Quanterium: The Weblog

Creating a Self-Signed SSL Certificate for Multiple Domains

2012-01-13T14:05:00.000-08:00

This morning's adventure was trying to figure out how to generate a self-signed SSL certificate for multiple domains using OpenSSL. I found lots of discussions online, but they all didn't quite work. There were a few different ways to get a Certificate Signing Request with the SubjectAltName fields correct, but the signed certificate itself didn't have them. Finally, I got something that worked.

Credit where credit is due: The final steps that worked were based on this message from the openssl-users list and the command to generate the certificate from this page in the Linode Library.

First, save the following in a config file, for this example I'll call it example.conf and it will be for various similar domains:

[ ca ]
default_ca = CA_default

[ CA_default ]
dir = .
serial = $dir/serial
database = $dir/index.txt
new_certs_dir = $dir/newcerts
certs = $dir/certs
certificate = $certs/cacert.pem
private_key = $dir/private/cakey.pem
default_days = 365
default_md = sha1
preserve = no
email_in_dn = no
nameopt = default_ca
certopt = default_ca
policy = policy_match
copy_extensions = copy

[ policy_match ]
countryName = match
stateOrProvinceName = match
organizationName = match
organizationalUnitName = optional
commonName = supplied
emailAddress = optional

[ req ]
default_bits = 2048 # Size of keys
default_keyfile = example.key # name of generated keys
default_md = sha1 # message digest algorithm
string_mask = nombstr # permitted characters
distinguished_name = req_distinguished_name
req_extensions = v3_req
x509_extensions = v3_req

[ req_distinguished_name ]
# Variable name Prompt string
#---------------------- ----------------------------------
0.organizationName = Organization Name (company)
organizationalUnitName = Organizational Unit Name (department, division)
emailAddress = Email Address
emailAddress_max = 40
localityName = Locality Name (city, district)
stateOrProvinceName = State or Province Name (full name)
countryName = Country Name (2 letter code)
countryName_min = 2
countryName_max = 2
commonName = Common Name (hostname, IP, or your name)
commonName_max = 64

# Default values for the above, for consistency and less typing.
# Variable name Value
#------------------------------ ------------------------------
commonName_default = www.example.com
0.organizationName_default = Example Company
localityName_default = Honolulu
stateOrProvinceName_default = Hawaii
countryName_default = US
emailAddress_default = webmaster@example.com

[ v3_ca ]
basicConstraints = CA:TRUE
subjectKeyIdentifier = hash
authorityKeyIdentifier = keyid:always,issuer:always

[ v3_req ]
# Extensions to add to a certificate request
basicConstraints = CA:FALSE
keyUsage = nonRepudiation, digitalSignature, keyEncipherment

# Some CAs do not yet support subjectAltName in CSRs.
# Instead the additional names are form entries on web
# pages where one requests the certificate...
subjectAltName = @alt_names

[alt_names]
DNS.1 = www.example.com
DNS.2 = www2.example.com
DNS.3 = www.example.net
DNS.4 = example.com

[ server ]
# Make a cert with nsCertType set to "server"
basicConstraints=CA:FALSE
nsCertType = server
nsComment = "OpenSSL Generated Server Certificate"
subjectKeyIdentifier=hash
authorityKeyIdentifier=keyid,issuer:always

[ client ]
# Make a cert with nsCertType set to "client"
basicConstraints=CA:FALSE
nsCertType = client
nsComment = "OpenSSL Generated Client Certificate"
subjectKeyIdentifier=hash
authorityKeyIdentifier=keyid,issuer:always

Before saving the file, some changes will need to be made to be specific to your site. The one critical change is to change the [alt_names] section to be relevant to your domain, since these needed to be specified in the configuration file rather than being requested later. If you need more or fewer DNS names you can add or remove lines. One thing to note is that the first time I tried this, Firefox didn't like the URL when I tried to connect using the domain name listed in the commonName field, so I went ahead and added it to the alt_names section as well.

You may also want to change the default keyfile names and other defaults to save yourself some typing later, especially if you're only going to be generating one certificate.

Once you have the configuration file the way you like it, you're ready to generate the key and certificate. We'll be doing it in just one step, without saving the intermediate certificate signing request:

$ openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -nodes -out example.crt -keyout example.key -config example.conf

You'll be promoted for various certificate parameters; if you didn't change the defaults to what you want, you will need to enter them when prompted, otherwise you can just hit Enter at each prompt to accept the default specified in the configuration file. The certificate will be good for one year, if you want to change it, you can alter the number of days specified in the command line (or change the default in the config file).

Once this is done, you'll see two new files: example.key (which contains the private key) and example.crt (which contains the public certificate). Do whatever it is to need to do with them for your application.

Using a Scientific Linux/CentOS/RHEL 6 Server for Time Machine

2011-11-16T16:16:00.001-08:00

I recently tried to setup a Scientific Linux 6 server as a backup volume for Time Machine. I based my steps on these instructions for Ubuntu, but I thought there was enough differences that I thought it was worth posting what worked for me. I used Scientific Linux 6, but it should work just as well for CentOS 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

A few assumptions made in these instructions, you will want to replace them as appropriate:

The user's username is "user".
The Linux server has a hostname of "linux.example.com". If you don't have a hostname in DNS, you can use the server's IP address instead.

First, we need to setup the server:

1. Install the EPEL repository. I already had it on the machine, but if it's not yet installed, read and follow the instructions at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL.

2. Install netatalk from the EPEL repository:
# yum install netatalk

3. Add the following line to the end of /etc/netatalk/afpd.conf:

- -transall -uamlist uams_randnum.so,uams_dhx.so -nosavepassword -advertise_ssh

4. Create the TimeMachine directory in the user's home directory or wherever you want it:

$ mkdir /home/user/TimeMachine

5. Add the following two lines to the end of /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default. Note that I commented out the ~ line that was already present since I didn't want to enable home directory access; I just want to use this for Time Machine:

/home/user/TimeMachine TimeMachine allow:user cnidscheme:dbd options:userdots,upriv

6. Configure netatalk to be started when the system boots:

# chkconfig netatalk on

7. Start netatalk:

# service netatalk start

8. Open the AFP port in the firewall. Go to System, Administration, Firewall. Click Other Ports, Add, then scroll down until you find Port 548, Protocol tcp, Service afpovertcp. Select it and click OK. Repeat for Port 548, Protocol udp, Service aftpovertcp. Click Apply, then close the Firewall Configuration window.

Now, on your Mac:

1. Verify that you can connect to the server. From the Finder's Go menu, choose Connect to Server. Enter the server address afp://linux.example.com and click Connect. You should be prompted for a username and password.

2. Configure Time Machine to allow you to use network volumes for Time Machine. Enter the following command in Terminal.app:

$ defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

3. Go to System Preferences, select Time Machine. Enable Time Machine and select your mounted TimeMachine volume. You will be prompted for a username and password that Time Machine will use to connect when it's performing the backup.

Why AT&T Should Give Me a 93% Discount on U-Verse Internet

2011-03-18T21:35:00.000-07:00

So, I recently moved. At my new house, I signed up for AT&T U-Verse TV and Internet. So, what happens this week, before I've even received my first bill? DSLReports and Engadget break the news that AT&T will begin imposing a 250 gigabyte per month cap on U-Verse Internet service. This already has me reconsidering my options.

Switching to DSL (I've heard a lot of good things about DSLExtreme) would be my likely choice, as I've had some pretty bad experiences with Time Warner Cable's Internet offerings. Plus, from what I understand, DSL and U-Verse run over the same copper pair, so I'd also have to change my TV provider. Time Warner Cable isn't all that attractive, and I had some bad experiences with the DirecTV customer service people before deciding on U-Verse. But that's really beside the point, and not why I'm breaking out the Blogger account for the first time in almost a year.

