Adam's livejournal

Changing the media type on a 3c509b-c

2009-08-26T18:02:15Z

A few weeks ago I had to replace an old ethernet card at my parents' house due to lightning damage. We had purchased a few spare cards for exactly this scenario, but I needed to reconfigure them using an old DOS utility from 3com. I needed to disable Plug 'n' Play and configured the I/O and IRQ addresses manually to match the old card. However, I kept getting this error:

The NIC has been configured by Plug and Play.

This option can only be set using the Plug and Play configuration utility.

I found the solution in section 6.1.7 of this page, which is rendered in German.

Running the 3c5x9cfg.exe tool as 3c5x9cfg CONFIGURE /PNP:DISABLED and then power-cycling the computer fixes the problem.

Kudos to the Google oracle for this. Boo to 3com for providing a brain-dead error message.

Free Kindle Books

2009-08-12T16:18:15Z

Amazon has a large number of public domain and copyrighted books available for free on the Kindle.

<3 technology. There are many titles in there that for years I've wanted to devour.

ajensen @ 2009-07-14T17:35:00

2009-07-14T21:36:27Z

Complete with music.

debategraph

2009-01-15T01:45:15Z

One of the problems with debates on the internet is that they tend to degrade into tangents and shouting matches, and one can easily lose the flow of the argument due to the noise.

A few years ago, I had an idea: build a website that would enable people to articulate specific arguments for or against a particular idea (e.g., Israel's recent actions in Gaza) and then break down those arguments into smaller sub-arguments and related ideas. By doing this for a large number of arguments, you could conceivably end up with some common sub-arguments -- a country's need to defend its citizens is always/never a justification for war, for example. After a while, then, you could construct a pretty large and detailed graph of common arguments and counter-arguments along with their respective origins. Some conclusion that was argued from basic moral principles could be shown visually as a chain of arguments, each one supporting the next until the conclusion is reached.

A site like this would hopefully tease out the arguments themselves, deferring the discussion of their validity to another time or place (maybe the site could provide a place for comments on each node in the graph). Aside from the obvious benefit of having the arguments cleanly articulated, this visual representation of an argument might help people to follow and understand arguments that are too complex to be explained verbally.

Somebody build a site that does this. It's available at debategraph.org.

Election

2008-11-01T15:51:00Z

A recent article from Economist takes a considered look at the candidates.

Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media and a prominent figure in the world of technology and open source software, has posted a very thoughtful endorsement of Senator Obama.

I have tried, with moderate success, not to become emotionally invested in this campaign. What follows is mostly a brain-dump of my feelings on a few major issues that are most important to me, both personally and professionally.

The commercials that mocked Senator McCain for not knowing how to send an email were rather silly, but the point that they make is germane when our stock market operates almost entirely on computer-driven trading. The humans keep an eye on things to ensure that there is no major meltdown (oops), but the low-level details are automated. Much of our critical infrastructure operates this way, and it's important that we have leaders who grok the basic ideas.

The scorn for science that Tim O'Reilly describes, especially coming from Governor Palin, is depressing. Regardless of leanings on thorny social and moral issues related to science, the most effective way for us to drag ourselves backward in world standing is to dismiss the overwhelming scientific evidence for things like climate change. The rest of the world is ready to tackle the major energy and environmental problems that we're facing, but somehow we still find it respectable to deny that there is a (largely man-made) problem. You can convince yourself that the world looks fine, that there's no need for concern, or that the colder-than-average weather in the last few years is evidence against global warming, but this ignores the significant evidence given by climatologists (who know better than anyone) that we're contributing heavily to changes in the global climate. We don't ignore such strong evidence in other parts of our lives. If your doctor warns you that continuing to do X will make your lifestyle extremely difficult or impossible to maintain in the near future, do you continue with X? I should hope not. It's time to be intellectually honest about this, even if it means that we need to change our old ways.

Without a big shift in our attitude toward fixing these things, the world is going to leave us behind. And we don't have enough remaining clout to convince them to wait for us. The incentives need to come from the top, where there is awareness of the problem. By the time the market starts to feel pressure from climate change, it's far too late. The free market isn't a silver bullet, but it certainly has an important role to play, in addition to some strong and thoughtful leadership.

Obama is not my ideal candidate. When he voted for the FISA legislation that legalized President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program (i.e., enabling the NSA to spy on our conversations, and not just those of suspected criminals, without a warrant), he nearly lost my vote. I don't like the fact that he committed to public campaign finance and then withdrew that commitment once he realized that he could raise significantly more money on his own. (I understand the decision from a strategic perspective, but the reversal on a campaign commitment is unfortunate.) In addition, Senator Biden's stances on major issues (privacy and civil rights come immediately to mind), although far less naive and scary than Gov. Palin's, are a mixed bag.

