My name is
David Robins:
Christian, lead developer (resume), writer, photographer, runner,
libertarian (voluntaryist),
and student.
This is also my son David Geoffrey Robins' site.
Nikon film scanner: SOLD
News ·Saturday June 12, 2010 @ 02:02 EDT (link)
Sold it for the same price I paid for it, $500. Had a little trouble since it doesn't work out of the box on Windows 7, but I found some instructions and got it to work on my new laptop, since the buyer wanted to use it on Windows 7 64-bit. The scanner.inf file needed one more tweak: the LS-50 (CoolScan V) line needed to be copied from the [Models] section to the [Models.ntamd64] section, which covers 64-bit operating systems, and then it installed. Argh, Windows… it gave me such trouble recognizing the device and trying to do things as administrator. The buyer wanted to use it to let his mother scan some negatives. I hope he's happy with it. I never really got around to using it, and I think given the time I calculated it would take to scan my thousands of negatives, it might be better (cost a little more, save a lot of time) using a negative scanning service like ScanCafe.
Books finished: Rich Dad's Who Took My Money?.
New laptop: HP from Costco
News ·Sunday June 6, 2010 @ 16:19 EDT (link)
My old Acer laptop gave up the ghost recently; it was quite sudden; it had exhibited some hard drive slowdowns and occasional boot trouble, but then a few weeks ago it either failed to boot up entirely or required a lot of power-up attempts to start, and then froze up completely a few minutes in. I suspected a heat issue, as did the technician at Hard Drives Northwest where I took it for service, although he also suspected that it was just the motherboard wearing out. He managed to back up the drive, which was going bad, to another IDE drive in a USB enclosure.
I brought the laptop in for service on May 5th; they had it for several weeks; I picked it up on May 28th, a couple days after the technician gave up on getting it to stay booted. Much of the time was spent copying the drive to another one (also an IDE, since the first plan was to put it back in the hopes that the disk was the only problem). Total cost for the repairs and new drive (old drive was 100G, new 120G, the closest they had) was $156.56, not bad given the diagnostic work done and new drive too. I just attached the USB enclosure to a machine today and everything is accessible (even the Linux ext3 partition). The most important data I think was a OneNote notebook, which is unfortunately in the binary format difficult to view from Linux. I'm not sure if any open tools can open it and (due to sharing, range-locking, etc.) they don't have an XML format. I will attempt to convert it (via export, or possibly writing a convert myself in Python or Perl using the public MS-ONE OneNote file format specification).
The old Acer was a TravelMate 4504LMi (Intel Pentium M, 1.8GHz, 100G HD, DVD±RW, 1G RAM, 802.11b/g). I checked the database—I was wondering how much I paid for it—and I'd forgotten to enter it, but I found the original receipt (turns out I bought it at Hard Drives Northwest). (When I was looking at laptops at HDNW after picking it up, I noticed that a good many were slower than my Acer; improvements now are more in the multicore or low-power areas.) I bought it on May 14, 2005, so it lasted almost 5 years, which isn't a bad run for a laptop, around when we were getting our Washington drivers' licenses, so not long after we moved here.
The price I'm paying for laptops, probably of equivalent quality at time of purchase, is trending down: my Sony Vaio was $2381.45 (June 2002, Circuit City, Memphis, TN), the Acer was $1630.91 (May 2005, HDNW, Bellevue, WA), and the new HP was just under $1000 (Costco, Woodinville, WA).
I haven't unpacked the HP from Costco yet, but I liked the store demo model because it was reasonable small, among the lightest on display, and I'd been told by users that HP was a reliable brand (although I'm sure each line has good and bad models). I bought it from Costco because they have a 90-day no questions asked return policy. I'll bet that it gets abused by some (device "rental", returning items they damaged—they've even accepted returns of half-eaten food I hear), but it's also such peace of mind that it probably drives a good number of people to buy there and cancels out the cost of abuse. Since I'll be taking the laptop on our trip cross-country, where it will get more use than in the few weeks before, I might not find problems with it until then; so HDNW's 30-day return policy would be insufficient. Furthermore, Costco has stores all across the country and they probably allow returns at any of them.
