Category Archives: Bloggy Things

The sort of odd things that a personal blog might have

Things come together

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Currently, I believe the 30’s depression was a crisis of confidence and expertise.

Confidence: Most of the world had been farming for 7000+ years. When things got rough with this new-fangled manufacturing thing, people yearned for the normal days of yore – rosy colored to the mind. And wallowed in the yearning instead of moving ahead to dependency on manufacturing.

Expertise: Every society that moved from farming to manufacturing had huge, painful dislocations. Witness the mondo revolutions and wars of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Brits were the pioneers and reaped big rewards and big pains. Later societies benefited from hard-won knowledge. It now takes 1 generation to transition from farming to manufacturing. During the 30’s people simply didn’t know how to operate a world-wide manufacturing system. Witness the economic ineptitude saturating that decade.

It took trained, younger people to trust that new manufacturing stuff. They were ready to do so after WWII.

In the last couple of decades the manufacturing world has ridden the same curve that the farming world took. Nobody in the “advanced countries” works down at the plant anymore. People work in offices moving information in jobs that were completely unknown 50 years ago. Huge transitions like that are hard to pull off. My direct experience is that there is a lot of money out there looking for good, new ideas. But not finding them. The expertise simply isn’t there yet.

To someone of the early 20th century is must seem odd that we’ve not had a 30’s style depression. I have figured that’s for these reasons:

  1. The difference between humans living through 4 generations of manufacturing and living through 400 generations of farming. We’re not genetically selected to view jobs on the line through rosy eyes.
  2. That the world’s political leadership is not entranced by disastrous socialist ideas this time around.
  3. The baby booms have been going through their peak productive years.

I’m a blatant optimist. Yes, it’s possible to botch things up. But the fundamentals are that the whole world is wiring up and inter-trading. 4 out of 6 billion people are coming out of subsistence farming. It’s an amazing boom time, like no other in human history. And, to top it off, as the world’s population soon catastrophically levels off, it will be almost to the day (in broad, historical terms) that humans will be able to produce huge numbers of optimized “humans”:

  • Bio-engineered living things.
  • Robots.

Still looking broadly, I can see only these limiting factors:

  • The bio-shell around the Earth.
  • Confusion and insanity.

Both are effectively limitless. But we shall see.

Near term: On the bright side, it’s less than 1 month before the US media starts their upbeat, “dawn in America” campaign. Set your watch.

Things fall apart

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Interestingly, “everyone” except the data has been announcing a recession for months now. But, unless the guys with the current, huge stock market short positions get caught with their pants down, the stopped clock will be correct soon.

So, that raises a spector a lot more scary than a few broke house flippers, some failed banks, and a lot of Manhattan know-it-alls pounding the streets.

Specifically, the US government will be in a pickle when tax revenues drop off a cliff. It will be the equivalent of a real war. (Check out the Congressional Budget Office’s data http://www.cbo.gov/budget/data/historical.pdf on income and spending relative to GDP, by the way. Very steady numbers since the reports’ start in the mid-60’s.)

So, I’m curious what will happen in the next few years.

US government shortfalls are covered by some combination the following:

  1. Cutting government expenditures.
  2. Raising tax revenues.
  3. Printing money.
  4. Borrowing money.
  5. Forcing non-government entities to pay off-budget.
  6. Forcing other countries to pay.

The government workers party is now in control of congress. And, people who put there money where their mouths are have picked Obama for many months now. It may take Nixon to go to China, but I believe we can rule out #1.

Economic down times are not the time to raise taxes unless you want to make things worse. And down times don’t cause tax revenues to crank up with “natural” productivity increases. Anyway, history says the US government is on the down-slope side of the Laffer curve. As doing counter-intuitive things is not congresses’ strong suit, the word, “fees” will be heard a lot, soon. But reality rules out #2.

In the ’70’s they printed money to cover Vietnam and the Great Society – and had the “Carter inflation”. (Near the end of which, the same people who now control the airwaves satisfied themselves that stagflation was the normal state of any capitalist economy. Keep that in mind when you watch the 6 o’clock news.) Anyway, the whole world is caught up in the current financial follies. And, there is some indication that people outside the US are walking the safe-dollar path right now. Fire up the printing press and they’s run away like rabbits. #3 doesn’t look good.

In the last 3 decades the US government has replaced printing with borrowing. Borrowing works if someone is willing to loan you money at low interest rates. It works especially well if you’re investing that money in a way that pays off better than the interest rate. One might argue that the US government has been doing just that. But, baby boomers are getting older now, and supporting the old folks is not done as an investment. #4 won’t cover the tab.

