All posts by Kris

About Kris

Hardware hacker, technology integrator, and maker. He enjoys staring blankly at code and voiding the warranty.

Shocks and a ride to the airport.

personal

Two things lead to the demise of my weekend. I’m very big on the causality of events. Tracing decisions a few pages back, like a “Choose your own adventure” book. Oh, if I had run from the dragon on page 86 I would have found the princess in Ankh-Morpork. Then if I had drank the potion over on 114. I would have found the gold on page 32.

James and I gathered the stuff required to put a 3″ lift in da’Jeep. We picked up the compressor from Sean, bought new U bolts from AutoZone, and parked the Jeep inside the garage. We had all the right tools – or at least enough options to make anything work. Including cutting and burning one of the rear leaf bushings out.

Christine was coming back from Snow Carolina on Sunday. The poor thing has a cold. She did her UNC interviews with a frog voice and a runny nose. I know she was tired of traveling after being delayed on Thursday and having it snow on Friday.

James had tried his best to determine what parts he needed for the kit. Someone had told him with confidence that he didn’t need shocks. We needed shocks. You always find out this information on a Sunday after everything is closed. He may have to special order them anyway.

Christine called me from Logan. Her ride had not shown up for an hour. Several calls to the girl that was supposed to pick her up yielded no results. At 2:00 I headed out to Boston from Bedford, NH. 115 miles later we were back where we started from.

If you want to run from the dragon, turn to page 102.
If you want to attempt to slay the dragon, turn to page 35.

Move to the Carolinas to get AWAY from winter.

rant

BrolkswagenNew England is a funny place for winter. It seems to be the only place on the planet that gets snow every winter and where people forget how to drive every winter. Even though we usually can get snow for half the year. Compared to North Carolina, we have no excuses. Our towns own plows, we know what winter tires look like, most of us have driven in it, and I’ve seen it snow in May.

Yesterday, in parts of North Carolina it was snowing 2 inches an hour. These people have no idea what to do with it. It’s as if a landslide came down the hills of Worcester and a 6.9 earthquake opened up on downtown Boston. Game over, close the doors, go home.

Christine was headed to UNC Chapel Hill for a grad school interview. They cancelled the 5:00PM flight, she was unable to fit on the 7:00, and had to wait around Logan until 10:00. Bowl of suck.

I think it’s not as bad as it could be, because people in the South don’t even bother to drive. Here in New England however, we do drive. We drive our 10,000Lb Lincoln SUV with bald “all seasons” down 93 at 75MPH. Then we blame the “freak” patch of black ice for flipping the boat 4 times, throwing headrest mounted LCD panels everywhere, and the resulting 14 car pile-up.

EtchA-OS – How Apple could take back the desktop.

creativity

Shake to reboot!
I was thinking about GUI’s the other night while doodling on my OhioArt PDA.

The megacorp that owns the desktop is like any other. They start out small, lie, cheat, steal, become the only option, and move right to the top. Then after a while complacent thinking takes over. “Well, we’re your ONLY option, so – DEAL…” Then down the road, they get kicked – hard. Remember when big blue was your ONLY hardware option?

Well, Micro$oft has taken this path. “Borrowed” some stuff from IBM, “evaluated” some Xerox hardware, flat out stole some file compression software, bundled all of that together in order to push out some Internet browsers. You write code for their OS, while praying that you don’t get stepped on, and dreaming that one day they will buy your little software company.

It’s clear that complacent thinking has taken over in Redmond. With the recent code leak they are scrambling the FBI on contractors, while downplaying the vulnerability. The time is right for an open source kick.

RedHat is a fine example of a company that can make money giving away it’s products and letting everyone look at their code. You can load RedHat, or called by it’s free-ware name Fedora, on just about anything, including the KitchenAid blender. (Okay you may need FreeBSD for the blender.) The point is – you can get any personal computer to run a UNIX based OS. Darwin is Apple’s open source UNIX based OS. The Darwin X86 project is running Darwin on Intel PC’s right now.

So, Apple – here’s what you do: Compile your GUI for Darwin x86. Now every PC on the planet can run MacOSX. Setup a support structure for paying customers and let go of being able to dictate hardware requirements. You will still have the fastest PC’s on the planet and we can now do a true side by side compare of Intel vs. Motorola. Who cares who’s faster – in the long run they will be running your operating system. You will at this point go into competition with RedHat, but I think they’ll survive. Give them free iPods or something. :)

Strong like bull.

personal

taurus.gifI’m not a real proponent of astrology. A system of symbols and logic developed when we only knew about 7 planets. Believing in it today is like believing in the great turtle that carries the Earth on it’s back. It’s fun to wonder, but with it’s vague predictions of the past, present, and future – one has to realize that it’s more of a window to ourselves, and our desires, then the actual prediction of events in our lives.

So, am I stubborn? Yes. Does the prediction that, I will be a strong group leader, always faithful, and passionate about my work, hold true? I would like to think so. Do I think that spelling my name with a K makes me unique? Yes. So, if I think these things – Am I changing conformity with will? Is this my own will or the written book of the universe?
Continue reading Strong like bull. →

chkdsk /r

rant

I often find it funny when I am unable to solve my own computer problems. I equate it to the carpenters unfinished house.

I got a sweet DVD burner for Christmas, and it’s been hooked up for a month now. I have successfully made 1 DVD. The $20 pile of crashed DVD-R’s in the trash was starting to pile up. You see – the system would write about 20% of the data, the system would blue-screen, and then reboot.

Updated the BIOS, the drivers, the software, the DVD firmware, the VIA main board drivers, and then went to SP4. Click… Burn… Crash.

I turned off the “reboot automatically feature” and was able to see the offending command. NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM was causing the boat to run aground. I googled the dump and the responding Microsquash tech article said in so many words:

Run chkdsk /r on your drives.

Of course it worked. It’s always the simple stuff screwing up the complicated stuff. It’s always the complicated stuff screwing up the easy stuff. I was able to backup some files on the single remaining DVD-R I had.
groan

– Kris

WiFi + PDA = FADWiiP?

rant

Visor PrismI’ve been thinking about buying a new PDA for about a year now. I cut my teeth on a Handspring Visor back in 2000, and have been a PalmOS PDA user ever since. Last year I upgraded to a refurbished Visor Prism. I was worried about battery life, and evils of backlit color. The Prism is still working great, but I’m wanting more.

PalmOne Tungsten TThis search started when the sleek new PalmOne Tungsten caught my eye. I have some basic requirements for a PDA.

1. It can fit in my pocket and take said abuse. The Prism is a bit on the bulky side. It’s the limit of what I will cram in my front pocket. So anything thinner / shorter would be an improvement.
2. It runs PalmOS and stores; Phone numbers, to-do lists, journal entries, email drafts, alarms, and some random astronomy applications. The “camera-phone-cappuccino-maker-mini-keyboard” option does nothing for me. A high res color screen would be nice – but that just leads to palm pr0n.
3. Some sort of upgradeability. Springboard, SD, MemoryStick, etc. Even if no company ever makes 3rd party stuff for the gameboy sized slot on the back of your PDA. It’s there and it makes me THINK that I have options.

WiFi Baby!… and finally
4. WiFi. No, not Bluetooth. I mean 802.11B. This is where we hit our big stumbling block for PDA’s. Even PocketPC’s have this problem. “That’s not true Kris! My iPaq is on teh int@rw3b!” Well, it’s a hack at best. Pull the giant PCMCIA WiFi card out of the ass of your PDA, and ask yourself if it’s an “integrated solution”.
Continue reading WiFi + PDA = FADWiiP? →