on Pogoplug

2009-04-11T12:46:00.000-07:00

After complaining loudly on their support page, I've got an excellent reply from Pogoplug:

Hi.

I spoke with our dev group and here's what's going on. They are working on a LAN discovery broadcast for the drive software, so that it will work without internet access. It should be available soon, and I'll update you when it's ready. We did not provide SMB/CIFS support because we wanted a consistent user experience for Mac and Windows, both in and out of the home. The protocol used by Pogoplug drive software is also a lot faster than SMB. Having said that, you can get full access to your Pogoplug and add any software that you want. We are just about to publish this on our site, but here's the info you'll need:

Pogoplug runs with Linux 2.6.22.18. and the full open source for the kernel, glibc, busybox, u-boot, and other user-mode processes will be available linked from our developer section. Pogoplug currently accepts SSH sessions for the root user (un: root, pw: ceadmin). The processor is a ARM processor with all firmware stored on the internal NAND flash device. The standard linux MTD device drive is used to manage this NAND device with JFFS2 filesystem. Once you SSH to the device, you can change the root file system, install a new kernel modules, etc.

We also support a 3.3v RS-232 UART connection on the main logic board. This UART connection gives low level access to the u-boot boot loader which allows for upgrading the main kernel image.

Please let me know if I can provide any additional information.

Thanks,

I haven't set up the cross compiler on my linux box yet, so haven't done any serious attempt of adding more functionality to it. But regardless, given this information, you definitely want to block ssh/telnet port at the firewall if you haven't done so already, and you shouldn't hook it up to the network you don't trust.

My brief performance testing (just copying some big file) seems to suggest that it is not particularly slower or faster. One issue I've encountered was BSOD - I tried playing .mkv from a windows box that has pogoplug software installed (hence the pogoplug shows up as a disk), and I've got BSOD (the first time in a few years since I've got that laptop). On the second attempt, it didn't crash, so it's not a definite evidence of a bug in their software, but nonetheless not a great sign.

So, it's still not useable as my main network storage. But there are some good signs that it may become one.

My Pogoplug arrived, and I'm disappointed.

2009-04-08T21:46:00.001-07:00

This is a quick review of Pogoplug. I have preordered the box, and it has finally arrived. Unfortunately, I'm deeply disappointed, because it has so much potential that's being wasted.

Pogoplug is essentially a small embedded computer, with Marvell's low-power ARM processor core with some DRAM and flash memory, one ethernet port and one USB port.
I pre-ordered it, figuring there's not much to lose - I figured this would be a perfect device that I can play with, as a small home server, given that this little box was supposed to run linux.

Now that I've received the box, it has a few critical flaws that make it not very usable in its current state.

No power saving mode for the disk - I've been using an old laptop running Windows XP as a file/print server. Naturally, when I don't use the disk, the disk doesn't do any "seeks", and it's configured so that it spins down the hard disk fairly quickly when idle. This means my external hard disk spends most of its time spinned down, not consuming much power. This is in great contrast to Pogoplug - it constantly spins the disk, and even when I'm not using it, it does bunch of seeks, consuming power and wearing down the disk. For a box that's meant to be on all the time, this is...deeply disappointing, to say it politely.
No CIFS/SMB support nor NFS - I don't know what Pogoplug people are thinking, but they didn't enable this, and there's no way to "properly" access the files, except...
A priorietary software on Windows and Mac that show the drive hooked to Pogoplug as a network disk. This software, confusingly also called Pogoplug, doesn't connect if your machine and your pogoplug can't talk to pogoplug's server. For example, if you lose your connection to your ISP, you can't connect to your disk hooked to Pogoplug. This means...
Total dependence on the proprietary webservice - as is, the box is useless without pogoplug website. If the company folds, the box will essentially become a deadweight.
No printer server support - given how easy it is to support print server, it's crazy not to support this.
No ssh into the box - even though this is my computer, I don't have root access. It's not like the box doesn't have sshd running - it has the port open (crazily, it has the telnetd running on port 22 as well - whoever left telnetd running by default needs some serious education on the network security).

As you can see, all the flaws are software - the hardware itself is compact, silent, and low power, and just the right form factor and the price. It's just the software that's not allowing the little-box-that-can from doing all things it's meant to do.

And scanning through the pogoplug support forum and reading some responses, I don't see enough good signs that the company is willing to listen to the similar requests that's already made on the board.

For all you mothers out there

2009-03-26T21:49:00.000-07:00

Enjoy!

The Bay Model

2009-03-05T22:09:00.001-08:00

This is the first time I heard of this, but looks amazing. It seems like a perfect place to visit during spring break...

Validation, and Rent-a-person

2009-03-02T10:22:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine sent me a link to a movie called Validation (thanks Tom!). It's an awesome movie, and my wife and I thoroughly enjoyed it - and guess what ? It turns out the same directory made a movie called Rent-a-person. It's equally entertaining...and those two movies are separate yet entwined :)

Ever heard of beef that's over $150 per lb ?

2009-01-09T18:02:00.000-08:00

Costco online now sells Japanese Wagyu Beef. Price? $2299.99 for 15 lbs. That's over $150 per lb. That's gotta be more expensive than a regular cow in whole...

Snow + tree = breathtaking :)

2008-12-26T12:42:00.000-08:00

Taken at the top of Sky Express lift in Heavenly, on Christmas Eve.

Driving to the end of the rainbow...

