LOCUS DEMENTIA

End The IRS

2011-11-17T09:31:00.000-08:00

Before you read this, you need to download the accounting spreadsheet from IRS:

IRS Accounting Spreadsheet

You want to click on the "2010" link as that is the most current data. After you download the XLS file, open it and see the Table 29 "Collections, Costs, Personnel, and U.S. Population, Fiscal Years 1980 - 2010".

For each 5 year span marked in the table:

1980 - 1984:
24% increase in tax
30% increase in IRS cost ($998M)
4% increase in population

1985 - 1989:
27% increase in tax
31% increase in IRS cost ($1.597B)
4% increase in population

1990 - 1994:
17% increase in tax
25% increase in IRS cost ($1.804B)
5% increase in population

1995 - 1999:
28% increase in tax
11% increase in IRS cost ($879M)
5% increase in population

2000 - 2004:
4% decrease in tax
15% increase in IRS cost ($1.497B)
4% increase in population

2005 - 2010:
3% increase in tax
16% increase in IRS cost ($1.955B)
4% increase in population

This information tells us that:

1. We are taxed more and more each year.
2. Our population growth does not match the tax revenue growth.
3. The IRS has continued to be MORE INEFFICIENT in 30 years.
4. The IRS has cost about $400M more each consecutive year since 1985.

IRS 2010 Data Book (big)

The IRS Data Book, link above, shows that in 1997 we have the single largest leap in the number of electronic filings (27% increase). In Table 29, we see a happy time in 1995 to 1996 and 1997 where the cost of the IRS was actually going DOWN, as you would expect in the case of electronic filing.

Then, after 1997, the $400M per year trend returns and continues to spiral out of control to a whopping $12.35B to collect $2.345T in revenue.

Each year, according to the IRS Data Book, the number of electronically filing tax payers is growing, from 11.8 million electronic returns in 1995 to 87.3 million returns in 2007.

From the IRS Data Book, 2010, page 10, Table 4, the total number of electronic filings for individuals was about 67 million out of a total 116 million. Table 3, page 6, gives us the total number of returns, both electronic and paper, filed in the USA in 2010 as 230,408,678. That means about 50% of ALL RETURNS were filed electronically, by a machine, processed by a computer, and assessed electronically.

Why is it that we need 82% MORE MONEY to operate an agency to collect money when nearly half of the job is being done by a computer.

Write to your Congressional Representative and Senator, then send email to the President (president@whitehouse.gov). Demand to reduce the IRS to an operating level that is en par with its real cost of doing business.

Money, College, and High School Sports

2011-10-26T21:36:00.000-07:00

I have a daughter who is a freshman at George Washington University. She has been in school for about 59 days now. For the last two weeks, we have gotten several appeals for more money on her "GWorld" spending card so that she can "eat."

When she started school, her GWorld was funded with $1,000 and her Dining Dollars account was given $700. That's $1,700 to spend on food and sundries. After 59 days of school, and an infusion of $200, she is down to about $300 overall.

We are able to get the transaction breakdown of her spending, which allowed me to come up with some metrics.

Being female, she needs makeup and other girl things from a pharmacy store like CVS. To that, she spent $438, or roughly $7.42 per day.

Being a hungry college kid, she spends most of her food money on carbohydrates and fast food from 7-11. To that, she has spent $745 or roughly $12.63 per day. Recently she discovered the magical elixer of caffeine, which comes in nifty packaging from Starbucks.

$12.63 is pretty high for food. You can get the NutriSystem delivered to your door for 28 days for just $8.33 per day [1]. You could eat relatively good frozen dinners (college kids do have Microwave ovens) for $3.50 each [2], or about $10.50 per day.

This is her first experience with being entirely on her own. During the summer she had a job and was paid a good amount of money, probaby about $2,000. Nearly all of that was spent by the end of summer, 43% of which was spent on fast food from Wendys, Jack In The Box, and other restaurants.

To what do we owe this apparently lack of feduciary responsibility? Of all things, I blame High School sports. My daughter was an athletics student and spent most of her non-school time engaged in sports. As a result of such an experience, she never had to be responsible with money because her parents were always there to "do it for me." As she did more sports, more so did the athletics programs encourage her to continue along this path, thus perpetuating the athlete cycle.

I could blame me, her parent, but I've lectured her so many times on being more responsible with money. In the end, when it comes to money, only life experience can teach us how to manage it better. Maybe $12.63 per day for food isn't so bad, just a little on the rich side, but not so bad given the location of her school.

[1] NutriSystem Pricing

[2] Vons - Hc Naturally Gourmet Light Pumpkin Squash Ravioli - 9.2 Oz - $3.29

Where is your $46,376 bailout?

2011-10-12T08:48:00.000-07:00

The US GAO (Government Accounting Office) has published its audit of the federal reserve:

Audit in PDF | Synopsis of Audit

The audit shows the Federal Reserve Bank issuing $16 TRILLION in debt to banks and corporations around the world. Who authorized this release of US capital? The Federal Reserve Bank chairmen, such as Ben Bernanke.

For the 340 Million happy citizens of the US, that $16 Trillion is about $46,376 for every citizens of the US. Remember back in the Bush Presidency where we all got a little check for $800, or $1200, or something like that as our "incentive" to go invigorate the economy? That little amount seems more like a slap in the face now. With $16T of cash, the US could have paid all of its debts and gotta China off of our back.

Instead we continue to print paper with little regard to the consequences because the people in charge of said currency are not governed. We, the people of the United States, should be in charge of where our money is lent. That means our congress, the elected officials that we all lament at times, should be overseeing these Federal Reserve Bank people. Yet, they are not?

Write to your congress-person and demand that congressional oversight be implemented on the Federal Reserve Bank. Then demand some form of justice. Ben Bernanke and his cronies should be indicted for fraud and larceny.

Don't forget the capstone of this failure - our President who wants to raise all of our taxes because we can't afford to bailout our own senior citizens and their failing Social Security accounts. Imagine a $16T infusion of capital into Social Security? I think the AARP political machine should get on that right away.

Amanda Tape Description for Gateway 823

2011-05-25T14:59:00.000-07:00

This is the configuration description for a Gateway 823 autoloader (LTO-3 8-tape loader):

define tapetype GW823 {

comment "Gateway 823 LTO3 Tape Autoloader"
length 447129 mbytes
filemark 6342 kbytes
speed 38069 kps

}

This was generated using the amanda configuration utility against the loader and having the loader attached to an HP DL180 G6 with an LSI LVD SCSI card.

TSQL SmallDateTime vs DateTime

2011-01-27T16:14:00.000-08:00

Today I noticed an odd little quirk about TSQL (Microsoft SQL) and SQL Server. If you have a smalldatetime, you only record date + hours + minutes. To get seconds, millis, and such, you need the full datetime.

Well, if you are using "getdate()" to compare against the smalldatetime, then know that smalldatetime rounds the seconds UP to the next minute. The smalldatetime on 12:36:24.00 is actually 12:37:00.00.

This caught me today in a query where I was doing a select looking for a record that occured after the last insertion time (smalldatetime) using "getdate()". That was always returning empty because the getdate() to smalldatetime conversion was giving me a date that was in the future thanks to the round-up behavior.

To work around it, I had to convert(smalldatetime,getdate()) and then compare against my smalldatetime values.

If you are inserting records with smalldatetime and using getdate() as the smalldatetime value, then those records will be recorded up to 1 minute into the future. Be wary.

How To Cancel ATT Uverse

2011-01-27T16:02:00.000-08:00

I was a subscriber to the AT&T Uverse service for a little over 2 years. In that time, we had experienced good service for the first year, and then it sucked. After 12 months, or there in, the service degraded quickly, and would stop working all together at times. At first it would die for a short period of time, usually when we were not home. Then it would get progressively worst, until there was an entire week of no service. We had technicians at the house trying to fix the service, but it would repeat the behavior quite consistently.

On January 15th we finally gave up and switched to a lesser service, COX TV and Internet. In the past we had cable service and it was always reliable, but not as good as the AT&T digital service. COX doesn't have nearly as many HD channels, but that's not enough. We needed internet to be reliable, and AT&T couldn't deliver that.

Cancelling the AT&T service was a nightmare. Try to find anything about such things on their web site only left you with a number to their automated menu system. If you answered "Cancel Service" to the computer, it directed you to a number that was for an office that was always "closed", and then it would hang up.

I had to get on a chat session with tech support, complain about the bad number that she gave me (same as the IVR number for support), and then was transferred to a customer service chat, who responded to my lamentation with:

Sorry to know that. You have to call our disconnection department to cancel your U-verse service. You may reach them at 877-377-0415, between 8am-7pm, Mondays-Fridays.

Note that number because that's the number you call if you want to disconnect your service. The time is CENTRAL TIME in the US (not local time as the AT&T web site claims for other numbers). Once I called that number, I got a no-nonsense CSR who was quick and to the point.

Our house is new construction in an area where the AT&T fibre node was literally just a couple blocks away. The DVR device from AT&T is very slow and would often times just lock up on us while trying to move through the channel line up.

AT&T DVRs can record up to 4 shows at once AND allow you to watch live TV. The COX DVR can only record 2 shows and when at 2 shows, you can not watch live TV. The AT&T technology is superior to COX, but the delivery of the service is horribly inept. The service techs are great and very knowledgeable, but in the end, you just can't polish a tird.

COX by far has been the lowest of the three TV services we've tried (AT&T and Time Warner before). I find myself watching 480p TV now, whereas with AT&T I never watched those channels. The COX DVR is only 1080i, even with HDMI. The AT&T DVR was 1080p.

On OS/400 and IBM

2010-11-25T20:11:00.000-08:00

For the past 12 months, I've had the liberty of working closely with IBM hardware and software. Specifically, I work on iOS, or once known as OS/400, or now as System i.

When you first purchase your System i machine, you are left with a sense of confusion and emptiness. There are no resources for you to leverage on the web, and the IBM information site (boulder) just gives you information from versions of System i that are not relevant to your project.

You may find some on-line resources and a wiki or two about setting up a System i machine. I found some too but left them aside early on as I found the people who maintain these resources are bitter and vengeful and often times prone to public humiliation and slander. Never in my long 25+ years of programming experience have I ever encountered a more beligerent and sophomoric group of people as are the System i administrators of the web.

Once you disable the QSECOFR account for the first time after typing in the wrong password 3 times, and then subsequently have to reset it back to default using the push button console interface, you will learn why these administrators are so bitter and vengeful. The technology is antiquated and stuck in a bygone era of legacy support.

After getting access to the iOS interface using the operations console, you are left wondering why anyone would ever want to use this system. It is menu driven, not unlike an undergraduate exercise in curses and command line processing. Further, the base feature set of OS/400 is marginal when compared to something like Windows.

Here is a matrix of the comparison between Windows and OS/400:

Windows	OS/400
Task scheduler able to schedule tasks in any configuration for any periodicity. You can schedule a task on a specific day of the month, weekly, every 2 weeks, daily, hourly, etc. Task scheduler also allows you to kill jobs that go too long and to only run a job when the system is not in use.	The base job scheduler allows you to schedule jobs weekly, daily, or hourly, or at the end or the beginning of the month. No other features are provided to control when the job runs according to resource allocation or job run length. If you want that, you need to purchase the Advanced Job Schedule (AJS), which is thousands of dollars ($1750 for V6R1 on a P05 tier).

Performance Monitor allows you to monitor nearly every and any aspect of a process and its function. You can monitor it in real time, or you can journal it for later playback and analysis.	Performance Tools is an add-on for $750 at P05 which allows you to get a menu in the emulator. This will give you a detail breakdown of jobs and their tasks and tell you page faults, cpu usage, memory usage, etc. For an additional fee, you can have the iSeries push that data to an IBM web management web site for reporting on a quarterly basis.

Server Backup is part of the system and it allows you to do some basic backup operations. The new Server Backup in Windows 2008 is somewhat unwieldly for the enterprise version because it requires a dedicated volume for the backup. That makes doing backups a little frustrating unless you have a TB class USB hard drive handy.	GO SAVE is the only backup solution in the base OS/400 distro. This allows you to backup the entire system and reboot it. Yes, you have to reboot the machine after a full system save, otherwise it can't do the full save. Now, it saves the bios and microcode and the OS all in one, so that's different than the windows backup, but it is not cool. Having to reboot a system that takes at least two or more minutes to become interactive is not cool at all. You can purchase BRMS as an add-on, much like you would purchse BackupExec for Windows. BRMS is no less pricey than BackupExec, and it can do some good stuff, like backup user data, system data, or the full system, and even save files while they are active. But for nearly $2400 extra, it's a hard sell, but is better than doing nightly reboots.
Database is not included in the Windows Enterprise edition, which is the only comparable operating system to OS/400. To get a database solution, you would need to purchase Microsoft SQL Server, and that would cost you at least $5000.	DB2 is part of OS/400 and has extension features that can be enabled as part of the OS/400 installation. The cost for these extensions is small, usually less than $2000 for everything. This is one place where IBM outshines Microsoft. If you try to get DB2 for your Windows box, then you'll need to mortgage all of the houses on your block.
Web/Network servers are part of the OS. IIS does the web handling and handles the ftp services.	All of the core web and network services common to Unix systems are part of OS/400. New versions of OS/400, e.g. V6R1, have apache built into the system and have PHP enabled. You may not be able to do any ASP.NET on your System i, but you can do everything else, including Java. IBM was the first company to ever have a core Java compiler that compiled bytecodes to silicon. This same technology (Jikes) is a core part of OS/400.
Security is a no-op today. Windows logs security events by default and has a strict if not cumbersome security model to restrict object level access for users. The one failure of the Windows security model is the person who uses the box. The same is said of OS/400.	SE-Linux was inspired by the OS/400. NSA gave us SE-linux because it was phasing out the OS/400 systems in lieu of the less-expensive Linux variants with SE-linux enabled (and in strict mode). OS/400 security is the inspiration for all operating systems that do multi-level security control.
Viruses/Malware are pervasive on Windows machines running on Intel or AMD hardware. This is just a happenstance of the popularity and commodity pricing of the platform. There is an army of developers working on security and virus/malware prevention.	There has never been an OS/400 virus in its history. People who write viruses and malware can not afford a $22,000 System i machine. It just is a matter of economics that has kept the OS/400 market safe from viruses. If System i was commodity priced, then you would see many viruses and malware/trojans available.

Why would you choose OS/400 and System i over a Windows machine? When you want to create a database application that encapsulates all of the logic of the program into the database. If you do choose that route, then your resources are limited, but your direct IBM software support is outstanding.

What you will find, though, is that the IBM Business Partner network is fractured, confusing, and misleading. I've encountered so called BPs who claims to be Premier Business Partners but who are really just member business partners.

Remember, that if you are buying System i, make sure your BP is authorized to sell System i. All of them will claim to sell it to you and just have some other System i reseller do the quote and they just drop-ship to you. Call IBM sales first before engaging any IBM Business Partner. Once you engage the BP, IBM is not allowed to advise on pricing or anything else about the quote you are working.

It's a racket.

Linux Data Recovery

2010-05-01T14:50:00.000-07:00

Recently I had a RAID5 array crash on me. The array was composed of 3 Western Digital 250GB disks controlled by a 3Ware 9550SX card. This array had been in continuous operation for nearly 4 years. Yet, about 12 days ago one of the drives appeared to have crashed. As luck would have it, though, the PSU was also failing in this box, so the +5V line stopped working and took another drive offline. That was the end of the array.

3Ware/LSI was a great help. They created a custom application that was able to recover the original RAID header information. After attaching a new PSU to the box, 2 of 3 drives were online and the LSI tool made the array online too (but degraded).

That was zero day and I was still hopeful. I downloaded R-Tools linux recovery application and created a rescue CD. Stuck the CDROM into the failed system and started the recovery process. After about 4 days, R-Tools consumed the entirety of a 500GB disk that I had attached to the system and it was not done. So I gave up on R-Tools and tried Disk Patch, but that couldn't even recognize the drive array (no driver for the 3ware card). Then I found a forensic tool from Italy called CAINE. CAINE had Test Disk built into its operation environment, which was able to recognize the partition information on the LVM volumes and was able to rewrite it successfully. But still, nothing could mount the file system.

So I downloaded Phoenix Linux Recovery. It has a fun interface and looks nice and pretty, but it did not discover any of the LVM volumes. I tried their quick scan and their deep scan. It wasn't until a couple days of support interaction that I was told it does not support LVM volumes.

I went back to R-Tools and gave it a regular expression to match on the file names that I needed. Of the 300MB of files that were all named using the same method (32-character hash code), it found 1. That scan tool another 3 days.

