So, It’s been a long time since I have actually picked up a book and read it all the way through - quite possibly since graduation. I had started a few, but got bored, distracted, or just lost interest in what i was reading.
Before my trip out to California last month, I wanted to get something to read on the plane, and picked up the Fark book. Getting said book was quite an ordeal as the employees of Barnes & noble took probably 10 minutes to find it while i browsed the store. I saw Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon there, and picked it up, knowing very little about it, but recognizing it as some sort of technical thriller and reading the jacket.
Anyway, the Fark book was great for the airplane, a quick, funny read. I have it on good authority that it’s even good if you’ve never been to the fark website. (The book is making its rounds at work.)
The week of the 4th I took off for vacation, and not having any tv or movies to watch, decided it would be a good time to start Cryptonomicon. I finished it 20 minutes ago, and it was pretty good. I guess the best genre description would be historical/technical fiction thriller. The story follows many related story lines in both WW2 and present day, with lots of switching back and forth. It focuses mainly on crypto topics, which I didn’t really know much about, but provided enough technical detail that it seemed plausible and kept me interested It was great for my short attention span, because about the time I was getting a little bored with the current storyline, it switched somewhere else. Of course, this was quite frustrating with some fairly major cliffhangers.

Anyway, this wasn’t really meant to be a review as much as an opportunity to post that I think I’m back into reading books and it feels good. I think snow crash is gonna be up next (or at least soon), as well as 2 ‘classics’ that I somehow missed in my education : 1984 and the slaughterhouse five. Might have to go find Chricton’s latest few books too. Have you read anything good lately?

I saw the transformers movie last week with a bunch of old friends, and so long as you went into expecting a brain-dead action flick, it was fine. Cars transformed into robots that fought each other and blew stuff up.

However, if you brought a brain, the story was quite disappointing, even for a mindless action flick. Here’s a sample of quotes and annoyances

I think you could probably edit the movie down to like 110 minutes and keep most of the action - and could have made more action by not filming it downtown LA… anybody want to work with me on re-editing it? maybe we can convince dreamworks or Paramount to hire us to consult on the sequel they will inevitably ruin.

–probably spoilers below.

“more than meets the eye” - it was ok the first time, waaaay too lame the second
“This is gonna be better than armageddon!”
“We’re going to DEFCON delta” - check wikipedia or watch some scifi, idiot
“I found the sound it used to hack our network!!”
Ok, I’ll stop here because this is a good launching point for plot failure #1 : The decepticons needed to attack the military’s computer network to find out stuff about megatron and the cube. (using an audible sound not connected to any network) Then they use the internet to find out where to find the glasses. wouldn’t you think the internet would be a fine attack point for the military network? I think its more likely that a military analyst is using a crappy browser that gets exploited and backdoors some routers and security protocols, than the most secure government secrets being accessible from a poorly defended military base in almost enemy territory? also, if the autobots didn’t hack the network similarly, how did they know to search ebay for some old glasses? and how come the decepticons couldn’t have done it that way?

Lame plot element #2: why, once the autobots found the cube, didn’t they just fly out into the desert or space to duke it out? Any why did they need puny humans to carry it to the top of a building and rescue it with helicopters?

What was the point of bumblebee not being able to speak? how did that further any plot or action? you’re telling me that transforming robots (that can also change what model car they transform into) from another planet can’t repair a voice simulator?

I was dissapointed there was no soundwave. he was the best transformer aside from prime and megatron.

I think i caught the correct transforming sound once in the whole movie, and it was masked pretty well, I could have made it up because i wanted to hear it so bad.

The political commentary was funny (im laughing at you, Bay, not with you…), because it was so tacky and obvious.

As other websites pointed out, the film with the aircraft carriers was recycled and digitally remasted from Bay’s pearl harbor footage. I really didn’t care about that, but I didn’t know why we needed scenes of aircraft carriers and battleships when none of the action of the whole movie happened anywhere near water.