2008-12-15T10:47:00.000-08:00

We - the commuters driving to work - are the pursuers of the proverbial end of the rainbow for a pot of gold. But this morning, it was literally true:

This storm's getting better :)

2008-12-14T15:32:00.000-08:00

Well, NWS just updated the forecast, and it gets better and better:

* TOTAL SNOW ACCUMULATIONS THROUGH MONDAY NIGHT: 10 TO 20
INCHES...WITH 18 TO 30 INCHES ABOVE 7000 FEET.

Yes! Yes! Yes!

Finally, the storm I've been waiting for is coming :)

2008-12-13T16:19:00.000-08:00

National Weather Service's special weather statement at 3:24pm today (Dec 13th) says:

* IN THE LAKE TAHOE BASIN...6 TO 12 INCHES ARE POSSIBLE AT LAKE
LEVEL...WITH 10 TO 20 INCHES ABOVE 7000 FEET.

Yeepee! That ought to cover enough coverage to open up a lot more slopes. Sounds like the real snowboard season in Lake Tahoe will start soon :)

A chance to submit your question to the upcoming Obama-Biden administration.

2008-12-09T13:31:00.000-08:00

The transition team of the upcoming US administration set up a page using Google Moderator service (internally called Dory - if you've seen Nemo....) http://change.gov/page/content/openforquestions. You can ask any questions, and vote for the questions. I really appreciate the transition team trying to listen to the people through various channels like this. While this is really only a small sign, I already feel better about the new president-elect, and can't wait to see him into the office :)

PS. The URL has changed from my earlier post.
PS2. Now the transition team has a blog explaining why they are doing this: http://change.gov/newsroom/entry/open_for_questions

The flower that blooms in adversity is the most...

2008-11-07T10:35:00.000-08:00

Well, the winter's finally arrived in California, but we still have these amazing flowers in our frontyard:

Taken with T-Mobile G1 :)

Heavenly started making snow - opening on Nov 21.

2008-11-04T13:54:00.000-08:00

Yeepee! I can't wait to go up there on the Thanksgiving week - I have booked a room for the entire week :)

Bike friendly or not ?

2008-10-20T09:22:00.000-07:00

In reply to my previous post, a friend of mine (who doesn't live in the Bay Area) asked me if my route is really bike-friendly. Well, you can find the answer to that question at:

http://www.vta.org/schedules/gmaps/index.html

And if you overlay my route (unfortunately I don't know how to overlap my route on top of that bike map yet), you'll notice that a lot of it is covered by bike lanes. And except for a short stretch on Camden (and the right most lane in that section on Camden is really wide so no worries), most of my routes outside bike lane are through neighborhood streets (e.g. through Campbell), which has virtually no traffic in Saturday morning. So that route is very safe and bike friendly (there are less traffic signals on those routes as well, which helps a lot). Oh, and the route is essentially flat - there are very minor incline/declines but no hills at all, with a lot of straight runs where you can go as fast as your legs can allow.

Saturday's bike trip

2008-10-19T00:34:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I had the longest bike trip so far - about 21 miles (33km) from my house to Cupertino High School.

It took me about an hour and 40 minutes - the average speed of about 12.6 miles per hour.

Considering all those stop times at numerous traffic signals, this is better than I actually expected

- 30 seconds wait at 20 signals would be 10 minutes, and that would make the average speed 14 miles per hour.

Here's the map with my route:

View Larger Map

The weird loop at the end was basically to spend time before I met my wife at

Cupertino High School - I arrived there much earlier than I expected,

so the loop became much larger than I originally planned.

Now this gives me high hope that I can bike to my work within 2.5 hour or so in the bike-to-work day next year...

Silicon Valley's road names

2008-10-04T17:45:00.000-07:00

As a computer science geek, Silicon Valley has many "interesting" things around, and among them is the names of streets. Here's a few of them that are interesting to me:

While Semiconductor Drive in San Jose sounds like a perfect place to find semiconductor companies, you'll have better luck around Component Drive, which crosses with N. 1st Street - where you can pretty much find all major and minor semiconductor companies. Not so far from Component Drive, you can drive through Disk Drive in San Jose, and then after just one signal away and you can hit Fortran Drive and Fortran Court right next to each other.

You don't even need to ask which company is at 1 Amd Place, Sunnyvale. Of course, there are a few giants that won't be satisfied without its name on the road sign: you can't drive through Oracle Parkway in Redmond City or Cisco Way in San Jose, and you don't even need those road names to know where you're getting into if you drive through those streets.

However, not all companies are witless and boring to make their coporate address in their own name. The famous Infinite Loop in Cupertino is a pun for every programmers out there, although the Loop isn't really a complete loop by itself- which kind of fits the "fruit" company that is located there). Both Network Circles in Santa Clara and Menlo Park are really full circles and you can keep driving on those Circles without leaving them (they are also the address of the same company who owns network.com).

Joe Garcia for Congress....NOT

2008-09-12T09:22:00.000-07:00

If you can vote against Joe Garcia (you can, if you live in Florida), here's one more reason to do so. He's a spammer - I live in California, and I rarely register for any political events/organizations, and I suddenly got two emails from him, asking for support.
Unless this is a deliberate attempt by his opponent to put mud on his face (which I seriously doubt), he's a bona fide spammer in my book, and although I have no idea who he is and what kind of politician he is, he's either not paying enough attention to his campaign or he's using illegal and abusive tactics (spamming IS illegal), and in either case, you should not vote for him.

Keep an eye on LHC

2008-09-10T16:12:00.000-07:00

Are you worried about LHC (Large Hadron Collider) bringing the end of the world ? Then rejoice - now you can keep an eye on LHC at: http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html

Enjoy!

