& Etc.

LCD Screen Drawings

Mark Treadwell — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 03:59:35 GMT

My children's artwork adorns the walls of my house in several locations. It is regularly replaced with the most recent efforts, since the preschools seem to excel at a multitude of different craft projects. At home, we favor crayons and washable markers, but we keep close control of them.

This evening my three-year-old decided to climb up Daddy's chair and get onto my desk. A ball point pen beckoned from a pen holder placed far from a child-accessible edge. The canvas -- two 19-inch LCD screens. She seemed pleased with her art work when I came in, but I certainly was not.

I tried several cleaners unsuccessfully, but then had great success using full-strength isopropyl rubbing alcohol. I have been meaning to clean them for awhile. I just did not want to get around to it for this particular reason.

Technorati Tags: LCD, cleaning

Tafiti Search

Mark Treadwell — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 15:02:16 GMT

Microsoft announced the availability of a new Tafiti experimental search front-end based on Silverlight. I tried out the Halo 3 branded system, and it is visually very nice and functionally very smooth.

However, as a search engine front-end, it is currently a failure. I sent the team the following feedback:

Sorry guys, but I have to grade it as a complete failure.
1) You completely fail to operate under a common setting (popup blocker set at medium) in your own browser (IE7)
2) You cannot bypass #1 using a Ctrl-Click
While it looks spiffy, it is useless.

They need to test more usage scenarios.

Strange Amazon Connection

Mark Treadwell — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 23:33:41 GMT

We got a very strange recommendation from Amazon for our four-year-old.

We do not understand it either.

Merry Christmas: Santa's Goin' To Kokomo

Mark Treadwell — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 13:27:00 GMT

Merry Christmas!

Mike Love's Santa's Goin' To Kokomo

Google Code Search - Finding Source Code

Mark Treadwell — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 22:09:00 GMT

Google Labs has come out with a new means to find source code online. Google Code Search is a feature that returns hits from within posted source code. It did not take long for me to ignore the main page and set the advanced search page as my shortcut. So far, it seems heavily weighted towards Java (not surprising), with less available from C-based sites. The results layout also needs more differentiation between each separate result -- things blend together too much. More to follow as I use the system -- recommended, so far.

The associated FAQ is pretty simple at the moment:

1. What kind of code are you crawling?

We're crawling as much publicly accessible source code as we can find, including archives (.tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar, and .zip), CVS repositories and Subversion repositories.

2. What regexp syntax does Code Search support?

Google Code Search supports POSIX extended regular expression syntax, excluding backreferences, collating elements, and collation classes. To search for a space character, escape it with a backslash, as in hello,\ world. You can search for literal strings by enclosing the strings in quotation marks, as in "hello, world". We also support Perl extensions \d, \D, \s, \S, \w, and \W.

3. How do I restrict by language, license or filename?

You can either use the Advanced Code Search page or use our operators. Our operators include:

The lang: operator, which restricts by programming language (e.g., lang:"c++", -lang:java, or lang:^(c|c#|c\+\+)$)
The license: operator, which restricts by software license (e.g., license:apache, -license:gpl, or license:bsd|mit)
The package: operator, which restricts by package URL (e.g., package:"www.kernel.org" or package:\.tgz$)
The file: operator, which restricts by filename (e.g., file:include/linux/$ or -file:\.cc$)

The argument to each of these operators can be either a quoted literal string or a regular expression. As illustrated in some of the examples above, each of the operators can be used as a negative by placing a minus sign ("-") in front of it.

4. Can I add Google Code Search results to my website, IDE or application?

Yes. Code Search results are available via a GData/XML feed, and we encourage you to help create IDE plugins and add Google Code Search to your site.

5. How do you decide what software license to list for a piece of code?

We do our best to determine the software license for code packages by looking for a license in the comments or in a separate license file (e.g., LICENSE, LICENCE, COPYRIGHT, COPYING). If we can't find a license, we indicate that the license is "Unknown." Please note that our license detection is not perfect -- we try to list the license as indicated by the code's author, but we can make mistakes and sometimes the author indicates the wrong license. The Code Search results also can't tell you what patents may cover a piece of software. We tell you what we can about the likely license terms, but understanding the legal requirements to reuse a piece of code is your responsibility.