Nearly at the point of giving up, I installed CentOS 5 on that 500GB spare drive, attached it to the motherboard, and changed the bios to give it boot priority (higher up on the boot device list, above the 3Ware card). With CentOS installed, i was able to run LVM and get the list of volumes on the drive array and see that its partition information was intact. So I ran e2fsck with the "-y" option on the array's volume and waited. Then I ran e2fsck about 4 more times before it finally was done fixing bad inode references and such.

Now I was able to mount the root file system, but all of the files were in "lost+found." So I did a "du" on the directory to see where I was at and spotted my original directory structure during the du process output. Control-C, change du to a du with a pipe through grep, and I found my files! Then tar, gzip, and scp, and the files were safely tucked away on more secure hardware.

I paid probably $700 for the various software products that all failed to anything useful. The two tools that worked for me were CAINE and e2fsck, both of which are FREE. Quotes from Kroll-OnTrack had the recovery cost between $3000 and $10,000. Every service wanted an upfront $300 fee to diagnose the RAID array.

Using LVM to partition your array makes future recovery from a crash more difficult. Make sure that you attach the crashed array to a new install of your original OS type and try to discover the extent of your damage. e2fsck can run in non-volatile mode, which means it will report the errors on your volume, but will not make any changes. In the end, using the "-y" option will allow you to sit back and watch the magic.

More Climate Misconceptions

2009-12-16T13:10:00.001-08:00

I was reading the New Scientist today and found an article about the Global Warming/Climate Change debate that is raging today.

Page 2 of this article (Deniergate: Turning the tables on climate sceptics) makes a statement that is, well, sophomoric:

"The UK Met Office this week published data showing that the first decade of the 2000s has been the warmest on record."

A very long time ago, this planet was covered in ice and snow. Slowly, this global "ice age" receded and has gradually given rise to the modern world of today (2009). Yet, there are still large ice sheets on the planet (the Arctic and Antarctic Poles) that are continuing to melt.

For these large sheets of ice to melt, the average atmospheric temperature of the planet must increase. Without that increase, we would still have more ice and snow, and likely no humans and fancy fast cars. Therefore, it goes without saying that the Plant's average temperature is increasing, and it HAS been increasing for a very very very long time. We are all glad it has, because I could not write this critique without it being a balmy 75 degrees Farenheit outside today.

Imagine for a moment if you lived your entire life in a moving car. As a child, you never noticed that it was moving fast, so you just lived your life happy, playing with your toys. Then one day, self awareness started, and you noticed your surroundings moving fast. Bumps would jostle your body and your head would bounce about like a balloon. Now you're a little older, and the car is still going the same speed, but you care a little more about yourself. You realize "hey, we're moving fast, we better slow down," much to the dismay of the older and wiser operators of the car.

Humans, today, are in this point of reference. We are seeing now that the planet is warm, warmer than it was a thousand years ago. Yet we have eaten billions of fish and shat billions of tons of waste in those thousand years too. Are we drowning in our waste? Are there still fish in the Oceans? Yes, and no, mostly.

Anyone who claims to have any clear answers about "Global Climate Change" today is nothing more than a fool. We've only managed to monitor climate on this plant for a few hundred years (with any respectable accuracy). That's just a passing fart in the nearly 5 BILLION years of this planet's life. Yet, there are a bunch of misguided people at this Copenhagen Summit, causing "constructive violence" in protest of climate control policies and "elitism."

I had a chat once with one of those misguided "eco-terrorist" types. She had some very misinformed ideas about farm subsidies, government involvement in crop rotations, and trade negotiations. These people are given a little information and told to "fight the good fight," in the name of human preservation. They rarely research on their own, and seek out self-fulfilling half-truths to further their agendas.

There isn't any "Climate Crisis" yet. This planet is going through its own natural climate changes that it has experienced consistently in its lifetime. We are at the final stage of the current global warming trend (Heleocene) and will be entering into a global ice age soon (5,000 to 10,000 years).

Humans will no longer be on this planet in 5,000 years though. Our adolescent view of the world is ending and, like all adolescents, we must grow up and leave the comforts of our nests. The time, effort, and money that we waste on this "Global Climate" debate can be better served solving real social issues on this planet.

Children are murdered and raped every day on this planet, and yet we are spending billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of hours worrying about what will happen on this planet in 100, 200, 500 years? We have giant ice bergs of fresh water floating in our oceans, and yet we need to build desalination facilities to extract fresh water from our coastal waters?

The absurdity of this debate and our times makes me think that Monty Python is behind this global comedy. Are we living the Flying Circus?

Crash Crash Crash

2009-10-19T13:38:00.000-07:00

So I bought a new XFX X58i motherboard and a nifty Intel Core i7 CPU to go with it. It was time to upgrade my Core 2 Quad system to a faster Core i7 system and get more RAM. I had Windows XP Pro 64bit and it was finally starting to run slow after a good 2 years of processing and programming.

Friday came and I pulled apart my system and installed the new motherboard. Turned it on and ... nothing. No beeps, no POST, nothing. Worst yet, my 3ware card did not show the bios.

So I pulled out the new stuff and returned the old stuff. Turned it on.

Got past the POST and the Marvel embedded RAID controller BIOS and then again, no 3ware bios. Well, that really stinks because the 3ware card controls my RAID-1 array that contains my system data.

I called 3ware who insisted that I just RMA the 8006-2LP and get a replacement. When I talked to the tech support person, she stated that it was not possible to hook the drives up to a new 3ware card because the "old" 8006-2LP (pre-9000 series) locks the drives. Not only was I stuck with RMA'ing the card, but I had no other recourse but to wait for the RMA process to finish to recover my hard drive with all of my data on it.

Then Monday came, and Zen had taken root. I had absolved myself to waiting until Wednesday to get my data off one of the drives. I took the slave RAID member and installed Windows 7 on it (clean install). That was a smart move, as now the drives and the system is super fast again. That makes me think the 3ware card was failing long before this day.

I found a software program - Data Recovery Wizard (www.easeus.com) - for $89 that appeared to be able to pull the data off the RAID-1 member. So I did exactly that - I pulled data off that drive and after several hours (150GB of data to recover), I had the most important aspects of my old system - the Outlook PST file and some development files that I did not have under source control.

Will I buy a 3ware card again? Probably not. Now that 3ware is LSI, though, they may have finally decided to add some compatibility to their cards. It was clearly short sighted of them to not allow future compatibility with their hardware RAID cards.

3ware did offer to send me a new 8006-2LP overnight on Monday for $49. The cost of overnighting my old 8006-2LP to Huntsville? $46. It's all a wash. I won't be using the new 8006-2LP in any system, though.

XFX board - crash. Never again. Why I experiment with non-Intel motherboard vendors, I don't know. EVGA and XFX get my Big Turkey rating when it comes to hardware. They're about as reliable as Dell. BFG gets my Lame Duck rating because they refused to honor my rebate check and cost me $20!

3ware Cards - can't say that I am happy there, but I do know that they are reliable cards. Only purchase new cards in the 95xx or newer range.

I've never had a problem like this with my HP/Compaq hardware. We sure do need another premium hardware vendor like Compaq.

Niche Taxes

2009-10-05T12:02:00.000-07:00

In the USA, it would seem that lots of writers, commentators, screen writers, and pundits are obsessed with fat or obese people. One commentator on CNN [1] writes about using a tax to control obesity.

In California, we already have a Fat Tax, it's in the form of a tax on fast foods and sugary junk foods. Yet, there are fat people in California, and most of the people who are eating at McDonalds, Wendy's, Jack, and In-N-Out are all thin or acceptably sized.

Forbes ran an article in September of 2009 discussing how a fat tax could be some kind of reformist ideology. The Forbes article mostly is concerned with raising billions of dollars to help pay for some kind of unforseen increase in socialized healthcare. It also claims that by 2015, 40% of Americans will be obese.

Seriously, how can anyone publish this stuff?

There are some level headed people out there who have some good things to say [2] in the Center for Consumer Freedom's Who Wants A Fat Tax article. There, a reference was made to a CSPI article [3] that pretty much sums up a simple position, yet not in so many words: Tax Food.

Oh wait, a general food tax? What states in the US have a general food tax? There is a comprehensive list [4] that has the food tax amount by state, as of January of 2008. That's pretty interesting. Most states do not charge any food sales taxes, and some not any sales tax.

Let's pick on Tennessee. They have a food sales tax 5.5%, and the average BMI according to the Tennessee On The Move survey: [5]

"According to the Tennessee on the Move study, the average Tennessean is overweight and nearly obese, with an average BMI score of 29.2."

Well, if this panacea Fat Tax was doing its job, then you would think that Tennesseeans would be thin and healthy. The average Tennesseean is pretty happy, though. They gave us Jack Daniels Whiskey, Elvis Presley, and FedEx Overnight Delivery.

The highest food tax rate is Mississippi, at 7%. Some data from NIH [6] suggests that in 2003, the mean BMI was 27.7, which is pretty darn high for a state with the highest food tax rate.

I could not find a comprehensive comparison of food tax rate as it relates to BMI, normalized by average salary. The BMI distribution of the typical human being is highly correlated with wage earnings (inversely apparently, according to one study regarding Food Stamp usage), and social setting. Apparently fat people beget more fat people, yet I don't believe it.

In 1998, the NIH changed the definition of "fat" to be a measure of BMI [7]. According to that change, a person with a BMI of 26 or higher is considered overweight, and at 31 they are obese.

I am apparently obese, and a fat tax would do nothing to my consumption habits. A fat tax would definitly put many people out of work, though, including an army of adolescents who sharpen their job skills while flipping burgers and asking "Do you want fries with that?" Kids without jobs leads to kids with idle hands. If you want to keep kids out of trouble, make them work, right?

I say that we need a stupid tax. People with an IQ that is over 125 should pay significantly less taxes than those with an IQ of 98. Those with 145 and above should be tax-free! Smarter people make the world easier and more fun. We also need a criminal tax, so that federal criminals on parole pay double taxes to pay back their incarceration costs and any future cost of policing them with parole agents and bounty hunters.

Let fat people be fat if they want to. If we don't, then what's next? Vulgar language tax? I don't like hearing vulgar language in public, so why not? How about vulgar dress tax? I see lots of poorly clothed teenagers and adults on the street, so maybe they should be taxed too?

Where do we stop with the over-taxing of our people. It's no wonder we have so many poor people. If we keep taxing them, what else do they have to do but eat more snickers and watch the fabricated world of TV, because they certainly can't afford to visit Disney Land when all of their money is being paid back to the government. A government that is itself obese with regulations!

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/10/05/ruiz.obesity.tax/index.html
[2] http://www.consumerfreedom.com/news_detail.cfm/headline/2336
[3] http://www.consumerfreedom.com/news_detail.cfm/headline/1412
[4] http://www.taxadmin.org/FTA/rate/sales.html
[5] http://www.utmedicalcenter.org/news/Women+and+Heart+Disease/1828.html
[6] http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1636707
[7] http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9806/17/weight.guidelines/

Additional Reading:

[*] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/foodanddrinknews/6169880/Fat-tax-to-hit-McDonalds-in-Essex.html
[*] http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/whos-ready-for-a-fat-tax/

IPTABLES and M4

2009-08-18T09:31:00.000-07:00

I manage high traffic web servers that are constantly under attack. To manage the security of these web servers, I need to routinely update my iptables rules, and by routinely, I mean every morning when I roll into the office.

When I searched for a solution that allowed me to dynamically define my rules with a merge option, nothing come to the forefront. There are some miscellaneous posts about using PERL and cat, but nothing really useful.

Then I remember M4. If you don't know about M4, then you should man it.

Here's what you do.

iptables.m4:


---- start ----

# Firewall configuration written by 
# system-config-securitylevel
# Manual customization of this file is not
# recommended.
*filter
:INPUT ACCEPT [0:0]
:FORWARD ACCEPT [0:0]
:OUTPUT ACCEPT [0:0]
:RH-Firewall-1-INPUT - [0:0]
-A INPUT -j RH-Firewall-1-INPUT
-A FORWARD -j RH-Firewall-1-INPUT
include(/root/iptables/iptables_special)
include(/root/iptables/iptables_reject)
include(/root/iptables/iptables_accept)
#
# The final rule that rejects everything 
# that does not match
# the other explicit rules
#
-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
COMMIT

----- end -----

This is the driver for the m4 process. When you want to create the iptables file, you just run:

m4 iptables.m4 > iptables

Here is a nifty script that does it all:


---- start ----

rm -f iptables
cp -f /etc/sysconfig/iptables iptables_back_`date +%Y%m%d`
m4 iptables.m4 > iptables
cp -f iptables /etc/sysconfig/
/etc/rc.d/init.d/iptables restart

---- end ----

This script will create a backup file for you so you don't clobber your current config with a bad m4 parse.

Just save that script into something like "update.x" and chmod +x on it. Then you can update components of your iptables rule file much more easily.

Quick and easy solution. No perl junk, no expensive security management software, nothing but runtime macro substitution with M4.

Rookie Mistake

2009-08-17T21:17:00.000-07:00

I've been fighting with an ASP.NET 1 conversion to ASP.NET 2 where for some unknown reason, the Global.asax code is no longer being run. No matter what I do, including making a Global class or even embedding the code into the asax file, the Application_Start is not being invoked when the app starts. No matter though.

What I am embarassed about though is a simple mistake:


public class Foo
{
      private static Foo _Instance = new Foo();
      private static KEY = null;

      private Foo()
      {
         KEY = ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings["MyKeyValue"];
      }

      public static Foo Instance() { return(_Instance); }
}

Guess what value "Foo.KEY" has after you call Foo.Instance? Eight hours later, I finally realized why KEY is always null and the real fix is just to do the following:


public class Foo
{
      private static KEY = null;
      private static Foo _Instance = new Foo();

      private Foo()
      {
         KEY = ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings["MyKeyValue"];
      }

      public static Foo Instance() { return(_Instance); }
}

When Foo.Instance is called, the Foo static instance was being created, and the ctor was being invoked which set the value of KEY. Then the next initialization occured where the KEY = null statement was executed, and thus the KEY value was clobbered back to null.

Rookie.

Covert Communications

2009-08-10T15:28:00.001-07:00

A recent experience with intermittent network failure started me thinking about how I could read data from a server without the NOC knowing about it. I could do this with a virus that replaces "netstat" and "syslog" and "ps" so that it never shows itself running. That's just too simple and blunt, a child could do that. No, what I wanted to do is create a method that goes undetected because it looks like a common attack that is easily thwarted and often ignored.

First, there is the ICMP ping relay attack. One way to communicate with a 3rd party covertly is to send ping packets to a server and spoof the source IP so that they are bounced to the 3rd party by the server. This way you never directly communicate with the 3rd party.

Secondly, you need to take advantage of subliminal channels [1] in network protocols. This is the super-secret spy stuff that makes this idea a reality. By utilizing a subliminal channel, I am able to send secret messages to the 3rd party, and have the message go undetected.

So now I have established a covert method of communication that can be exploited to communicate securely using some novel security methods. You can expect to make use of about 64 [2] bytes of data in the subliminal channel. You could get away with any size of data, but very large payloads would be conspicuous, so we need to limit the size of our covert channel.

The next step requires compromising the host computer. We want to subvert the NIC driver so that it handles the special ICMP packets that we are relaying through the server. The NIC driver is a special case because we can write relatively innocuous code in there that will run in kernel mode and gain access to the internal memory image. Network cards all take advantage of DMA (direct memory access), which gives them privileged access to the RAM state of the OS. A specially crafted ICMP packet would trigger our covert driver code and begin the process of relaying the RAM image of the compromised computer to a 3rd party.

For our sake, the ICMP packet is 92 bytes total. On a 1.5 Mbps channel, we can push 655360 bytes of data per second, or 7123 packets per second max. That gives us 455872 bytes of covert data per second. To image a full 1GB of RAM we have to transmit packets for 2355 seconds. Since we have to push packets to the server first, our throughput is halved, so we need 4710 seconds, or 1 hour and 18 minutes. On a 10 Mbps network, you can do the imaging in about 11 minutes. If you compromised the LAN and it was 1 Gbps, then you could image the server in 6.7 seconds.

By imaging the RAM space of the server, you could quickly gain access to passwords that have been decrypted or kept in memory. If you compromised a secure server, then you could gain access to decrypted intelligence. The vulnerability is nearly limitless because in the RAM space of the hardware, the data must be decrypted so that it is usable by the human user.

To make the exploit "real time" the imaging process would have to run in at least 1 second. To do that, a 10 Gbps network connection would be required for every 1 GB of RAM. Another approach to "real time" imaging is to use selective searching of the RAM image. The compromised NIC driver could actively search the RAM space during idle time to look for keywords that identify passwords, key intelligence information, or other opportunistic information. Once the key address spaces are known, quick imaging can ensue. Most kernel memory management do not move around data often, so tracking the location of the key data become relatively trivial.