PS. Ian, thanks for the link :)

The first spam that made me laugh...

2008-07-08T21:34:00.000-07:00

I found this in my inbox today:


From: "clinton tarsicius" <fuge@mail.totalcar.hu>
To: <gcc-patches@gcc.gnu.org>
Subject: I got you naked gcc-patches
Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:04:39 +0000

Watch.

For most of you who don't know what gcc-patches means: gcc stands for the GNU Compiler Collection, and gcc-patches@gcc.gnu.org is a mailing list where the code changes to the GCC are sent and discussed. Naturally for an open source project, the list is open to everybody. So, in some sense, the spam is not only funny but also correct :)

Software Engineers vs the Universe

2008-07-01T10:47:00.000-07:00

I subscribe to the quotes of the day feed from QuotationsPage.com. I really like today's quote:

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

Rick Cook, The Wizardry Compiled

The answer to Apple's use of PA Semi

2008-06-11T20:53:00.000-07:00

The new article confirms my own speculation.

What would Apple do with PA Semi ?

2008-05-15T22:12:00.000-07:00

Ever since Apple acquired PA Semiconductor (if you missed the original news, one of the first reports is here),
I've been pondering what Apple can/will do with PA Semi that would be interesting enough for PA Semi people to stay around. PA Semi arguably has one of the best microprocessor team in the world, but such people are not easy to keep - after all, if you're a good microprocessor designer, it isn't very hard to find another project/company to jump to. Companies are always looking for great engineers, and PA Semi had many. For Apple to have any hope of retaining those people in PA Semi, it has to have some interesting project for them (or, alternatively, large enough money can do the same job, but I doubt Apple is willing to spend much more - good processor designers are not exactly cheap already). Also, buying a microprocessor design house isn't a tactical move - it must have some deep strategic advantage to Apple.

So what new project would be interesting to PA semi folks and also benefit Apple strategically ? I think it must be a new processor for iPhone and iPod. Apple uses various chips for iPhone and iPods - at least from PortalPlayer, SigmaTel and Samsung. I forget the exact figure, but I think the current estimate of iPod and iPhone unit sales for 2008 is somewhere around 70-80M (with iPhone taking 7-8M). I don't know exact sales breakdown between different iPods, but let's say Apple sells 20M iPod Touch and iPhones (which presumably share the same processor). If the development of a processor for iPod costs $100M a year, per-unit cost would be $5. At that price, it's not a slam dunk in terms of economics, but it's within economically viable range. Apple might very well design their own SoC for iPhone specifically, and can reap the economic benefit.

However, another important point is the explosion of smart phones. The processor arms race that happened with PC is only going to happen again with smart phones. It's bound to happen - as people do more and more stuff on their cell phones, people will demand better performance which translates into new capabilities. Part of the reason Apple lost the first PC game was the performance. Apple couldn't quite develop their own processors - their volume wasn't high enough (I don't remember exact numbers, but before iMac, their sales only around 1M a year, if I remember correctly). This time around, the difference is that Apple has enough volume. With that, the economics of having a processor team in-house just might be viable, and provide all the strategic benefit that comes with it.

SCO used to be a great company, and here's a proof.

2008-04-14T13:10:00.000-07:00

I present you a music video of SCOhemian Rhapsody:

with the lyric in its full glory:

(Many thanks to Simon!)

Disappearing doormats ? Here's the answer...

2008-04-11T17:09:00.000-07:00

A snowboarder's review of Kirkwood Ski Resort

2008-04-06T20:42:00.000-07:00

On April 5, I made a day trip to Kirkwood Ski Resort in Kirkwood, CA.
This was only my second trip to Kirkwood - my first trip was when I was still a budding beginner snowboarder, trying to connect some beginner turns and thus I could ride only very few slopes.
A few more seasons of snowboarding apparently made big difference, and now I was able to ride many of the runs in the resort.

The location of K-wood or simply the Wood for some people, is both its blessing and its curse. Statistically K-wood gets the most snow (average 630+ inches in a season) among the Tahoe area resorts and the base altitude is one of the highest (7800feet, or 2377 meters), which means both quality and quantity of the snow are among the best in the Lake Tahoe area. However, it's also one of the remotest resorts - it's almost 1 hour drive from the lake, or any other "town" other than the resort itself. And the rugged terrain with heavy snowfall makes the resort one of the least accessible, especially during the heavy storm - even though K-wood is one of the closest to the bay area in distance. These factors apparently make lodging more expensive than other resorts (e.g. heavenly, with entire South Lake Tahoe, and any of the other north lake resorts, with Truckee or even Reno which is only 30-45 minutes away from many of the north lake resorts).

Hence, for past four years of snowboarding in the Tahoe area, I've been to the wood only once before. This time though, they had a promotion of giving a one-day free pass for any season pass holders of other resorts - and I happened to have a pass for Heavenly. I also needed to make a day trip, which made Heavenly less desirable due to 30+ minutes more drive, while the spring weather kept the road to K-wood clear and pleasant to drive.

So I woke up at 5:30am, had my first breakfast and packed my breakfast/lunch and snacks, filled up the gas in my car and took off - it was 6 when I got on the freeway. Other than one brief stop at Starbuck's at the beginning of 88 in Stockton, I drove nonstop and it was 9:30 when I arrived in the resort parking lot. I dropped off my board for the tune-up at The Edge Repair Shop - free thanks to Snowbomb Card - and got the free lift ticket from the office (which was indoors, a lot nicer than other resorts where you have to wait outside, often shivering in the cold). While waiting for my board to be ready for ice and slush of the spring, I had my second breakfast.