That leaves making others pay.

How is this done?

I’m not creative enough to think of many ways.

That “regulation” is the current label given to offloading costs from government budgets is one clue, though. Regulation won’t keep the government lights on, though. But new regulations would be a good excuse for new “fees” to pay the regulators.

It appears a done deal that the social security age of retirement is going up. That’s always been the reasonable and effective “solution” to the social security funding problem, so this is truly a “Nixon/China” situation. A Republican would have zero chance of doing this.

Back in the 1990’s Bill (or was it Hillary?) floated the idea of raiding private pension funds for government use. (This was long before the Internet Bubble shot tax income up to the point of balancing the US budget.) So, congress might require private funds to “contribute” some fraction of their outlays to the “community”.

And, finally, what I predicted in the 60’s would happen when my generation got old: We baby boomers would go out to the world and force others to pay for our entitled retirement. Count on Iraq paying through the nose, for starters.

Odder things have happened.

But this is all if the bottom drops out. Little inherent in the world requires such a thing to happen.

Note:


Military cuts?

Military people don’t vote Democrat, so military cuts are politically safe. But the military doesn’t take much of the US government’s budget (close to zero of state budgets). And, it’s not clear how the headlines about a new arms race among other countries will feel.

Too, a good deal of military expenses goes to the secondary core Democrat group, “grad students”. (… for want of a better label. Though that secondary core group is out of school, they identify with the grad-student mentality.) Cutting academic research would be unthinkable to this group. — And they are the taxpayers paying the bills now. — Count on this money changing to “green” research. No net dollar difference.

Margin call on the roll call

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Congress and the Fed seem to be wiggling around, using a day’s worth of stock market activity to tell them how and when to “invest” $700,000,000,000. I guess that the chart broke through a price resistance barrier on the downside and signaled a buy to our duly elected day-traders.

The “bailout,” if done honestly, will use borrowed money. That raises an interesting question: What happens if the market value of the “troubled assets” goes down? Does that mean that Congress will get a margin call?

HDR photos

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In a few years (5 to 10?) we’ll look at current color photos and think of them like we think of black and white photos now. “Real” pictures will be High Dynamic Range pictures.

That will be nice.

The new Canon A650IS takes away the shakes, has enough pixels (12meg), and handles low light ok, so now I find the limiting factor is dynamic range.

The Great Oil Crisis of 2008

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A couple things seem interesting about the recent oil price spike:

  1. Where is the “Oil Crisis”?
  2. Where is the mention of the trash-by-the-freeway effect?

Huh?

  • Consider #1. If it were 1973 or 1979 (gas-line years in the States), buckets of ink and hours of heavy-breathing news anchors would have beaten the “oil crisis” in to us. Why not this time? Is it because Nixon and Carter aren’t president? Not literally “because” of them, perhaps (though a silly argument could be made for that), but rather, is the mind-set that yielded Nixon and Carter as presidents no longer with us – even in the media!

    (Just to be clear, a “crisis” is what we have when someone wants to “do something”. If you don’t know what that means, wait a few years and watch the results of a few “do something-ings”. Hint: The guy who wanted to “do something” will never, ever mention it until they have successfully shifted the blame.)

    Or is this “oil crisis” missing to only me simply because I’m not exposed to these media guys. Every few nights, does NightLine lead off with a dramatic graphic mocking The Onion’s “War for the White House”, followed by talking heads wringing their hands and pronouncing this week’s events a turning point in the history of mankind and proof that there is no end to the “crisis”. …Uh. … Ah. … Is NightLine still on TV? … Whatever.

    My bet is that there is a different attitude out there from the one that was prevalent in the ’70s. The air’s simply been cleared. We don’t breath that stench any more.

    Consider what a true and beautiful thing that is, oh you who bemoan today’s world.

  • #2: A queue or flow system flowing near a critical density will crystalize from the occasional, tiny distraction. Think of how a piece of cardboard blowing slightly toward the traffic lane of a packed, fast-flowing freeway can cause a 1 hour traffic jam. You have driven through such a big slowdown but have seen no cause for it.

    The was no “cause”.

    Such slowdowns are a natural characteristic of dense, flowing material in this universe.

    The way I understand the world’s oil system is that it’s a flow of material from underground muck to hot air thousands of miles away. The “oil” changes hands many times. It’s a huge system and highly, highly optimized. There are predictable elements to it – both on the source end and on the sink end. But, it’s so leanly built that the predictability is optimized out of the system. Leaving a classic, saturated, queue/flow system.