Counterfeiting the network drivers would be trivial. The network driver engineer would only have to insert their code in the driver code and release it to the bundled disc for deployment. Once in the code base, it would be in the download as well, and would quickly disseminate to the production world. Since there would not be any way to detect such a compromise, it could easily go undetected until a thorough review of the network driver source was performed.

An open-source network driver would likely not be more secure. It was my experience that the open-source community respects the ownership of driver source and often leaves maintenance and review in the hands of the author. Hardware drivers are implicitly complex and hard to debug, and so any non-expert device driver engineer would have nearly zero chance of detecting any anomalous code.

[1] http://www.springerlink.com/content/qu26013256884354
[2] http://www.iv2-technologies.com/CovertChannels.pdf, pg 7.

Additional reading

http://archives.ece.iastate.edu/archive/00000154/01/mcpthesis.pdf
http://www.gray-world.net/cn/papers/acs2003-hiccups.pdf
http://www.nersc.gov/~scottc/papers/ICMP_Backdoor_Detection.html
http://www.s0ftpj.org/docs/covert_shells.htm
http://www.sans.org/resources/idfaq/traffic.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping

TYPE 1 DIABETES DILEMMA

2009-04-15T12:40:00.000-07:00

Stem cells are abound in medical research. Today I read an article on CNN [1] that claims blood stem cell transplantation gets Type-I diabetics off of insulin. I suppose that is good news for the countless young kids who are dealt this death sentence.

Yet, there is something more to this disease. This year, 2009, has found several research papers on the study of viral activity and Type-I diabetes [2], [3], [4], [5]. This makes me question whether or not any transfusion, transplantation, or any other replacement therapy has any merit for Type-I diabetes. No matter what you replace in the patient's body, the virus will continue to infect the new material, and the disease will continue to manifest.

What we really need to see isn't more snake-oil stem cell therapy that is costly and inconsequential, but rather real medical trials using virus-targeting therapies that are localized to the infected pancreas. These kids are doomed to an early death with this disease, and if it can be cured, and not just treated, with anti-viral medications, then why not start aggressive treatment trials?

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/15/stem.cells.diabetes/index.html
[2] http://www.childrenwithdiabetes.com/d_0n_120.htm
[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11919574
[4] http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118782400/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
[5] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090305141639.htm
[6] http://diabetes.diabetesjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/55/4/996

Oh The Pain

2009-01-02T14:23:00.000-08:00

I seem to be the poster child for failed hardware. Today, my Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-112D decided to stop writing discs. From what I can tell, though, this has been going on since the day I installed this disc drive.

Pioneer admitted in 2007, just prior to my purchase of the drive, that there are some manufacturing problems with the drive. They shipped the drive because they "did not feel that a use-case existed in which the error would manifest." Well, apparently that was wrong because many a person has experienced problems with these drives.

For the last year, I've noticed that my Windows XP 64-bit has been experiencing random halts that would last for about 5 seconds. During that time, I would grumble and refine my repertoire of colorful expletives.

Today, after installing a SONY DRU-842A as a replacement, I noticed the random halting was gone. The startup time for Windows was back to its super-fast normal self. With the Pioneer in there, sometimes the Windows boot would just pause for about 15 seconds, or longer, before the splash screen, and then resume. With the SONY, it was super-fast again.

Reviewing the Windows EventViewer, I see that the Pioneer cdrom reported "An error was detected on device \Device\CdRom0 during a paging operation." I suppose that would be the first indication that something was awry with the drive. In the EventViewer, though, that is only a warning. The real error that I saw recently was "The device, \Device\CdRom0, has a bad block." That error is a real indication of death for the Pioneer CD drive.

So far I've replaced my CDROM, my motherboard, and my video card. I have a 22 inch Hanns-G HG216 waiting for install as soon as I get some screws that properly seat it into my Neo-Flex bracket. What's next? I suppose there will be a hard drive failure soon, but that's expected, so I run RAID-5 with Western Digital hard drives and a 3Ware controller.

Crazy Parallel Madness

2008-12-30T12:07:00.000-08:00

This was originally sent to me from a friend who works on massively parallel medical imaging software:

I thought I'd take a little time out of my day to rail, once again, against the incompetency of those [software developers at Microsoft]. Consider the following innocent looking bit of code:

  #include <omp.h>
  #include <vector>

  int main(int argc, char* argv[])
  {
    #pragma omp parallel
    {
      std::vector<int> A(1024 * 1024);
    }
  }

For the OpenMP-uneducated, the inner code block will be executed
in parallel by one thread per CPU on your system. In my case that is 8 threads (dual quad-core). If you run this bit of code in VTune and look at which black hole your clock-cycles disappear down, you'll find an unusually large number of them being gobbled up by "ntoskrnl.exe". And, if you dive down into this file, you'll find that a good portion of those cycles are attributable to a kernel function named ExfAcquirePushLockExclusive().

What happens in the above code segment? Eight threads are created, each running on a separate core. All eight proceed to allocate and then zero-fill 4MB worth of memory. The zero-fill occurs in this case because std::vector always initializes its contents. Because Microsoft writes their software for the [average consumer] who are loath to spend the $25 it would take to outfit their system with more than 256 MB of RAM, the NT kernel conveniently doesn't assign you any physical memory when you allocate the 4MB array. Instead it waits until you actually write to a page in that array. Our code segment, then, is actually eight threads executing:

  Allocate 4MB
  Loop from 1 to 1024
      Page fault resulting in the allocation of one page (4KB) of physical memory
      Write 1024 zeroes to that page

The coup de gras is that those [Microsoft developers] decided it would be just fine if each page fault required the locking of some sort of internal kernel structure that is shared between all the cores. Don't know exactly what because the details of the kernel are, of course, hidden from my prying eyes. But I do know the end result - massive lock contention and performance that sucks ass.

Now the above example is obviously contrived. But Bill spent a substantial bit of time in November digging into why, when optimizing the 3D volume loading/decompression of our software, he kept seeing a good 30% of the CPU cycles swallowed up by this particular black hole. So this particular issue is not simply academic. I'm writing about it now because one of my colleagues just ran into a slightly different manifestation of exactly the same problem. His trials have freshly aggravated my own wound.

This solution, while simple in execution, is insane in its necessity. Whenever I have a significantly sized data structure, or data structures, which is to be filled rapidly by multiple concurrent threads, I must, after allocation, perform what I've coined a "page touching" operation on it. This is exactly what the name implies… I have a single thread march over the entire extent of the memory, at page-sized intervals, and write a single zero value into each page. After the page touching, my parallel algorithm can proceed to fill the data structure without the performance loss that results from the lock contention.

BFG TECHNOLOGIES SUCKS

2008-12-08T14:29:00.000-08:00

I bought a BFG Technologies video card (GeForce 9800 GX2) which had an $80 rebate attached to it. So I sent in all of the required items, including the proof of purchase which mutilated my retail box.

Surprisingly, I received the rebate check numbered 16605458 drawn from Stearns Bank of Scottsdale, Arizona, USA, and deposited it. Much to my further surprise, the check was returned to me with a stop payment order! The void date on the check is 01/26/2009, and I deposited the check in November 2008.

Not only did this video card NOT fit properly in my Intel motherboard, but the manufacturer refused to pay on their retail rebate.

My list of acceptable manufacturers is growing shorter by the minute. BFG is yet another casualty in my quest to find a reliable hardware vendor.

Dell : Off the list (blown capacitor)
EVGA : Off the list (blown capacitor TWICE)
BFG Technologies : Off the list (snubbed)

Deadly Information

2008-12-04T12:42:00.000-08:00

Remember back to 2006 when a young girl killed herself [1], [4] after being tricked and harassed by a faux boy she found on the Web using MySpace. The trial against the faux boy, an adult woman (Lori Drew), did not result in prosecution for the death of Megan, much to the dismay of many.

Yet, today we read about another trial where someone is being accused of second degree murder because they may have mentioned something slanderous about another person who was later killed by a hit man [2]. In this case, though, the person on trial is a former FBI agent who was working deep cover to infiltrate organized crime.

In both cases, someone released information to third parties that resulted in the death of another person. Neither defendant in either of these cases actually committed the act of murder, though.

In the case of the FBI agent, though, the murder charge is being taken seriously. Yet, in the MySpace slander case, the murder charge was not taken seriously. How are these two cases dissimilar? If this FBI agent is supposedly responsible for the death of John Callahan, then why isn't that woman responsible for the death of Megan Meier?

Let's look at murder for what it is. According to wikipedia, murder is:

"... the unlawful killing of another human person with intent or malice aforethought ..." [3]

So what does it mean to "kill" someone. Well, that goes back to the malice aforethought of murder. One of the accepted criteria for malice aforethought is:

"... (iii) Reckless indifference to an unjustifiably high risk to human life (sometimes described as an "abandoned and malignant heart")" [3]

So let's consider this for the woman who demonstrated reckless indifference to a sensitive, clinically depressed, teenage girl. By slandering Megan in a public forum, the woman clearly was indifferent to Megan's social well being. By pretending to be a boy who was socially and romantically interested in Megan, she clearly demonstrated a recklessness with Megan's mental state. Yet, a jury of supposedly informed adults decided that this was not murder [5].

In the case of the FBI agent, he clearly knew that Callahan was in dire threat of harm when he made statements that lead to Callahan's death. Yet, did he make the remarks recklessly? We don't know all of the details in that case, so it's hard to say whether or not Agent Connolly was negligent in his protection of Callahan's well being. That protection was something he swore to uphold as an Agent of US Federal Law.

[1] http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,312018,00.html

[2] http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/12/04/connolly.case/index.html?iref=mpstoryview
[3] Wikipedia Definition of Murder

[4] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24652422/

[5] http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-us-myspace-suicide.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

$18,048,000 Bill for China

2008-10-28T12:46:00.000-07:00

Apparently Microsoft is being accused of abuse in China because it is cracking down on illegal copies of its software. [1]

One excerpt from the article sums up the mentality in China:

More than 80% of the 60,000 Internet users participating in an online survey conducted by Tencent, one of the largest Internet service portals in China, protested the campaign. They complained that it was the high price of a legitimate copy of XP that had forced them to turn to counterfeits. A genuine copy of XP Pro is priced at $376 (2,578 yuan) in the Chinese market.

So if you don't like the price of candy at the local grocery store, you should just steal it. Why should you pay their fair market price when you could just take it and then claim that they forced you to steal it.

China is the single largest offender of global information espionage and currency manipulation. On all of the computer systems that I monitor daily, the vast majority of elicit hacker activity originates from IP addresses in China. Never once have I ever received any response from any complaint that I have filed at a Chinese ISP.

Since China is a communist regime, Microsoft has a legitimate complaint against the government. China has allowed its people to illegally acquire Microsoft's products without any reprocussions, therefore China is subsidizing the cost of said software for its citizens. In short, China owes Microsoft the $376 per copy of illegally installed software, which comes out to $18,048,000 (48,000 users x $376).

A Chinese attorney is quoted in the article asking for $1 Billion in fines for Microsoft. To that, I say, okay. After China pays Microsoft $105,280,000,000 for lost revenue to software piracy. That's assuming 20% of the country are using computers that are running Windows illegally. Even if only 80% of those 20% are illegal, then the fine owed to Microsoft would be $84,224,000,000. I'd be happy to pay $1 Billion to make $84 Billion.

[1] http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/ "Microsoft Hacking Computer in China"

Faster Climate Change

2008-10-20T12:18:00.000-07:00

CNN reports that a WWF study has found that global climate change is happening faster than predicted in 2007 and that there will not be any arctic ice by 2013, or 2040. [1]

Then it goes on to say that global sea level will increase by 1.08 meters by the end of the century, which is 2100, 92 years from now.

Quite honestly, nobody really cares what is going to happen to the planet in 98 years. Why? Because in 98 years we (as humans) will either:

(1) Obliterate ourselves because God told us to do it.

(2) Eat eachother because there will no longer be any land available to grow crops and sustain living quarters for our 50 billion people.

(3) Suffocate because our planet will no longer smell nice thanks to 50 billion people producing lots of solid waste in our oceans.

(4) Leave the planet because there will no longer be enough fresh water to sustain our lives.

Wait a minute. Consider (4) for a moment. Where can we get an abundance of fresh water TODAY? Anyone? Yeah, the arctic! It's going to melt into the ocean and wreck havoc on us anyway, so why not just collect all of that ice into a container and let it thaw! That'll give us some great fresh water for years and years to come.

Seriously, though, climate prediction on the scale of 100 years is absurd. When a climatologist can predict the exact amount of rain fall that will occur on any given day of THIS YEAR, then I'll reconsider my position. Until then, get out the ice breaker and start harvesting ice bergs!

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/10/20/wwf.climate.report/index.html

GRAVE THREATS INDEED

2008-09-24T13:05:00.000-07:00

Testimony today by Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, has him quoted as saying there are "Grave threats" to our economy if we don't act on this $700 Billion dollar MBS purchase deal.

Let's go back in time when Ben Bernanke came into power. What was the first big decision he made? Raise interest rates. How many times did Ben Bernanke and his buddies at the Federal Reserve raise interest rates? Over 11 times! [1]

In mid-2004, when the US housing bubble was in full swing, the typical mortgage holder could get money for as low as 3.5% and banks were getting it for 1%. Many home buyers purchased mortgages with a variable interest rate and were told that the rate was unlikely to go up that much.

When Bernanke took hold of the purse, his only trick was to raise interest rates. He kept claiming that inflation was out of control and that raising interest rates would help contain raising inflation. Clearly, this myopic and sophomoric view of the US economy lead to the destruction of the inflated housing market.

Bernanke, and his draconian cronies at the Federal Reserve, raised interest rates to banks from 1% to nearly 4% in just one year. That kicked many of those variable interest rate loans up more than 3% higher than their origination rate.

3% on a $400,000 loan means $12,000 more in interest each year, which is $1000 more per month in their payments. Who could afford that? Even the average loan of $250,000 would equal a minimum correction of $7500 per year, or at leat $600 per month. For most families living the dream, that meant the end of their homes.

Who's to blame? Ben Bernanke and his buddies. Clearly none of them knew anything about mortgage backed securities (CDOs) and didn't understand how they were intertwined into the economy. I had read about CDOs in the MIT Technology Review journal and quickly came to the conclusion that they were nothing more than an inverted equity vehicle. Instead of betting on revenue and profit, you were betting on debt value reduction. That smelled like junk bonds to me.

Now when Secretary Paulson gives his testimony [2], he's forced to explain in earnest why we need to infuse this money back into the economy when so much of it has already just evaporated (likely moved off-shore). Rightly so, though. These bad securities need to be removed from the economy so that people can remain in their homes.

Remember that there was a time when the person defaulting on their mortgage could afford their mortgage. It's only when the interest rates went into orbit that these people were forced out of their home. Why not just leave them in their homes with the origination interest rate and be done? Force all banks to carry their current mortgages at the origination rate and pick up the debt that has fallen out of recent bankruptcies.

Any deal that is struck with Congress must include the removal of Ben Bernanke. This has to be the final chapter in his inexcusable and incompetent term as Chairman. None of this would have happened if we had Alan Greenspan still at the helm.

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2005/09/20/news/economy/fed_rates/index.htm

[2] http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/24/news/economy/paulson_frank/index.htm?cnn=yes

FINANCIAL BLUES

2008-09-15T10:43:00.000-07:00

Today I heard that the US Federal Reserve is accepting stock as payment on loans to banks [1]. I am still not able to understand the reasoning behind this change of policy.

First of all, a single share of stock in a company is a share in that company's DEBT. It's not ownership in anything, it's not a guarantee of pay back, nothing. It's just a share of debt that the company thinks will be worth more than the strike price at some time in the future. That is, if you choose to purchase stock on the long. The difference in the stock price at sale versus purchase is the interest rate on that debt.

If I am the Federal Reserve and I am LOANING money to a company, then I have leverage on that company in terms of DEBT. This is the same thing that happens when a consumer gets a loan on a car or house. Yet, in the Federal Reserve situation, there is no collateral, so this is UNSECURED DEBT.

When the company issues stock, it is releasing debt in micro amounts so as to amortize the cost of the debt across multiple sources of capital. In that way, the individual leverage over the company for that debt is small and therefore lower financial risk to the company. The financial risk to the stock holder is much higher because they have nearly zero leverage over the company.

So when a company pays the Federal Reserve in stock, it is really paying for a debt using another debt vehicle. This is exactly the same as a consumer paying their home mortgage using their credit card. Sound familiar? This is the type of behavior that got many sub-prime mortgage holders into trouble, and is a common problem in the sub-prime credit market.

Now that the Federal Reserve has stock, the company that has issued the stock can sell off its assets and fold itself, thereby releasing itself of having to pay off that obligation to the Federal Reserve. This happens quite often when an encumbered company can no longer operate with profitability.