By 10, I was on my first lift ride of the day, the chair #1 (see the trail map) - I wanted to try the back side, the chair #4 through the chair #2 and #3. The chair #1 is super slow, as is usually the case for a lift serving green trails - unfortunately I noticed one sideways from the top of the chair #11 that can go to the bottom of the chair #2 very late in the afternoon. Anyhow, Snowkirk looked nice and flat and not too short nor too long - just about right for beginners.

When I first looked at the trail map, I didn't pay much attention to the runs from the chair #2. However, on the #2 lift, I saw the nicely groomed Flying Carpet, which is a wide blue run with moderate pitch. Keeping in mind to try that run on the way back to the main lodge later, I went over the hill and headed to the chair #4. On Herringbone Straight, snow was a bit slushy already - considering that it was April, it wasn't too bad. Unfortunately I missed Bud's Alley split (too bad there's no sign) which meant I had to take #3 to go back up the same hill again. The chair #4 is long but fairly fast and provides excellent view of all the runs from it. Here's some pictures I took on the lift:

On the picture, you can see Elevator Shaft to the left of the lift, Hully Gully and Cold Shoulder on the right.

Off the chair, I figured I'd try the easiest runs first, since this was a warm up, and went on Happiness Is. It's a very nice blue cruiser, crossing the huge bowl. It felt a bit like Alpine Bowl in Alpine Meadows - wide open bowl and fun blue run in the middle but plenty of opportunities on the skirt for more steep start. Overall, the snow turned out to be excellent - sure, it wasn't a fresh powder, but it sure was as good as any packed powder condition on a warm winter day. Some pockets that don't get much sun was a bit icy (not on Happiness Is, but on other runs off of #4) but nothing like rock-hard ice on a really cold winter day and my freshly tuned edges had plenty of bite to chew through what little of ice up there.

Hully Gully is like a half made half-pipe that's steep. The pitch is only a tad bit more steep than most blue runs, but the huge gully makes it a lot of fun to zigzag. Right next to Hully Gully is Cold Shoulder. It is a bit more steep than Hully Gully, so about middle of the pack for a black run, and it was topped off with huge rocks at the end - giving some opportunity to try your cliff jumping and rock avoiding skills if you want. I'm not good enough for that kind of stuff, but if and when I'm ready and want to hone my skills, I think I'd feel a lot more comfortable to do my first jump off of those rocks at the end of Cold Shoulder than others, since it has much better visibility than most such places and fairly short (for what it is).

Elevator Shaft, Hully Gully and Cold Shoulder all merge into a single trail which lead to the bottom of the lift #4. It was a nice cruising course, and surprisingly there wasn't any slush - thanks to huge trees casting shadows - it looked like the entire valley/bowl is facing north and the trees blocked sun very well, keeping the snow in good condition. I tried Elevator Shaft again and then headed back to the main lodge.

Now at the top of the lift #2 and #3, I got to enjoy Flying Carpet. As the name suggests, the well-groomed wide run looked like an excellent place for practicing carving, and it sure was. You could turn as wide as you want and the slope was indeed very very consistent, making long carving turns so much more enjoyable. Indeed it was so much fun that I rode the chair many more times before going back to the lodge - being relatively short and with very few people on the slope, you can check your turn shapes you made on the slope on the lift back (if you can find your mark, that is).

One reason K-wood is especially good for snowboarders, is that there are very few flat traverses. But there's still few spots that are not snowboard friendly and that's Hay Flat. It's aptly named cause it's really really flat and combined with the slush, it was a leg killer. If I knew it was that flat, I would have speeded up coming down #2, but being a conscious rider, I followed the SLOW sign at the bottom of #2 and slowed down and got stuck in Hay Flat. Well, at least it wasn't that long, so I got out without burning my leg too much, and was back on the main lodge.

On the lift #2

After lunch, I got on the lift #5, Solitude and rode Lower Zachary and Mokelumne. Lower Zachary was probably on the steep side among blue runs, so had more potential to be quite fun, but unfortunately snow wasn't very good - especially toward the bottom, it was quite slush. Not surprising, since this side of the slope was facing slightly east. Mokelumne was even worse - it was full of slush (though not complete slush with running water). Making sliding turns on slush is painful, but it wasn't too bad to come carving down. Anyway, all those slush forced me to head back to the excellent lift #4.

After many runs on Elevator Shaft/Hully Gully/Cold Shoulder, I wanted to see The Wave more closely - from a far, the snow looked promising. Well, it wasn't so - the entire ledge was all hard-packed rock-solid ice and jumping off vertical for more than my height was certainly beyond my skills, so I rode back to Happiness Is and was indeed very happy to be back :)

On the way back to the lodge, I decided to try High Whiskey - partly to avoid the bad experience of going through Hay Flat, and partly to try out another black run. And I was richly rewarded for that - I made fresh tracks on slightly frozen wind-blown powders on High Whiskey. On April! Fresh tracks! And frozen powder (i.e. not packed nor icy)! I was simply blown away for the excellent snow quality and the perfectly nice pitch. There were some exposed rocks but no narrow chute. If only it had quick lift connections, I'd have loved to make more fresh tracks all over High Whiskey, but the relatively short run combined with the slow lift #1, and another lift #2 and the traverse through Whiskey Slide made it not worth another trip just for it, with only short time left in the afternoon. But if I'm coming back from #4/Sunrise, I'd definitely take High Whiskey anytime.