In spite of those things, though, I think that Senator Obama's keen insight, calm nature, and charisma are significant intellectual and character qualities that stand a good chance of helping to begin the long process of healing our weakened image in the eyes of the world. A muscly posture backed by a powerful military has not worked well. An interventionist approach to world events has not worked well, especially when we focus on events that threaten our oil supply and ignore other devastating problems (e.g., Darfur, or Zimbabwe, or even Hurricane Katrina).

Soft skills are important. Negotiating, even if it means meeting with people who are considered enemies, is not the same as being a sympathizer. To move forward, I believe that we need someone who is able to understand and communicate a nuanced view of reality, since the world is a messy, complicated place that does not respond well to being over-simplified. The ability to do so is not an elitist quality. It is a sign of maturity and character.

Please remember to vote.

Chris DiBona, Android, Jello

2008-10-08T21:19:45Z

Today Chris DiBona, the open source program manager at Google, gave a talk at MSU on open source communities. Most of the tidbits I had heard before, but he had an Android-powered mobile phone to demonstrate and pass around (though, unfortunately, it never reached me). He did a short demonstration of how easy it is to develop and deploy your own applications for the phone using Eclipse. The phone's hardware contains a camera, an accelerometer (for switching the screen from portrait to landscape mode dynamically), and a GPS receiver, along with the Android stack of open source applications based on Linux. Pretty awesome setup. After my somewhat disappointing experience with developing software for my Palm Treo, I'm excited that these phones are finally really opening up. These things in our pockets are computers, even the cheap ones that you get for 99 cents (two year contact required), and it's long overdue that the manufacturers and network operators let us use them as such.

DiBona also talked about the Summer of Code program, and there seemed to be some genuine interest among the other students. I would certainly participate again, and I hope that we can get some more MSU involvement next time.

As a closing aside, when DiBona asked someone for a recently-used Google search string, someone offered "nail jello to a wall". Naturally, Google has the answer.

Cider Mill Ride

2008-10-06T14:13:23Z

The photo is a bit fuzzy (taken with a mobile phone), but the bottom number is most significant: the Allez road bike that I bought over the summer turned 1000km old during a 60-mile ride to/from Uncle John's Cider Mill yesterday. We had seven riders and lovely weather (once the temperature rose above 40F, anyway).

The cider at the Mill was fresh and unpasteurized, making it the best refreshment we could have asked for. They also produce wine and pies, I'm told. Next time I drive by on US127, I think I will be stopping by again.

Spartan Stadium

2008-10-06T13:46:22Z

This is my third year as a Spartan, and I finally attended a home football game this weekend. The tailgating experience was calmer than I expected, but the atmosphere inside and outside the stadium was exciting. Michigan State won the game despite a comeback by Iowa in the second half. This was the homecoming game, so thankfully the win meant that there probably would be no riots, cars being burned, etc. Since I can attend three home hockey games for the price of one football ticket, though, I think I will stick with just one game per season.

ajensen @ 2008-09-17T17:45:00

2008-09-17T21:50:20Z

I just came across a PhD thesis from a student at the University of Edinburgh, and the author dedicated page 42 to the memory of Douglas Adams.

Very cool.

ajensen @ 2008-09-04T14:51:00

2008-09-04T18:57:10Z

Yesterday's bike ride with a few of the MSU cycling clubbers.

That's a lot of %CPUs

2008-08-24T18:24:15Z

One of our departmental servers has been working some overtime, despite its eight fast processors:

 PID  USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
16104 user0001  29   4  689m 374m  26m R  100  2.3   3067:49 MATLAB
17948 user0002  29   4  687m 371m  26m R   99  2.3   3033:52 MATLAB
16699 user0001  29   4  812m 492m  26m R   51  3.1   3189:12 MATLAB
17357 user0002  29   4  711m 390m  26m R   51  2.4   2997:31 MATLAB
17502 user0002  29   4  698m 378m  26m R   51  2.4   3065:57 MATLAB
17797 user0002  29   4  686m 370m  26m R   51  2.3   3165:14 MATLAB
16187 user0001  29   4  684m 365m  26m R   50  2.3   3033:10 MATLAB
18093 user0002  29   4  688m 369m  26m R   50  2.3   3102:16 MATLAB
17060 user0002  29   4  708m 387m  26m R   50  2.4   3066:07 MATLAB
29766 user0002  29   4  673m 356m  26m R   50  2.2   2200:27 MATLAB
16448 user0001  29   4  808m 487m  26m R   50  3.0   3080:14 MATLAB
16781 user0001  29   4  725m 404m  26m R   50  2.5   3053:22 MATLAB
17652 user0002  29   4  694m 378m  26m R   50  2.4   3229:21 MATLAB
31048 user0001  29   4  780m 464m  26m R   50  2.9   2161:58 MATLAB

The names have been changed to protect the guilty.

ajensen @ 2008-08-22T16:39:00

2008-08-22T20:44:08Z

It's uncanny how often xkcd comics capture moments in life as they happen. After Ron and I spent yesterday fighting with Comcast's stupidity and trying various open wireless networks, this comic appears on cue:

Thankfully, I didn't have to dig out one of my old cantennas.