Who will ultimately have to pay back the loan for these banks? The US tax payer. By saturating the economy with junk debt backed by a leverage vehicle, e.g. stock, the Federal Reserve is contributing to increasing inflation. This works opposite to the efforts of the Federal Reserve, which has been struggling to find a blance in the economy to control inflation.

I find it hard to believe that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is okay with this strategy. Not only is the US Treasury capitalizing junk debt, but it's authorizing the Federal Reserve to increase inflation and prolong the inevitable crash of several bad banking companies.

Inevitably, consumers who pay their debts with more debt will file for bankruptcy. This will also happen with the US Treasury when it is holding $50 Billion US Dollars in junk stock that has zero par value.

If I were Michael Milken, I would be seriously angry with the Judicial system. He was indicated and convicted of fraudulent junk bond dealing in the 80s. The junk bonds that he was selling are no different than the low value stock being used to pay back cash loans by these banks.

This is yet another prime example of Ben Bernanke's lack-luster chairmanship of the Federal Reserve. I don't have to be a Professor of Economics to understand bad debt, junk bonds, and over-leveraged finance. The banks that are struggling right now need to find their own fix for the trouble they are in.

Just look at Merrill-Lynch and Bank of America [2]. These banks got it right. The heads of the banks figured out their own financial problems, fixed themselves, and immediately got on top of their problem. Why can't the rest of these enumbered banks do the same?

Ben Bernanke needs to leave the Federal Reserve. He's too parochial in his view of the greater economy that is the USA. We need someone who has more real-world finance experience. Someone who doesn't sit on economic theory as his basis for policy. Economic theory is what got us into this problem in the first place with CDOs.

[1] CNBC News Article on the Federal Reserve decision

[2] CNBC News On Merrill-Lynch and Bank of America

UNTITLED

2008-09-10T13:02:00.000-07:00

I like people who can talk straight and take it standing. There's not enough straight talkers in the world, and certainly not enough in the USA. It seems as though our opinions are illegal if they are not in-line with the normative line of acceptance. That truly seems Orwellian to me.

That said, though, this blog is more about race and ignorance than about the Thought Police. There does not exist a more sensitive and inflammatory topic than race. You should read the Wikipedia entry on race as it pertains to humans. It may enlighten you somewhat.

The USA has two presidential candidates in its 2008 Presidential race. One of them is sort of a pinkish-white color, and the other is something of a brown color. The pinkish-white one has an American heritage with clear ancestry back to Northern Europeans. The brownish colored one has an Indonesian heritage with some suspected ancestry back to Africa, although he also has European ancestry. Call them whatever race you want.

Where I have an objection is in the labeling of Senator Obama as the Black Candidate. Really, I have an objection to the use of Black, or any other physical prefix, to describe anyone. Nobody runs around saying the Tall American where I am concerned, do they? None of the political pundits are writing about the White Candidate, are they? Yet, you have CNN's own commentator Martin Roland writing about exactly that, a Black Candidate. As if there was something special about Senator Obama having dark skin.

The first sign of racist behavior, or ideology, is in identifying a class of people as a race. Scientists are contending now that human races are just social constructs. These constructs are something we are all tought as children and should shake from our psyche as adults.

Yet, when our published free thinkers, such as Martin Roland, write about race in America, I am reminded that the racist mindset spans all socially constructed races.

Martin Roland Article

In Martin Roland's article titled Race, age, gender are taboo in election (see link above), he writes a few things that finally pushed me to write this blog.

(1) "... and it's wrong for us to stand here and not support one of their own, even though we're Democrats."

This ignorant quote from his interview is incomprehensible. The very notion that Barak Obama is "one of THEIR own" is absurd. Any person of any color or any social construct in America is an American, period. Deprogramming the racial rhetoric starts with that simple notion that WE are Americans, and that none are of their own. Senator Obama is one of OUR OWN.

(2) His action item #1, ".. When you watch TV and hear folks talk about Wal-Mart moms or small, rural towns, they are talking about white Americans. These catch phrases never include African-Americans or Hispanics."

Another ignorant comment, for sure. There is no special "black consumer" button on the Wal-Mart cash register. Hispanics don't have special marked dollars that identify them as such. No, these normalized presumptions about a social group apply to any, and all, color of human being purchasing items in the American economy.

(3) "... love to toss around the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s quote ..."

If The Reverend were alive today and were to see and hear the mis-use of his words and meaning to continually aggrandize Barak Obama, I am certain that he would have cross words to share. It seems as though every time an article is written about Barak Obama by someone with a similar skin tone, they have to include some quip about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Senator Obama has no relation to racial apartheid or equal rights. He does not walk the streets, congregating an opressed people to fight ignorance and equalize the social caste in America.

Barak Obama is just a Senator from Illinois, just a regular American who worries and praises about the same things that we all experience in America. This goes for every person in America, regardless of their socially constructed race identity.

Racism exists solely because we see race. It comforts us to organize things into groups so that we can isolate our intersts and optimize our relationships to further our own personal goals. These comforts and goals are the very cause of racism because we create an artificial social caste to elevate ourselves out of our self-perceived social poverty.

If you want to see racism end in America, then stop using racist terminology. We're not European-Americans, not Hispanic-Americans, not African-Americans. Just plain, old, ordinary, boring, Americans. I hope that in 2008, we're going to elect an American who truly inpired us to believe that we are all just Americans. That is The Dream of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

EVGA SUCKS

2008-09-05T09:55:00.000-07:00

Today I came into my office to find that my monitors were blank. Thinking it might just be Windows, I rebooted and waited for the friendly screen. Nothing, and no sync on the power button.

Fortunately, I had a spare ATI Radeon 2400 Pro hanging around, so I took out my EVGA e-GeForce 8600 GTS and put in the ATI Radeon. Guess what? Everything is happy.

This is the second EVGA component, out of two, that has fried on me. First it was the EVGA motherboard, which died after 2 months of nearly no usage at all (not even powered). Now, the EVGA video card is dead after a year.

This card is P/N 512-P2-N773-AR, serial 7067732006267. The QA sticker shows it was checked in 2007. Apparently, the EVGA QA department is drunk because this POS should not have gotten past any testing.

Words of wisdom for all of you self-building system makers, don't buy EVGA crap. Stick with what you know. I only buy Intel motherboards now, no matter what.

Binary Sort Bug?

2008-08-06T09:43:00.000-07:00

I was forwarded a link today from a friend that explains a bug in a binary sort implementation.

Here is the blog entry

First it's important to note that the bug is not in the binary sort algorithm, but just in the short sighted implementations of binary sort that pervade the industry. When binary sort was first proposed as an implementation, we were using 8-bit processors and the only big iron systems out there were multi-million dollar systems that could barely process a million records, let alone 2.2 billion.

The bug, as pointed out in the blog entry, is in the calculation of the pivot. The implementations use (high+low)/2 as their pivot, which then fails when you are sorting billions of records because high+low quickly overflows.

The real simple solution is to use the arithmetic lessons we learned in the 3rd grade: pivot = high/2 + low/2. This will work because you're not adding the two out of range values together, so you won't have an arithmetic overflow during your pivot calculation. The easier calculation is "pivot = high >> 1 + low >> 1".

The real solution is to use a 64-bit system and use long ints (QWORD) for your index variables intead of DWORDS (32-bit). Any other solution is just a band-aid that will eventually experience an overflow again.

Commodity Misconceptions

2008-06-10T08:19:00.000-07:00

The price of oil has been the hottest topic in the news for the last 6 months. Today, the Saudis are meeting to discuss the unacceptable high price of oil and ways of controlling that price. To this, many supposed experts in commodity pricing have claimed that the US dollar is the cause for the high price.

The claim that a currency is the cause of a high commodity value is absurdly parochial. The US dollar is freely traded on the open money market. Therefore, if more people purchase dollars instead of their own currency, then the value of the dollar increases. When currency investors realize their gains, the relative value of a currency decreases, much like a stock. In effect, currency is the stock of a country, and commodities are traded by trading equity positions in countries.

The price of a commodity is controlled by contracts, not supply. You don't purchase hard commodities on the open exchange [3] [4]. Rather, you purchase the rights to a contract of a specific amount of that commodity. Then you find a buyer who should need that hard commodity. If this were always the case, then the commodity would have a supply/demand pricing history and would be controlled solely by consumption. [1]

With oil and other speculative commodities, though, this type of trading is no longer happening. Rather, speculators purchase contracts, and then sell them to other speculators who continue to hold their contracts knowing that they can keep the oil contract without burden. This type of unregulated electronic trading (which is how it occurs) creates an artificial demand for oil (and Gold too).

Then, an investor who has commodity contracts tells their investor buddies that the commodity is running low on supply, and artificially creates a feverish demand for this commodity. Since the investor does not have to disclose their commodity contract positions, they manipulate the market to their advantage. This is how the US stock market crashed in 1929.

There is speculation about increasing the regulation [2] of commodity futures trading and requiring further disclosure of such positions. This regulation will likely only affect new positions and not existing positions, thereby not reducing the manipulation price of the commodities in question.

You can bet that hedge funds with enormous cash reserves are the cause of the speculative pricing in the commodities futures markets. Many wealthy and powerful people have interests in these types of funds so there is no incentive to add regulation that would eliminate this incredible money making method.

[1] http://futures.tradingcharts.com/tafm/
[2] http://www.cftc.gov/
[3] http://www.optimusfutures.com/
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_market

The Spinning Brain

2008-02-18T13:42:00.000-08:00

Intuition is a phenomenon of the biological brain that doesn't have any physical explanation. Many people experience intuition with varying degrees of success. There are a variety of theories regarding intuition [1] and some people regard intuition with much caution [2].

Yet, I am happily in the camp that has learned to respect my intuition as it has proven time and time again to be correct. Recently, though, I'd been thinking about intuition and soothsaying. There are many cases of people who claim to see the future, whatever that might be. Maybe there is something to be said about this mystical phenomenon. Maybe there is a real physical process at work that we just haven't thought of yet.

To this end, I am proposing a theory about human intuition. This theory, though requires some background in quantum mechanics. Specifically, quantum entanglement.

I'm not the only person who has theorized about quantum entanglement and its role in biological congnition and the conscious mind [3]. In fact, there is an entire school of thought called Quantum Consciousness [4] that discusses the very idea of quantum computing in the brain.

Let's just say these quantum consciousness theories are correct, and the human brain is a quantum computer that stores information in the form of spin states. We can do this in the laboratory today with some experimental hardware that is just beginning to evolve out of the laboratory. It's not a big leap, now, to consider this as the functional work of the human brain (or any biological brain for that matter).

Back to intuition, though, as that is the topic of this article. Intuition is the feeling that something is going to happen, or a feeling that one choice is better than another. How is this possible? If the brain is a quantum computer and it stores information based on spin states, then it is possible that the brain is producing entangled pairs.

Crazy as it may sound, those entangled pairs of particles can also be used by the brain during memory encoding via spin encoding. Entanglement is important to intuition because entangled pairs affect eachother across space and time. In the world of quantum mechanics, though, space and time are one of the same. Therefore, the entangled pair of particles produced in the brain can affect eachother across time. More importantly, this means that your brain can encode a memory in the future that can be experienced in the past. With entanglement, if one particle is given spin S, then its entangled pair is also given that same spin, instantaneously.

It's my theory, with really no experimental evidence, that the human brain does produce entangled pairs of particles. Also, these particles play intrumental roles in encoding memory into the human brain. Furthermore, it's the existence of the entangled pairs that gives humans the sense of intuition and even the possibility of precognition by virtue of spin changes propagating through space-time.

If quantum consciousness is the evolution of consciousness, then it serves to theorize that the next evolution of consciousness will be in precognition. Eventually more humans will become sensitive to the entangled pairs being produced in their brains. For some already the sensitivity is there, yet for others not. It could be that the smartest of people really are just the most precognitive of their own thoughts, being able to regurgitate the correct answer quickly solely because they were given the answer in the future.

This is alot of speculation, yet quantum computing is real and demonstrated. Quantum entanglement is also real and has been demonstrated, and is the basis for secure quantum communication. The parts left to demonstrate is that the human brain uses spin to encode memories, and that the brain produces entangled pairs of memory particles.

[1] http://www.davidmyers.org/Brix?pageID=84
[2] http://www.turtletrader.com/intuition.html
[3] http://cogprints.org/4581/
[4] http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/penrose-hameroff/quantumcomputation.html

A Test for SETI

2008-01-10T10:14:00.000-08:00

I am a big fan of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. If you don't know much about the SETI project, then take a look at seti.org. Buy some stuff there too so that you can support their mission, which is to find some proof that advanced life exists outside of Planet Earth.

How do we know that SETI is really doing the right thing, though? Can you possibly expect to detect any signal at all from 5 light years away using a planetary network of telescopes? One would think not because a radio wave gets wider (dispersion) as it travels farther. As it disperses, its energy dampens, and eventually the incident energy is slow low that it can not be detected above the background noise. Essentially, the noise we hear in the cosmic background, is made up of widely dispersed radio waves that have been bouncing around for billions of earth years.

Is there a way to test out the SETI thesis and make some use of their telescope network? Well, if you're a fan of the Pioneer space probes, then you might think along the lines of this thought too. Pioneer 10 is outside of our solar system, or so we think. Its radio telemetry is getting very faint for lots of reasons, one of which is its distance, and the other its weak transmitter power.

If SETI truly can detect a radio signal at 4.2 light years, then it should be able to easily pick up the weak Pioneer 10 signal. About 5 years ago, Pioneer was 7.5 billion miles away from earth, which is about 0.00128 light years away, or a fraction of the distance to our closest solar neighbor, Proxima Centauri.

SETI, are you up for the challenge? Turn your network at Pioneer 10 and tell us what it is saying. If you can't pick up Pioneer 10, then you're likely not going to pickup anything from Proxima Centauri, or any other extrasolar system. Pioneer 10 is so close, that its signal should be as if it were shouting at you. How could you fail?

If SETI fails to pickup the Pioneer probe, then maybe we can divert their money to other more useful endeavors, like global water reclamation and treatment, or Project Longshot. I certainly want to know if SETI's extensive terrestrial radio array can pickup the closest KNOWN radio signal from an advanced civilization. If nothing else, it will confirm that our money is being well spent on useful research.

Time, Time, There is no Time.

2008-01-03T09:00:00.000-08:00

I often wonder about time and what it really means. Some people think you can travel through time, as if it has some corporeal properties. I don't think this is so.

First off, all of our time measurements are based upon physical phenomena. A second of time is an arc second of planet movement. This is the equivalent of the Earth moving 1 arc second through it revolution about its axis. A year, keeping with the physical analogies, is just one revolution about the Sun. The Earth also moves about 139 miles per second through Space. Its movement in the galaxy is rotational, so those 139 miles are along a curved path. So really the Earth follows a curly path through Space as it travels through time.

Why is this important, you ask? Well, imagine that you can travel through time, like HG Wells would like you to think. Say you go back in time 1 second. In 1 second, the Earth has moved 139 miles from its original location, and it has moved 1 arc second about its axis. Where would you be?

If you are to travel backwards, or forwards, through time, then you have to also travel through space. Otherwise, if you keep your physical location constant and you change your time location, then you are lost in space. Lost 139 miles away from the Earth, in space, that is.

What if there is no time. If the Earth didn't move, would we still have time? Would humans have devised time keeping if the heavens were static and the Sun shone always? How would we measure time in such an environment? It would be likely that we'd measure time in terms of how long it took the King to walk a meter, or something like that. Yet, still, we're creating time to describe physical movement. What if there simply is no such thing as time.

When you lay in bed tonight, try to deprogram yourself from considering time as something real. Try to imagine yourself living in a timeless reality. You can do it. You did it for the first couple of years of your life. Nobody is born with the notion of time as we know it. We are programmed with the notion of schedule and when to sleep, but not time.

Clean Transportation Enlightenment

2007-10-15T14:49:00.000-07:00

Today I was reading about power cosumption and CO2 emissions, and I ran across a blog entry from someone in Holland. Apparently he was going to travel to a consumer conference that was 100 kilometers away and had to decide if he should drive or take the train. His decision was to take the train because it was more environmentally friendly and economical than driving.

Like many people, I am skeptical of the argument that a train is more friendly than a car. Right? Cars have catalytic converters and all sorts of emission controls that reduce their output. There aren't any hefty catalytic converters on diesel locomotives.

So I decided to run some numbers and do a little research.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev_train#_note-0

I assumed that the fella was taking a magnetic levitation train because that's what I'd like to do. Eventhough there isn't a maglev train in Holland that could have been used, I calculated it anyway.

According to Wikipedia, a maglev train consumes 22 watt-hours of power per kilometer and per person travelling.

Maglev = 22 Wh/pkm

[2] http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/page/co2_report/co2report.html#electric

The generation of this ephemeral electric power produces CO2. We know that power generation loses much power during transmission and distribution. According to a study done in the late 1990s on the USA, electric distribution loss was about 7.2%.