Back in the main lodge, I had another afternoon snack, and got ready for the last few hours of riding. And I decided to try the lift #11. On my first trip to K-wood two years ago, I was crazy enough to try The Wall - which is one of the signature runs of K-wood (picture below):

On the lift #11, looking at The Wall (top of the other lift).

That was on a knee-deep big powder day, so there was no way I could have hurt myself at the time, but nonetheless it was crazy - I was just about making some basic sliding turns and I was far from ready for even an easy black run. But I remember having some fun (even through tumbling down and slogging through deep powder) down at Wagon Trail at the lower half of The Wall. So I had to try.

If Hully Gully is a half-made half-pipe, Wagon Trail is a nearly-fully-made half-pipe, except nature in its infinite wisdom, made it twisting like a snake, leaving us an amazingly fun run - you could go racing down the valley, or zig-zag the half-pipes, or use small kickers here and there to make small jumps, i.e. infinite sources of fun. Short Spoke, right next to Wagon Trail, is more steep but straight run and I had a lot of fun there too - it's steep but short, so before my legs turned to jellies, I got a nice break on the lift and I was ready for it again. With Wagon Trail and Short Spoke, and with its fast operation, #11 is definitely my favorite chair in K-wood (probably until I'm ready for #10/The Wall).

Usually when I'm riding alone, I stop riding at 3pm or so, partly because I get tired and partly because there aren't many more runs to try with tired legs. K-wood, even with its spring snow (around the base was pretty much slush, though at least not watery slush you can find in many other lower resorts), had many different runs with a lot of good snows that I wanted to keep riding - I left the slope around 3:45pm or so, and only because my legs were simply too tired to have more fun, not because I ran out of more things to try.

With reasonable season pass price, excellent snow and many different fun runs, K-wood is definitely one of my favorite resorts in the Tahoe area. The downside are: less lodging options, more difficult access (if you don't have a 4WD, forget about K-wood during snow season), and no long runs (nothing like Dipper or Orion on Heavenly, or Gold Coast- Mountain Run combo on Squaw).

-On April 6th, still waiting for another opportunity to ride on K-wood (holding on to my snowbomb sugarwood lift ticket on the hands).

Costco, selling everything at warehouse price...even casket.

2008-03-28T21:30:00.000-07:00

Now you can even buy a casket online at Costco.

Trees covered in snow in the Bay Area ?

2008-03-16T19:56:00.000-07:00

It sure feels like it snowed in front of our office.

make says: multiple infinities are no more than one.

2008-03-12T17:53:00.000-07:00

This got to be some kind of make-zen:


 If you give `-j' with no numeric argument, meaning to run
as many jobs as possible in parallel, this is passed down, since
multiple infinities are no more than one.

from info page section 5.6.3 of GNU Make version 3.81.

News is comic, and comic is the news

2008-03-06T18:15:00.000-08:00

Too bad the otherwise fine article doesn't mention Daily Show or Colbert Report - especially things like Colbert Bump :)

Ouch (another old news)

2008-03-04T10:32:00.000-08:00

Ouch ! - brought to you by Google Maps.

Namdaemun, gone.

2008-03-03T20:31:00.000-08:00

A little belated news, but Namdaemun (literally, the great southern gate) of Seoul has burned down as you can see in the picture. The arsonist has been caught, but what difference does it make, when the nearly 600 years old gate has been burned down ? It has withstood so many invasions of various powers, yet, it was crumpled down by one crazy person...

"Yes, do as I say!" - or how to shut up apt-get

2008-02-29T13:00:00.000-08:00

$ sudo apt-get install ...
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
....
The following NEW packages will be installed:
...
WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed.
This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you are doing!
...
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 3 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 18.6kB of archives.
After unpacking 5206kB disk space will be freed.
You are about to do something potentially harmful.
To continue type in the phrase 'Yes, do as I say!'
?]

Now I even need to tell my computer to "do as I say"...

Ski resorts, east coast vs west coast

2008-02-26T09:16:00.000-08:00

Ok, not exactly representative samples but nevertheless.
Compare the Google Map terrain views of Stratton Mountain Resort in Vermont vs Squaw Valley in California. It's amazing how flat Stratton mountain looks compared to Squaw.

Well, just in case you don't want to click the above links, here's the map views. You can see the trails if you choose sat view.
Stratton Mountain:

View Larger Map

Squaw Valley:

View Larger Map

The Emperor's Old Clothes

2008-01-11T11:16:00.000-08:00

I've recently reread the C.A.R. Hoare's Turing award acceptance speech (available here among other places). And I thought one particular paragraph applies very well to C++:

Programming is complex because of the large number of conflicting objectives for each of our programming projects. If our basic tool, the language in which we design and code our programs, is also complicated, the language itself becomes part of the problem rather than part of its solution.

I guess we - the programming language designers - haven't learned the lesson even after all those wise warnings.

오로치가 스포츠 카? 스포티 카!

2007-10-22T22:34:00.001-07:00

한겨레 신문에서 일본의 미쓰오카에서 만든 오로치를 "세계최고의 스포츠카"라는 부제의 기사로 소개하면서, 이 차를 포르쉐911터보와 페라리599에 비교해 놓았다. 기사에서 차에 대한 설명이라고는 달랑 사진 한장과 이름의 유래 그리고 가격 뿐. 차에 별 관심이 없는 나같은 사람들이 그냥 보면 뭐 대단한 차인것 처럼 써놓기는 했는데, 심심해서 한 번 세 자동차를 비교해 봤다.