— nostalgic, whiny, anti michael bay rant over.

Mine.

I finally got motivated and bought a house! I’ll have more pics up soon, I’ll be moving in sometime mid-June. Its a ranch with a walkout basement on a 1/2 acre with an awesome sunroom, wooded backyard, and its in a real quiet neighborhood, but still close to work and downtown.

In other news, not much has been going on because of the house search and insanity at work. (I still love what I do, but it can be stressful and time-consuming working on 4 or 5 different projects at once).
I played in an Ultimate frisbee tournament last weekend, that was a bunch of fun, and enjoyed some good beer at Arcadia brewing in Battle Creek. (omg starboard stout, so good).

also, Studio 60 is now officially cancelled, the last episode airs May 24. (maybe if everyone watches it, it will get uncancelled? no? damn). –edit, there are a few more, not just 1. (wikipedia)

So, while reading metafilter today, I came across this post on a music blog. The post provides some links to songs that Daft Punk ‘Sampled’ in their own work. Some are a little bit of a stretch, but the ones for ‘Crescendolls’ and ‘Harder Better Faster Stronger’ were shocking at how similar the sample songs were to the Daft Punk tracks - not just little snippets here and there - the main rhythm and background of the whole song.

My world just got turned upside-down.

Well, I finally removed BoingBoing from my RSS reader (bloglines) today. They haven’t had too much that interesting lately, and their feed seems to be very broken (lots of old stories keep popping up as new). Plus, anything I am probably interested in that they would have reported on will be picked up by another site I watch within the week. Now I no longer have to be bothered with Mark’s obsession with Disney crap, Cory’s obsession with map mashups and copyright, and Xeni’s off-the-wall random stuff and vacation photos (by the way, that flash video you posted that got embedded in the broken rss and can’t be paused? That’s the straw that broke the camel’s back). They are probably the most likely to have qsfw (questionably safe-for-work) content pop up in my feedreader…
It seems that even though people make a big deal about ‘bloggers’ and how many of them there are and how they are changing the news world, they aren’t the ones generating the content. I think there have been studies about this, but subscribing to slashdot, metafilter, and boingboing used to overlap about 25%, and after adding digg’s ‘front page’, I see at least 2 summaries for every interesting, useful post.
I really want to hate Digg, but it’s the only site that seems to be trying to use the community to moderate the stories. There is a real immaturity about the site, most of the headlines are sloppy and inaccurate, and many of the links point to random blogs that aren’t setup for any kind of bandwidth. Stories that are completely wrong or very weak still make it to the front page (which could probably be solved if they allowed for saving stories separately from ‘digg’ing it and declaring it good or useful). It’s a haven like I’ve never seen for ubuntu/linux zealots, nintendo fanboys, and sony/microsoft bashers. But every once and a while, a story from some random site I’ve never heard of is actually interesting, so I have a few searches, my friends, and the front page in my rss reader.
I think community moderation can be taken further though. Slashdot has had a bad week of dupes, and every once in a rare while, boingboing had something interesting. If there was a site that could aggregate every rss feed you wanted, but then allow you to “digg” individual stories to say it was an interesting story, I think that would have real promise. Anybody want to get started on that? The biggest problem is aggregating feeds. I wonder how much space that takes to do well.

So, I went to google maps to look for a place to eat lunch today, and I noticed that they have finally implemented intermediate destinations in the directions part of the site. I have wanted this ever since I discovered mapquest ages ago. It seems like it will be really handy, especially when their routes are a little off, and you want to trick the system into giving you slightly different directions.

check it out at maps.google.com:

So, when I picked out the 28-135mm USM IS lens for my canon rebel xt, I really wasn’t sure how much the IS really helped. I figured it would be kind of minor and not help me a ton, because I’d be using the tripod anytime I was working with anything remotely slow. I decided to mess around with is a little today just to see how good or bad it was, and I was pretty impressed. I threw the lens out to 135, put the camera on my tripod and shot at a poster in my room while shaking the camera slightly. (it was dark enough that I had to use a 3+ second exposure)

Here is the image with IS off:

And here is the same setup with IS on:

I wouldn’t call image 2 great, its still blurred some, but it is incredibly better than image 1, and it was a 3 second exposure!