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission

I'll use this loss factor for my calculations, eventhough the UK study had their loss estimates at 7.4%.

Maglev = 1.072 * 22 Wh/pkm = 23.584 Wh/pkm

For a 100 km, one-way, jaunt, the maglev transportation would consume 4716.8 Wh per passenger. This is the same as saying it takes 4.7168 kWh per person to travel to his conference.

Back to the coal burning plant that is pushing electricity to our maglev train. The DOE study in [2] states that a coal fire plant produces 2.117 pounds of CO2 per kWh. At 2.2 pounds per kilogram, that means coal fire produces 0.962 kg/kWh of CO2.

We need 4.7168 kWh to run our maglev train, so that means the train really produces 4.5376 kg of CO2 during this trip.

Reality is that the traveller likely took a diesel commuter train. These trains produce a bit more effluence and CO2, so let's consider that for a moment.

[4] http://www.aeris.eko.org.pl/niem/kalkulator/Methodology_transport.doc

A diesel train is estimated to produce 0.0294 kg of CO2 per passenger-km. In this analysis, the traveller is going 200 km, so the train would produce 5.88 kg of CO2 on his behalf.

It is surprising to note that a modern diesel train produces about 30% more CO2 than its maglev cousin. If the maglev train only cost 30% more to build, maybe we'd have more of them for travel.

The final consideration is that of a passenger car. Finding CO2 emission data for passenger cars is not too easy. I had to poke around for a bit until I found a nifty UK site that had a calculator:

[5] http://www.smmtco2.co.uk/co2search2.asp

I punched in BMW 325CI SE and got 229 g/km. I tried some other cars, such as a VW Passat, and had no luck. I was able to get the rating on a Nissan XTerra SE, which was 237 g/km. Given that the SUV and the BMW sedan were about the same, this 229 g/km figure was my metric.

200 km to go produces 45,800 g of CO2, or 45.8 kg. Holy smokes, literally! That's nearly 10 times the output of a maglev train, and about 8 times that of a diesel train. Why are we still driving our cars?? Oh yeah, because we don't have trains going everywhere we need to go.

When the traveller gets to the city, he still has to take passenger transportation to get to the conference. That produces a trace amount of CO2 by way of the bus, which is likely a clean burning natural gas vehicle.

I used to be a doubter in the train versus car argument, seeing the billowy black effluence from a diesel train. Now, though, I am convinced. If you truly have a choice, then you should make the train your choice of transportation. It simply is cleaner.

My Toilet Ratted Me Out

2007-08-31T12:02:00.000-07:00

I found a story on bbc.com that struck my funny bone. Tongue and cheek aside, though, this article is very poignant about our future in the developed world. It's not entirely unlikely that your entire life will be recorded by a camera. You can't go anywhere today without being seen by a camera.

Dumb cameras don't scare me. Sure you can make them auto-track and interface with a computer that knows where you are. Okay, big deal. Maybe Tom Hanks cares about that more than me. What does concern me is the growing interest in supposed smart home devices.

The BBC article made a cheeky comment about a toilet that knows when a woman is pregnant before she knows. Harumpf you say, that's a good thing. Well, how about if you're a cocaine user and your lovely smart commode decides to check on your drug use and then rat you out to the cops.

Worst yet, let's say you do get the fancy John, and you love that it tells you that your blood sugar is too high, or that you're eating too much sodium. What if it was hacked by a nefarious dude like me, and it starts alerting those coppers to your elicit drug use even when you're not. Hmm, that sounds fun. It's another level of disinformation terrorism that is only now starting with those phoney bomb scares in the USA.

So everybody has to make water, whether in a toilet, or on a tree. In the future with nifty smart devices, you can imagine a smart storm drain that is able to do quick DNA analysis. Oh snap, huh? So much for being a criminal. The minute you make water, either the dirty rat of a commode will rat you out at Jump'n Jimmy's Truck Stop, or else the sewer drain will start calling the coppers on you. Once you're identified by your urine, the army of eyeballs will turn their attention to you, and you won't be able to get your liquid life, a.k.a. Starbucks, without being molested by some billy who's waiting for charbucks. Maybe you can bribe him with a Carmel, Non-Fat, No-Whip, Sugar Free, Soy, Half-Decaf Mocha Frappuccino. With 2 Equals.

There was a book that I read recently titled The Light of Other Days by Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter. You should read this fiction book because it has a good message about our future. We may not be creating worm holes today, but we are creating a video archive of history that is unprecedented. In thirty years time you will be able to call up images of "yesterday" on just about anyone and anywhere in the world from your embedded cellular search device.

Does anybody want to start a Ludite colony?

Communication Addiction

2007-08-16T12:48:00.000-07:00

As of this writing, I have a daughter who is in her early teen years. At her junior high school, most of her friends and schoolmates have cellular phones with SMS ability. Like good parents should, we held off getting her a phone because it was not necessary. There's no situation in her life where a cell phone would be mission critical. It would be fashion-critical for elevating her "cool factor," but nothing more.

Recently, now that she is starting high school, we've relinquished her starvation diet and granted her a pay as you go cellular phone with an affordable SMS plan. At first, we made her pay for every little use of the phone, such as voice calls and SMS messages. I felt this would be a good lesson in resource usage for her. Being a kid, she has no external income, so her allowance was the only source of money for the phone.

When she got the phone, she immediately started to text her friends, and vice versa. She knew that her plan required her to pay for every message, but still she continued to SMS. In the first week she burned through the $25 that I granted to her with the phone and was ready to add another $20 from her reserves. Her mother, being a softy for her plight, gave her another $20 to help out with the cause. So that's about $65 in the first two weeks.

I sat down with her and explained the signs of addiction. The first phase is recognizing that you need to do something with no respect for any of your life responsibilities. In other words, you no longer have control over you actions.

Here is a good explanation of addiction [1]:

The World Health Organization has defined addiction as a pathological relationship with a mood-altering substance or experience that has life damaging consequences.

In her mind, she is compelled to communicate with her friends. Certainly typing a text message will not damage her physical or mental being. Rather, the "life damaging consequences" here is the excessive burn rate of money, a critical resource for survival in a society. It's important for our children to learn how to manage their money in an effective and secure way.

At this point she had no more money, about $1 on her phone balance, and was looking for ways to make more money around the house. When I asked her what she would do with her extra money, she said that it would go onto her phone. Interesting.

When people become addicted to substances or activity, it's the result of having a resource that can be easily converted into the subject of the addiction. Once that resource is extinguished, though, the addiction has already started to set in, and the victim begins to panic. They quickly start to find additional methods for replenishing that enabling resource.

I did start to see panic in her behavior when her phone balance was below $5. She was not violent or destructive, as some addicts eventually regress into, but rather she was "pushy" about getting her allowance (which I started to withhold "in the bank").

Then we started to notice her sending SMS messages after 10PM. That's a critical hour for us because that's when we're all retiring to sleep for the night. After 10PM, she's "alone" and away from her parental influences, and thus able to fulfill her compulsion to "text" her friends without risk of reprisal. This might be a form of shame and isolation that is common to addicts.

After a month she's burned through about $100. She's scoured the AT&T web site looking for a cheaper plan that allows her to do unlimited "texting," much like you'd expect of an addict looking for a cheaper way to get a fix. Her mother's also enrolled her into a monthy fixed payment plan with additional charges for over-use. It hasn't helped. By Friday, just before we pay her allowance, she's burned through her money and is adamant about getting her allowance.

So I have another hard talk with her about addiction, this time with her mother present. She vehemently denies that she's addicted to "texting" and gives me her kind look of indignation. Her defense is "there is no such thing as text addiction." To that, I have to explain that the SMS phenomenon is so new that, like alcohol and marijuana, nobody thought it would, or even could, be addictive at first. Now we know better about those substances, and we are starting to see that instant communication can also be addictive [2].

Let's recap addiction and how it relates to my situation:

(1) Denial - My daughter vehemently denied every being addicted to SMS. Every time I'd bring it up, she was defensive and quick to push back on me.

(2) Tolerance - There was never enough texting. She had to text at night and throughout the day, even when a free POTS phone was present.

(3) Withdrawal - Her mood was sour and sometimes intolerable when I held back her allowance and thus made it not possible to add more minutes for texting.

(4) Obsessions - I monitor my home network closely and saw her scouring the AT&T payment site for cheaper plans to enable her use of SMS.

(5) Compulsions - She told us that she would stop texting at night after 10PM, but I caught her doing it again, blaming it on her friends rather than herself.

(6) Isolation and shame - Not sure about this sign.

After my second lecture about addiction, she finally wisened up and curtailed her use. She also made it a point to use the free POTS phone to talk with her friends.

My unprofessional opinion about SMS addiction is that it is closely related to codependency. People who exhibit addictive behavior towards SMS or instant communication may likely have exhibited codependency addiction, or have even been treated for it.

References:

[1] http://www.abdsurvivalguide.com/News/031005.htm
[2] http://runningahospital.blogspot.com/ "Blackberry Cold Turkey"

Someone Is Finally Listening

2007-08-06T11:33:00.000-07:00

This is going to be a short posting. Check out this BBC report:

Focus on carbon 'missing the point'

Finally a policy maker has articulated a voice for reason on the topic of global warming. CO2 is not the only game. Despite what Al Gore thinks, changing our production of CO2 will not produce the "golden ticket" solution to global climate change.

If Al had said that in the first place, then he would not have produced his award winning documentary. Then he wouldn't have been able to consume lots of jet fuel and produce lots of CO2 flying around the world on his anti-CO2 tirade. Then he wouldn't have been able to raise millions selling his DVDs, which are made using oil while producing CO2, and end up filling our land fills with more non-recyclable junk that lasts thousands of years.

If I Only Had A Human Eyeball ...

2007-08-02T12:31:00.000-07:00

A news story on BBC News struck me as peculiar today. Witchcraft arrest in Mozambique is the title of this noteworthy story. It's really about the trade of human remains for religious ritual. How odd that in the year 2007 we have a country where human remains are trafficked to the point of requiring legislation.

Isn't it just an obvious wrong to kill people and sell their remains in the name of some religious craft? When there is no other money to be made, why not turn to your neighbor as a source of income, right? Heck, he's not using that other leg anyway!

All humor aside, this is a very serious situation. Not only is it yet another stain on Africa's diverse and rich cultures, but it's another shining example of bad human behavior against other humans in Africa. Maybe more free laptops will help stop this tragedy of human violence. Nicholas Negroponte, hear their cries! Send them free laptops so they can google non-human magical potion recipes.

If you do read the whole article, you will note that the general population of Cabo Delgado are sophisticated enough to have lynched one prior offender of this crime. Yes, indeed, the authorities released one of these criminals and was thereafter hunted down and killed by, likely, a mob of angry citizens. Thank goodness that most of the people there are thinking beyond their couldrons.

Keep a close eye on your neighbor, though. The up-down he's casting your way may not be a sexual advance, but rather a discerning appraisal of his magical merchandise.

WMS9 Development

2007-07-31T07:39:00.000-07:00

As one of my consulting services, I develop WMS9 server plugins. If any of you has ever tried to develop a plugin for the Microsoft Media Server, you know that there is very little documentation for it, and very little support.

Recently, one of my clients setup a new Windows Server 2003 Enterprise system and tried to deploy our plugins to it. As you can imagine, the plugins did not work. While the other Micorosoft supplied plugins worked, my plugins reported error 0xc00d157d. You should try to google for that error code to see what you find.

The WMS log console shows that my plugins are reporting a binding error, yet the popup error message reports that it's a .NET runtime version error. Which path to choose?

For about a week, both me and my client's IT staff looked feverishly for a fix. Sometimes they blamed my code, sometimes we cursed Microsoft, and other times we looked to the heavens ala Google searching. Nothing seemed to work.

When I tried using the fusion log viewer, and with a little super-user configuration, I discovered that the binding error should have been our investigation path. As it turns out, the shipped WMS9 installation has Microsoft.WindowsMediaServices DLL version 9.1.1.3842. I knew this from long ago b/c this update has been around for a long time, and I've avoided it to preserve compatibility with existing systems. I didn't know that Microsoft had decided to put this new version into its latest service pack.

The WMS DLL version that I've been using for the past 2 years is 9.0.0.3693. This was the cutting edge DLL back in the day when we first started deploying the plugins. This was also the version that came with the Platform SDK for Multimedia/WindowsMediaServices9.

What really chaps me is that I pay good money to be an MSDN subscriber. You would think that Microsoft would want to tell the developer world that they are scrapping the old Platform SDK DLL in lieu of a new one that will break compatibility with existing plugins. Then again, you would also expect Microsoft to police their WMS newsgroups and actually answer questions that are more involved than the typical "how do I write a logging plugin." Neither is the case with WMS development.

Clustered Foolishness

2007-07-17T16:24:00.000-07:00

I had morning coffee with a well respected friend of mine recently. Aside from chatting about the usual wifery and family, we touched on the subject of clustered indices and SQL Server performance.

A common misconception in the software industry is that a clustered index will make your database queries faster. In fact, most cases will demonstrate the polar opposite of this assumption. The reason for this misconception is a misunderstanding of how the clustered index works in any database server.

A clustered index is a node clustering of records that share a common index value. When you decide on an index strategy for your data, you must consider the range of data to be indexed. Remember back to your data structures classes and what you were taught about hashtable optimizations.

A hashtable, which is another way of saying a database index, is just a table of N values that organizes a set of M records in quickly accessible lists that are of order L, where L is significantly less than M. If your index/hashtable is poorly performing, then you have a problem with your L and N, i.e. your N is approaching M and your L is approaching 1.

A clustered index is something special because it is the only index that dictates how data is PHYSICALLY stored on disk. While a simple index is an in-memory data structure, the clustered index is a physical clustering of the data records (order L from prior paragraph) written to storage. This is the killing joke of a clustered index because the worst case scenario of your index is to constantly change its range, which means you're constantly recreating your clusters. That, my friends, is why your database gets slower as it fills with records.

Your solution is to never use a clustered index unless you have a finite, pre-determined, range of index values. The clustered index is only best-performing when the key range is static, or rarely changing.

A common mistake is to set a record ID in your table to be your Primary Key, which by default is also clustered. Oops. That means your key space for that primary clustered key is always changing with every insert. Crap, right? I bet you've got a few of those in your database right now. You better run off and fix that right now.

You might wonder why this is such a big deal, right? At what point does the clustered index start to fail? Thousands of records, hundreds of thousands, millions? Those are good questions.

Every index in a database is ordered. This is a requirement so that searching the index space can be done in log(n) time. This is also the reason why the physical layout of a clustered index is so problematic. Each time the index space changes, the physical layout of the records must be recomputed and stored. A write operation to a hard disk is orders of magnitude slower than one in memory, and so the cost of rewriting the ENTIRE INDEX SPACE becomes prohibitive as the indexed table grows in size. Sound familiar? Even with fill factors set as high as 90%, you will feel the bite of rewriting the clustered index space if your index range changes rapidly.

I've found that the clustered index on a bad key range starts to fail around a hundred thousand records, but that depends on the size of your records and the speed of your hard drives. If you have high speed (AV-rated) SCSI drives, then you might be able to get away with more records. Once you hit a million records, though, you're sunk, no matter how fast the hard drive.

Your remedy is to always use non-clustered indices for your primary keys. The very nature of a primary key is that it must be unique, which is orthogonal to the idea of a clustered index. In SQL Server, the clustered nature of a key is a constraint, so you have to ALTER the table and DROP the constraint, and then re-create the primary key without clustering.

Then when you decide to add other indices to your tables, only do it on columns that are used in queries. Take advantage of multi-column indices because many times, your searches are multi-column filtered.

If you absolutely need to use a clustered index to make your row sorting faster, then do it on a static key space, or one that is almost never changing.

A Valuation of Earth, Inc.

2007-06-20T14:59:00.000-07:00

Stock speculation is a big business. Trillions of dollars are exchanged on a daily basis in the stock market. If you're savvy, you can make some serious cash buying and selling stock, either short or long.

What is stock? Well, it's ownership in a company. If you own 1 share of stock in a company that has 100 shares, then you own 1% of that company. That's easy to understand, right?

Real estate is really the same idea, except that your company is The Planet Earth. So, how much stock is available in Earth, Inc? Let's start with a unit of stock that would represent a detached home on the planet. For this, let's say is a quarter of an acre.

There are 148,939,100 square kilometers of surface land on Earth [1]. Now we need to find out how many acres are on the Earth so that we can determine the number of shares in the company.