No, I want to lay out why AT&T should be giving me an 93% discount on my U-Verse service. It all boils down to simple math:

I have the U-Verse Max plan, which offers download speeds of 12 megabits per second. I even did the math in AT&T's favor, and used a non-leap year February as the definition of a month, being 28 days. Now we need to do one more division:

In other words, the bandwidth caps allow me to use just 7% of the theoretical maximum amount of Internet usage I could have in a month. And that doesn't account for the 1.5 megabits per second upload speed. So if I can only get 7% of what I signed up for, I should only pay 7% of what I was paying for before. In other words, a 93% discount.

Since the current charge for U-Verse Max is $45/month, that means I'll be paying just $3.15/month if I were to get the discount. Oh, and the folks with the $65/month Max Turbo plan, which offers 24 megabits per second? They'll barely get 4% of what they signed up for. It actually makes Max Turbo the an even better deal, at a mere $2.60/month.

Figuring out how long it would take at 12 megabits per second to consume the 250 gigabyte per month limit is left as an exercise to the reader. It's simple middle school algebra.

Spirit Airlines Hates Its Customers

2010-04-06T22:33:00.000-07:00

Spirit Airlines likes to charge low fares. Really low fares. Absurdly low fares. So low, that they don't cover the cost of hauling the passenger from the gate to the end of the runway. How low? Try $9. But that's apparently not low enough. Yesterday, they announced new, even lower fares. But where do you go from $9?

Of course, if you think you're really going to get to fly somewhere on an airplane for one measly penny, you'd be quite mistaken. For if there's one thing Sprit likes more than really low fares, this is it:

Fees.

Here are a few of them:

Want to check a bag? $19 if you pay online, $25 at the airport.
How about another bag? $25. After August 1st, it will be $45.
Get thirsty on board the plane? $2-3
Want to pick your seat before you check in? $7. For the middle seat.
Rather pre-reserve a window or aisle seat? $12. $20 for the emergency exit row.
Oh, and you actually want that $9 fare? You'll have to join their $9 Fare Club, which costs $39.95 per year.

But all of that isn't new. And much of it is being copied by other airlines, some not exactly known for having low fares in the first place. That one-penny fare also doesn't include fuel. You pay for the seat, but there's an extra fee to actually move it anywhere.

But, buried in that press release about the one-penny fare (which I'm sure Spirit was hoping would get most of the attention), was yet another new fee.

Want to carry-on your own luggage? Free. If it fits under the seat in front of you.
$20. If you're a member of the $9 Fare Club and you pay in advance.
Otherwise, it's $30.
Or $45 if you wait to pay at the gate.

That's right. For the privilege of hauling your bag through the security checkpoint by yourself (ensuring that all liquids are in 100mL containers or less in a 1-quart zip top plastic bag outside your luggage), dragging it all through the airport terminals and down the jet bridge, and hoisting it in to the overhead bin all by yourself (ok, so you might get another passenger or a flight attendant to help you with that last bit), you have to pay Spirit Airlines a fee.

I want people to pay me to do things themselves. Imagine having to tip the bellman at a hotel for not bringing your luggage to your room, or tipping the valet to park your car yourself. That's what this is.

At the same time, they're lowering the fee for the first checked bag. $15 on domestic flights and $20 on international flights; $10 more if you're not a $9 Fare Club member. So it's actually cheaper to check a bag then not. The airline is charging you more if you do something yourself than if they do it for you.

Does that make any sense? It's like if, at the gas station, the prices at the full service pumps cost less than at the self service pumps.

Actually, yes it does make sense. Spirit's COO lays it out in the press release:

“In addition to lowering fares even further, this will reduce the number of carry-on bags, which will improve inflight safety and efficiency by speeding up the boarding and deplaning process, all of which ultimately improve the overall customer experience,” says Spirit’s Chief Operating Officer Ken McKenzie. “Bring less; pay less. It’s simple.”

So, they want to reduce the number of carry-on bags. So if you charge people to do it, they won't. Simple enough.

Or is it? We have to ask the question: Why are people bringing on so many carry-on bags?

I've already answered that question. Scroll back up. I'll wait.

Ok, I'll tell you again:

Want to check a bag? $19 if you pay online, $25 at the airport.
How about another bag? $25. After August 1st, it will be $45.

As I predicted when American Airlines started charging for that first checked bag almost two years ago, when asked to pay a fee to check their bags, many customers will choose instead to carry them on. How do we know this is happening? Ask the flight attendants, who will tell you that passengers have been carrying on more since the airlines started charging to check bags.

So, doesn't that mean that the problem of too-many carry-ons is really the airlines' fault in the first place?

Yes.

And does it also mean that they could solve the problem by simply not charging that fee?

Yes.

But instead of reversing the move that caused the problem in the first place, Sprit has decided to solve the problem by charging yet another fee. It may work too, but not in the way Spirit is hoping.

Fewer passengers on board mean fewer carry ons, regardless of whether or not they check the bags.

So why would the company choose the customer-unfriendly option in the first place, that has the possibility of hurting its business even more?

I can draw only one conclusion:

Spirit Airlines hates its customers.

Captain EO, a Quick Review

2010-03-01T22:11:00.000-08:00

I was at Disneyland on Sunday and saw the return of Captain EO. This was the first day with full weekend crowds since it opened (as Saturday was rainy, the park was likely not as busy as it would normally be on a Saturday). I was there around 10:30 in the morning and the wait was about the same as I'd read about during the week on MiceChat's forums: I had to wait a few minutes in the queue, pretty much right under the new sign. We were then let in to the main queue area, and I was able to find a spot to stand at the bottom of the steps near the theater door.

There was a several minute wait for the pre-show video to start. Some of it seemed familiar. It was nice, and the Kodak ad wasn't nearly as drawn out as it was for Honey, I Shrunk the Audience!

When we were let into the theater, several announcements were made reminding people to move all the way to the end of the row as the auditorium was going to be full. I was seated a few rows back, near the exit side of the row.

The show itself was great. I did see some ghosting in the 3D picture, but it might have just been me as I was noticing the picture didn't seem quite right for MuppetVision 3D and It's Tough to be a Bug that afternoon as well. I was too young to remember the starfield effect, but having had it pointed out in advance, I did miss the lasers when EO's ship is under attack in space, since there's no visual effect to go with the sound. It seems like of the three missing original effects (the third being smoke), the lasers would have been the easiest to reinstall in the theater. This might be heretical to say, but if they're not going to reinstall the lasers, I wonder if the visual effect should be added to the film itself.

The motion floor was interesting. I don't know if it can move at an angle or just uniform up and down; if so it would have been nice to angle the floor to synchronize with the movements of the ship before it lands, to give the audience the feeling of turning as well. The movement of the floor during the musical numbers sometimes worked and seem to fit but sometimes felt unnecessary, like it was added just because they could.

Got a cheer from the audience when EO first comes on screen -- before we even saw his face.

At the end of the show, the cast member referred to our 3D glasses as "safety goggles", which is what they were referred to as for HISTA. The signs at the receptacle bins also referred to them that way. The glasses are HISTA yellow; the original EO glasses were purple. MuppetVision glasses are purple, it seems like it would be simple enough to swap the EO and MuppetVision glasses for the extra bit of authenticity at EO, but the color of the glasses is a pretty minor thing.

Here's hoping that, at least in Anaheim, Wayne Szalinski has shrunk his last audience.

TRENDnet modems with AT&T DSL

2009-11-03T21:21:00.000-08:00

I recently got a new DSL modem, a TRENDnet TEW-435BRM. I had trouble getting it to work; the automatic configuration wasn't working. I searched around and saw lots of people having problems getting TRENDnet routers to work on AT&T DSL as well. After playing around with settings for a while, I did get it to work, so I thought I'd post here in case it might help others in the future.

The following settings work for me:

VPI: 0
VCI: 35
DSL Modulation: ADSL2
Connection method: Login, PPPoE
DSL Duplexing Method: LLC-BASED
Login name and password are my AT&T/Yahoo credentials
Connect Behavior: Keep Alive (Reconnect immediately)
IP Address: Automatic
DNS: Automatic

The GIGO Buffer

2009-06-05T14:41:00.000-07:00

I've contemplated doing this for a while, and after a conversation at work this past week, I've decided to actually implement it.