A report on using the laptop will surely follow (assume no news is good news).
Books finished: Winter's Heart.
Word development party at Rob's
News ·Friday June 4, 2010 @ 00:19 EDT (link)
I went shooting in the morning (WCA, Glock 34, moved up to 30' and shot some good targets). Guys in the next booth had something very loud (maybe just a .45) but they left before I was done.
For Office 15, Word and Publisher (and PTLS—Page, Table, and Line Services) are merging into a new team called PARC (IIRC, it stands for Publishing, Authoring, Reading, and Collaborating, with a nod towards the Xerox PARC laboratory that produced so many innovations). Our new development manager (a Word lead when I started, who then moved to be Publisher's development manager, and originally started as a Word intern), Rob, invited us all to his place for the afternoon. He's not too far from our apartment, actually—a little way up Avondale and east on 116th.
I got to Rob's around 1330 and let myself in (event start at 1300, people actually got there on time), didn't bother ringing the doorbell since I could see people I knew. He's on a very steep road, and I parked at the bottom as suggested in the invite, even though there did happen to be space in the driveway. There was plenty of food and drink—Mexican themed—and then people gravitated to the Xbox and played Roy's Street Fighter IV game. In between, Rob said a few words about people that were leaving the former teams or arriving on the new one, both full-time and interns. I took a turn with the game—Roy's "fight stick" is great—and just used Blanka's shock repeatedly (what can I say, I don't know the game, so I stuck with what worked). Jessica had a good run, and Roy's blindfolded win against Levent was epic.
It was raining when I left—the crowd had thinned considerably and most people were heading out—around 1730, so I raced down the steep street (117th) to my car. Mark's ride had left without him, so I took him back to work and then got to face the usual 520/Avondale traffic. It was a decent party, and Rob says he'll be having more. With a new development manager and a lot of great new code projects to work on, Office 15 looks like it will be a lot of fun (and hard work).
Books finished: The Limits of Power, Universally Preferable Behaviour: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
The UW healthcare debate: wrestling with a pig
News, Political, School, Law ·Thursday May 27, 2010 @ 19:40 EDT (link)
I went to the universal health care constitutionality debate at the UW law school today and, while the debate itself was rather a waste of time, I was reminded of an important adage: Don't get into a fight with a pig, because he'll win, you'll both get dirty, and the pig likes it. The guy from the CATO institute did that, and he regretted it.
Here, the "mud" is the constitution-as-currently-interpreted (CACI) and the pig is the UW law school expert steeped in all those rationalizing court decisions about whether something is a tax, or can be taxed, or can be regulated using the taxing clause, or if the interstate commerce clause can be used to regulate growing wheat (or marijuana) for one's own use, or whether the necessary and proper clause conveys absolute power to congress (of course it does! need you ask?) and so on. You're on their playing field, the playing field of the CACI, and the CATO guy was doomed before he started. He should have tried to arrange for a morality-based debate; but then nobody at UW would have stepped forward to debate him.
The UW law professor did make a valid point that would exist even in an originalist debate, though: the current lawsuits are generally problematical in that the court only hears "cases or controversies" of "injury in fact"; and since many of the provisions that require the states to pay don't go into effect until 2016, nor the individual mandate until 2014; and the states do not have standing to bring a case for their residents anyway. So it seems many of these suits will be validly dismissed for lack of standing.
It's was very clear that the originalist constitution and the CACI are two extremely different things. In one, for example, the federal government only has the powers explicitly delegated to it; in the other, all sorts of things creep out of the penumbras and emanations, giving congress powers never imagined by the framers. I think the CATO guy gave it a good shot and would have scored a lot of points if he was debating the morality of the healthcare bill, or how pro-liberty it is or is not, but on holding it up to the current interpretation of the constitution and active precedents, the UW law professor picked him up by the scruff of the neck and swept the floor with him. He even took him to task with the economics of it all, emphasizing a potential free rider concern, that, of course, is really made worse by the exclusions of pre-existing conditions from insurer consideration (if your house is burning down, you shouldn't be able to buy insurance).