Blind programmers

2008-07-28T14:29:40Z

There was an interesting thread on Reddit over the weekend about programmers who are blind (or may be going blind). The original post was written by a guy whose doctors told him that his retinas are slowly detaching from the back of his eyes, removing patches of vision over time. It's good to see that some folks have had luck with laser surgery in combination with other techniques. For more severe cases, people have been successful at programming through the use of voice feedback software.

ajensen @ 2008-07-10T11:20:00

2008-07-10T15:23:52Z

I think I'll check my—

Sigh. Thank you, "Ignore all" link...

ajensen @ 2008-07-10T08:32:00

2008-07-10T12:51:11Z

I'm going to Ottawa, Ontario later this month for the Ottawa Linux Symposium. Has anyone visited Ottawa before? Any tips?

Apparently the city has a large network of bike paths, so I'm planning to do some cycling.

I had hoped to avoid driving (~10h), but it's still more economical to rent a car and pay $4.20/gal for fuel than to fly or take a train. The drive should be scenic, though.

My mobile phone is not a GSM type, so I'll need to address that issue as well. I won't need a lot of minutes (getting it mostly for peace of mind), so maybe one of the prepaid services will do the trick. Some companies will ship you a phone and SIM card to use for a few days, and then you mail it back to them afterward. I'd rather not end up with a useless $39.99 phone.

ajensen @ 2008-06-21T08:42:00

2008-06-21T13:18:27Z

Kill a few watts on your next electric bill:

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. - A fourth-grader has told Monroe County officials that they could save $25,000 a year by turning off computers at night.

Ten-year-old Wynn Brower discovered in a science project for school that by turning off his home's four computers at night, the family would save $1 per day.
[...]
Wynn demonstrated how he used a device to test the energy use of a laptop and desktop computer, then extrapolated the results to the county's 550 computers. He came up with a savings of $25,000 a year if all computers are turned off at the end of the work day.
[...]
Wynn got an A-plus and second place on his project when he entered it in his school's science fair.

(Emphasis added)

If you (or your employer) have been insulted by high electricity costs, turning off those idle PCs will help. It won't hurt the equipment to cycle off/on a few more times.

Standby mode helps, too, by reducing your consumption from ~150W to perhaps 10W.

Firefox 3 download day

2008-06-17T19:45:09Z

The Mozilla Project is trying to set a Guinness World Record for the number of Firefox 3 downloads today.

The new version (in my experience) is quite a bit faster, much leaner on memory usage, and has some new productivity features that I've found very helpful.

Go get it!

I let the black smoke out

2008-06-17T15:58:45Z

This happened during a thunderstorm, but everything else (including the motherboard that this card was mounted in!) still works fine. Everything was surge protected.

The next storm, on Friday the 13th, cooked two other network cards (in separate but connected computers) in similar fashion.

ajensen @ 2008-05-03T11:29:00

2008-05-03T15:48:05Z

After two full years of living here, I discovered only by sheer will power and way too much web digging that there is a recycling center inside Spartan Village.

Why don't they advertise this? The laundry next door has its own sign, so why not the recycling center? They could put a big green recycle symbol on the back of the building, which faces the main road, and people could find it easily.

Now, if I can just find the suggestion box...

ajensen @ 2008-04-29T17:09:00

2008-04-29T21:26:57Z

The semester is finally over.

My work output from the past week has included a 32-page report (written with three other people) and a 7-page report co-written with a good friend who was in the same class. By May 15, I will also have finished a research paper (~20 pages) that hopefully will make it into the MODELS'08 conference scheduled for September in France.

In other news, I put in an application for Google's Summer of Code and was accepted. This means that I will be working from home this summer, improving the software package management tools for Debian Linux. Groovy!

In even more exciting news, Jeff got awarded a leadership/musicianship scholarship at the WCCB concert on Sunday. If you know him, call him up and dish out some friendly harassment!

ajensen @ 2008-04-10T08:20:00

2008-04-10T12:25:05Z

Apparently there was quite a party last weekend:

[...]
Police contained the crowd for most of the night by targeting and arresting disorderly individuals, Wibert said.

But at about 1:30 a.m., police declared the event an unlawful assembly and ordered the crowd to disperse after a change in its mood.