    Which leaves us with “This will happen. You can’t predict it.”

    That is not satisfying. … Hence, we have plenty of left-brains ready to supply an explanation for why the coin, this year, came up heads.

    There is actually a reason why I’m guessing that a large part of the oil price spike was simply a traffic jam. I looked all around and found no information that accurately filtered from the “price” of oil the effect of the dollar’s drop against other currencies. Of course, there are calculations out there, but they sure looked like horseshoes and bombing. If the effect of the kahuna of “explanations”, the dollar’s value, is a wild guess then one might suppose that the oil guys who were stuck in the traffic jam simply didn’t know when that jerk right ahead of ’em would get off the d****d phone and move, for Christ’s sake!

    Quick argument against this: Where are the traffic jams in food? It’s an old story that “major cities only have 3 days of food; we’re all gonna starve; blah, blah, blah”. The food chain is very evolved and optimized. Where are the (mathematically) catastrophic spikes in the system? Answers I can think of off hand:

    1. Major cities have a lot more food stocked than 3 days’ worth.
    2. There are many alternatives to each type of food. This makes the system robust in the same ways that non-deterministic packet switching systems are robust compared to older systems, and in the same way that traffic flow is more robust through a grid-pattern city than through a more modern, flow-controlled, tributary-to-artery system.
    3. Hey! Remember the toilet paper “crisis”? Well, toilet paper’s kinda like food.
    4. And, panicing lunatics played the OH MY GOD! ALL THE RICE IS GONE FROM COSTCO! card this year.

      So, maybe there are serious traffic jams in the food system.

Scattering MegaSystem to Ubuntu/XP – Part 2

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Lots of particular lessons learned.

Here’s the latest:

If Ubuntu’s System Monitor program and the Linux “top” program are to be believed about CPU and RAM usage, then modern computers are not memory or CPU bound.

They are disk bound.

After 30+ years of being RAM bound.

Now, spring is a modern, dual core Intel with 8 gig of memory. The CPU is rarely busy to any extent. Memory use doesn’t go above 3 or 4 gig after running for a couple weeks – with the XP VM running, remember. And lots of other things running (including throwing away those 20-30k emails every day).

But.

But, the cursor freezes – especially in the VM. And there are long delays in routine operations while the disk drive is busy, chattering to itself.

Test it yourself: rsync a 400 gig drive’s contents to your main drive. Don’t expect things to work well while this is going on. Programs will spend a lot of time in hourglass mode, whether they show the 11th century timepiece of not. It’s bizarre how the VM’s XP’s cursor goes in to mondo-lag mode, too. Huh? What’s going on? Is the cursor location cached to disk in a blocking thread?

This is interesting because of the current transition in mass storage.

Let’s review.

1) The optical guys muffed the transition up from DVD. Yeah, you can’t beat the media price of optical. 10x under hard disk. But that boat left the dock and they missed it futzing around with Blu-Ray/HDVD/whatever wars. It’s over. The gamers and Hollywood might use these things to pack better quality stuff and more content on ’em. But the computer world simply doesn’t have any need for cheap storage in the 10-100 gig range. Maybe not even in the 100-1000 gig range! Hard drives are too cheap and they don’t have the insert-the-11-teenth CD problem. Hard drives provide the bottomless bucket in which to put stuff now. Thumb drives and CDs satisfy the sneaker-net need.

2) NAND flash has plummeted in price. It’s possible to get a working drive for a couple hundred bucks and that will drop in a year.

The latter, I figure, is the reason why the drive manufacturers’ stock prices look like buggy whip companies. The Wall Street guys may all be running flash drives in their laptops already.

I have also figured a couple of things:

1) You can’t have too much storage. You’ll fill it with video and the like. And dupes. And backups. And history of everything ever done on your system, or seen or heard by your system, or whatever.

2) Hard drives are still staying 10x cheaper than flash.

And wondered, can a hard drive with some brains and a few gig of cache look like a terabyte flash drive?

The predicted death of disk drives (caused by bubble memory) was my key, early lesson to ignore hysteria-hype. Since learning that lesson I’ve only bought in to two hysteria-hyped things (with, by definition, no false negatives):

  1. The internet.
  2. Leave #2 for another time.

Heck, I even backed off predicting the death of CRT tubes for all these years. By the time it finally happened, it had been hashed over so many times that it was, “Uh. Yeah. Finally. … So, how ’bout them Ducks?”.

