niflheim

I have to thank Governor Palin for reminding me that I am a Libertarian.

Whew!  Almost voted Republican for the first time in my life, and would have if not for her.

As weird as it seems to think of Barr as in any way supportive of “liberty”, it is great to remember that it is possible to vote in a principled manner rather than feeling pressured to choose between the least dangerous of two very dangerous options.

Thank you, Governor!

So my Macbook Pro has been developing “issues”.  In the midst of some very important work, everything started to run slower until the system was effectively locked up.  Even with a reboot, one could not actually launch applications.

ssh worked, so I was able to copy everything I needed from the machine, but the laptop itself was, in short, hosed.  As it is absolutely vital to work, that posed certain difficulties.

So I drive the hour or so to the nearest Apple Store.  I need service.  They’re it.  What could possibly go wrong?

Glad you asked!  They refuse to talk to me, look at the laptop, or take the laptop from me for later service without an appointment.  I, of course, do not have an appointment.  They, of course, are fresh out of appointments and I will have to come back another day.

Wow.  Just…  Wow.

3 hours of my day gone because I didn’t have one of the precious 15 minute appointments with the Apple Genius who will certainly be unable to determine the problem and will take the laptop from me in order to ship it to someone who can.

If I needed any other reasons to stop using Apple products, and I most assuredly did not need additional reasons to stop using Apple products, this sealed the deal.

Folks at work suggested I call AppleCare directly.  They’ll send me a box/mailer and I won’t have to lose 3 hours of my day hearing about appointments I don’t have.  So, what the heck.  Sounds great to me.

Of course, the laptop is fully functional while I’m on the phone, the hardware tests report no failures while I’m on the phone, the tech won’t simply send me the mailer so they can examine the thing in person because he has to spend an hour with me on the phone…

…and in the middle of it all, he hangs up on me.

No doubt an accident, but I haven’t received a phone call or an email from anyone hoping to resume that conversation, nor will I receive one, and I surely am not going to call them and start the Tech Support for Macbook Pro script all over again.

Thanks Steve.  Real winner, here.  Glad I sold AAPL.

I set out to write about something completely different, but I ran across this article:

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08266/914029-298.stm

Or to quote:

Pittsburgh Public Schools officials say they want to give struggling children a chance, but the district is raising eyebrows with a policy that sets 50 percent as the minimum score a student can receive for assignments, tests and other work.

Even more disconcerting are the willful delusions:

The district and union insist the policy still holds students accountable for performance.

I skipped the first… month… of Calculus I in college.  By the time I elected to arrive, half of the class had withdrawn because it was too difficult.  By the end of the semester, there were only 2 or 3 of us remaining.  I spoke with the professor at the end and complained that the class was too easy, that we hardly covered 1/4 of the available textbook, that in short I had learned almost nothing.

He directed me to a filing cabinet.  6′ tall, old and damaged and intimidating, many drawers, each of them literally stuffed to overflowing with papers.  This, he said, was the lesson plan and coursework he used 30 years previous.  We weren’t even making a dent in a single folder from that filing cabinet.

Why?  Because he had a quota of students to pass.  If he didn’t meet this quota, it meant he was a poor teacher (he was in fact excellent), it meant he taught at a poor school (eh), it meant students would not attend and grants would not be made and so on and so on and he watered it down and watered it down and it didn’t matter at all.

This “Post Gazette” story is the same stupidity driven by an entitlement culture born of that diseased misunderstanding that festers in the American psyche, that “All men are created equal” meant something contrary to the blatant facts of reality.

People “deserve” to pass.  People “deserve” to graduate.  Even if we have to reduce the standards to ensure that we don’t leave any lowest common denominators behind to do it.

Instead of improving education, or hell, instead of even recognizing that some people just aren’t very good at some things and nothing will change that, or any of a number of other things that could be done without ensuring the death of a nation

It’s not new, and that Calculus story is almost 20 years old (*sigh*), but the “50% Minimum” is so shockingly inconceivable I had to spout off about it.

I am tired of writing about Virtual Box, but they have given me an early birthday present.

Virtual Box 2.0 dropped today.  Now I have my 64 bit guests AND apparently the lockup under OS X was a VBox defect of some sort or other, because it does not occur under 2.0.

Now if only the Windows “AMD64″ installer (ie: for the 64 bit host) would execute I might actually be able to use this thing for something serious.  Either it dislikes Intel CPUs or dislikes 32 bit Vista; VMWare doesn’t care, and neither do I, so VBox loses again.

