bengt-erik norum

i've caved. while i still don't understand the appeal of blogs, more people i know are maintaining them everyday. i've found acutal information in them, i've been impressed by the design of them and i've occationally thought about keeping an online diary to report on the status of something...

so, i've caved. this is a blog.

to sod or not to sod...

the backyard on the new house is in pretty bad shape. i've been contemplating the options. the guy at dale hardware suggested starting with weed and feed, just to see what it'll do. he said that there's typically lots of grass lying dormant under all the thistles and weeds. we'll see what it can do. i'll try that later this week.

i am somewhat obsessed with the thought of new sod, though. some random guy's re-sodding adventure turned out looking quite nice. lots of work, though.

i'll flip a coin, i guess.

i picked up a microsoft mn-710 usb 802.11g dongle, last friday. the microsoft company store had them for $40 (access points for $70, pci and pccard nics also for $40). with the recent purchase and bastardization of a linksys wrt54gs, i thought i should at least have one 54mbit/sec capable nic in the house.

looks like we just started producing these and are discontinuing them. circuit city had them for $40 ($20 after rebate), but were all sold-out, of course. they are back in stock, but sans rebate. i found them online for as low as $34.

hoping to find that it was a prism 54, broadcom wl, or another hostap/openap/linuxap/freebsd-capable chipset, i looked at the fcc filings for it. the fcc filings were submitted by microsoft with testing done by a company called, 'adt,' (advance data technology corporation). all the chips in the photos were photoshopped black. nothing relavent. note to self: revisit for power output specs.

the device is not listed in the wlan-ng list of prism gt devices. interestingly enough, though the pci and pccard (mn-720 and mn-730) versions appear to be broadcom.

took the thing apart... sure enough, there's a prism 54, a "netchip" usb ic, and one other ic.

i used the new version of netstumbler and wardrove (wardrived?) home, picking up a number of ssid strings i'd never seen. most interesting was a pair of networks seen (albeit weak signals) while at the apex of the dunbarton bridge. "Allison South SJ Link 3" (in BSS mode with a Proxim MAC address) and "Allison North SJ Link 2" (same). wigle.net maps this right next to the newark mall, 4-5 miles away!

i picked up a pile of new networks while headed toward mission on decoto, paseo padre, peralta and walnut. one, in particular, cracked me up, having seen reference to it, only days before.

i'll take it apart, again and photograph it. i'll also plug it into a host with a more flexible os, so i can pull the vendor:deviceid pair off it and try to force the prism 54 development driver on it.

this is easily the most useful perl module i've found in recent history: Parallel::ForkManager. doing something in parallel without the overhead of actually writing really multithreaded code is quite cool.

use Parallel::ForkManager;
$pm = new Parallel::ForkManager($MAX_PROCESSES);

foreach $data (@all_data) {
# Forks and returns the pid for the child:
my $pid = $pm->start and next;
work goes here
$pm->finish; # Terminates the child process
}

highly inelegant and hardly clean, but damn this is useful.

there are a few bay area college radio stations that i don't think i could live without.

kfjc is what radio stations should aspire to be. well trained djs with good scope of music knowledge and a free form format. i am a huge supporter of kfjc.

kpfa is good to have around as pacifica reminds me that i'm not all that radical a left-winger.

kzsu is the prototypical college station, complete with 4 hour sets of boston followed by a riot grrrl marathon. i listen often.

i haven't included links to mp3/rm streams, as they tend to move around.

no particular order:

coffee
nicole has instituted a rule in our house. the kids can ask nothing of us until after we've had two cups of coffee. this has helped; note the time of this entry. today celeste asked me to make coffee.

booze
had tapas and drinks at cascal, wednesday. first exposure to mojitos and i'm sold. rum, soda water, sugar (raw), muddled fresh mint, and lime in a highball. the tapas were good, though fairly typical. the service was horrible, though we fell victim to the beer vendors parading through with schwag for the bartender.

i'm swimming in data. i need something that will let me take a stream of data (filehandle on a text file, in this case) and graph it in real-time. i need to be able to spin up a new real-time graph for an arbitrary number of datapoints completely ad hoc. i need scatter graphs and line graphs. i might occationally want a bar graph.

ideas (mostly bad) i've had so far:

• shove the data into a perfmon counter (or 56, in this case) and graph using perfmon.exe
  
• write some nasty module for a cutesy desktop widget like serious samurize. i think this might actually be useful for a hallway/conference room display.
  
• do it in perl with gd
  
• do it in perl/tk (ala the scotty/tkined graphlets)
  

i've decided to do a photo-a-day project. http://gallery.norum.org/pad/

i need to setup a category for blog specific stuff. i installed zempt, thinking i might post more, if the process were somewhat less byzantine. i wonder how much blog content is self-referential?

i also looked (briefly) at greymatter, livejournal, and dasblog. i think i'll probably move to wordpress, after 1.2 is released.

found via google: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&c2coff=1&q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fbengt.norum.org:
Pages of Folks from Technomads
Bengt-Erik Norum, a self-professed computer geek, who lives in Moscow.

more than slightly out of date..

the cut and paste behavior between an rdp cilent on xp and ts on a win2k machine appears to be dependant upon the size of the window. maximized windows share the clients clipboard.

typeperf is useful, except when you are limited by the maximum command line length by cmd.exe.

i know how pagerank works. googleblogtag.

dave said that he was afraid he'd wake up in the middle of the night and post something he'd be embarassed of. what can be more embarassing than:

i'm not sure, but it looks like our spanky new stainless steel range hood may be stuck on the rangehoods.com loading dock. the ups tracking info is less than helpful. sent email tonight and will be calling them tommorow to validate shipment.

bought 802.11 the oreilly wireless book. lots of the acronym's defined, good diagrams, and overall a pretty useful-looking book.

got an almost immediate (7AM, this morning) reply from rangehoods.com claiming that ups lost my hood. i'm trying to decipher 'origin scan' on the ups tracking page. i don't know if this means that they just printed the label or if it was actually billed and printed at a ups location. i would have expected a pickup scan; there isn't one there.

i may have to write a www::screenscraper::ups perl module, if one doesn't exist. (maybe they've published an api?)