So, that’s it. Time for a fast hard drive.

Scattering MegaSystem to Ubuntu/XP – Part 1

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Email stopped coming in.

I dropped the 11+ year tranzoa.com web hoster. What I said to the guys at AZC.com: “You don’t shut off someone’s email without telling them, dictionary spam surge or no. And, you don’t tell them to use gmail. Not on a $33 a month service … in 2008.”

So, poor asuka (aka tranzoa.net) almost worked its aged, 128meg, 200mhz Pentium II heart out hosting tranzoa.com.

gina (aka bran) overflew its 1 gig system disk and floundered its powerhouse, dual Pentium II 250mhz, 512mb trying to process email to the tune of 20k – 30k spams a day. It’s amazing what a 9 year old, $100 Boeing Surplus machine can do in a pinch.

The old ViewSonic 21″ secondary monitor faded to dark.

The replacement box, spring, took a week to find a working motherboard from Fry’s and had a hard disk failure in a month (power outage – maybe not something to even notice except that it failed on some data needed to boot).

To get spring running I managed to toast MegaSystem’s motherboard. This was not well timed.

For perhaps good reasons, perhaps not, spring’s OS is Ubuntu H 64. The new Megasystem XP runs in a VMWare box. That’s the theory. In practice, I have spent a boatload of time moving much of my personal computing operation to spring’s Ubuntu. Browser, email, IM, picture editing and much of the housekeeping stuff built over years.

This would be the fun part of computing if I were a computer person. Remember the verified, 70’s observation: “Normal people expect computers to treat them badly. Computer people demand it.”

I am not even a normal person. Computers exist for me, not the other way around. At 10 years old, I claimed as much while half-stepping arithmetic homework. And, I claimed right.

This has not been the fun part of computing.

Ah, well. I lied. There was one fun part. Since MegaSystem was dead, its 3 gig of RAM fit rather nicely in Scott’s old “tara” box with the Auburn VO stickers and all. So, to keep the status quo, asuka is still running on antiquated hardware. It’s just running on 10x the CPU and 20x the RAM. Makes a difference. Doesn’t take 5 minutes to deliver a web page, for instance.

Earth on a pool table

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Many years ago I read that if the Earth were the size of a cue ball, it would be as smooth and round as a cue ball.

That was startling.

And I questioned it. Along the lines of, well, Mauna Loa rises about 5 miles off the seafloor. And the Mariana Trench goes down about 6 miles. So, could you feel Mauna Loa as a bump or the Mariana Trench as a groove?

OK, a pool ball is a bit over 2 inches in diameter and the Earth is about 8000 miles through the center. So, a mile would be about 1/4000th of an inch on the Earth-ball. 5 or 6 miles makes these two extremes, Mauna Loa and the Mariana Trench, about 1/1000th of an inch on the Earth-ball.

To get a line on how big 1/1000th of an inch is, I pulled out my Autologic printer’s loop and found that the steps leading up to the Lincoln Memorial on the back of a $5 bill are about 5/1000ths of an inch apart. The horizontal lines that are the sky in the Memorial picture are double that at about 1/100th of an inch apart. To my eyes the sky looks like lines when looked at closely. The steps look gray.

Another estimate of now much 1/1000ths of an inch is: Thin paper runs 2 or 3 1000ths of an inch in thickness. Normal paper is in the 4 to 8 range.

The bump at the edge of a piece of paper is easy to feel.

But Mauna Loa would be pretty small – not a long cliff like the edge of a piece of paper. Just one bump. And the bump wouldn’t be a lot wider than it is high – triple, say. Maybe that Earth-ball might feel vaguely blemished to a blind movie hero, but it sure would feel pretty smooth to people who work with their hands.

That isn’t the end of things.

I wondered about that Earth-ball.

For instance, what would it feel like?

Consider that the Earth is covered by ocean a couple of miles deep, on average. Would the Earth-ball feel sorta like it just came in from the cold – steamed up? That’d be about the most that could be detected of the oceans.

If the atmosphere were solid, it would be a paper-thin shell around the whole Earth-ball.

And speaking of paper-thin shells around the Earth-ball, that’s about what the Earth’s crust would be.

Which gets to the fun point:

What if set an Earth-ball down on a pool table? What would happen?

Tick, tick, tick.