So I gave up and tried 32 bit guests, just for the sake of testing and comparing.

I finally managed to get VBox functional on OS X.  Installed Ubuntu and discovered that I can lock up the VM at will by “ls -lR /”.  This only happens under OS X and actually reinforces my suspicion that my Macbook Pro has a hardware problem.  But maybe VBox is buggy on that platform.  I switched to Windows as the host OS for reliability (…)

I decided to try OpenSolaris (for the first time) under VBox.  I have a long-standing hatred of Solaris’ installation procedure and “user experience”, and have to say that Sun/We/Gaia are going very much in the right direction with this.  Gnu userland utilities would probably cause me to switch to OpenSolaris on my *desktop*, never mind the server.

Ubuntu “server” seemed to have mostly similar performance between VMware Server and VirtualBox.  Ubuntu “desktop” was dramatically better under VirtualBox (and, to continue gushing, Gnome under OpenSolaris/VBox was also dramatically better than Unbuntu/Gnome/VMware).  For whatever reason, Ubuntu/Gnome/VMware is too slow for usability.

So, all in all a mostly positive experience.  I need to investigate whether my Macbook is fubar (very likely), and Sun/We/Gaia need to enable 64 bit guests.  As I’m doing rather important things in my VMs, I confess that I will continue to trust VMware more for at least the near future.

They definitely have some competition, however.  And that’s good for virtualization.

I’ve been using VMWare for a while.  Let’s start with why I do that.

1) Some of my newer computers are dramatically more powerful and energy efficient (all around) than my older systems.  It’s simpler/cheaper/saner to virtualize many/most/all of the older machines and run them on a single physical server.  Consolidating their respective functions onto a single server would take weeks or more of my time, so this was the way to go.

2) Being able to “pack up” an entire server and “take it with me” to different servers (or laptops) makes my life and my work a lot easier.

So I decided to try Sun’s xVM VirtualBox today.  It’s leaner/meaner/maybefaster and “Open Source”, and it supports a better set of host operating systems than VMWare Server itself, so I was actually looking forward to it.

Right up until 30 seconds into it when I encountered an apparent limitation, in the form of not supporting 64 bit guests.  I found this on a forum post, wherein We Freeloading Community are informed that the team is demand driven and focused on the needs of paying customers and that this isn’t one of them.

Sad to think that the paying customers don’t need 64 bit guests.  It made me wonder what they’re virtualizing, really.

Old and/or “small, dedicated, low-load” systems, a’la my #1 above?

Presumably they aren’t pre-provisioning servers for scale-out, because the first thing they’d want then are 64 bit systems, and their Demand would Drive support for this seemingly wild and exotic feature.

Oh well.  Back to VMWare.  A real shame, too, as I was looking forward to moving some of my VMs to the Macbook Pro.

I guess I need to buy VMWare’s Mac product, now.  Their paying customers apparently need the same things I do.

I’m just typing out loud.  Battlestar Galactica stuff, ignore freely.  I want to come back and look at what I was thinking next year, when the series ends.  This is very much spoilery, so if you watch BSG and haven’t caught up, or don’t want my speculation to ruin the show for you, stop reading now.

Thought #1: Ron Moore claims that “The Final Cylon” is not any of the people who appear in the “Last Supper” picture.  Only three of the four we already know are pictured, however.  So, if Ron is playing semantic games, the final-unknown-cylon could in fact be present in the picture while the “final cylon” in this case would be the one we do know who was absent from the shoot.

Thought #2: D’Anna/Three claims that only four of the “Final Five” are with the human fleet.  The obvious has already been beaten to death (fifth is dead and Three knows it; fifth is with the Cylons; Three is lying; fifth is not with either fleet), but the “How would she know?” and “Is that good writing?” questions trump most things (including the possibility of her lying).

So, Adamas (even the dead ones) and Roslin would be poor writing.  Unless “Thought #1″ is correct (and I believe it is incorrect), they and also Starbuck/Gaius are out (and too obvious and thus boring writing).  Ellen (although interesting) would undermine a whole lot of good writing.  Everyone obviously interesting is either in the picture, with the human fleet or certainly not “hungering for redemption”.

I was babbling to Laurie about all this, and how the only available bigger “reveals” for the final cylon are universally stupid or contradict “what we know”.  And what do you know, but she managed to identify the one presumably-dead person that fits, that blew my entire mind and is all kinds of interesting: Socrata Thrace, Kara’s mother.  Leoben knows far too much about Socrata, and considers Kara far too important, for her to be just another meaningless human.

