Got a Droid

I got a Droid a few weeks ago. I am still learning how much it does. I have a found a few good aps, but I have not found replacements for all the ones I had on my ipod touch. This post was done with wptogo.

Windows 7

I upgrade to Windows 7 today, but I did with a clean install on a new disk that I added to my computer. This required me to reinstall my applications. I decided to only add those programs that I use regularly.  It turned out to be more programs than I thought.

• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• Google Chrome, which makes three browsers on the computer
• OpenOffice
• Picasa
• iTunes
• KeePass
• ProcessExplorer
• TeraCopy
• Filezilla
• Foxit PDF reader
• CutePDF writer
• Dropbox
• Evernote
• Launchy
• GIMP
• 7-Zip
• NeatWorks

Great Footnote

** The parallel passage in Luke’s Gospel is more fun if you ever have to deal with a PMD in conversation. Be sure to use the King James Version when you bring up Luke 17:34 — “In that night there shall be two men in one bed; the one shall be taken, and the other shall be left” — and then argue that a literal interpretation suggests that precisely 50 percent of homosexuals will be raptured.

from Slacktivist.

I Still Got It

I installed Virtualbox virtualization software today on my PC. It allows me to run Linux inside of Windows. I did an install of Ubuntu 8.10 and it is working fine. I have a dual core processor which helps a lot. I can see that one processor is busy almost constantly.

VirtualBox has a feature that lets you share folders between the guest OS, Ubuntu in this case, and the host OS, Windows in this case. I had trouble getting it to run. After some serious poking around, I discovered that VirtualBox provides linux kernel modules to support this feature, although they call them Linux guest additions.

I had upgraded my linux kernel with the automatic updates feature of Ubuntu after I had added the Linux guest additions. When I then tried to turn on faolder sharing, it did not work. I discovered that I had the needed kernel modules for version 2.6.27-07, but I was running 2.6.27-11. The fix was simple, and I might have stumbled on it even if I did not understand it. Reinstall the Linux guest additions. I looked, and I saw that I had the correct kernel modules now.  Folder sharing is now working.

I think that I am happier that I figured out what was really wrong than that I have a properly working system.

Ancient Roman Joke Book

Beard’s favourite joke is a version of the Englishman, Irishman, Scotsman variety, with a barber, a bald man and an absent-minded professor taking a journey together. They have to camp overnight, so decide to take turns watching the luggage. When it’s the barber’s turn, he gets bored, so amuses himself by shaving the head of the professor. When the professor is woken up for his shift, he feels his head, and says “How stupid is that barber? He’s woken up the bald man instead of me.”

from an article in the Guardian, hence the English spelling of favorite, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/13/roman-joke-book-beard

The Real World is Complex and There Are Few Simple Answers

I was reading an article on Newsweek about the delays in the LHC, and I saw a link to an article on the role of libertarians in the financial collapse.  I came across this quote.

The worst thing you can say about libertarians is that they are intellectually immature, frozen in the worldview many of them absorbed from Ayn Rand. Like other ideologues, libertarians react to the world failing to conform to their model by asking where the world went wrong. Their heroic view of capitalism makes it difficult for them to accept that markets can be irrational, misunderstand risk and misallocate resources—or that financial systems without vigorous government oversight constitute a recipe for disaster. They are bankrupt, and this time, there will be no bailout.

I believe that we can learn a lot about how people really behave, but it will not be simple answer. People are a very diverse lot with many motivations, and no simple model is going to capture all of it. 

Working from Home Today

That’s ice not snow. I hate freezing rain.

Well Said

Andrew Sullivan

It seems to me that dignity and training and expertise and humaneness are the values of our society at its best. All of them are self-evidently superior to the values of vainglory, amateurism, impulsiveness and cruelty that bedevil our enemies. If these are the grounds on which we fight this war – and they are ours to choose – then we will win. And we will deserve to.

Read the original to see the context. I wish I could write like this.

Welcome to the Federal Government

The Washington Post reported today that new White House staff was quite disappointed by the quality of the IT equipment and the restrictive rules on the use of IT. As a federal employee all I can say is welcome to the federal government. The poor quality of the tools provided to me is my number one complaint about working for the government. 

When I joined the Department of Energy in 2000 the department was still running Windows 95. We have reached Windows XP after several years of Windows 2000, but we are still running Internet Explorer 6.

People working in jobs with similar responsibilities in the private sector have a laptop that can be docked when they are at their desk. Laptops in my department are only used for travel and are never connected to the internal local area network. We do not have wireless in the building since we do not use laptops. I cannot count the number of times I have been meetings arguing over some fact or budget information that could be looked up in two minutes if we had access to the LAN from a laptop taken to a meeting.

We are limited to a basic suite of office software. It is one size fits all. Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, and that’s about it. If you can’t do it with those programs, you probably can’t do it at all. When I wanted to get some data off the website of one our labs on a weekly basis, I wrote a small python script to scrape the pages and calcualte some totals. Once the script was written a weekly 15 minute task became a 1 minute task. I could write the script at home, but I could not run it at work. Python is not on the approved software list.

Perhaps the new President can get us some decent tools to allow us to do our jobs better.

Now Running Wireless N

I installed a new wireless N router. It is dual band, and this is being transmitted from my MacBook Pro over the 5.0 GHz band using WPA2-PSK.  Now I have to see if I can get the older computers in the house running on G over the 2.4 Ghz band.

UPDATE: I had to update the driver for the Dell wireless 1450 miniPCI card in the Dell INSPIRON that my daughter uses.  The installed driver did not support WPA. I still had a Linksys USB adapter for one of the desktops. It was only 802.11b, but I has a very similar Linksys USB adapter that supported G lying around, so I switched to that one. Now I have two Windows XP computers running 802.11g and two Macs running 802.11n.