We (libertarians) are too used to thinking of the original constitution, not the 300 years of corruption it's undergone to become the CACI. Thus, we still think of it as a good thing, and we still think that blatantly, obviously (originally) unconstitutional laws can be challenged on constitutional grounds. And they can, but big government will win just about every time because it's their pigpen—and SCOTUS is part of the government too, and they don't get appointed for being in favor of shrinking it.
So don't take up offers to play in their pigpen; if you must wrestle, wrestle in the light of day and over morality and economics, not in a pigpen designed, built, enclosed, and fully controlled by the other guy. Don't get sucked in to hopeless causes; don't walk onto a stage where their rules prevail and morality is utterly irrelevant. Why waste your time?
Books finished: Why Popcorn Costs So Much At the Movies.
XBMC and VDPAU headaches
News, Technical ·Sunday May 23, 2010 @ 06:42 EDT (link)
I upgraded XBMC from source control recently and all the background textures (overlays?) were gone—the Confluence skin looked like the sample but but without any of the shading behind the menus, weather info, or dialog boxes. Menus and movie info were quite hard to read with the text superimposed on other text or the background image without any contrast.
First I checked if it was the nVidia OpenGL, by switching temporarily to the (much slower) X11 OpenGL, but it had the same issue. I debugged around the code a bit to ensure the textures in question were being loaded, and they were.
Then I figured I'd play a movie anyway, but XBMC crashed in VDPAU code. It looked like it was trying to detect the graphics card or support, and eventually on a hunch I went to verify if my card actually support VDPAU and/or VAAPI. It turns out VAAPI uses VDPAU as a backend on nVidia cards (as in the crash callstack) and my particular card does not in fact support VDPAU. So it gracelessly decides that crashing is a robust solution: bit of a fail.
I uninstalled the VDPAU (libvdpau) and VAAPI (libva) packages and rebuilt the dependencies (primarily MythTV, Transcode, and XBMC), and as it happens the background overlays came back too, which made me happy, even though it was rather a long aggravating process. (To top it off, the machine I was using to debug—the machine I am typing on—also had some issues: D-Bus problems, KDE sync dependency hell, KDM ignoring keyboard and mouse input—the last was fixed by re-installing evdev). What a mess!
Does this mean Linux sucks? No, but it means if you want to run a source-based distro (Gentoo) and upgrade it frequently and to the bleeding edge, a little expertise is required. But nobody has to run a source-based distro (there are plenty of binary distros) nor use leading-edge packages. But where's the fun in that?
Books finished: The Path of Daggers.
Delete files older than n days
Technical ·Monday May 17, 2010 @ 00:31 EDT (link)
Used this to clean out /usr/portage/distfiles (which also contains source control packages—"-9999" versions):
find . -maxdepth 1 -mtime +5 -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm
Keeping this around as a handy reference. (-maxdepth prevents recursing into source control directions—just svn-src now—and -mtime +5 tags anything 5 days old and older (the + means "and up".)
Books finished: Black Rednecks and White Liberals.
Guy Gavriel Kay interview/signing at Sammamish Library
News, Media ·Tuesday May 11, 2010 @ 21:13 EDT (link)
I went to Sammamish Libary Tuesday to see Nancy Pearl interview Guy Gavriel Kay, a fantasy author of whom I have long been a fan. The interview was recorded, so it should be online, but I couldn't find it yet. He signed the copy of Tigana that I brought with me. It seems he has written a few books since I last checked—Ysobel, a Celtic tale, and his latest, Under Heaven, set in China. The interview was definitely worth attending—worth the drive to Sammamish—he's a bright lively old elf; watch the video when you can find it. Excuse me while I put a few of his books on hold.