CPAN revealed that someone has already created a UPS screen scraper. it is outdated and it appears that the ups license doesn't allow for this type of activity, anymore. shame.

dell flatpanels appear to be really cheap, as refurbs. i may have to spring for a 20.1"

grabbed a demo of newsgator. pretty spanky. it integrates with outlook and turns an arbitrary folder into the base for it's "news" articles. the integration is really tight and it doesn't hog much screen/toolbar real estate. i have not yet played with moveableposter, a newsgator plug-in that allows posting to moveable type blogs, but probably will in the next few days.

i got hit; on the way into work today, i was involved in a car accident.

drove celeste to school on my way to work and took the jetta down mission south from celeste's school to 680 south. after washington, i followed mission (south) down to the 880 onramp. the metering lights were still on, though it was a pretty light traffic day; the backup didn't start until after the overpass.

i had been waiting in the line of ~20 cars for probably about 45 seconds or so when i felt my headrest smack my skull. almost immediately, i smelled smoke and something pungent that i couldn't place. it took me a second to realize that i'd been hit. i opened the drivers side door and the headache started. looking back, i saw the car behind me, a white honda hatchback (accord, maybe, bigger than a civic) and a ford f150 that had smashed into it. i held my head in my hands for about a minute, after i saw that both of the other drivers were out of their cars and standing. my head was throbbing... "oh, that's the pungent smell, radiator fluid."

i got out of the car and walked back on the curb to the area between my car and the honda. i didn't even have a chance to look at the damage to my car before the enormity of the situation caught me by suprise. the honda was about 1/3 to 1/2 smaller than it was before the accident. the truck had radiator fluids gushing out of it and into the "back seat" of the honda and had basically lost everything between bumper and hood. the honda's rear axle was inches behind the driver's seat and clearly busted; the left rear wheel protruded from the car by about 5 inches. there was glass from the rear window of the honda everywhere. both front airbags in the honda had deployed and were still smoking "that's the gunpowder smoke smell! got it."

the driver of the honda commented that he was covered in radiator fluids. it had looked like spilled coffee to me, running from his right shoulder down onto his right knee. he was picking tempered glass out of his hair and clothing. his face looked like he'd been smacked by something big and flat. his left arm had been ripped up by the shoulder belt and blood was soaking into his shirt. i mentioned that he'd slammed his right kneecap into the steering column. based on the way i felt, i was pretty sure this guy's head was killing him. he said that he saw it coming. he'd looked in the rear view mirror and had seen the truck coming at him. i pointed out a couple of pieces of glass he'd missed (in his ear and between his neck and shirt collar. "damn, this guy's lucky he's alive."

i noticed that the bmw 5-series (m5, i think) in front of me had also stopped and the driver was milling about seemingly very concerned about his rear bumper. my front license plate had wrapped around his bumper and the impact had broken the lowest reflectors in his tail lights. he spent a fair amount of time saying things like, "this is going to be expensive" (referring to his car, not the overall incident.) i tried hard to show that i was annoyed with him. he didn't really talk to me other than to say that he thought the truck's insurance would pay for all of our cars' damage. hardly what i was thinking about, at this point.

the driver of the truck just kept walking back and forth between the cab of his truck and the two of us and asking if everything was ok. ("does it look like everything is ok, dumbass?") he was wearing a t-shirt from 'e & b engineering' or somesuch. his truck was equipped with the side toolboxes typical on construction vehicles, but didn't have a company emblem on the doors or hood. trying not to pass judgement, i noted that he was stereotypically blue collar, in every detail i saw.

the rear end of the jetta was pretty messed up. it looks like everything from the back of the rear doors dropped by about 3 inches. the wheel wells are compressed and almost touch the tires. the trunk and rear doors don't close. the bumper is split and moves with hand pressure.

someone had called the chp (driver of the truck, i think) and they showed up after about 15 minutes and talked us through a pretty standard accident routine. they made sure that none of us had broken anything, were seriously bleeding or had head/spinal injuries. the more senior (rank?) of the two cops suggested that we move the cars off to the right side of the road, where the on ramp forks (to gateway blvd and to 880). they ran a traffic break for a couple minutes and had the honda owner climb back into his car, something that he was clearly not eager to do, and "gun it in first... you'll be able to drag the back half of the car" the honda broke free from the ford's bumper remarkably easily. smoke everywhere and horrible horrible metal on asphalt noises almost stopped traffic on 880, while we limped down the shoulder in a freak-show twisted metal convoy. part-way down the ramp, resistance between honda and road became a bit much for the engine and one of the two cop cars pushed for the last 40 feet. the smell of burning rubber and plastic made me gag a little, when i got back out of the jetta.

45 minutes of statements, documentation swapping, and procedural stuff and the bmw and i drove off.

i've had a low-grade headache since.

following my wreck on friday, i'm dealing with insurance. this sucks. with the jetta as the second car, we only carry liabilty insurance. usaa said that i had to deal with the truck's insurance.