페라리 599 GTB Fiorano는 6000cc 12기통 엔진이 620 마력을 내고 정지상태에서 60마일(96.56km)까지 가속하는데 3.7초 정도 걸린다고 한다.

포르쉐 911시리즈의 최신형인 997 GT2는 3600cc 터보 6기통 엔진이 530마력를 내고 정지상태에서 60마일 가속하는데 3.6초 걸린다고 한다.

둘다 스포츠카의 대명사격인 차들이니, 놀라운 성능이 어찌보면 당연하다.

이 둘에 비해 오로치는 초라한 정도가 아니라 비교하는 자체가 무의미하다. 3300cc 6기통 토요타의 3MZ-FE 엔진은 겨우 230마력에 내지 못하는 그저 평범한 6기통 엔진에 불과하다. 같은 엔진을 사용하는 토요타의 캠리 솔라라의 경우 정지상태에서 60마일 가속하는데 7초쯤 걸린다고 하니, 무게가 비슷한 오로치가 그보다 큰 차이가 없으리라는 것은 빤한일.
이정도 성능이면 현대의 티뷰론 - 한국에선 투스카니라고 부르던가 - 과 별 차이가 없으니, 잘 하면 투스카니도 세계최고라고 불러줄 수 있겠다. 이 토요타의 엔진은, 토요타의 미니밴 시에나에도 사용되는 엔진이니, 특히나 미니밴 하면 동네 아줌마들 생각하는 미국에서는 미니밴에 쓰는 엔진을 넣은 스포츠카..라는 건 거의 그 자체로 모순.

세계 최고의 기준이 뭔지도 모르겠고 스포츠카라고 부르는 기준이 뭔지는 잘 모르겠지만, 아무리 성능이 안나와도
수바루 Impreza WRX만큼은 나온 다음에 세계 수준의 스포츠카에 낄 수있지 않을까. 현 BMW 모델등 중에서 가장 성능이 떨어지는 328i 세단도 60마일 가속하는데 6.2초정도 걸린다니 가장 싼 BMW (게닥 전형적인 스포츠카가 아니라 그냥 세단)만큼도 성능이 안나오는 차를 "세계 최고"의 "스포츠 카"라고 부르는 것은...심해도 좀 많이 심한 과장이다.

The Sunflower

2007-08-29T22:04:00.000-07:00

By Hannah Park, on the first day of her third grade 2007-8-28

The sunflower is a brilliant golden flower with leaves as green as an owl's eye. It stands up straight like a queen, and graceful like a dove. Its petals are smooth and soft. The seed of a sunflower is very black and striped with white.

Review Board, open source code review tool

2007-05-18T08:51:00.001-07:00

Finally something useful on tools for code review - Review Board.
I haven't actually tried it myself, but looks quite sweet.

A spectacular display of "The Angel Decoy"

2007-05-14T20:32:00.000-07:00

I wouldn't have believed this if I hadn't seen the picture - "The Angel Decoy"

What's obvious is not obvious...

2007-05-14T20:30:00.000-07:00

...when you're talking about patents in the US, that is.
A slightly old news but still an interesting read on
US Supreme Court loosening the definition of "obviousness" to closely match what's really obvious :)

연합뉴스 vs Business Week

2007-05-03T11:22:00.000-07:00

지난번 blog에서:

그나마도 다양한 매체를 통해서 "흘려들은" 것들을 바탕으로 한 이미지 중심일 수 밖에 없겠다 - 경영학과 전공에 해당 회사들을 비교연구 정도 해본 학생들만 대상으로 조사를 하지 않았다면 말이다

라고 했는데, 마침 Business Week에서 좋은 반례가 될만한 기사를 게제해서 소개한다.

연합뉴스발 대학생들의 일하고 싶은 기업, 누구를 위한 기사인가?

2007-04-29T22:30:00.000-07:00

연합뉴스발로 한겨레에 실린 기사를 보면서 언뜻 드는 생각이, 이 통계는 사실 학생들에게는 거의 쓸모가 없는 통계라는 점이었다. 뭐 인크루트라는 회사가 사실 다른 회사들이 주 고객이라는 걸 생각해보면 별 놀랄 일도 아니긴 하지만 대체 이 기사 그리고 통계는 누구에게 도움이 되는가?

일단 일반적인 대학생들의 특정 회사에 대한 의견은 대부분 간접정보들을 바탕으로 한 것이고, 그나마도 다양한 매체를 통해서 "흘려들은" 것들을 바탕으로 한 이미지 중심일 수 밖에 없겠다 - 경영학과 전공에 해당 회사들을 비교연구 정도 해본 학생들만 대상으로 조사를 하지 않았다면 말이다. 그러니 이 통계는 회사들 입장에서 볼때 잠재적인 고용 대상자들(대학 재학생들) 가운데 이미지가 어떤지를 알아낼 수 있는, 그래서 기업내 홍보팀 입장에서는 나름대로 유용한 정보가 되겠다.

그런데, 이 통계를 학생들 입장에서나 일반 소비자들 입장에서 보면, 그닥 쓸모가 없어 보인다. 실제로 진짜 일하기 좋은 기업을 측정한 것이 아니니, 취업하는 사람들 입장에서는 어느 회사를 선택할 지 결정하는 데 별다른 도움이 되지 않고 (뭐, 이 통계에서 순위가 높은 기업은 경쟁률도 높다고 생각할 수 있을테니, 쓸데없이 경쟁률만 높은 회사를 걸러내는 데에나 써먹을 수 있으려나), 일반 소비자들의 관점에서도 해당 회사들을 평가하는 데 하등의 도움이 되지 않는다.