Presenting, a GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) Buffer. Implemented in Python, and won't work on Windows (because really, that whole OS is basically a giant GIGO buffer).


#!/usr/bin/env python

class GIGO_Buffer:
 """
 Implementation of a Garbage In, Garbage Out buffer.
 """

 def push(self, element):
   """
   Push data into the buffer.
  
   @param element: Data to add to the buffer.
   """
   return

 def pop(self, len):
   """
   Pop data from the buffer.
  
   @param len: Number of bytes of data to pop from the buffer.
   @returns len bytes of data from the buffer.
   """
   data = open('/dev/urandom', 'r')
   rval = data.read(len)
   data.close()
   return rval

More Bad Ideas from the Airline Industry

2008-05-21T19:40:00.000-07:00

Here's why this is a bad idea:

First, for at least the short term, checking in will take longer as people argue with the agents about the fee. Plus, there will be confusion about who pays the fee and who doesn't. Sure, they lay it out pretty clearly on their web site, but do we really expect all their front line agents to know all the details? And we know customers don't read.

Second, it will make security lines longer as more people who might have otherwise checked a bag now try to bring it through as a carry on to avoid paying the fee. People like me who would check through their liquid stuff will now have to have it as one more thing to pull out of the back and place in a separate bin along with my shoes, laptop, and sweater/coat.

Third, boarding will take longer while people try to find room for all that stuff they didn't check. People trying to stuff it in the overhead bin, figure out how to get it under their seat, and finally having to check it through anyway.

The ultra-low-cost carriers like Ryanair, Allegiant, and the late, unmissed Skybus can get away with this because their fares are so low that I actually buy the argument that they're simply operating on an a la carte model where you pay for the services you want. I have a harder time buying that argument from American, where we won't be seeing the fares going down (and most people won't notice if they keep the fares lower by doing this in lieu of simply raising fares) and their fares aren't and won't be substantially different from their competitors.

We'll Miss You

2008-03-30T15:44:00.001-07:00

1946-2008

Leopard: The Cat is Out of the Bag

2007-10-27T21:05:00.000-07:00

Yeah, yeah. That's not original at all.

Rawr.

So I've had Leopard running on my G5 for a few hours, and here are some thoughts.

Before I installed Leopard, I used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my system onto an external FireWire hard drive that will ultimately become my Time Machine backup drive. This turned out to be a good thing, as the installation turned out to be a bit of a hairy experience. I initially attempted to do an Archive and Install, however during the process I got a message that installation had failed. I tried again, this time doing an Erase and Install, and got the same error. I dug out my original Power Mac G5 DVD and ran the Apple Hardware Test. Sure enough, it reported problems with memory. I pulled the two 512MB modules I had added a while back, reverting to the original 512MB of RAM. These modules were warranty replacements for my original pair which had gone bad, and I didn't really want to have to replace them again. Sure enough, this time the install succeeded. After the system was up and running, I put the extra memory modules back in and so far no problems.

During the install process, there was the option to copy my information over from an external hard drive; a feature I had used before when I replaced my iBook with a PowerBook, only this time I would be using just the hard drive rather than a Mac in FireWire target disk mode. The copy took a while, but when it was done I was up and running again, just the same as if I had done an Archive and Install -- except that the Previous System was tucked away on another disk rather than on the same disk. The only hitch was that it had trouble copying over the software for my Microsoft keyboard; I was able to grab that off of their web site and reinstall it without much difficulty.

Once I got things up and running, things seemed to work fine. I did have to update the Xiph QuickTime Components to get Ogg files to play properly in iTunes. One time Firefox got suck behind the other windows; quitting and relaunching fixed that. Chax doesn't work yet; while I no longer need it to get tabbed chats in iChat, I do miss having the buddy list automatically resize itself to be just long enough to show all my online contacts like Adium does. I'd use Adium for everything, except that I do use the video feature, and now expect to use screen sharing as well.

Thanks to a post on the InsanelyMac forum, I found the new nebula background that is used on the login screen. It's DefaultDesktop.jpg in /System/Library/CoreServices. I wanted to use it as my desktop, so I opened up the Desktop & Screen Saver preferences panel and dragged it into the little graphic well. Why Apple didn't just put it in with the other default desktop pictures, I'm not sure.

I like the look of the new dock. Until now, I'd always kept the dock set to hide unless I moved the mouse to the bottom of the screen. Which probably made sense back when I was using a 17" CRT (at probably 1034x768) like when I first installed Mac OS X 10.0. Since I'm now using a 21" LCD at 1600x1200, I think I can give up that little bit of space at the bottom. I'm not sure about the Stacks thing but I think I can get used to it. In the past, I've kept a copy of my Applications and user home folder in my dock for easy access. I'd right click on Applications to pick an application, and usually just click the home folder to open it in a Finder window. It seems to be taking a bit longer to find applications in the grid view than it did as a menu, since instead of just finding it vertically, I have to search both the right row and column in the grid. On the other hand, not having to scroll ought to be nice, so it balances out. I do prefer the grid view to the fan view; having the list curve off to the side seems rather useless.

I'm not wild about the new folder icon; I prefer the older ones. The new ones remind me of the rather ugly ones used in the default Fedora 7 desktop. Did someone decide that the 3D folder icons--which date back to the Copland project and ultimately appeared in Mac OS 8--have gone out of style?

I also saw some complaints about the transparent menu bar, but that doesn't seem to be bothering me. It seems pretty smart: Against a dark background, it is less transparent so it maintains good contrast with the black text.

I'm not wild about having document icons be previews. I usually turn this off in Konqueror. I normally use the column view, so all the icons are pretty small and they all look about the same. I'd much rather have a Word document icon for .docs, an Adobe Reader document icon for .pdfs, and so on, and use Quick Look to get a preview.

I'll wrap this post up with this thought: How come I haven't seen any Leopard Lolcats yet? Too obvious?

San Diego Fires

2007-10-22T19:18:00.000-07:00

Just for anyone who might be concerned about me, my area of San Diego thus far isn't very badly affected. Some smoke in the air but that's it.

Taro Chips

2007-08-23T21:23:00.001-07:00

I knew taro chips are tasty, but apparently they also have great taste in television:

HDTV

2007-06-17T10:51:00.000-07:00

After stumbling across Pirates of the Caribbean last night on ABC, I realized that ABC is one of the channels I get an over the air HDTV signal from, so I switched from my cable input to that. And I have to say, HDTV looks a lot better.

As an aside, I've also been rather impressed by the side-by-side comparisons of DVD versus BluRay at stores like Best Buy and Circuit City. But I'm planning to wait until there's a clear winner in the BluRay versus HD-DVD format war (or players that can handle both formats become cheap) before moving from DVD to a new format.

Done Voting? Good. Pay More for Gas.

2006-11-07T22:36:00.000-08:00

Sigh.

Guess all those conspiracy theorists that were saying gas prices were down just for the elections were true. They're already going up.

Where's my hydrogen-hybrid RX-8?

Tap, tap, tap...

2006-11-07T21:33:00.000-08:00

Yes, I voted today. Yes, we had electronic voting machines. Yes, they were Diebold. Yes, they had voter verified paper trails. Yes, I used it.

Seemed to work pretty well. I didn't have any problems with the machine not registering my vote correctly, so I guess my machine was properly calibrated. I also went after work, so if there had been any issues hopefully they got worked out. They also had paper ballots for those who needed to cast a provisional ballot and I suspect if I asked I could have gone that route. Which I would have if they didn't have the paper trail.

The only potential problem I saw was that the paper trail was pretty narrow, so some of the issue titles were cut off. In particular I think all the judge confirmations looked the same.