Liberty Belle debates a socialist
News ·Saturday May 8, 2010 @ 21:50 EDT (link)
We drove out to the University of Seattle (not much street parking, so we paid the $6) to see Keli Carender debate a socialist at the NW Socialism Conference. (Keli is Liberty Belle of Tea Party fame.) Although it was hostile territory there were a few conservatives and libertarians who made up by our volume what we lacked in numbers. The debate consisted of opening and closing statements, and four questions in between, allowing responses to each, with a few audience questions at the end. It was pretty decent actually. I had heard Keli speak but not debate and I was impressed that she held to a strong defense of individual rights versus collectivism, although she didn't go as far as to condemn theft, even when it got fairly explicit (taking "the rich"'s money because they have "too much" of it, and so on). I got to chat with a few socialists at the end—straightened them up about their "oppression of the workers" by pointing out how kind it was for corporations to actually give people money for their skills when, apparently, they have no better prospects. We talked briefly with some of the other conservatives and a (libertarian) lady who had asked the last question and made a statement about how much capitalists help "society" by providing jobs, and their frequent large charitable donations—none of which is stolen goods.
We aided the capitalist machine by picking up chicken Teriyaki from the place down the road for dinner.
Books finished: A Crown of Swords.
UW graduate student walkout
News, School ·Sunday May 2, 2010 @ 18:49 EDT (link)
Some idiot socialist-leaning group ("For a Democratic University (FADU), an independent labor activist organization") is trying to muster up a graduate student strike tomorrow (May 3, 2010) because of tuition hikes necessary because of a state budget crunch (i.e., it's not really a hike, it's a lessening of the existing subsidies—reality is intruding into academia).
From an email I received (I don't know how they got my address, or the address of anyone at UW; mail came from "UW Grad Walkout <uw.grad.walkout@gmail.com>"): "FADU demands … Freeze tuition as a step towards free public education. No cuts to interdisciplinary programs such as Women's Studies, American Ethnic Studies, and Disability Studies. Build them up instead! Free quality childcare for UW employees." While we'd all like "free" stuff, TANSTAAFL. Either students need to pay the cost of their tuition, or teachers and administrators and utility bills don't get paid, or someone else has to be robbed to pay the cost. There is no magic money source; the entitlements they want come from the hard work of their neighbors in the real world.
Furthermore, these are graduate students that are proposing walking out. While they may have a little leverage in the hard sciences, in all areas there are more places than applicants, and graduate students are usually getting if not a complete free ride then subsidized tuition, housing, and TA appointments to help pay their way. Welfare recipients don't strike! For us not receiving benefits—which includes all of us here in the CS&E PMP (which "pays for itself" and maintains a separate cost center, which is the reason they gave for no longer allowing supervised research in the program), probably most out of state students (who pay higher tuition generally), we have no incentive to strike. The ones that are receiving the handouts have no moral basis to strike; they should be thankful for what the hard-working people of the state are already giving them. If they must stand and hold signs, those signs should display a profound gratitude to the taxpayers for their sinecures.
Two and a Half Men marathon
News, School, Media ·Sunday May 2, 2010 @ 15:25 EDT (link)
We finished season three of Two and a Half Men this morning, watching the last eight or nine episodes between about 0130 and 0630, with a few breaks.
Most of the day we'd both been working on homework—me on my Data Mining course, Honey on French. This assignment involves building a voted Perceptron to classify spam (the previous assignment had us write a naive Bayes classifier). I had a rather horrible bug which caused my success rates to be terrible (no more than about 70%, and falling back to about 42% and 57% in a 3-cycle); I wasn't clearing the previous message's word counts before adding the next one. Once that was fixed, after much gnashing of teeth (and copious debug tracing), my success rate converged to about 99.9% on the training set and over 98% on the test set, as expected. I may post the code for my various assignments at the end of the course.
Books finished: The Conscience of a Conservative, Politically Correct Guns.
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