이 기사가 실려서 이익을 보는 곳은 첫째로 인크루트이고 - 회사들과 취업 지망자들(대학생)에게 무료로 널리 홍보할 수 있었으니까 - 둘째로는 순위에 높이 오른 회사들이겠다 - "대학생들의 선망의 대상 1위"라는 제목은 해당 회사에게는 좋은 홍보 재료가 되니까 말이다.

연합뉴스가 홈페이지에 소개에서 "고객의 이익과 국가 발전에 기여하고 있습니다"라고 말할 때 "고객"이 인크루트와 몇몇 대기업만인지 궁금하다.

PS. Sorry for readers who can't read Korean - I guess most blogs are single-language sources, so I haven't seen any RSS reader that supports filtering based on languages. Maybe I should split my blog into two different blogs, one in Korean and one in English.

BIZARRE airplane misshaps -- unbelievable, but true! [photo gallery]

2007-04-26T13:12:00.001-07:00

Amazing pictures of airplanes in...various "situations".

read more | digg story

NYT gun death statistics

2007-04-24T11:03:00.000-07:00

A very graphic summary of gun-related deaths in the US.

한국, Virginia Tech, 그리고 인종주의

2007-04-23T21:38:00.000-07:00

한계레 신문에 게제된 Virginia Tech 참사와 관련된 기사에 달려있는 댓글중에서:

ozzybear
(70.XXX.159.240)

2007/04/24 10:26:32

버지니아 사태와 한국인의 반응변화:

1. 사건 발생직후: 역시 폭력적인 나라 미국이야.. (그럼 그렇지...)
2. 범인이 중국인일지 모른다.: 짱개쉐끼들이 그럼 그렇지.. 으이 떼놈들이 남의
나라가서 깽판치네...ㅋㅋ
3. 범인이 한국인이다. : 이그 좆됐다.. 어떻하나 이제 한국인 전부 보복당하겠다. 한국으로 도망가야겠다.
4. 전부 사죄하자.. 무릅꿇고 빌자.. 금식하고 모금하자..

한국을 비꼬는 시각이 다분하긴 하지만, 사실 이 댓글이 이번 "사건"을 단적으로 설명해주는 글이라고 생각한다.

총기 사망사고로는 Columbine 사건 이후 최대의 사고라고는 하지만, 어떤 면에서는 총기 사망 사고는 미국에서 "흔히"있는 일에 불과하다. 많은 사람이 죽었다는 양적인 면에서는 특별하지만, 한 정신병자가 총으로 불특정 다수를 겨냥해서 여러사람을 죽였다는 내용적인 측면에서는 그저 미국에서 한 해 여러건 발생하는 사고중에 하나 였을 뿐이다. 오히려 내용적인 측면에서는 2003년에 있었던 Beltway Sniper 사건이 많은 미국사람에게는 더 깊은 충격을 줬다.

그런 면에서 보면 한국의 이번 사건에 대한 반응은...되려 한국 사람들 속에 있는 인종주의를 드러나게 했다고 본다. "한국"이라는 나라와 그 나라 출신 사람들 모두가 정신병자 한 명 배출한 것에 대해 미안해 해야 한다고 보는 시각은, 한국인들 스스로가 한국인들 전체를 하나의 묶음으로 일괄적으로 보려는 인종주의적인 사고에서 비롯된다고 생각한다. "한국이 같은 일을 당했더라면 어떻게 했을까" 하는 질문에 대한 답이 무서운 것이기에, 한국 사람들은 이렇게 놀라고, 미안해 하며, 용서를 빈다. 한국이 "반성"해야 하는 것은 조승희가 아니라 한 명의 정신병자로 국가와 인종 전체를 쉽게 평가해 버리는 그 단순한 인종주의적인 관점이다.

Drive-by Pharming anyone ?

2007-03-13T00:24:00.001-07:00

I find this relatively recent paper (PDF) about a new attack on the home routers interesting. Not only because of the attack itself, but because many other HTTP-based attack is possible from an internal network - imagine a corporate user behind the company firewall loading a Javascript that scans the internal network for a possible victim of HTTP-based attack...

A proof of non-existence of God ?

2007-02-22T06:31:00.000-08:00

This book sounds very interesting, to believers of either God or science (or none).

Quote of the day.

2007-01-16T14:53:00.000-08:00

The concluding remark from another interesting article at Wired News titled "How Yahoo blew it":

But now we have empirical evidence: At Yahoo, the marketers rule, and at Google the engineers rule. And for that, Yahoo is finally paying the price.

Apple being arrogant ?

2007-01-10T23:08:00.000-08:00

After reading Cisco blog and Bloomberg report, I can't believe Apple uses the argument of "first cell phone with iPhone name". A phone is a phone, whether that's based on wireless or wired or cell or VoIP. Would Apple just let purely Ogg-based music player use iPod name, because such a player would be "first Ogg-based music player" ? IANAL, and I know law sometimes has funny implications and consequences, but this has to be BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS that Apple is infrining upon Cisco's trademark.

I'd say this is typical Apple arrogance.

Custom search for compiler and optimization

2006-12-22T23:12:00.000-08:00

If you want to search the information about the compiler optimization,
you may want to try http://www.codeopt.com.I've tried a few keywords and it worked reasonably well although I didn't compare it against the regular Google.