Decisions, Decisions

2006-10-19T18:26:00.000-07:00

Well, I was planning to vote to reelect Susan Davis, since she did vote against the Military Commissions Act (you know, the one that lets the President define what torture is), but then she went and supported a bill to prohibit joint-use at Miramar. I'm also not fond of the idea of the Republicans keeping control of the House.

I wonder what Davis' proposal is for an alternative solution to the airport. Does she really want to build an airport in Imperial County? Does she really want to dislocate many people in order to build a second runway at Lindbergh? Or does she prefer to keep the airport as is and watch Lindbergh get busier and busier, and hope that the problem just solves itself.

Which is wishful thinking, because it won't. We can't just demand airlines bring in larger planes, unless we want to alienate San Diego's largest airline, Southwest, which doesn't have anything bigger than it's current 737s. We can't rely on Orange County and LAX to relieve us, as they have their own capacity problems to deal with, and Ontario is no better alternative for us than it is for LAX.

Inter-Island Airfares

2006-09-20T22:22:00.000-07:00

One cannot deny that the arrival of go! in Hawaii's inter-island market has lowered airfares. What there seems to be a lot of misconceptions about is just how high fares were before Go arrived.

Our tale starts in the good old days. The standard method of purchasing inter-island travel was the coupon. These were pre-paid vouchers that were sold primarily through travel agents. You bought the coupon, and then booked your reservation. Or not. If there was an open seat, you could just show up at the airport, hand the agent a coupon, and get on the plane. You could also book your reservation by calling the airline, then buy the coupon. It didn't matter. Hawaiian had them. Aloha had them. Island Air had them (but they were more expensive). Mahalo had them. Air Molokai had them. Coupon prices fluctuated; when there was more competition (such as Mahalo being in business), prices were down. Then they'd slowly go up. Different agencies sold them at different prices (Bankoh ATMs were usually a bit more expensive, but you couldn't beat the convenience of buying one at the Bankoh ATM in the Honolulu airport on your way from your flight from the mainland to your inter-island flight. I did that once.)

As you can imagine, yield-management, the practice of controlling price and inventory so as flights get fuller, prices go up, was basically impossible.

So what happened?

The same thing that wrecked everything else in the airline industry. 9/11.

Coupons went away. In its place came yield-managed e-tickets. Actually, they had yield-managed fares for inter-island flights before, the difference was that people who knew about them went the coupon route.

For the most part, the fares were a bit higher than what coupons left off at. But not always. But what really matters here is how it forced a changed in the way island residents had to travel. Instead of being able to get on the flight for a relatively fixed price, last minute travelers would generally end up paying more, because the more popular flights would have long sold out their lower fares. To get the lower fares, it became necessary to plan ahead and/or settle for a less desirable flight time. Which is how it works everywhere else in the country. Even on Southwest. People paying $200 or more to fly on a round trip inter-island ticket didn't plan ahead or insisted on taking a more popular flight time.

All the arrival of Go did was cause the bottom end of the fare range to fall back into places it hasn't been... well, since Mahalo was around. Go still has a range of fares, though to be fair their fares top out lower than Hawaiian's or Aloha's. If you pick the more popular flight or don't plan ahead, you'll have to pay more.

If you want the $39 flight, you'll have to plan ahead and be flexible. It doesn't matter whether you're doing Las Vegas to Phoenix with Southwest or US Airways, or Honolulu to Kahului with Hawaiian or Go.

Star Trek HD!

2006-08-31T21:01:00.000-07:00

The rumors have been floating around this week, but you know it's confirmed with it's on StarTrek.com. In mid month, the original Star Trek will return to TV with new digital special effects. I've had thoughts now and then that this might be a neat thing to do, so I'm excited about it. It's going into syndication so I'll have to track down which local station will be airing it.

The TV Guide article has a photo of the new Enterprise.

Intel-Native Office: The Sooner, the Better

2006-06-30T20:08:00.000-07:00

Oh, and while I was at Best Buy I also stopped to briefly try out a MacBook. I was particularly interested in checking out the new keyboard, so when I walked up to it (a black one, for the record), I clicked on the first word processing application I saw in the dock: Word. Wow, it was slow to launch. I didn't time it, but I just tried it on my 2001-vintage, 500MHz G3 iBook and it brought up Word a lot quicker. I didn't try doing anything but opening a new document and typing a little, but just the launch time alone would have me wishing daily for an Intel-native version of Office.

And for the record, the MacBook's new keyboard didn't bother me, nor did the shiny screen.

Vista, First Impressions

2006-06-30T19:38:00.000-07:00

Best Buy has a Seagate 120GB hard drive on sale for $50 -- with no rebate nonsense -- so I decided I'd pick one up to throw Vista on. Read on for some of my first impressions.

The installer was a bit lame. I booted off the DVD I'd burned and it installed ok. But when it came to reboot, it booted off the DVD again and wanted to start the install again. I'm not sure if that's just because of my particular PC's BIOS settings, but from when I've done XP installs, I seem to recall it managing to reboot to the hard drive without issues. They could at least add a message saying to remove the DVD before rebooting, since it isn't needed after reboot anyway.

My video card is weak (64MB GeForce4 MX 440) so I can only use the Vista Basic theme. So no Aero for me. Do get at least some of the new effects though. The pulsing blue default button reminds me a lot of Mac OS X. But I do think the new progress bar effect is pretty neat. In programs that support it correctly, anyway. Firefox doesn't. Window borders for non-maximized windows are too big and take up too much space.

The sideways folder icon is silly.

Since I have separate Vista and XP installations, it would be nice if Vista could still recognize and use the apps I have installed in my XP partition, so I don't have to reinstall stuff to use under Vista.

IE7 has tabs. Nice. Firefox was still the first program I downloaded and installed.

Windows Vista Is Too Big

2006-06-14T20:35:00.000-07:00

I downloaded Windows Vista Beta 2 to install on the spare 6GB hard drive in my PC in order to check it out. It won't fit. I guess Vista will have to wait until I get around to buying a bigger spare hard drive, assuming it ever gets on the PC at all (it's already iffy with my low-end 64MB GeForce4 MX 440 graphics card).

I didn't figure that part out until I'd already wiped out the Ubuntu install on that disk. But that's not a big loss, since I still have Gentoo as my main Linux install on the machine, and the Ubuntu install had completed its purpose of my testing a Linux distribution to recommend besides Gentoo. I approve of Ubuntu, and the network manager in Dapper Drake looks like the next best thing to Mac OS X I've seen yet.

Why Boot Camp Doesn't Mean the End of Mac OS X

2006-04-20T20:44:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of discussion going on ever since Apple released Boot Camp, a program that sets up Intel-powered Macs to dual boot Mac OS X and Windows XP. A lot of that discussion has speculated as to what it means for the future of Mac OS X. Some people think it means that software developers will stop supporting the Mac. After all, why bother with a Mac OS X version when people can just reboot to Windows and use that?

Because people won't reboot.

My home PC is actually currently set up to triple boot, with the option of Windows XP Home, Gentoo Linux, and Ubuntu Linux (the latter just to play around with so I can give some advice on a good Linux distro for non-geeks, and so far I'd have to say it fits the bill a lot better than Fedora, though I still don't care much for Gnome...) But this is a viable setup for me since I don't use the PC as my primary computer -- that's what my Power Mac G5 is for -- and spends most of it's time powered off. So when I do want to use it for something, I just select which OS I want and go.

As an aside, it's really nice to have a second machine, I don't have to stop doing what I'm doing on the Mac. Instead I just turn to the PC and use it. It's really nice when I need directions for something: I can have the directions up in a web browser, Adobe Reader, or whatever, on the Mac while doing whatever it is I'm trying to do on the PC.

Which leads to why people won't want to reboot when they need to do something in Windows on an Intel-powered Mac. To do that, you have to stop whatever you're doing, restart the computer, and bring up Windows. If you're having an AIM chat with someone, you have to tell them you'll be right back, then log out of iChat when you reboot, then log into GAIM once Windows gets started and resume your conversation. It's a pain.