1 acre = 4046.85 sq meters [2]
1 sq-km = 1,000,000 sq meters
1 acre = 0.00404685 sq km

For simplicity, let's create 1 share of surface as 0.25 acres. That gives us:

0.25 acre = 0.0010117125 sq km

Using this value along with the 149M sq km of surface area on Earth gives us about 147,214,846,115 shares. This number is about 472 times the number of outstanding common shares available in google on 6/20/2007, just for perspective.

In the USA, there is 3,537,441 sq miles of land [3]. This comes out to be about 9,161,972 sq km [2]. Using our handy formula, the number of shares in the USA is 9,055,904,904, or about 6% of the Earth, Inc. float.

The average home price in the USA is 185,200 US [4], using numbers from 2004. One house, remember, is one share of Earth, Inc. What we need, though, is a world-wide average home price to make this analysis more balanced. Let's take a look at some numbers:

USA: 185,200 [4]
New Zealand: 350,000 (265,979 US) [5,10]
South Africa: 911,800 (127,515 US) [6,10]
UK: 210,000 (417,900 US) [7,10]
Australia: 391,000 (330,125 US) [8,10]
Ireland: 310,632 (416,395 US) [9,10]
Mexico: 86,143 US [11]

The average of these 7 countries is $261,322 US. This puts a value of about 38,470,541,108,540,937, or about 38,471 trillion US dollars.

Now when the Vogans come to blow up the Earth, we can ask for remuneration in the order of 39,000 trillion US dollars, or something of similar value. Maybe a signed picture of William Shatner and Patrick Stewart together?

A better valuation of Earth, Inc., would be a weighted determination of mean stock price using the average home price per region, rather than per country. For instance, the average home price in California is 450,550 [12]. The land area in California is 155,959 sq miles [13], or 403,933 sq km [2]. This is about 399,257,506 Earth, Inc., shares, or 0.27% of Earth, Inc. That means 0.27% of the stock price should be calculated using the $450,550 median home price.

More countries should be used in this analysis. I could only find average home sale prices for a few countries. I am sure home sales in Croatia, Uganda, and Uzbekistan are significantly less than the average California home price.

[1] http://www.google.com/
[2] http://www.irrigationtutorials.com/formulas.htm
[3] http://open-site.org/Regional/North_America/United_States/
[4] http://www.realestateabc.com/graphs/natlmedian.htm
[5] http://www.stuff.co.nz/4096261a10.html
[6] http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=13&art_id=vn20070522112439540C909499
[7] http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/mortgages/house-prices/article.html?in_article_id=421225&in_page_id=8&ito=1565
[8] http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200702/s1839641.htm
[9] http://www.rte.ie/news/2007/0129/housing.html
[10] http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/market/exchangerates.aspx?pkw=convert_currency&vendor=google&refcd=go310193s_convert_currency
[11] http://www.homegain.com/local_real_estate/MO/mexico.html
[12] http://www.svdaily.com/realestateprices.html
[13] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html

Google Me This. Google Me That.

2007-05-22T14:20:00.000-07:00

Today one of the headlines from MSNBC puts this little startup named "23andme.com" into the public eye. The news pundits claim that this little company is actually a "biotech," but I disagree. The apparent business plan for this company is to provide novel and helpful technologies for you, their customer, to understand your personal genome. That's fun, just like in the blockbuster movie "Gattaca," you can share your genomic inequities with your future girlfriend or boyfriend. Although, once they find out that you have a genetic marker for a debilitating disease, they will likely not choose you as a mate. Thus begins the Age of Eugenics.

This company, 23andme, caught my attention because it received $4,000,000 (million) US dollars from our most favorite public company, Google. Apparently this $4M is just pocket change for Google, otherwise why would it fritter it away on such a bad business plan?

What you may not know is that the co-founder of "23andme" is none other than the wife of Sergei, the co-founder of Google. Hey wait. Why would the behemoth Google need to give Sergei's wife $4M to fund a high risk venture when Sergei is worth hundreds of millions himself. Isn't this just pocket change for Sergei? Is there something amiss with Sergei's personal finances that Google shareholders need to know?

Hipocrisy. This is the word that comes to mind when I think of this transaction between "23andme" and Google. Why? Well, you have the former chairman of the WorldBank, Paul Wolfowitz, who recently stepped down because his girlfriend received a pay raise and promotion after he took the chairman post. What you didn't know was that his "girlfriend" had already been marked for promotion BEFORE Mr. Wolfowitz took his post. Did Paul give his girlfriend $4 MILLION DOLLARS to squander away on some movie-inspired business plan? No, he didn't even give his girlfriend a promotion with a big raise. That was already approved by the board before Paul took office. He simply was the victim of bad press pushed by the European agenda to replace Mr. Wolfowitz with a European-sympathetic lap-dog.

When Google went public, they spent a fortune on a 747 as their company jet. It's lavish and cool with the nifty Google logo on it. Why is this necessary for a company that is solely an INTERNET BASED advertising business. Are they going to entertain big ad clients who don't know how to signup for AdWords over the web?

It wasn't enough that Google bought a 747 as a company jet after it went public. Now it's giving pocket spending money to its executive's wives so that they can experiment with premature business plans. This is inappropriate and reckless money management by a public company.

Fresh Water Crisis

2007-05-02T11:36:00.000-07:00

In 2007, there are about 6.5 billion humans on the planet. Each of those humans needs about 48 oz of water each day to survive. That's about 6 cups of water for 6.5 billion humans. That comes out to about 2,437,500,000 gallons of fresh water each and every day consumed by humans.

Next we have toilets and waste water treatment. In the USA and other toileted countries, we use fresh water as our "pot" water. Each flush is about 1 gallon of water. In the USA, every citizen flushes the toilet about once per day, so that's about 300,000,000 gallons of waste water used each day. Add in Europe at 350,000,000 gallons, and we're up to over 3 billion gallons of water used every day. I don't know what the usage would be for the other areas of the planet, so I will estimate that it will increase the usage to 4 billion gallons.

There are a few trillion gallons of water in the Antarctic ice cap. One trillion gallons of fresh water would give the entire world about 250 days of fresh water. 1000 billion gallons divided by 4 billion gallons used each day is 250 days. Doomsday?

There's no definitive estimate on the amount of fresh groundwater on our continents. It's obviously more than 1 trillion, otherwise we'd all be dead already. Fortunately, though, that fresh water is replenished with rain from the evaporating soil and oceans. If our oceans didn't evaporate surface water into the air, we'd be on a Mars-like desert planet.

If you really want to see first-hand what your precious fresh water is creating, go visit El Centro, California. It's in the dessert, literally, yet there are huge farms of leafy greens growing. Thank you Colorado and Arizona for sharing the dwindling Colorado River. Need more food for thought? Go visit Borrego Springs, California. There, also in the dessert, they grow huge groves of grapefruit trees. Have you ever seen a grapefruit? Well, it needs quite a bit of water to survive. The aquifer under Borrego Springs is nearly empty. In about 100 years it will be gone and so will Borrego Springs with it.

For all of you activists, consider fresh water as your cause. You can save all of the monkeys and dogs from clinical trials, but in the end, you'll lay alongside the rest of those evil scientists, dying from dehydration because you've missed the real problem on this planet. We don't have enough fresh water to sustain our people. Don't think so? Go visit Israel and Palestine. There, the fresh water table is polluted by the ocean because the sands can't keep it away anymore.

Fresh water is something that you can not live without. If we keep growing our population at the current rate (not likely), then we will see a global crisis for potable water at the same time that we burn up our last chunk of coal (in about 148 years). What's even worst is that biotechnology will have found a way to keep me and you alive up to that age, so we'll be there together. Hooray. At least we'll have reduced CO2 emissions and saved some monkeys.

Inconvenient Confusion

2007-05-02T10:47:00.000-07:00

You probably know that Al Gore won an oscar for his documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth." I didn't understand why it would have won given that there were so many other far better documentaries in 2006. As fortune would have it, the documentary was running on a premium channel recently, so me and the family watched it.

I have a mix of emotions about this documentary. First, as a critic of film entertainment, I did not like its production. The central theme of the documentary is Al Gore giving a talk about global warming. There is footage of him actually giving this legendary talk, much like you would see in a recorded distance learning lecture. Only, this lecture was not educational, it was political. Second, the claims are confusingly misinformed and motivated politically.

You've likely read my position on global warming as a man-made doomsday scenario. Al Gore apparently believes that global warming is much akin to the ozone hole of the 80's. He even goes as far as referring to the ozone layer "crisis" as an example of man's ability to fix his (man's) problematic influence on the planet. Al Gore has obviously not read any recent studies about the ozone "hole" and its role in the dynamics of our planet's atmosphere. If he had, then he would know that holes in the ozone layer are a common occurence in our planet's history. Ignorance can be forgiven, though. Scientists used to think the Van Allen belts were going to explode, or worst, kill all of our astronauts. Guess what? Yeah, they were wrong, and the Van Allen belts were a blessing for reflecting highly energetic incident cosmic radiation.

What is most alarming in Al Gore's documentary is his blaming carbon dioxide emissions as the sole progenitor of global warming. Even more so, Al Gore positions the US as the largest contributor to his perspective on global warming. I've discussed this topic in another blog entry and determined that the US contribution to global carbon dioxide emissions is miniscule compared to the total volume of our atmosphere.

In fact, CO2 is only one facet in a larger constellation of emissions that plagues our planet. As more and more people (6 billion) exist on our planet, more waste is produced, and more biological decay is occuring. That biodecay produces a nasty greenhouse gas called methane. As we get more and more methane into our atmosphere, it will heat up even more. How are we going to stop that? We won't until we cull a few billion people off the planet. That's not likely going to happen, not even when the polar ice caps all melt and the coastal lands are flooded. That doomsday event will only displace about 250 million people, or about 4% of the world population.

Then Mr. Gore showed a graph of insurance losses caused by flooding as evidence of global warming and its economic impact. Well, really? Every industrialized waterway on this planet is controlled by man in some way or another. We have dammed numerous past floodways in the hope of controlling commerce on these waterways. By damming waterways, we have restricted the escape vector of flooded rivers, thus increasing the likelihood of inland flooding, especially around high population port cities.

Another place where this documentary fails is in its guidance for a course of action. In Al Gore's mind, all we have to do is stop producing CO2 and then it will all be fine. I don't have a problem with reducing the smog-creating emissions of factory plants. We should do it for ourselves, not the planet. What I do have a problem with is the delusion that reducing CO2 emissions will have any affect on stopping the planet's natural course of seasonal change. There is no conclusive science that links CO2 to global glaciations or global warming trends. We only have correlated circumstantial evidence found in ice cores and sediments that shows an increased carbon concentration in the atmosphere along with occasional rises in the average surface temperature of the Earth.

Yes, this planet has gone through multiple glaciations and warming trends. The planet has "seasons" of its own that are more catastropic than the minor seasons that we experience on the surface. There are many factors that contribute to the planetary glaciation cycle, one of which is the eccentric orbit it takes around our Sun. Are we going to try to change that too? How about its own wobbly revolutions that put it on a tilting spin. Our planet is likely to go topsey-turvey at some point and that'll make global warming look like a summer vacation in the Bahamas.

No matter what we do, this planet is going to heat up more and melt its polar ice caps. It has done that before, and it will do it now. All of our efforts should not be to "stop global warming," but rather to solve its fallout. What will we do with 250 million people moving inland? What economic provisions can we make to soften the blow? These are the issues for global warming, not CO2 emissions and finger pointing at countries who don't adopt some short-term political treaty.

On a positive note, though, this planet will recover and go into a global glaciation. As more fresh water hits the oceans, it will evaporate and fill the atmosphere with another greenhouse gas known as water vapor. That vapor, though, when it hits a critical concentration, will start to reflect the Sun's incident energy back into the cosmos more than it lets through. When that happens, the planet will cool down, and poof, we'll be in a global glaciation.

It's a real privilege to be at the cusp of this global change. Enjoy the show.

Full Disclosure

2007-04-19T18:37:00.000-07:00

I am sure that I share a common sentiment with my fellow Americans with regard to our Presidential Office. When we elect a new president, we get with it a handfull of appointments to the cabinet that are critical to the functioning of the government. Yet, when we do elect an official to become President, we do so without knowing who it is they are going to appoint to the cabinet.

For instance, there is the Secretary of Defense. This person is pretty powerful in the world political theatre. The President relies upon the Secretary of Defense to decide if a military action is necessary and winnable during an international complaint. If the President appoints some cracked-pot war monger, then we are stuck with it. Americans have the right to know who will fill this position with a new President.

Then there is the Secretary of State. This person is like the head ambassador to all nations in the world as we know it. When this secretary makes a visit to a nation, they are treated as if the President were visiting. Rightly so, because it's the role of this secretary to advise the President of foreign affairs with regard to US interests. Our foreign neighbors love to put on a good show that paints the US in a positive and engaging light. We need someone in this office who can look past themselves and the grandiose pageantry and really make an honest assessment to the President.

Probably the single most important cabinet position is the Chief of Staff. This position is responsible for herding the sheep and making sure that the windows are closed when important talk is going on. You might think of this position as the head nanny and parent to the President and its cabinet. What I really want in this position, though, is someone who places the best interests of the country before the reputation of the person who occupies the Presidential Office.

The problem with these appointments is that they are made with loyalty in mind, and nothing more. The Chief of Staff is selected solely on the basis of whether or not they can "keep their mouth shut and the cameras at bay." In my mind, that's a very diluted and cynical appraisal of this position, but entirely fair and accurate in our modern times.

In fact, it would seem that all of the appointed cabinet positions are really just "jam" coatings meant to cover up the shortcomings of a President who is not presidential. The very fact that an individual person makes these appointments solely on their history and raport, rather than merit and patriotism, gives me reason for pause. Why would I ever vote for a presidential candidate without knowing all of the baggage that they are bringing to the table.

Really? How many of you would marry someone with a dozen kids without ever meeting those kids? You would have to have an unnatural love for that person, or really be naive. I've been naive, but no more.

I want every candidate for the US Presidency to disclose who their top cabinet appointments will be BEFORE we go to the primary elections. Many of the candidates will argue that they simply don't know who it will be, which is a bunch of hooey. These people know their debts inside and out and know to whom they owe the greatest debt of opportunity. We need to know this information and why these people are going to be appointed. This is the government of a country, not some corporate executive board. We need to treat the presidential elections with as much scrutiny as a publicly traded company. As the citizens of this country, we all hold stock in its governance and we need to be treated as such!

No more bafoons! No more military rejects who were "removed" from their positions! No more "opportunity" appointments for friends and neighbors! We want due process for the proper governance of our country. Full disclosure is the only solution to this shortfall of parity in our government. So let your voice be heard and write to your congressional representatives. Demand to know who a candidate's top-level cabinet will be, and demand further that the President stick to that list. Otherwise, it's just bait and switch, and then we'd have cause to file a complaint with the US Supreme Court!

MeToo Apple

2007-03-22T09:59:00.000-07:00

So many people think that Apple is the "de facto innovator" in personal electronics. It pains me physically to hear people exclaim "oh what a wonderful idea" when they see some nifty little white gadget from Apple.

Today the news is a-buzz about the AppleTV. Why this thing is so wonderful, I will never understand. Apple is yet another Johnny Come-Later implementor of the media-fusion device. The first of its kind was the Tivo, which was just a computer that could decode MPEG and interface with a television set. Then came Microsoft MediaCenter. Typical of Microsoft, though, it was confusing and not marketed very well. The home user didn't understand how to use MediaCenter because it wasn't packaged. Then came all of the open-source knockoffs of the Tivo device. They're the lunatic fringe, so they don't really account for any market. Then came the XBox 360, which was Microsoft's way of packaging MediaCenter into a fun and useful console. Granted, using the 360's controller as your DVD remote is weird at first, but you get used to it.

Now we have AppleTV which is just a packaged version of Windows MediaCenter. You get a simplified iMac console with Apple's "Media Center" variant of MacOS installed on it. The rest is just plug and play, no different than using the XBox 360 or Microsoft MediaCenter or Tivo.

The great part of Tivo is that it has programming for it. AppleTV has iTunes and no way to get additional content to it outside of iTunes. Yeah, it can do the Tivo recording of your favorite programs, but so what. Any device in this space has to be able to do that. You can get it for free with open source.

Why is Apple "MeToo"? Well, first you had Lisa, which was the first to market a graphical UI for an OS. Apple bought Lisa and created the MacPlus. Then they rewrote their Mac OS to be unix based. Windows NT was already there two years before them. Then they marketed their iPod, which came after the Rio personal MP3 player hit the market. Then they switched to using Intel processors, which everyone else in the world has been using for decades. Today, they have a media fusion set-top box, just like everyone else. Apple's only true identity now is the apple logo and the color "white". They had to buy up the remaining rights to that apple logo, though, because someone else had it first.

Getting tired of me lamenting Apple's management? MeToo.

Are You 2896 Ready?