All the other theories I’ve read are stupid, so I’m sticking to this one.

Besides, Asimov already did the “Robot Waiting in the Moon for Humanity’s Return” bit, so here’s hoping BSG doesn’t decide to rip him off in this fashion.

Thought #3: Either “that ain’t Earth”or, even if it is, it isn’t the final destination.  Easy enough to explain why: Roslin isn’t dead yet.  I’m unclear as to why we haven’t given her another shot o’ cure-all miracle baby blood (Maybe “God, what were we thinking when we wrote that stupid plot twist?”).  Of course, Socrata’s mother died of a “wasting disease” and has certainly “lead” humanity to “Earth”, so keep Thought #2 in mind, huh huh huh.

Thought #4: “AND THEY HAVE A PLAN”…  Yes, and?  I guess it’s the cylons-behind-the-cylons who have The Plan?  I hope that gets resolved, because…

Thought #5: …you do not under any circumstance forgive and embrace the machines who exterminated many billions of your people, reducing your entire civilization to nothing.  I assume the non-rebel Cylons will be positioned to take the punishment/justice for this, but this aspect of the storyline, like so much that involves Lee, is farcical, even if it was or will be demonstrated to have been a form of “payback”.

That’s plenty for now.  Socrata!!!

Well, do they?

It must be that time of year.

People with whom I have lost contact (in some cases for 10-20 years) have been reaching out to me recently.  I’m absolutely rotten at maintaining “long distance” relationships these days unless they involve some form of IM/chat/email, but I do seem able to “resume the thread” right away.

My well-deserved reputation as an antisocial hermit be damned: sometimes it just feels good to hear from the people who mattered.

And that’s all Forrest has to say about that.

The market was kind to me last week so we embraced our iTool iLives and iBought iPhones.

I had been waiting for the SDK release, and holding out for GPS (”Late this year” according to “My Sources” who are nameless, faceless and possibly clueless) and 3G (more on that) and “Version 2.0 Hardware”, but service through my Blackberry has been so damnably frustrating lately and overpriced all along that I took the first good opportunity and jumped.

So, a few things:

• SDK, SDK, SDK. The first truly great PDA. Please for the love of your stock valuation let us develop apps for this thing without your updates bricking the device. This is the “mobile platform” we’ve been wanting for years. Let us use it.
• AT&T buying Cingular failed to correct the problem of the Edge network (or at least the Edge network here) being absolute garbage. No idea why I was holding out for 3G, as it is unavailable here and they have yet to seem able to reliably deliver more archaic services.
• My Belkin router’s (there’s a mistake I won’t make twice) funny little feature of randomly rendering wifi-to-wan service inoperable for no reason whatsoever does not play well with the iPhone, which seems to lack the capacity to recognize a busted wifi connection.
• I still hate cameras on phones. It’s not (only) that I prefer my bulkier Nikon (I do), but that so far every phone-camera I have used is junk. I guess I need a point-and-shoot if I’m not carrying the “real camera”.
• Great iPod! I think I may come to appreciate the video capabilities while travelling.
• SDK, SDK, SDK. And SDK.
• I wonder if I would rather read ebooks on this than Amazon’s Kindle (which is almost but not quite really nice)?
• The email client frequently refuses to display emails because they are in “some format” that it feels unable to comprehend. May as well brick the device, really. This is the #2 reason I have considered going back to my Blackberry.
• Touch-screen keyboard. The large version is nice, the small version less nice. Apparent inability to switch between them on demand is violently frustrating, and this is the #1 reason I have considered a return to the Blackberry.
• It needs a stylus and handwriting recognition. Fingerprints/smudges get out of control. Or maybe I’m just a greasy iPig.
• Some apps can kick sideways. Some cannot. Consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, but (no offense) that’s the market Apple likes, so it would be grand if we could have some consistency in this area. One would think the “system” applications, at least, would all support this.
• Flash. WMV. Flash. …Flash. You know, I still use lynx for browsing the web, but this is a glaring failure. I continue hoping I am only having a momentary bout of iBraindamage and it is all my fault somehow, but it looks like this really is a major “worm in the Apple” mistake.

Call quality is good. I’m enjoying using the device, but whether I continue to do so apparently depends entirely upon Apple’s attitude toward third party software, which it seems I will need in order to accomplish the sort of things I need to accomplish.