My work computer runs Fedora Linux. But there are some things that I need to do that I can only do with Windows. While my computer is configured to dual boot with Windows XP, I haven't actually done that. Instead, I also have VMWare Workstation installed, and when I need to do my Windows stuff, I just start up VMWare, resume the virtual machine, and do whatever I need to do. I don't have to close KDevelop, Evolution, Konsole, or any other apps I might have open, and can freely and smoothly move back and forth between Windows and Linux.

Yeah, it can be a bit slow (I used to have the virtual machine set for 188MB of RAM... not nearly enough for XP), once I noticed that and set it to 384MB things got better. There are some things that wouldn't work so well in the virtual machine, but nothing I need to do runs into that problem. I have heard that VMWare is working on a version to run on Mac OS X, and have also read the reports about Parallels Workstation, a competing product (a less expensive one, I might add).

So why won't developers say they don't need to create Mac OS X versions anymore, we can just run them in VMWare or Parallels? Two reasons.

One, this isn't really anything new. For one, Mac users have been able to run PC applications for years. I was running MS-DOS on a Mac LC II in the mid-1990s thanks to SoftPC. VirtualPC has taken over the market since the introduction of the PowerPC, and has been a viable (if not speedy) option to run Windows on Macs ever since. While virtualization products like VMWare and Parallels are faster since they don't have to emulate the Intel x86 processor architecture, it's still not quite as fast as running Windows naively, and having to start a second operating system on top of the first isn't that elegant. Plus, you're running in a window, or full screen, and not even semi-integrated like OS X's Classic mode.

More importantly is cost to the user. Neither VMWare, nor Parallels (the beta is, but the final version won't), nor Windows are free. Even if it was legal to do so, the version of Windows XP that comes with most store-bought PC's wouldn't install on an Intel Mac anyway, since it's not a full installer. Instead, what many manufacturers do is they ship a CD (or set of CDs) that contain an image of the contents of the hard drive the way it was when the computer shipped, with Windows and the bundled applications. Some companies don't even do that, instead including the image on the hard drive and telling the user to create a backup image using CD-Rs. There's no Windows installer to run.

So that means any switcher, who just got a new Intel-powered Mac, now has to go out and buy a copy of Windows XP. And not the upgrade edition either. That's $200 right there, for XP Home. Toss in another $100 if you want XP Pro instead (prices from CompUSA's web site). That's going to turn off a lot of people right there.

So even with Apple providing a way for users to dual boot with Windows XP, and third party vendors providing virtualization solutions, the Mac OS X application market isn't going to die.

So How is the Air?

2006-03-22T22:20:00.000-08:00

On my way home from work today, I heard a story on the radio that an Environmental Protection Agency study had determined that California has the second dirtiest air, after New York. No real surprises there I guess, having spent plenty of time in LA.

But then they said that the study was based on air quality surveys taken in 1999, the most recent year that information is available. So in other words, California had the second-dirtiest air seven years ago. While it's nice to know how bad things were then, it would be a bit more useful if they had more recent data. Or if the study had come out, say, six years ago.

My Favorite Train

2006-02-13T20:25:00.000-08:00

People who know me know that I have a thing for airplanes. What is less well-known is that I occasionally develop an interest in trains as well. Recently though, that interest has focused itself onto one train:

The Disneyland Monorail System.

The Mark V train is, quite simply, the best looking train in the world. It's sleek "LearJet" lines beat out those of the similar, but boxier and uglier Mark VI used at Walt Disney World. The Bombardier M-VI, a commercial derivative of the Mark VI used in Las Vegas, is uglier yet. Maybe it's just because I grew up at Disneyland, but to me a Mark V is what a monorail should look like.

The problem though, is that the Mark V isn't actually a full-size train. It is smaller than what you'd normally do, to help it fit in with Disneyland. So you'd have to make it taller (like the M-VI) and you'd lose the proportions. To compensate, you'd have to make the train wider as well, but since I'm not a Transportation Engineer, I can't say if that would introduce more problems.

That said, it's time to get your last rides on the Mark V, which has been in operation since 1987. It's currently running one way trips between Tomorrowland and Downtown Disney during construction of the new Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage. Later this year, it will close completely and in 2007, will reopen along with Nemo. At that time, new Mark VII trains are slated to appear.

Swiped from a MouseTimes Message Board thread, here's the concept drawing of what the Mark VII should look like:

I'll reserve judgment on it until I see the real thing, but in any case I'm sure I'll miss the Mark V.

Just don't get me started on Disney's using Disneyland's 50th Anniversary to advertise Walt Disney World. You'd think that at least in California, they'd advertise our park, the original, but no....

Honolulu Still Doesn't Get It

2006-01-20T10:13:00.000-08:00

From the Honolulu Star-Bulletin:

He learned from City Council members that widening the entire roadway means a speed-limit reduction from 45 mph to 35 mph.

Let's see: Traffic congestion on Fort Weaver Road is a problem, so we'll add another lane. Good. But we'll also lower the speed limit.

Um, yeah. That makes sense.

In my opinion as a driver who learned to drive in Southern California, Hawaii's speed limits are already lower than they should be, and the cynic in me assumes that it is to generate additional revenue from speeding tickets. Whenever there is any sort of traffic accident in Hawaii, the media will nearly always say something along the lines of "speed may have been a factor."

Get over it already. Hawaii drivers aren't bad drivers because they drive too fast, they are bad drivers because the driver's education system in Hawaii is bad. Speed doesn't cause accidents, speed differences do.

Ba-Le in the Star-Bulletin

2006-01-11T22:20:00.000-08:00

The Honolulu Star-Bulletin has an article today about the sandwiches at Ba-Le. Now I know they're called Bahn mi. And they are very yummy, however I wish more locations carried the teri beef sandwich, in my experience the one on Nimitz Highway near the airport is the only one that has them consistently.

Too bad it's 2,600 miles away...

Wings of Paradise: Hawaii's Incomparable Airlines

2005-12-26T12:52:00.000-08:00

Recently received my copy of this new book, and read it over the holiday weekend. I enjoyed it immensely, and recommend it to anyone interested in Hawaii's aviation history. Unlike some of the previous books, it covers the entire industry, rather than focusing on either Hawaiian Airlines (as in Kennedy's Hawaiian Air) or Aloha Airlines (50 Years of Aloha, published by Aloha Airlines itself). Both of these books are slanted towards the history of the airline's story they're trying to tell, such as often referring to Aloha as "Brand X" in Kennedy's Hawaiian Air. You get some of this feeling from Wings of Paradise, as well, but because it alternates between telling the story of Hawaiian, Aloha, Mid Pacific, Royal Hawaiian, Discovery, Mahalo, and others, you get a pretty balanced picture in the end.

My biggest complaint with the book is that it's a bit short on recent details. Coverage of Island Air, for example, is pretty much limited to the start as Princeville Airways, the acquisition by Aloha and name change to Aloha IslandAir, the crash on Molokai, and the final name change to Island Air, and the sale to Gavarnie Holding, though the acquiring company isn't mentioned by name in the book. Omitted from Island Air's history is the airline's brief flirtation with the Dornier Do 228 and eventual replacement of the Twin Otters with the Dash 8. It also missed the point that a contributing factor to Mahalo Air's downfall was the replacement of new ATR-42s with older examples that ended up costing the airline a lot in maintenance expenses. I can forgive omission of some of the recent events due to the lead time in book publishing, such as Island Air's planned acquisition of Q400 aircraft and details on Mesa and FlyHawaii's plans (though FlyHawaii is also not mentioned by name). But completely omitting Pacific Wings is a definite oversight.

However, one must keep in mind that it's easer to find out about more recent events, and perhaps omitting them now is reasonable course of action in favor of waiting to see how they effect the industry in the long term.

Movies

2005-12-17T21:27:00.000-08:00

I realized today that the last movie I saw in a theater is out on DVD. This can mean one of several things, or more likely, a combination of all.