Best I can figure is it would expand a bit and burn its way through to the floor, splatting out as a lump of molten metal and lava. The Earth, after all, appears to be like a balloon with the rubber part being cool rock and the air inside replaced by soft, hot rock, or molten metal, or iron that’s so compressed it’s solid.

Here’s a to-scale picture I found at http://einstein.byu.edu/~masong/HTMstuff/textbookpdf/C30.pdf:

Earth Structure

The mantle is hot rock. The core, liquid and solid, is iron. Or so it’s believed. There is no question that it gets hot going down in the crust. Deep mines get real hot – unlivably hot.

Side note: The density of the Earth is almost identical to the density of Radium – at room temperature and pressure. Which isn’t like 2000 miles under the Earth. But, hey, who’s counting?

Anyway, this whole line of thought raises the question:

What keeps the outer shell of the Earth cool?

XP SP3 Install

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Wherein I promote a fleeting computer experience to cosmic proportions…

It was a slow night of continuing to get nothing done, so I figured, “Why not go ahead and do the XP SP3 update?” Why not, indeed.

Let’s go back to the late ’70’s or early ’80’s. At the time I called Microsoft “the GM of 2020”. Remember GM – General Motors? They are still around, losing a few billion dollars now and then. Cadillac and Saturn are both GM cars. GM makes some other cars, too. Something called a Chevrolet, for instance. Sold to corporate/government fleets, one must suppose. Anyway, back in the day, GM was the company. And my faith in computers said Microsoft would be the company in 2020.

Fast forward to 2000 or so, when Microsoft made their catastrophic decision to not split up in the face of being IBM’d by the feds. That was jolting. Microsoft had done a very good job of not catching the monopoly disease, but they took a wrong turn with that decision. The pundits said that Microsoft had rolled the feds. I was never sure what these guys were smoking. Microsoft is a rounding error on the fed’s budget. Charles Atlas can’t roll an aircraft carrier. Microsoft decided, in brief, to acknowledge that they were no longer a private company but were an adjunct of the US government. Brussels, too, continues to claim a piece of ’em! Sad.

But I bought the stock. Heck. They were local. They had a lot of strengths and were fundamentally in great shape and would be for a long, long time.

Since Bubble 1, though, the big, center parts of Microsoft have been drifting. Their treatment of IE is a perfect micro-picture – ignored until the world has long passed them by. Then a sort of a “me too” upgrade.

They had caught the monopoly disease.

A couple of years ago, I test-installed Ubuntu on a new, vanilla box. Then, for fun, also installed the Vista RC1. Hmmm. Ubuntu struck me as very competitive against Windows from a few years before then. Ubuntu was “getting there,” but not quite “there.” It could have been called quite different from, but equivalent to Vista. Not quite up to XP level.

Recently, Ballmer decided that it would be a good idea … here’s the punch line … to buy Yahoo.

I sold the stock.

A week or two ago I upgraded ‘alexlap’, the 7-8 year old Ubuntu Dell laptop. This upgrade was to Ubuntu “H”, Hardy Heron. 3 problems:

1) 2 obscure config files fussed about being changed and what should be done about them?

2) With those 2 files, I experimented with the option to see the “differences side-by-side.” The side-by-side display is unusable. And the UI flow is a little disconcerting when you step through the options to check out the config file differences. You can’t go wrong, but you’re given a single, ambiguous button after you view the “side-by-side” comparisons.

3) Apache (custom installed on ‘alexlap’s desktop version of Ubuntu) didn’t start up properly. Apparently, the machine name, “alexlap”, is used somewhere in Apache’s configuration. I’d not put “alexlap” in /etc/hosts as a special name. Or something.

Put another way, the upgrade went very smoothly. Surprising, as the previous “G” upgrade from “F” presented a lot more fussing to ignore. And the laptop is unquestionably unusual hardware stocked with extra programs left over from various experiments and tests.

So, last night it was XP SP3 time for my main PC. This PC is a stock box, already completely up to date with respect to Windows Update.

Result: Infiniboot.

Here’s the nice part about the XP update experience: They offer, as a pop-up when Windows is booted in Safe Mode, something called “System Restore”. I tried it because of the reassuring message that the “restore” could be undone. The system booted OK after it was “restored” to a couple of days in the past. So there is the good and troubling news: The Windows mechanism to handle catastrophic failure is quite smooth.

Cosmic conclusion: No new information. Microsoft should make a note to wake up when Apple’s consumer share shoots past 30. Can you say “Christmas 2008?” Is Microsoft on the road to specializing in fleet sales of their Impala of OS against a world of Crown Vic Linuxes?