From wikipedia’s article on it, Canon’s optical implementation uses electromagnets to move one of the many optical elements in the lens based on input from accelerometers of some sort.

I still want to mess around with it more and see how great (in magnitude and frequency) of vibrations it can correct for over how long of exposures. It has to fall apart somewhere, because it can’t be able to move the lens very far, and most accelerometers small enough to fit in the body still aren’t too precise. They’re more like jerk sensors than acceleration sensors…

So, in stark contrast to the terrible weekend I had with my mythbox, Early sunday morning (4am) I showed up at the local Target store to wait in line for the Nintendo Wii release. It was really cold, but pretty fun. I got console #29 out of 33, so I was pumped.

There are a few pics over on flickr. Im lazy, theres a link on my photos page.

The system is a lot of fun. I picked up Zelda, super monkey ball, and rayman, and all 3 are unique, fun games. Zelda looks great, expecially given that it is essentially a GC game ported to the new controller style. Rayman is a ton of fun, lots of unique mini games with the controllers, and I havent gotten to SMB much yet- it seemed a little glitchy with the wiimote, but it could just be that im new to it.

I have discovered (annoyingly) that it looks like zelda does not autosave anywere - make sure you save before you quit, otherwise you’ll be doing a lot of the same stuff over and over again… (if it does happen to you, the minux button skips cutscenes….)
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anyway, it looks like nintendo mopped the floor with sony, and Im loving it. This is gonna be one wild trip.

Oh, and if any of those who read this thing want my id, well, you should be able to figure out a way of contacting me.

So I had an incredibly painful weekend with my mythbox.
I had rebooted it Saturday, and suddenly my SATA controller gave errors about “IRQ 11: Nobody Cared.” First of all, why a message that says “nobody cared” is an error, im not sure I understand. Supposedly, it has something to do with irq interrupts being disabled.
Anyway, The above error message claims that passing irqpoll as a boot parameter would fix the issue, and it did. I was able to boot the system from a sata drive, but it hardlocked after some random time amount (im guessing due to an irq-related deadlock condition or something during disk access. After messing with boot parameters for longer than is healthy, i noticed that if i removed the ‘noapic’ kernel param (inserted due to clock issues), everything worked great. (except the clock - I would gain 15 seconds per hour or so).
So after digging around on google for a while, I eventually stumbled upon a message board post by some guy from nvidia (my board is an asus a7n8x - nforce2 chipset) that said, “make sure FSB Spread Spectrum is disabled.” I had never heard of this option, so I expected to find it diabled by default, but when i checked, it was set to 50%.

So, why/how this happened is still a mystery to me, but at least im not ready to put my foot through the pc. I wrote this up so that I or somebody else can find it, because debugging this took me forever.
In summary, it appears that the noapic kernel option negatively affects libata performance, and the real solution for slight clock issues is to check for FSB SS in your BIOS. (somewhere noapic was suggested, and did fix the problem, but it is clearly the wrong direction.

Im using Ubuntu Dapper, but I’d be surprised if it was related to the distro.

well, today was fun.
I reinstalled the OS on this box - my webserver and mythbox. My OS was way out of date and very fragile, and I didn’t have near enough hard drive space. I’m running Ubuntu now, I gave up on maintaining the Gentoo system, especially after I was unable to correctly update to gcc 4 and the new modular xorg on my other computer.
Ubuntu’s ok - faster to get up and running, but they did re-arrange things a lot from how I was used to it, and it takes a while to get the right dev packages installed when you want to build something from source….
I’ve still got some minor things to fix, like lirc, awstats, and my dynamic ip, but everything to the outside user should be back.