2007-03-14T21:30:00.000-07:00

Here's something weird. I'm on Windows Vista again, and developing with VisualStudio 2005. I create my MSI several times each day and install it. But tonight on Vista, I got this weird error. What's worst is that I didn't discover this error until after I found a lame MSI hack from an MSDN blog.

So I am installing my MSI, and it gets to the very end and pops up an error message. The error code is 2896. That's all I got was that lame error code. 2896. Go to google and do a search on "windows vista error 2896." You'll find the blog that leads to a solution to decoding the error.

Turns out that this error message is really because the software I am installing is marked for deletion by Vista. Since I did not change the MSI version number, and did not change the product code, Vista thought it was installing the exact same product, which I had just uninstalled. Apparently the uninstallation process is queued, so you can't install and uninstall the same MSI repeatedly. It wasn't until after I rebooted Vista that I was able to install the MSI again. (Note, that after waiting for about 30 minutes, the MSI could be re-installed)

I would pay the Windows Vista Ultimate licensing price for a version of Vista that is tuned to developers. One that gives me access to things like this uninstall queue and the ability to shut off "virtual" registry support.

Mi Vista es su Vista

2007-03-14T20:51:00.000-07:00

Today I attended a code clinic about programming Windows Vista. I like attending the Microsoft learning events because they are free and the cross-section of talents are comfortable. There are some real old-timers that do Windows platform programming. They're fun people.

Anyway, one thing that I took from that talk was about how Vista handles registry access. In the past, if your application did not have permission to make registry changes, it would get an error. Now, Vista creates an isolated, virtual, registry for your application. This gives your application the impression of it working properly, and for the most part, it's correct. In my case, though, it's not.

I program middleware Windows Services that make use of .NET Remoting. To manage the services, I create a manager application that is available from the task tray. You've seen something like this with SQL Server Manager, if you do SQL Server programming.

So I figured out how to make my service run with elevated privileges, so now it runs with full-control as Local System. That was a great triumph. Alas, though, the service manager runs as the local user account. This has some unfortunate side effects.

From my service manager, I have a UI to make runtime configuration changes to the service it controls. The manager does this by writing to the registry. Because it is using LUA (local user access), it can't write to the real registry, so Vista lets it write to the "virtual" registry. So there I am thinking that I am fixing my configuration problem with the service, but darn if it just doesn't seem to work when I restart the service. That's because my service is reading its config from the real registry while my service manager reads it from the virtual registry.

The next time you develop a service manager that controls a service, remember to isolate all configuration changes in the service and not the service manager. The manager should just request changes in the process space of the service and not the manager.

I am yet to figure out how to make my service manager run as the administrator. I think it needs to be signed with my PFX file. Hopefully that solves the problem...

My First Theorem

2007-03-13T19:54:00.000-07:00

It's not everyday that I get to exercise my brain in a theoretical fashion, but today was special. I suppose a cosmic ray zapped that one neuron that was holding the rest of them back. Or maybe that cosmic ray zapped too many of those neurons, and now I am delusional about my own grandeur.

Anyway, I have a theory about numbers. Take any integer number and add up its digits. That means for a number like '123' you add '1 + 2 + 3'. My first theory is that the resulting sum will have no more than N-1 digits, where N is the number of digits in the original number. That's nothing new. Call this the DSUM operator.

Now for my conjecture:
(1) Given any number, X, define Y = DSUM(X).
(2) For every Y[i] = DSUM(Y[i-1]), the number of digits in Y[i] will be less than in Y[i-1].
(3) [i] will always be less than or equal to N, where N is the number of digits in X.
(4) For all Y[i], Y[i] is always less than Y[i-1].
(5) There always exists a value of Y[i] such that Y[i] is less than 10.

Now let's do some examples.

X = 123
Y[1] = 1 + 2 + 3 = 6

X = 94567
Y[1] = 9 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 = 31
Y[2] = 3 + 1 = 4

X = 0.13598
Y[1] = 1 + 3 + 5 + 9 + 8 = 26
Y[2] = 8

For fractional numbers, (4) does not hold, so it has to be inverted. Y[i] is always greater than Y[i-1].

Yeah fun with numbers. So you read it here first, and I'm off to be famous.

Viva la Vista

2007-03-05T16:41:00.000-08:00

Recently my Compaq Presario 2700T laptop's screen has been flaking-out on me. With the crash in laptop prices, I figured it would be more cost effective just to get a new laptop with a Core 2 chip and Vista. Why not? I'm a developer and I need to stay ahead of the curve on new technology.

My first stop was at CircuitCity.com where I purchase a new Gateway laptop with 2GB of RAM, and a 1.6 Ghz Core 2 Duo chip. This used to be my "wow" developer configuration, but apparently it's the status-quo for home users. I feel so uncool now.

The laptop came with Vista Home Premium, which is cool in its own right, but I need Vista Business or Ultimate. You can't upgrade laterally to Vista Business from Vista Home. Rather, you have to use the Vista Update Anywhere tool to go from Vista Home to Vista Ultimate. I didn't realize this until I purchase the laptop AND Vista Business separately. Oh well, I can re-use the Vista Home Premium license for another computer ...

Many of you may not remember the day when Windows 95 came out. I do. Back then there was Windows 3.1, and everyone thought it was hot stuff. So when Windows 95 came out, many people balked at it and complained about it being "too different." Many of the same complaints are made of Vista. Sure, there are compatibility issues, and the interface is a little bit different. Mostly, though, these lamentations are lame and unfounded.

I found Vista to be easy to install, easy to setup, and even easier to use. Vista was able to setup the driver for my HP Business Inkjet 1200 without me doing anything except clicking on a few buttons. Yeah, it's a network printer too, and it found the printer without fail. XP couldn't do that without locking up my entire shell for about 10 minutes.

Then I started to migrate my old data over to my new computer. This is where it gets really cool. I copied the "My Documents" folder from my old computer to the appropriate documents folder on Vista. During the copying, Vista figured out that I was copying these special folders, and was able to redirect the "My Pictures", "My Music" and other "My ..." folders to the appropriate NEW locations in Vista. Plus, it was smart enough not to automatically clobber the existing index files for these folders. How cool is that? Try that on a stinky-mac!

So far, the only software that has not been compatible is Norton SystemWorks 2005. I've gotten warnings about VisualStudio 2003 and 2005, and of course SQL Server 2005, but they all seem to work just fine. I have projects that are in the hundreds-of-thousands of lines of code, and Vista with VS 2003 and 2005 both crank!

ActiveDesktop is finally a first-class citizen with Vista. That's the nifty gadget bar on the right of the default desktop. Microsoft has made it easier to customize and program now that you can create HTML gadgets instead of ActiveX controls. Another hoo-ra for Microsoft and Vista. I saw AD released back in the early 90s and thought it was cool back then. Today, it's even cooler!

Probably the most important features for the end user of Windows are startup time and shutdown time. Vista startsup super-fast now, probably a whole 50% faster than XP does on a clean install. Shutdown is nearly instantaneous. My 1.6 Ghz Vista laptop kicks my 3.5GHz XP Pro desktop, seriously.

Because of some compatibility issues, I wonder if some business users will just wait 6 months to upgrade to Vista. I had thought about that too, but figured, why wait. It's not like Microsoft just went on vacation and isn't working on compatibility. Plus, to be fair to Microsoft, the vendors have had Vista in hand for over a year. They've had plenty of time to get their software Vista Ready. If nothing else, new Vista users will experience what it's like to be a Mac user with no software available to them. The only difference is that the Vista user is guaranteed to have an ocean of software open to them soon, whereas those Mac users, well, keep that inner-smile!

My PC is Your PC!

2007-02-13T16:38:00.000-08:00

For a few months now we've been watching commercials in the US where a Mac and a PC are compared using two people. The purpose of these commercials is to exemplify the differences between an Apple Mac computer and a PC. Really, though, what is this mythical PC that is being compared to a known brand name? The PC acronym means Personal Computer. This was originally coined in the 70s and taken-up by Apple to further its little hobbiest computer. Since that time, the PC became part of the IBM PC trademark on their own personal computing device. That product is long-since dead now, and Apple no longer uses the "Personal Computer" phrase for their product.

What's worst is that many Wallstreet writers and analysts seem to think that PC is synonymous with Microsoft. That's not entirely true, of course. Sure, you can run Microsoft Windows on your non-Apple, x86 based, IBM PC clone, but that doesn't mean it's the only game in town. In fact, only about 92% of the PCs (personal computers) in use today are running Microsoft Windows. The other 8% are running Mac OSX, linux, Unix, and other variants too numerous to list.

Why do I care? Well, I just heard another "informed" industry analyst say that you should sell your Microsoft stock because "the PC will be replaced by the Internet in 5 to 10 years." Yeah, that's a quote. The genius actually thinks that the Internet, which is a concept, not a physical reality, will replace the Personal Computer you are using right now. Okay, so let's say your PC goes away. How are you going to access this mythical Internet device? Oh yeah, with another Personal Computer. Sure, it will be small, maybe even an HP scientific calculator, but it will be a personal computing device with an operating system.

What operating system will be running on that Personal Computer? In 5 years, it is a safe bet that it will be Microsoft Windows. In 10 years, I bet it will still be a Microsoft Windows OS product. Do you think the world will all of a sudden decide that they need a pretty white PC with an Apple logo on it? Sure, maybe when the Mac OSX software section actually consumes a full aisle, or even two.

If you're considering selling your Microsoft stock, consider that over 5 BILLION people out there have not adopted a person computer yet. There's only one software company in the world with enough power and capacity to service an emerging market like that. Do you honestly think that Apple has enough manufacturing capacity to produce 100 million computers to take over the market? Let the tale of IBM be your beacon.

The Age of Magic

2007-02-08T13:15:00.000-08:00

We all have heard the saying that to any sufficiently primitive culture, any measure of technology appears to be magic. At what point does a technologically advanced society realize that it has begun to enter into the Age of Magic?

If you were born in the early part of 1900, then you would have seen some largely fantastic advances that would appear magical to any primitive culture. Yet, even throughout the last 100 years, all that we've seen are advances on our mechanical technology. Whether it is the mechanical control of electrons through an NP junction, or the mechanical scattering of electromagnetic waves, these are just advances on the mechanical.

Reading through Science today, I found a perspective on negative index of refraction materials (10.1126/science.1136481). What the heck is that, you say? Check this out:

http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/16/5/3

http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn10816.html

http://www.azom.com/details.asp?newsID=7492

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/315/5808/47

The Science article shows how these metamaterials are formed in real-life, not in computer simulations. Their structure is nano in scale, of course, but they are no more complicated than a simple square of wire with another square of wire embedded in it. Or better yet, just a fishnet of nanowire with a well-designed dielectric spacer. While simple in design, these metamaterials are capable of hiding objects from detection, yes even from RADAR. As the technology is perfected for visible light, there is no doubt that you will be able to purchase a cloaking "cape" that is able to hide your appearance (but not your existence).

As our technology continues to be reduced into the nano-scale world, more and more will it appear to be magical. While we won't be invoking any spells, per se, we will be making use of devices that will appear magical to us. Already we have micro-scale steam engines and lethal nanoized chemicals that can kill pathogens and other microorganisms and yet do not affect larger, more complicated organisms (EcoTru from EnviroSystems, Inc. - www.ecotru.com).

These negative index of refraction materials remind me of the Synthetic Aperture Radar developed by Dr. Edward Fenimore of Los Alamos National Laboratory. SAR is just a disk of material that has a pattern of "punch holes" in it that are designed to improve the focus of an image. The SAR works with any kind of EM-radiation, even visible light. The magical physics of the SAR are in its geometry, just like the NIMs.

Cosmic geometry. Maybe the Masons had the right idea thousands of years ago and have been waiting for the rest of us to catch-up.

Trademarks In The Dark

2007-02-02T08:56:00.000-08:00

If you have a business, then you know that filing for a trademark is pretty easy in the USA. You just go to the USPTO web site (www.uspto.gov) and start filling out the form. The cost is significantly less now, nearly a third of what it was a couple of years ago. That's great news.

What you don't know about your mark, though, is that there is a plethora of common law that dictates whether or not you can file with your specimens. The specimens are documents that clearly show your mark being used in commerce. Well, my last mark registration came back to me with the examiner asking for a better specimen that places the mark in closer proximity to evidence of commerce. Closer proximity. Yeah. Right.

Apparently Lands’ End, Inc. v. Manbeck, 797 F. Supp. 511, 514, 24 USPQ2d 1314, 1316 (E.D. Va. 1992); In re Dell Inc., 71 USPQ2d 1725, 1727-1729 (TTAB 2004); In re MediaShare Corp., 43 USPQ2d 1304 (TTAB 1997); TMEP §§904.06(a) and (b), establish some common law that determines an acceptable proximity of your mark to evidence of commerce.

I don't have a problem with common law judgements in the case of trademark protection. Really, it's a good thing. What I do have a problem with is the apparent lack of disclosure on the USPTO web site. If we are governed by common law,then someone needs to review those cases and establish clear guidelines about proximity and fair-use. Otherwise, filing a trademark is akin to running in the dark. We all know what happens when you run in the dark...

Without publishing proper guidelines, the USPTO is endorsing the legal industry. Apparently they don't want you to file your own trademark, but rather pay a trademark attorney $2500 to file it for you. That $2500 is 10 times what it costs to file it yourself. I'd rather spend my money on building the business that I am trademarking.

So in my case, the trademark was for a web site. My specimens were of the home page that clearly shows the mark near links to purchase service. Because of this proximity ruling, though, the specimen I used is not valid. I needed to show the mark physically closer to the act of commerce, such as a link or button to purchase items. So I suppose some judge out there pulls out his ruler and literally measures how close your mark is to commerce. If it's over 1 millimeter, then your specimen is invalid. On the Web, though, the spatial proximity of your mark to commerce is governed by the size of the font and its leading. If your customers use enlarged fonts for page viewing, then you're screwed. When you submit your specimen for examination, though, I encourage you to do so in the smallest, most scaled-down, font possible. That way this phantom proximity ruling would not apply to you.

Zune Exonerated

2006-12-04T11:02:00.000-08:00

I have recovered my love for All Things Zune. Turns out that many Zune users out there try to use the front-side USB ports on their computers only to be met with constant halts and failed synchronization attempts. I experienced the same.

On zunarama.com, I came across a post about someone who used the back-side USB ports to synch their zune, so I tried it. Sure enough, every song from my library ported quickly to my zune. Not a hiccup, nothing. Before, it would do about 20 songs and then die.

You might think this is a Zune Marketplace software problem, but it's not. This type of error is a buggy driver. It's likely that the USB driver I use has a NPE buried in it that causes the USB header to fault. Crappy hardware makes the world a terrible place, but the Zune definitely is not that.

I am finally Apple Free!

Zune Marketplace Sucks

2006-12-01T11:42:00.000-08:00

I like my Zune. The physical device is a great little media player. The one thing wrong with it is the software wrapped around it.

The Zune marketplace is the only control system for the Zune. If you want to put music on it, you have to use the Zune Marketplace software.

Today, I tried to burn some music and push it to my Zune. I only burn from CD and never buy anything online. Apparently this is not the usecase of the Zune demographic. After I burned my WMA files, I clicked on the "Sync" button in Zune Marketplace. What I got after that was a bucket of frustration. Apparently the software could not put the new music on the Zune, for whatever reason - don't know. All that I ever got was a generic "An error occured while synching ..."

So I decided to remove the old software and re-install. I downloaded the Zune software from zune.net and proceeded to uninstall the old Zune Marketplace. After rebooting my computer, I installed the supposed "updated" Zune Marketplace software. Well, actually, it isn't the latest version because the installer had to download an additional update. WTF.

Then I rebooted my computer again because the install process locked up while trying to discover my Zune. Figures. Yet another usecase that the dimwits didn't plan for.

After reboot, I plugged in the Zune and the Zune Marketplace software came up. This time, it asks me if this is a "Guest" Zune, or if I want to replace the contents of the Zune with my library. Hmm. I guess remembering the last "Zune" device wasn't part of the software spec again, so yet another failure.

I chose to "replace the contents of the Zune" with my library (which is already ON the Zune) and clicked Next. I am still waiting. It has been about 30 minutes. I am still waiting.

Let's recap the fun adventure this has been:

1. Zune Marketplace (ZM) download from zune.com is NOT the latest software.
2. During installation, ZM is not able to identify your zune if it already existed in a previous incarnation on your computer.
3. ZM uninstall removes any memory of your already configured zune.
4. ZM re-installation appears to do something unknown, and for a very long time, when it tries to re-establish your library on your already-configured Zune.

When I got the Zune and converted my iTunes library over to it, the process was smooth. If I had left it alone and not tried to add more music to it, then I would be listening to music right now. Instead, I just stare longingly at my Zune and wonder if I should just go back to my iPod. Of course, if I wanted to import the WMA files that I ripped this morning, I would have to do it on a per-file basis, which would take me forever. Yet more foresight by Steve Jobs Inc. Yeah.