I don't see enough movies.
Most movies aren't worth watching in theaters.
Movie to DVD time is a lot lower than it used to be for VHS.

Green Day Videos

2005-11-28T19:26:00.000-08:00

I was watching a few Green Day videos earlier today (American Idiot, Holiday, and Boulevard of Broken Dreams, if you must know) and noticed they had a green tint to them. At first I was thinking it was a reference to The Matrix, where the simulated world of the Matrix is presented with a green tint, drawing a sort of connection to the two.

Then I remembered the name of the band...

Website back up

2005-11-10T12:43:00.000-08:00

Finally, my web site is back up. Took longer to get the DSL installed in my new apartment than I originally expected.

Web Site Down

2005-10-01T11:43:00.000-07:00

Yes, my web site that hosts Quanterium.com including The Mueller Quadrant and Mid Pacific Images is currently down. I expect it should be back up around November 1st.

This Can't Be Good

2005-09-28T11:59:00.000-07:00

This quote from today's Honolulu Star-Bulletin caught my attention:

Faris said he was surprised the cash-strapped airline has been able to survive this long, and agreed with Aloha that it needs to hasten its emergence from bankruptcy.

It can't be a good sign when your bankruptcy judge is surprised that you're still in business.

I Want My Money Back

2005-09-17T11:58:00.000-07:00

First they go to WalMart and steal plasma TVs. Now they're using the money we (the taxpayers) gave them to buy expensive shoes and purses.

Star Trek: New Voyages

2005-09-11T17:34:00.000-07:00

If you haven't seen this yet, what are you waiting for? Go. Download. Watch. NOW!

Cats

2005-08-23T20:42:00.000-07:00

Eat
Sleep
Stare out window

Did I miss anything?

And then there were 10

2005-07-30T12:25:00.000-07:00

All our elementary school science textbooks are now out of date.

Acrobat Office Toolbar

2005-07-28T17:41:00.000-07:00

Apparantly I'm not the only one annoyed by the little two icon Acrobat toolbar taking up an entire line of screen space in Word for Mac. So here's how to get rid of it.

One Mustn't Forget One's Towel

2005-06-08T20:27:00.000-07:00

So I'm roaming around WalMart while they change my car's oil. Guess what I found? The original BBC television series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on DVD. So of course I immediately put it in my shopping cart.

I remember first reading about it when it was released for Region 2 (Europe); it's nice to see that it's made its way to North America.

Stuff to Read

2005-05-15T21:03:00.000-07:00

A couple of books I've read recently and recommend:

Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond. A nice, easy to read book that serves as a biography for both Linus Torvlads and the operated system he wrote, Linux.

Revolution in the Valley by Andy Hertzfield. A collection of short stories detailing the development and introduction of the Macintosh computer, by one of the people that did it. You can read the stories online at Folklore.org but I often find I prefer reading printed books over text on the screen.

These Are the Voyages...

2005-05-14T19:07:00.000-07:00

So, Star Trek: Enterprise is done. Over. Gone.

The ending was the worst of all of Star Trek's season finale episodes -- I don't count Turnabout Intruder, since there was nothing special about that episode as the last episode of the classic Star Trek.

Unlike others (such as Jolene Blalock), I didn't have a problem with the concept of doing a show where the crew of a future ship was looking back at the missions of NX-01. I can definitely see that encapsulating the story within a story about Riker and Troi pushed away emphasis from the regulars on the show, and that does seem inappropriate for a finale. However, These Are the Voyages... felt to me more like an epilogue to the series (or even the last 18 years of Star Trek on television, which the producers indicated they were trying to do to some extent), with Terra Prime being the "real" last episode of Enterprise.

My problem with the episode is that the two story arcs didn't seem to mesh that well. I've watched the episode twice, once last night and again this afternoon. I'm still having trouble working out exactly what about the events during the Enterprise's journey back to Earth was supposed to help Riker decide what to do with regards to telling Captain Picard the truth about the Pegasus. At first I thought it was something about Trip and T'Pol's admitting to each other that they still have feelings for each other, despite having ended their relationship six years prior. Watching it again, I picked up that it's definitely something about Trip and his relationship with Captain Archer. Riker sees to see that relationship as parallel to the one he has with Picard. I guess that's it (it's amazing how these issues sort themselves out as you sit down and write about it). But it's not very obvious, and by the time I've figured that out, the episode hasn't left a very favorable impression in my mind.

Jolene Blalock was right though, T'Pol does seem pretty out of character when she opens up to Riker. I suppose we can explain that away though as the holodeck adapting the program to have T'Pol answer Riker's questions in a way that is at least somewhat in character; no doubt Chef's discussions with various crew members were not word for word identical to Riker's.

There were a few technical issues I had with the production as well. The biggest had to do with the appearance of the characters. These Are the Voyages... is set six years after the events of Terra Prime. Only two characters looked they were any older. Shran definately looked older, and Hoshi Sato seemed a bit older as well, even if all they did was take her hair out of the ponytail for most of her scenes. Star Trek has aged characters plenty of times, examples that come to mind immediately are Unnatural Selection, The Deadly Years, All Good Things..., and Twilight. They changed the characters' appearances a bit for In A Mirror, Darkly, surely they could have done the same for These Are the Voyages....

There were a few smaller issues as well. Riker's beard seemed a bit too thin. The interior for the Enterprise-D's turbolift didn't look right. And if you look closely, right at the end of the teaser, after Riker has frozen the holodeck program and is on his way to the bridge, you can see Hoshi Sato moving a little bit. Though you do have to give the actors some leeway here; it can't be easy to stand perfectly still through several takes.

I am one of those people that think it would be a neat idea for a future Star Trek series not to be based around a single crew, but to do small arcs spanning a few episodes before moving on to someone else. Much like older television shows like The Twilight Zone were different every week. There are a lot of little story lines spread throughout 200 years of "history" that it would be nice to come back to and follow up on. The biggest technical hurdle I see would be the constant need for vastly different sets. Many 24th century (and even late 23rd century) Federation starships have similar interiors, which would help, but some weeks we might want to set a story on Deep Space Nine or a Romulan warbird, requiring vastly different sets. But recreating the Constitution-class sets for the Defiant in In A Mirror, Darkly and then doing the Enteprise-D for These Are the Voyages... leads me to believe that this might not be as big of a deal after all.

But anyway, the very end of These Are the Voyages... was quite nice. I would have liked to have heard Archer's speech, though. But after that, the montage with the three Enterprises was way nice, it brought a tear to my eye. Enterprise NCC-1701 is now my computer's wallpaper.

Oh and one final request. Will you forum people please stop posting the sexy pictures of Jeri Ryan and Jolene Blalock? It's all about Linda Park, after all. ;)

To the crew of the Enterprise, I can only say this: Live long, and prosper.

In A Mirror, Darkly

2005-05-01T22:31:00.000-07:00

If you missed the last two weeks of Star Trek: Enterprise, then you really missed out on a couple of really good episodes. Fortunately, this is the 21st Century, and we have BitTorrent.

Don't Panic

2005-04-29T21:52:00.000-07:00

Ignore what the film critics say. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a good movie. Go see it.

iPods and Candy

2005-04-26T20:47:00.000-07:00

Just in case you don't have time to go to a store, now you can get an iPod from a vending machine in the SFO International terminal. Click on the photo for a few more.

George Carlin says...

2005-03-05T20:05:00.000-08:00

Weather forcast for tonight: Dark. Continued dark overnight, with widely scattered light by morning.

Munch Munch!

2005-02-28T19:55:00.000-08:00

Found this on the Airliners.net forums. Enjoy.

Googling Yahoo

2005-02-26T18:00:00.000-08:00

I'm out driving around earlier today, with the radio on, and after hearing 1-2-Step and Let Me Love You for like the 10 millionth time since I've been in Albuquerque, I decide I need to find a better radio station. So I go home, Google "albuquerque radio stations" and which link to I find helpful in finding a new station to try? Yahoo Directory.

