Soviet Toys

When I was younger I read an essay that told how the leaders of Soviet Russia enforced a standard of low quality in the creation of their toys. The reason for doing this was to instill  low quality expectations from future Russian Citizens. While this was obviously a propaganda piece designed to make me think less of communist Russia, it resonates with me because I’m forced to do tech support on my son’s toys. The toy provoking this blog entry is the EA Sports Voice Command Pitching Machine. I’m going to put a new set of batteries in the thing and give it one more chance but given that it started out with new batteries in the first place I’m not holding out much hope. Now, this is in contrast to the Nintendo Wii and the Easton Junior Pitchback Elite. The problem with the Wii is that it’s made so well that he cannot unplug the Nunchuk attachment. The pitchback is a solid toy  that does one thing but does it extremely well.

Jay’s growing up in a Mac/Linux/TiVo world so when toys disappoint like this it really bugs him. When I look at his face I have to ask if we are doing our children any good when we provide them with poor quality toys. In consumer goods I believe that your choice is: cost, feature set, quality: pick two. It’s hard watching my son learn  this.

— Chris

Samsung 2333HD Dubious Easter Egg

I purchased a Samsung 2333HD Monitor to supplement/replace my 6 year old Samsung 213T. Until 30 minutes ago I would have classified this experience as disappointing. That is until I found the HDMI Easter Egg that Samsumg hid in the monitor’s firmware.

My problem is that I want to be able to use both my MacBook Pro and my Mac Mini with this monitor. And I want a full digital signal path from either computer. On the 213T that meant switching cables or sucking it up and using one computer with an Analog VGA input. The Advantage that the 2333HD has is that it takes HDMI Digital inputs. I got an HDMI  -> DVI cable and ran it to the monitor and I was surprised to see the poorest display that I’ve seen in a while. Luckily I ran across a review on the internet of the monitor that mentioned that it will change how it handles an HDMI input signal if you label it as coming from a PC. A couple of menu settings later and I’m looking at a reasonable display.

It’s nice that they set things up this way. It would have been nicer if they had documented it in the manual.

Website setup.

This seems obvious but it’s really handy to have my website setup with DAV access to the backend for administration purposes. I’ve recently setup on of my sites this way and it works out quite nicely.

bogofilter and the corrupt wordlist.db

Looks like something burped on my mailserver and my bogofilter wordlist got too big. Probably something to do with limits anyhow. In any case I was looking for a way to recover from the issue and came across this pearl in the Bogofilter FAQ. Well, the advice is incomplete. If you really hose up the database then bogoutil -d will stop printing  entries before the end of the database. The next recovery step is to use the db utilities: db_dump and db_load to fix the database. db_dump -r (on FreeBSD db_dump-<version>) dumps the database into a text file and db_load creates a text file from a word list. The problem is that the advice in the bogofilter faq is out of date. It looks like there are some parameters that have to be specified. My solution: use db_dump without the -r that creates a broken database with a default header. Copy the header into the new text file and then append the output of db_dump -r to that. Et voila!

Mother of all MiFi wishlist

My Mother of all MiFi wishlist:

  • Runs for 4 ~ 5 hours on rechargable batteries. Preferably 4xAA NiMh cells which I have in abundance.
  • WPA encryption if possible otherwise pre-auth by mac address or live auth via authpf.
  • Automatically connects to my lan using certificate based IPSec.
  • Provides DNS locally.
  • Gui configuration but can be a python TkInter of X11 Gui.
  • 802.11b/g although given my experience last week 802.11n over 5GHz would be nice.
  • SNMP configuration? That’s why I got an enterprise number from IETF.

To Do:

  • Put the Soekris Net4511 on my Kill-a-watt meter to see how much juice it really needs (and how efficient the power supply is.)
  • Figure out how to get USB into the thing. The outside internet will be a Verizon or Sprint network dongle.
  • Get a case and power supply for the 4511
  • Will OpenBSD provide WPA2 authentication?
  • How hard is it going to be to get a USB jack into a 4511 case? (Bill Johnson?)
  • How many people can I connect to it before it’s overloaded?
  • 4521 Case? Automatically has room for batteries.

Alright, it’s no longer 1998!

One thing that really ticks me off the web designer conversation where your web design guy insists on designing to an 800×600 screen resolution to ensure that your pages will be accessible by everyone on the web. Today I ran across this nugget (opens in a new window). I’ve always said that this is so 1998 yet I’ve had this conversation as recently as 2007. Well, if you dissect the table you come up with this:

Width
1920×1200 2.27%
1680×1050 8.72%
1440×900 18.37%
1366×768 20.76%
1280×1024 —-
1280×800 —-
1280×768 58.09%
1152×864 61.04%
1024×768 94.94%
800×600 100.00%
Height
1920×1200 2.27%
1680×1050 8.72%
1280×1024 21.97%
1440×900 31.62%
1152×864 34.57%
1280×800 56.92%
1366×768 —-
1280×768 —-
1024×768 94.94%
800×600 100.00%

That’s right. If you design for 1024×768 you reaching nearly 95% of all the web browsers that participated in this survey. Now web designers can partly like it’s 2004!