6. How do I add my code to Google Code Search results?

You can submit your code using our online form. Please note that we do not add all submitted code to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if it will appear.

7. How do I block you from crawling my code?

Google Code Search respects robots.txt, so there are a couple ways you can block us from crawling your code:

If you have access to the robots file for your web server, you can add the your code's path to the Disallow: line. Learn more.
Alternatively, you can simply put a robots file in the root directory of your code package. This will work for both archives and source control repositories like CVS and Subversion. For example, to indicate you want none of your code crawled, you could add a file called robots.txt in the root directory with the following:
User-agent: * Disallow: /

Please note that it may take some time for Code Search to update its index and remove your code. If you have an urgent request, please let us know by emailing codesearch-issues@google.com.

8. I have suggestions for product improvements. How do I let you know?

To share your thoughts with us, please post them to the discussion group. Google Code Search is part of Google Labs, so we're still in the early stages of development. Your feedback is important and will help us improve the product.

9. How do I let Google know if I see a Code Search result that I think should be removed?

Google Code Search is still in Google Labs, so the search results may not be perfect. If you notice a significant problem with the search results, please let us know by emailing codesearch-issues@google.com. If you're a copyright owner and believe you've found results that infringe your copyright, please follow our DMCA process to request removal.

10. What are the terms of use?

Please refer to the Google Code terms of service.

We Declare - 230 Years Ago

Mark Treadwell — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 11:23:00 GMT

It was very bad 230+ years ago in North America. Compare the bulleted list to the news of today and see if our world really compares. Personally, I like the sentence below, in red, that after listing his errors, calls the King of England a Tyrant.

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred. to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

New Dell Computer Crapware

Mark Treadwell — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 01:12:00 GMT

Today I got to unpack and set up my new toy. After over five years of existing with the same old 1.1GHz P3, I finally got my brand new Dell XPS 400 -- Pentium D Dual Core 3GHz Processor 930, 4GB DDR2 SDRAM, 256MB nVidia GeForce 7800 GTX, and other toys -- Sweet! I plugged in two 19-inch LCD monitors that I had ready, fired it up, and promptly got deluged with the Dell advertising crapware.

I had to read the startup configuration screen very closely to make sure I was not agreeing to AOL Broadband or NetZero dial-up. I wanted to use my existing ISP. Not to worry, I still had to view the AOL Broadband ad anyway since I chose to intentionally bypass the install.

Overall, not too bad, but lots more than past computers. I especially dislike anything AOL. I killed it off and uninstalled it as fast as I could. In typical AOL fashion, they left an install link on the Start menu along with an install package directory that I had to delete manually.

Update: I also pulled some stuff out of the registry at HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run.

What do I end up with on my new desktop?

Windows stuff (Recycle Bin, IE, Media Center, Windows Media Player)
Dell Documentation and Support; Games, Music, and Photos
Crap: AOL Free 6 Months, Internet Service Offers, NetZero - First Month Free!

Start Menu Crap:

MSN (twice)
America Online 9.0 (and subfolder)
Install Netscape Internet Service
NetZero - First Month Free!
InstallShield Update Service (it only updates itself and Corel Photo Album 6)
RealPlayer
WordPerfect Office 12

Background Process Crap:

AOL connectivity service (System level! Why would this ever need to be running in the background on every new PC?)

IE Shortcut Crap:

Real (3 links)
Dell (4 links)
MSN

Control Panel - Add or Remove Programs Crap

America Online
AOL Coach Version 1.0
AOL Connectivity Services
EarthLink Setup Files
ESPNMotion
Dell Get High Speed Internet!
Dell Internet Service Offers Launcher
NetZeroInstallers
RealPlayer
WordPerfect Office 12

I uninstalled all this since I never wanted it, will never use it, and feel much better with it gone. Interestingly, Dell is shipping old versions of Sun Java (1.4.2_03 vice the current 1.5.0_06-b05) and Adobe Acrobat Reader (6.0.2 vice 7.0.8). No Flash or Shockwave included either. Who knows what else I will find strange about this new machine.