Ban Urban Legends

2005-02-07T21:18:00.000-08:00

Oooh... I can't wait to see the letters from the Believers on this one!

CBS, NBC, whoever...

2005-02-03T17:33:00.000-08:00

Ok, so I kind of blew it with last night's rant about CBS. The original Star Trek was on NBC, not CBS.

CBS we can blame for ripping off Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek concepts for Lost In Space.

CBS Still Sucks

2005-02-02T20:33:00.000-08:00

They cancelled Star Trek again. Only this time, they did it as the show was getting better, not worse.

The TrekToday article indicates that it was CBS president Les Moonves that made the decision, so I think it's fair to blame them. It's also interesting to note that both times Star Trek has been cancelled (as opposed to the series simply ending after seven years), CBS did it.

This may not be all bad, though. New episodes could be produced in syndication, like The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. Or perhaps on SciFi (or another cable channel).

Though perhaps the best thing for Star Trek is to give it a few years off. No TV, no movies. Get rid of Berman; I'd much rather see Manny Coto take over, and lanuch a new series in about five years.

Live long and prosper, Captain Archer.

$50

2005-01-24T21:51:00.000-08:00

No wonder Mozilla took so long to come out. ;)

Another iPod user

2005-01-10T21:02:00.000-08:00

Scroll the thumbnails all the way to the right, then count back about 14.

evaPod

2005-01-03T20:55:00.000-08:00

Who saw this coming?

Even Microsoft Uses Firefox

2004-12-30T22:27:00.000-08:00

Look closely at the screen shot showing off the new MSN Search. That's Firefox, not IE.

Another Way the Airlines Screw Passengers

2004-12-26T21:39:00.000-08:00

A conversion my father had with a Continental Airlines gate agent yesterday lead to my realization of another way the airlines are screwing passengers. You see, the airlines have put Regional Jets on a lot of routes, not only those formerly operated by turboprop aircraft, but also those formerly operated with larger jets like 737s and DC-9s.

So why is this a problem? It's simple. There's not a lot of space for carry-on luggage in the cabin of RJs, so like on turboprops, most "carry-on" bags need to be checked. The airline will let you drop off your bag on a cart next to the aircraft, and you pick it up on another cart after the plane lands. Different airlines have different names for this. For example, Horizon Air calls it a la cart.

So how does this screw the passenger? As my father learned, the airline will not be responsible for damage to bags checked plane side. Most passengers know that fragile items should be carried on, to avoid the possibility of their items being damaged when passing through the baggage systems or as a result of rough handling by airline employees. Checking a bag plane side helps as it avoids some of the machinery, but it is still subject to rough handling when being loaded into the aircraft's cargo compartment. By using RJs instead of larger jets, the airlines force passengers who had hoped to avoid damage to fragile items by carrying them on to check them anyway, with the bonus that the airline will not pay for any damage that results.

Amusing signs in parking lots

2004-12-26T10:39:00.000-08:00

1 hour parking for Denny's customers only.

You Will Be Assimilated

2004-12-09T15:24:00.000-08:00

Well, today I was assimilated.

I have an iPod now. 20GB $279+tax at Costco, which works out to $300 plus some coins. So for the same price as one of those no tax and free shipping web sites, I got mine without having to wait for it.

The amusing part of all this, of all my PC-using friends who got iPods with their PowerBooks, I'm the one who got the HP iPod. Me, the Mac user since 1984. Go figure.

Atom Feed

2004-12-03T22:55:00.000-08:00

I just enabled the Atom feed for the blog, so those of you that like those can read the blog that way. Yes, it works with Firefox's Live Bookmarks feature and with My Yahoo. The feed URL is: http://quanterium.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Missing Blogger Feature

2004-11-29T23:14:00.000-08:00

Did you notice that Blogger doesn't put the date a comment was posted to an entry, just the time?

EDIT 12/3:
I figured out that you have to change your timestamp format settings under Settings - Formatting, then it will work. Yay. But it's slightly annoying, since the date info is redundant on the blog itself, since the date is listed above the post. I would like to have the time only on the blog, and date and time on comments.

Firefox 1.0

2004-11-09T11:18:00.000-08:00

Is here. Go get it. Now.

Vote for Me Calls

2004-11-06T13:37:00.000-08:00

On election day and the day before, I received a total of four phone calls that contained pre-recorded messages asking me to vote to re-elect President Bush.

The first was on November 1st, a pre-recoreded message from the President himself asking me to vote for him.

The remaining three were all on November 2nd. Two were the same pre-recorded message from Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The last one was an unidentified woman with a Hawaii-oriented message. Amusingly, this was about a half hour after Hawaii's polls closed.

I suppose I should mention that I sent in my absentee ballot a few weeks before the election.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

2004-11-02T10:10:00.000-08:00

At first, this survey sounds nice, makes it sound like Mac OS X and *BSD boxes are safer.

However, you can't actually draw any conclusions from it. Look at this:

Of the 235,907 successful break-ins researched as part of this study, 65.64 percent, or 154,846, were made against Linux-based systems. Microsoft Windows computers accounted for 25.19 percent of all break-ins recorded, while Mac OS X or BSD-based computers accounted for just 4.82 percent of all breaches recorded.

It breaks down percentage of successful break-ins by platform. This doesn't tell me much of anything. What you would want to know is what was the percentage of successful break-ins for each platform.

Neither the MacCentral article, nor the mi2g press release give an indication of how many of each platform were studied. I suppose I'd have to buy the report to get that info.

Matai calls adoption of Mac OS X and BSD Unix "an accelerating paradigm shift" thanks to professionals who "don't have the time to cope with umpteen flavours of Linux or to wait for Microsoft's Longhorn when Windows XP has proved to be a stumbling block in some well chronicled instances."

Professionals don't cope with umpteen flavors of Linix. Normally, they'll pick one (genernally a commercially supported distribution like Red Hat or SuSE) and stick with it. Home hobbists may play around, changing from Fredora to SuSE to Gentoo to Debian to Mandrake, and so on, but a professional running a commercial server isn't going to do that. And about the problem of waiting for Longhorn after the problems with Windows XP, well, they're forgetting Server 2003.

I'm not saying that people should stick with Linux or Windows servers rather than evaluating Mac OS X or another BSD. People should evaluate their needs, and decide which platform works best for them. The point I'm trying to make is that this study doesn't mean much at all.

Giving back to the community

2004-10-27T12:47:00.000-07:00

It's small, but here's my first contribution to the larger open source community. Since Gentoo's XgridAgent ebuild, which was listed alredy as working on PowerPC, worked just fine on my x86 Linux box, I let them know. xgridagent-1.0 is now marked ~x86.

Drew Carey's Green Screen Show

2004-10-21T21:12:00.000-07:00

Nifty new show on The WB. Take Whose Line is it Anyway?, do it in front of a green screen, and add animation. If you like Whose Line?, you'll like this. If you haven't seen Whose Line?, you'll probably like it anyway. And go watch Whose Line? on ABC Family, too.

Airlines of Hawaii

2004-10-21T06:13:00.000-07:00

New book coming out next year, will have to keep my eyes open for this one.

iBook Battery

2004-10-13T18:42:00.000-07:00

Oooh, lookie! This battery for an Apple iBook laptop is shown as PC Compatible! Complete with the Windows XP logo!

Learn to spell

2004-10-08T20:37:00.000-07:00

Folks, this is why your elementary school teacher made you memorize all those Presidents' names, states, etc.

Oh, the art looks like about 4th grade, too.

Dance, Monkeyboy! Dance!

2004-10-04T08:20:00.000-07:00

If Steve Ballmer did an iPod ad...

Paying too much

2004-10-03T18:04:00.000-07:00

I don't get it.