IA64, PowerPC and the irony of life

2006-11-13T12:16:00.000-08:00

I've never expected to work on Intel's IA64, or never imagined even logging into an IA64 box. Ditto for PowerPC (although slightly less so).

However, I must have incurred some wrath from God (or put your favorite deity here) - otherwise I wouldn't be logged onto an IA64 box and a PowerPC box, trying to bootstrap a branch of gcc on them. Talk about ironies...

Yet another open sourced C compiler

2006-08-16T08:54:00.000-07:00

I've just read this article in The Register:

 Sun furthermore re-stated its commitment
to open source Java - something IBM was
particularly vocal in calling for two years ago.
The Java HotSpot micro virtual machine,
the C compiler and the "majority" of
Java Standard Edition (Java SE) will
be open sourced by the end of this year.

Sounds like my former project is finally going to be open-sourced :)

Ever heard of...Encyclopedia of spam ?

2006-07-25T14:53:00.000-07:00

One day I came to the office, and found this huge book sitting on the desk of my officemate, with his own name on the cover. Certainly I can not complain I have a boring officemate :) - if you want to know more about this unlikely-to-exist tome, you can read about a rather interesting history of it.

Creative or crazy ?

2006-07-23T01:55:00.000-07:00

Naver, and core competency

2006-07-09T01:33:00.000-07:00

According to the report, Naver, one of the largest internet portal and search site in South Korea, had a service interruption of almost 6 hours. Well, 6-hour outage is outrageous itself, but that's not why I'm flabbergasted. I just learned from the same news report that Naver is "outsourcing" its IT infrastructure to IBM. And it gets even better. Apparently Naver doesn't take care of their domain either - they "outsource" their DNS management to www.gabia.com.

An internet portal/search site that doesn't know how to take care of its IT infrastructure and domain ? Somebody needs to have a better grip on their core competencies...

At last, Solaris libm source is available

2006-06-29T20:35:00.000-07:00

I knew this was coming but finally it happened:

http://opensolaris.org/os/downloads/devpro/
http://dlc.sun.com/osol/devpro/downloads/current/

This is arguably one of the best generic implementation of libm that supports C99. Sun's math library folks are, among the best - if you're interested in more detail, try reading Sun's numerical computation guide.

Too bad CDDL vs GPL schism will probably make it not as widely adopted :(

OT: quote of the day

2006-06-25T12:26:00.000-07:00

I collect interesting quotes in my diary, and today I added a new one:


...a very rich person should leave his kids
enough to do anything but not enough to do nothing.

Who else would say this but Warrent Buffett, the world's second richest man ?
20 years after saying this on an interview with Fortune magazine, he kept his word - here's the article about the estimated $40 billion charitable donation and the conversation with him about it.

You can say that my admiration for Mr. Buffett went up a couple notches today. Maybe it's time for you to pick up some Berkshire Hathaway shares - that is, if you can afford. If you're not familiar with the Berkshire Hathaway share prices, take a look at BRK.A or BRK.B.

Seeing the world in assembly

2006-06-09T14:05:00.000-07:00

Most typical programmers, when encountered a buggy behavior in their code, often try to diagnose it assuming the compiler is correct (as least intially). That should be the right approach for most programmers. However, being a compiler writer, I very often look at the assembly and start from there - and that helps me spot problems faster than others.

Today was no different - some user had a problem, and it turned out to be a compiler bug but everybody was trying to diagnose it from the higher-level. Given enough time, I have no doubt they would have found the same problem, but different perspective certainly helps (and saves time too!).

This "seeing-everything-through-assembly" approach is fairly robust (at least you won't get mislead by the compiler errors - IMNSHO "being mislead" is the biggest time killer in any debugging effort) but not fool-proof - sometimes, every once in a while, a hardware bug or a kernel bug can bite you :( Even then, you're well equipped to diagnose such a bug if you're looking at the assembly level.

I know, the assembly programmers are a dying breed - I often hear that nowadays some CS students don't even know the assembly. But let me tell you that it could be very useful to know your assembly (whichever processor you're using). At least that was the case for me today :)

Google Groups and typo

2006-06-07T09:19:00.000-07:00

Typo can be embarrasing. Especially when you mistyped your homepage URL, sending people to some squatter site. Worse if you do that in a USENET posting. *sigh*. I cancelled the post but USENET being what it is, it's already too late. (My apology to those of you who clicked that link).

I blame it to Google Groups for not picking up up my signature from the Gmail setting, nor providing any option to have a signature. I haven't figured out the company internal news server, and that's forcing me to use Google Groups instead of my usual client. Google Groups is fine for quick reading and searching, but not for everyday news reader (especially posting part). At least that's the case for me yet.

comp.arch internship anyone ?

2006-05-19T09:32:00.000-07:00

Looks like Andy Glew of (now) Intel is looking for an intern (see the comp.arch posting).

If you're a graduate student who's interested in the computer architecture, I'm sure this would be a great opportunity to learn from one of the most interesting processor architects of our time. The profile he's looking for would have fit me perfectly, if I were still a graduate student. Too bad I'm not :)

My last day at the first job

2006-05-18T21:18:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Seongbae's blog. Especially welcome to you folks who followed link from my old blog.

Today is 5/18/2006, and it's a very special day for me, cause it is my last day at my first job. Like all good things, my first job finally came to an end. I'm really proud of what I've accomplished, and happy for all things I've learned and all friends I made during that seven years.

Anyway, I don't know what will happen to my old blog at my company's blogging site - probably I'll lose the access although hopefully my postings won't be deleted. Regardless of what happens there, I'll continue to post here from now on.