International Units Trivia

Mark Treadwell — Sun, 28 May 2006 23:01:00 GMT

How many of the following 29 units have you never heard of before? The international system of units consists of a short list of base units defined in an absolute manner that does not refer to any other units. The base units are consistent with the part of the metric system called the MKS (meter-kilogram-second) system.

meter for distance
kilogram for mass
second for time
ampere for electric current
kelvin for temperature
mole for amount of substance
candela for intensity of light

Other international system units, called international system derived units, are defined algebraically in terms of these fundamental units. For example, the international system unit of force, the newton, is defined to be the force that accelerates a mass of one kilogram at the rate of one meter per second per second. This means the newton is equal to one kilogram meter per second squared, so the algebraic relationship is N = kg·m·s-2. Currently there are 22 international system derived units. They include:

radian and steradian for plane and solid angles, respectively
newton for force and the pascal for pressure
joule for energy and the watt for power
degree Celsius for everyday measurement of temperature
electricity: the coulomb (charge), volt (potential), farad (capacitance), ohm (resistance), and siemens (conductance)
magnetism: the weber (flux), tesla (flux density), and henry (inductance)
lumen for flux of light and the lux for illuminance
hertz for frequency of regular events and the becquerel for rates of radioactivity and other random events
gray and sievert for radiation dose
katal, a unit of catalytic activity used in biochemistry

Five of those were completely new for me: siemens, becquerel, gray, sievert, and katal. Did Tesla and Farad get together to design a flux capacitor? ;-)

Visiting Memory Lane

Mark Treadwell — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 22:55:00 GMT

Today I did some long delayed work and started cleaning out our garage. I needed to free-up space, so I went about straightening up the scattered lumber and tossing out the old and broken things that I held on to for very good reasons -- I just cannot recall what they are now.

One stack of boxes held all the old bits of computers that I have bought over the past 21 years. Some things brought a smile to my face. Here are some of the bits I came across. Remember these?

CD caddy - These were how we used to put CDs into computers. That was back in the time before burners when we were convinced that a CD was a fragile thing to be protected. For those too young to remember, a caddy is plastic container that holds a CD or DVD disc for added protection. The bare disc is placed in the caddy, and the caddy is inserted into the drive. A caddy is not a jewel case or a sleeve. A jewel case protects the disc for transportation. A caddy protects the disc while it is in the drive.

Bernoulli Disk - The ones I found are 44MB discs. They were huge amounts of storage at the time. Now they may hold only a single MP3 file -- and let you get to it very slowly. Advertised as allowing infinite storage, they came with 5 year warranties and were individually serialized.

SCSI terminator - A SCSI bus used to be the only way you could get a large number of drives hooked onto a computer. Initially, getting SCSI to work was a black art. It greatly depended on the cable, the drives, the controller and the terminator used. Still used today, things are much more automated and less painful. I am still mentally scarred by my long-ago pain of getting a SCSI scanner to work.

PS/2 Model 80 - This was my second computer after owning one of the original IBM PCs. I bought it at literally a fire sale after a warehouse got a little smoky. The machine ran fine despite its microchannel bus - a great technology that went nowhere. This machine was very heavy and you really needed that sturdy fold up handle.

This stuff is now heading for the recycler and into computer oblivion.

Blogiversary 2

Mark Treadwell — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 18:56:00 GMT

Last year I had hoped to cover so much, but then real life entered the picture and intruded on my time. Two years ago, I started blogging on GWB, and continue, in the hobbyist mode. I support the family via my military job, but I still try to find the time to keep the updates to the EDR. It is a modest income to put against the credit card, but nothing to live by. I hope to get going on VS2005, EntLib, GAT and other neat stuff from Microsoft. We will see how the time is taken up through this coming year.

Oh yeah, hurricane season starts in ten weeks.