I've used one of these cameras. The image quality isn't that great. 10x optical zoom is nice, but still, only 0.3 megapixels and 640x480 resolution. You can't really get all that many images on a floppy disk, and unlike flash memory card based cameras, you can't avoid carrying around lots of disks by getting a larger disk. For $270, you can definately do better.

Why I Prefer Earthquakes to Hurricanes

2004-09-29T10:20:00.000-07:00

Hurricans you see coming at you, so you worry and panic and prepare for days on end, then it hits you or maybe not. Earthquakes just come with no warning (unless you have a pet that goes nuts before one) so while you keep in the back of your mind that one might come, you don't have to spend the days immediately before worrying about what's going to happen. You're just happily going about your life, then it happens. It lasts for a few seconds, maybe even a minute or two, then it's over. Hurricanes can take several hours to pass through.

Also, hurricanes move around, so the damage can cover a pretty large area. An earthquake is centered in one spot, and damage is inversely proportional to distance from that spot: Greater distance implies less damage. So the likelyhood of damage from a single event in a particular location is lower.

Crazy Train or Emotional Subway Attack

2004-09-22T17:24:00.000-07:00

This is great. I'm pretty tolerant of most people's different beliefs, except those beliefs specifically preach intolerance of my beliefs. That includes most of those loud God-nuts.

Riker to Enterprise

2004-09-20T23:51:00.000-07:00

Life continues to imitate Star Trek. It seems there's a device out now that does person to person communications over WiFi and Voice over IP. What makes it really interesting, is that it's a one button interface and uses voice recognition to determine who you're trying to reach.

GMail

2004-09-14T15:32:00.000-07:00

I've got some GMail invites. Let me know if you want one.

Windows XP Service Pack 2 (yes, again)

2004-09-08T14:53:00.000-07:00

Hehe.

Windows XP Service Pack 2 removes the copyright date from the screen that appears before the login screen. I guess Microsoft wants to hide the fact that Windows XP is from 2001.

They also removed the notation of which Edition is running, though that is still on the login screen itself.

Why the iMac G5 will succeed

2004-09-08T12:53:00.000-07:00

In case you're living under a rock (or more likely, a Windows box) you might not yet know that at Apple Expo in Paris last month, Apple unveiled the new iMac G5. Like the iMacs before it, it is an all in one design, however this time the CPU is directly behind the LCD. If you imagine a 2-inch thick LCD display, that's the new iMac. Or go click the link for photos.

I have read some criticism of the new iMac, and I want to address the point that other computer companies (and, in fact, Apple itself - namely, the 20th Anniversary Macintosh) have done a similar designs before, but they haven't been terribly successful. There is one major reason I think the iMac G5 will be different.

Previous all-in-one-LCD designs have been compromised machines, generally with a far inferior price/performance ratio than a conventional tower/LCD combination, let alone a tower/CRT. But the iMac G5 is different.

The iMac G5 fits right in the Apple product line right where the iMac belongs, right between the Power Mac G5 and the eMac. Now, the iMac G5 is no Power Mac G5: The big tower features overall higher end specs, starting with the presence of two PowerPC G5 processors, rather than one. But it doesn't invert price/performance, that is, charge more for lesser performance. At $1899, top configuration, the 20-inch model with a 1.8 GHz Power PC G5, is $100 less than the lowest-priced Power Mac, the $1999 dual 1.8GHz model. Which doesn't include a display.

Compare this with Gateway. Their Profile 5 series places the CPU in the base, so it's really more like the iMac G4 rather than the iMac G5 in design. The low-end model, the Profile 5S-C, gives you a 2.6GHz Celeron processor for $1099.99. Compare this to Gateway's 310B, which gives you a a 2.8GHz Celeron in a mini-tower case for $499.99, including a 17" CRT. The specs are pretty similar, though the Profile does give you a DVD/CD-RW drive, but you can add that and also double your memory and hard drive size for $150 more.

Let's also look at Sony, which sells the Viao W700G, an all-in-one which places the CPU behind the LCD. $1999.99 gets you a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 processor and a 17.5" LCD. Sony's entry-level mini-tower, the Viao RS600C, when equipped with a 2.8GHz Pentium 4, runs $877.99. Add $399.99 for a 17" LCD.

I would have a hard time justifying either the Gateway or the Sony all-in-one models versus a comparable mini-tower. I suspect that most people have the same difficulty, and as a result these models don't end up selling well. The iMac G5, on the other hand, isn't undercut by a significantly cheaper model with similar specs but in a more ordinary case. Sure, you can grab the eMac for a mere $799, including 17" CRT, but that gets you a mere 1.25GHz PowerPC G4. But the iMac G5, starting at $1299, gets you so much more computer, most notably a G5 processor. There may not be as much as a difference now, but in a few years, there will be plenty of applications that will run only on a G5, just like now Mac OS X runs only on G3 and newer chips, ruling out the first generation (601) and second generation (603/604) PowerPC processors.

They think of everything...

2004-09-02T23:39:00.000-07:00

How to pick up and carry your iMac G5

How to determine if you have a Hewlett-Packard iPod

Transparent Aluminum!

2004-08-23T13:17:00.000-07:00

Once again, life imitates Star Trek.

Fun things to type in Gentoo

2004-08-21T23:21:00.000-07:00

#ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge --update world

Edit: 8/22:
Don't do it. You'll regret it. Stick to x86, not ~x86 (or the equivalent if you're running on another architecture).

You know you're a computer scientist when...

2004-08-14T14:32:00.000-07:00

You doze off on a Saturday afternoon thinking about assemblers using Tux Racer imagery.

Strange Invasion

2004-08-07T14:07:00.000-07:00

The last paragraph amused me. It's not every day that the movie Evolution gets referenced in a major newspaper.

Windows XP Service Pack 2

2004-08-06T19:04:00.000-07:00

So Windows XP Service Pack 2 is finally done and on its way.

Looks like Microsoft still doesn't quite get it. I found the following paragraph from an article on PC Magazine's web site to be rather interesting:

Microsoft has included a programmatic interface for Windows Firewall that allows an application to do things like set FirewallEnabled to FALSE, add itself to the list of AuthorizedApplications, or change the configuration of GloballyOpenPorts. Our concern here is that a malicious application could turn off Windows Firewall or, more likely, mark itself as an authorized application. Corporate administrators can disable some or all local configurations, which will prevent programs from making changes; but ultimately, Microsoft maintains, individuals still have to be smart about what apps they run. Even the best deadbolt won't protect your house once you've let the bad guys in.

The way I see it, they gave the keys to the dead bolt to the bad guys. Suppose one way or another, I manage to get some malware on my system. This malware then has the ability to disable the firewall and do whatever it wants. Thanks. Looks like I'll still be recommending a third party firewall such as ZoneAlarm.

A while back, Bill Gates was quoted as saying something along the lines of there isn't a need for perfectly secure software, since we have firewalls to protect us. At the time it seemed absurd to me: What happens if your firewall software isn't secure? Now, Microsoft shows they can't even get the firewall right.

I posted some of this on Slashdot, too.

Repetitively repetitive

2004-08-03T21:47:00.000-07:00

An e-ticket confirmation e-mail I got tonight from American Airlines contained the following:

Nonrefundable tickets cannot be refunded.

Ziggy

2004-08-01T23:29:00.000-07:00

At least he has some idea about computer viruses, which I'd say is more than most people, based on the the number of Slammer hits I picked up during the two months I was running Snort.

Matt Damon Makes Benefit Appearance In Oklahoma City

2004-07-22T18:04:00.000-07:00

Why am I noting this? I was also in Oklahoma City on Sunday, visiting the Oklahoma City National Memorial, located at the site of the Murrah Federal Building. Matt Damon was also there. I didn't see him, but others in the group I was with did.

Slashdot fan

2004-07-16T14:43:00.000-07:00

Wow, I have a fan on Slashdot. When did this happen?

First Post!

2004-07-15T22:32:00.000-07:00

Why not start with something simple, hmm?

William Shatner was nominated for an Emmy Award.