After numerous loudspeaker commands to disperse were ignored by some partygoers, police launched smoke grenades and flash bangs — which produce firecracker-like noise and light — into the crowd at about 2:07 a.m.

Wibert said the warnings only eliminated some of the crowd.

Some students reported not hearing the loudspeaker announcements, while others said they heard them but didn’t take them seriously.

“I never really saw a warning,” junior Tony Smith said.

“I’m sure they did somehow, but I never saw.”

At about 2:16 a.m., officers launched tear gas as what Wibert called a last resort.
[...]

More: Photo gallery, full SN coverage.

At least there were no cars flipped over this time.

ajensen @ 2008-04-02T08:51:00

2008-04-02T12:57:08Z

Look out for that—

Thank you, tree, for falling in the direction of least destruction.

ajensen @ 2008-04-02T08:39:00

2008-04-02T12:51:39Z

Robert Fisk on How Ireland exorcised the ghost of empire:

A few Irish journalists remembered Ireland's sacrifice for King and Country before it was fashionable to do so. In the early 1970s – when I was Northern Ireland correspondent of The Times – I wrote about the old Irish-British regiments. But my article elicited not a scintilla of interest at a time when theProvisional IRA claimed to be following the blood sacrifice of Dublin in 1916, when Protestant paramilitaries claimed to be following the blood sacrifice of the Somme in 1916 and when the British, believing Northern Ireland was an "integral" part of the United Kingdom, made a claim that now sounds wearily familiar in our post-Iraq ears: that a British retreat from Belfast would mean – yes – civil war.

This Easter, the 92nd anniversary of the Rising, it is intriguing to look at the parallels that connect Ireland and the Middle East. The "Black and Tans", whom Churchill supported when they took their revenge on Irish civilians in 1920, were later sent – again with Churchill's support – to Palestine, where they became the "British Gendarmerie" and continued their reprisals against Arab and Jewish civilians to considerable effect. Decades later, John Hume (Ireland's only living statesman) wrote in The Jerusalem Post that Israel and "Palestine" should take a page out of Ireland's Good Friday Agreement. It was all about compromise, he said.

He was wrong. Israel's settlements on Palestinian Arab land in the occupied territories were as illegal as the Protestant settlements and the dispossession of the Catholics in 16th-century Ireland. A closer historical symbol was Fallujah. Not long after the US 82nd Airborne killed 14 Iraqi civilians during a protest in 2003, the people of Derry wanted to twin with Fallujah. Had not the British Parachute Regiment killed 14 Irish civilians in Derry (13 on "Bloody Sunday", another died of wounds) in 1972? The offer was never taken up – but the message was valid enough: we must deal with injustice before we look for "compromise".

The relatives of the Bloody Sunday dead received a multi-million-pound inquiry. The relatives of the Fallujah dead were twice put under US siege until their city was almost destroyed.

(Emphasis added)

ajensen @ 2008-03-11T14:03:00

2008-03-11T18:20:53Z

On the last day of vacation, we came across this nifty-looking facility on highway 95 in Nevada. We guessed that it was an array of solar panels, both due to its looks and the many electrical lines that were built next to it.

It turns out that it's even cooler than that. The Advanced Parabolic Trough Pilot Project, sponsored by UNLV and the U.S. Department of Energy, is testing some new equipment for "a 64 MW solar plant near Boulder City, Nevada, that utilizes an advanced parabolic trough design":

This project was initiated to test some of the necessary component engineering work prior to the start of the 64 MW plant installation. As part of the work, two Solar Collector Assemblies (SCA's) are being erected, exclusive of the receiver tubes and only partially outfitted with parabolic mirrors, so that mechanical testing can be completed, proper fit and function can be demonstrated, and installation methods can be verified and improved. Receivers and additional parabolic mirrors may be added at a later time so that the SCA's can also be tested for thermal performance in the future. Included in the equipment to be tested at the site are Advanced Local Controllers (AdLoC's), which have been newly developed, to control the sun tracking of the parabolic troughs using a new hydraulic-based drive system.

One of the recurring thoughts that I had while driving around Arizona and Nevada was that there is a tremendous amount of solar energy waiting to be captured. I hope that we will find a nice way to do this without compromising the desert ecosystems.

Thunderbird extension: attachmentremember

2008-03-01T14:23:02Z

Problem: forgetting to attach a file to an email before sending it.

Solution: have the computer scan the message for keywords ("attach", "see attached", etc) after you have clicked "Send" and warn you if any of the keywords are found but there is no attachment.

I was going to implement this, but someone beat me to it. For anyone who uses Mozilla Thunderbird for email, the attachmentremember extension/add-on solves this problem nicely. The keywords are provided in a text box, so you can even adapt it to your writing style.