Why does commercial software suck so bad today? I just don't get it. This problem appears to be a plague for all software vendors, not just Microsoft, Apple, and SUN.

DUMB TRADERS ANONYMOUS

2006-11-30T07:15:00.000-08:00

This morning on the television I saw AMEX ticker symbol CSN climb 800%, from $0.08 to $1.09. Wow, I though, that is a stock to investigate. What the heck is going on there? The last time I saw that jump, it was 2002 and I was buying SONUS Networks.

CSN is the symbol for City Networks, Inc. This is a Taiwanese based company that provides wireless access infrastructure and resells network hardware. They don't manufacture anything,and claim this in their company profile:

"The Company also created the Hotspot solution and the Next Generation Loops (NGL) solution, both of which help companies extend their business to the carrier's solution to meet people's communication inquires." (From E*Trade)

Their website, shows the last news update in December of 2004. So this is a company that hasn't done anything in the last 2 years except exist.

(Update: The stock is now at $0.24 with a 118% gain. Someone is getting smart).

So why did its stock go up so high? The news wire (Marketwatch) listed the ticker symbol for Brazil's Companhia Siderurgia Nacional as CSN. This company was listed on a news brief about Pfizer's recent layoffs as being a possible purchaser of Corus Group (CGA). Imagine your excitement finding a big biotech stock for $0.08 per share. Bargain hunters abound!!

The run-up of this stock is a clear indicator that automated electronic trading is a dangerous game. About 1.6 million shares of CSN were traded today, which is enormously more than the average daily volume of 90K that this stock sees. That probably means a bunch of traders out there made serious bank on this mixup, and a bunch more of the not so savvy home traders are about to buy a stinker stock that will lose 90% of its value in the next 7 days.

All of this likely because Marketwatch listed the wrong ticker symbol for a real company. The AMEX will likely cancel all of these trades in lieu of the mixup, if they ever realize that it happened.

ZUNE UPDATE

2006-11-29T14:28:00.000-08:00

A good friend of mine pointed out a flaw in my Zune analysis. The price of Zune music is not $0.79 in US dollars, but rather 79 ZUNE cents. A good analysis of this came from Apple Matters, which pegs the price at about $0.985, or a haypenny less than that of iTunes.

I stand corrected. The price of music is the same, whether Zune or iTunes.

This friend also pointed out that you can share your iTunes music across your LAN by streaming music from iTunes outward. This music is DRM'd just as it is in Zune, thus allowing you to legally listen to other's music. I've not seen anything like that in Zune.

Lindon Dollars, Zune Dollars, iTunes Credits, what's the deal with new currency? At least iTunes got it right when it made the exchange rate 1 iTunes Credit for $1 US Dollar.

I don't like the Zune Dollar idea, but I do like my Zune. If the Zune had better volume control, I would love it more. As it is, though, audio level 1 is still too high for my sensitive hearing. Maybe Roger Daltrey will file a lawsuit against Microsoft too for destroying his hearing?

MY ZUNE AND ME

2006-11-16T11:18:00.000-08:00

On November 15th, Microsoft released its new Zune media player to the US market. Not so surprisingly, my kid asked me "What's a Zune" when I told her that I had bought one. Microsoft hasn't really tried to market this device that much, probably hoping to capture more of the viral market. With iPod out there, it will be hard to convince people to switch to a new media device that costs $249. If there was a "trade in" deal, though...

I love my Zune. The handprint of the Zune is more inline with the size of my hands. The iPod gets lost in my oven mits, and I can feel the hard drive in it humming along. The Zune, though, is quiet. I tried to hear the drive in it, but couldn't. I even tried to make it skip by banging it on the table lots of times while it was playing, and still no skip. My iPod is a skipping champion and often times just blanks out in confusion.

The screen is crisp and attractive. My kid loved it when she saw it. Plus, when I told her that she could "send" her music to other Zunes, and get music back, she was sold. Did I mention she has an iPod? Yup, but she's ready to get the Zune instead of a bigger capacity iPod.

Sound quality is competitive with the iPod, if not better in some instances. The earbuds that come with the iPod are the secret to its success. Microsoft has not forgotten that, and has included not only equally sounding phones, but also more functional ones. The Zune earphones have magnets on them so they stay together when you store them! You have to appreciate that little feature.

My family put the Zune to the test against the iPod and iTunes. We searched for music that was missing from iTunes, and found that Zune had listed the music, but noted it as "not available". Yet, some European versions of the songs for which we searched were available on Zune and not on iTunes.

Although brick-like in appearance, the Zune is the same weight as my 3G iPod, and about the same as the 4G video iPod that my wife has. She wasn't sold on the Zune because it's not as pretty as the iPod. Typical. She's more of the Apple demographic anyway.

So let's recap why I love my Zune:

1. Beam music between other Zunes (can be turned off too).
2. Better form-factor for my large hands.
3. Ear phones that are easier to store.
4. Non-skipping technology that defeats the iPod like George Foreman!
5. More ways to shuffle and repeat ad hoc play lists.
6. Device controls are more decisive (no weird rub-wheel interface).
7. Capable of interfacing with your home media center to playback of video.
8. Pulled in my iTunes music without any problems or prompts.

Problems with the Zune:

1. Installation of the Zune 1.1 update did not work properly, likely because of my wireless internet and bluetooth transmitters that surround me.
2. Apple iPod 30GB is $10 cheaper at CircuitCity with $10 rebate offer.
3. Not nearly as stylish as the iPod.
4. Only 2 other accessories for the Zune - a travel pack and a charger.
5. Volume control is not fine-grained enough for sensitive hearing.
6. Can not publish your playlists on a LAN through the Zune interface.

Chatty AJAX

2006-10-16T14:37:00.000-07:00

I recently attended a technical conference about AJAX and .NET. We all know that AJAX has been around in some shape or another for more than six years. The nature of AJAX is no different than an applet calling back to its home. Instead of a Java applet, though, you’re just writing a JavaScript “applet” and hitting the dynamic rendering engine of the web server. What we’ve all forgotten is why we stopped creating fat clients and put the CPU burden back on the server.

First of all, back in the 90s, nobody had gigahertz computers, so we all lamented the slow speed of a fat client. Then there were compatibility issues with the browsers and their implementations of Java. Then there was the problem of a chatty network, where your applet produced lots of little requests that bogged down your thin pipe. The Java applet was nice because you could combine your requests into a larger payload and make more efficient use of your bandwidth. AJAX doesn’t do that.

Why is a chatty network so bad? Network communication occurs through software that implements a nice and clean protocol that guarantees that you will be able to send your data on the wire, and possibly receive your response. If you are using TCP, then you are guaranteed to get something back. That something, though, may not be your expected response. Yet, all of this communication carries with it a protocol burden that is as small as 20 bytes, plus 20 bytes for the IP header, and some additional bytes for the MAC header.

http://www.erg.abdn.ac.uk/users/gorry/eg3561/lan-pages/mac.html

http://www.networksorcery.com/enp/protocol/ip.htm

http://www.networksorcery.com/enp/protocol/tcp.htm

So that’s at least 54 bytes just to send a single packet to a destination. If you are using HTTP or an XML web service, then you further add space for the request headers, which could be an additional 40, 50, 250, or thousands of bytes. As you can plainly see, the protocol expense for TCP with HTTP or XML-WS can be pretty high, and not to be taken lightly. Our networks haven’t expanded capacity beyond 10/100 megabits to the client. Yeah, bits remember, not bytes. So a 10 megabit connection really only allows for about 1.25 megabytes per second, or about 23000 empty TCP packets. The 100 megabit connections only allow for 12.5 megabytes per second, or about 230000 empty TCP packets.

Let’s consider a real world example. You own www.myniftywebservice.com and you have an AJAX application that computes mortgage amortization using the current interest rate from the US Federal Reserve Bank. There is an API available that allows you to get this information over the web. So let’s make a simple http service that uses JSP, or ASP, or perl, or Ruby, or whatever poison you like.

First thing you do is deliver your AJAX application to the client, which could be between 30K and 400K of JavaScript. The ATLAS library is supposedly about 400K worth of JS code. Your load page is probably going to be a simple web page with a form on it and a button to update the mortgage schedule. That page will likely be about 6K, maybe 10K without pictures and fancy branding. So the round trip on your page would really be something like 10K download + 2K upload, or 12K total, sans the images.

Being the innovator, you add in AJAX to the mix, and now your page goes to 40K on the download. Your AJAX is pretty simple to implement because you’re just hitting a URL on your server to get back the current interest rate: http://www.myniftywebservice.com/getcurrentfedrate.xx. That URL is 53 bytes long. The HTTP request header for your rate update is:

GET /getcurrentfedrate.xx HTTP/1.1CRLF
Host:www.myniftywebservice.comCRLF

That’s a minimum of 68 bytes for the header. Add in another CRLF line for the body marker, and you’re up to 70 bytes. You haven’t even requested any data yet. What is your data? That would be just the form data that you would post anyway on an HTTP post request. We’ll say is 8 digits for the loan amount, 2 digits for the term, and 6 digits for the down payment. That’s a total of 16 bytes, plus the field identifiers, which we can just encode as simple one-digit numbers. So far that’s 28 bytes for the data, and 5 bytes for the result (2-digits for the mantissa, and 2 digits for the ordinate, and 1 digit for the separator).

Let’s compute our total cost for this 28 byte request.

1. TCP incurs 40 bytes
2. IP incurs 40 bytes
3. MAC header incurs maybe 14 bytes
4. HTTP request header takes 70 bytes

The grand total just to get in the door is 40 + 40 + 14 + 70, or 164 bytes for your 28 byte request, and 5 byte result. That means your request data would take only 14% of your total transmission on the wire, leaving 86% of the transmission as “noise.” Oh, wait, that’s “chatter” right? We like that term better because it makes the marketing guys happier.

Don’t think this makes any real-world sense? This type of AJAX application is what you are going to be seeing on many composite “mash-up” sites. Lots of little nifty applications (used to be Java applets, and Flashlets) that produce a lot of noisy chatter on the network to produce very little information.

The downside of this “new” AJAX craze is that you can’t coordinate requests effectively. With a Java applet, you could funnel your requests through a sieve and make better use of your connections. With AJAX, you are distributing your requests across the execution space of your page, which sounds like a great idea to the young programmers out there who are just fresh off the boat. For the seasoned software engineer, though, this produces more problems than solution. Not only have you increased the amount of noise on the network, but you’ve reduced the value of a click on the page.

Users control their behavior on a web page because they know that there is a time cost to their click. With AJAX, you are reducing that time cost to almost nothing. Why would a user not click on your nifty little gadget if there is no time cost for it to update? The end result will be to empower the noisy “chatter” user so they can play with more Web 2.0 gadgets. The downside is the enablement of more users producing more chatter on a network that is still not equipped to handle an enormous number of simultaneous users.

The right solution for the future of Web 2.0 is a finer-grained control on the caching of page parts. If I could mark DIV sections in an HTML page as ‘cached’, then I could better control what data gets updated and what doesn’t. That would make the web browser far more complicated, but it would also make it more efficiently use network bandwidth. Another solution is the Windows Presentation Framework (WPF). This is yet another “Java” solution where plugins provide the capability to render customer content in a more “rich-client” experience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Presentation_Foundation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_gadgets#Microsoft_Gadgets

http://microsoftgadgets.com/

WYBIWYG

2006-08-04T07:31:00.000-07:00

My friends lament how I’ve turned coat against the Java establishment and joined the ranks of Microsoft.  For the past few years, I’ve enjoyed a model of efficiency that I hadn’t had since the early days of Java.  Back then code was king, and writing software quickly and smartly is what made Java such a hit.

When .NET was released, it was 1996 all over again for me.  I could write code quickly, and so I did. As a result, many products I did develop, and many of which were libraries that would be incorporated into future products.  Like many Java to .NET’ers, I didn’t really understand the implications of the Microsoft’s library versioning, so I did not establish a clear version protocol for my early work.

Yesterday, that lack of foresight was my undoing.  After 8 hours of fighting with ASP, I finally got my application to work.  This was all the result of a minor bug fix in a core library that is used ubiquitously. Additional products of mine that are incorporated into my client’s projects were also affected by this bug fix, so I had to update them as well, and so on.

In the realm of .NET 1, this was very easy to do.  ASP.NET in version 1 was good about letting you decide what libraries would go into your web application.  I call that WYBIWYG, or “What You Build Is What You Get.”  That’s a great thing for programmers, because we tend to have lots of junk on our development machines for other clients and projects.

In the world of .NET 2, though, it is different.  Microsoft has “fixed” ASP so that it can load libraries from the GAC (shared library space) as well as from a local bin directory.  Unfortunately, you specify libraries using the configuration file of the web application or just plunk them into the project output directory.  But that really doesn’t work.  You have to use the VS.NET 2005 IDE to figure out how to include the external libraries into your project output, which doesn’t work either.  All that ever did was cause the ASP worker process to “terminate unexpectedly.”

If you try to include libraries into your project, and they turn out to also be registered in the GAC, then they will be included as GAC libraries in your web configuration file.  When you go to deploy the web project, they aren’t in the deployment output because they are assumed to be in the GAC of your server. That’s not always the case when you have a variety of projects hosted on the same server.

From all of this, I concluded that ASP.NET 2 is not WYBIWYG compliant because it includes “phantom” library references that you can not override with any measure of determination.  You simply are forced to install your libraries into the GAC and hope that they do not conflict with any other projects on the server.  That, in the Java world, is considered a dirty deployment, tantamount to sticking your library jars in the “ext” directory (no no!).

I like .NET and will continue to espouse its efficiencies and support, but I can not say the same for ASP.NET 2.  The Java Enterprise platform is much more friendly to developers because you can truly get WYBIWYG (except in early versions of JBOSS) for your projects. That, my friends, is peace of mind.

41 Seconds

2006-07-31T09:50:00.000-07:00

What does “Global Warming” really mean?  The entire planet isn’t heating up, only the atmosphere.  The temperature of the oceans isn’t increasing either, only the surface temperature is changing.  So what is “Global Warming?” Should you care about “Global Warming?”

As you may know, our planet has been around for over 4 BILLION years.  That’s a very long time in the cosmic sense, because our universe is estimated to be around 13 BILLION years old.  You might say that our planet is now an “adult” planet that is reaching middle-age.

There is no human alive who can fathom the gulf of time that is 4 billion years.  Our lifetime is only 72 years on average, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter.  Therefore, humans really only live for about 0.0000018% of the current planet’s lifetime. Our lifetime is to the planet as a creature living for 41 seconds is to our lifetime. How much influence can that one creature have on our lives in those 41 seconds?

Well, as an infant, when we are the most dynamic and susceptible to change, those 41 seconds can mean life or death.  As we approach our own middle-age, though, our bodies are more stable and resistant to change.  Those 41 seconds won’t mean anything. There are thousands of creatures living on our bodies that only live for seconds. These creatures are microscopic to us, much like we are to the planet.

All living creatures emit waste gases. Out of our bodies come water vapor, methane, and some malodorous airs from those 41 second microscopic organisms in our crevices.  We also produce waste gas as a part of our lifecycle.  For instance, driving a car, heating the house, cooling the house, playing computer, cooking food, etc., all produce carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, and various other noxious effluence as a byproduct.

http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/7b.html

The volume of the effective atmosphere is 51,924,265,160,241,167,534 cubic meters. I figured this using 12,756,000 meters as the Earth’s diameter, and 100,000 meters as the atmosphere’s depth. Roughly 78% of the atmosphere is molecular nitrogen (N2) and 21% molecular oxygen (O2). The remaining 1% is composed of Argon and other trace elements, such as Carbon, Methane, etc.

http://ess.geology.ufl.edu/HTMLpages/ESS/GLY1033_notes/lecture1.html

Consider the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in the atmosphere.  This is the big player in the “Global Warming” theory.  To understand how CO2, and any other chemical, affects our atmosphere and surface temperature, you need to consider its THERMAL CAPACITY.  This is a measurement of how much energy it can “hold” (or absorb and remit through radiative and kinetic transfer).

http://biocab.org/Heat_Transfer.html

The thermal capacity (specific heat) of CO2 is 850 J/Kg-C, which is 25% of the thermal capacity of water vapor, which is 4190 J/Kg-C.  This is very important because you see a tremendous amount of water vapor in the atmosphere every single day of your life.  Often times, you pray for it when the average surface temperature of your area is unusually high.  Water vapor in its condensed form is cloud cover, and furthermore, falling rain.

Thermal capacity is very important because it measures how well the surface albedo will be absorbed into the atmosphere, as well as the solar incident radiation.  Surface albedo is the energy reflectivity of a surface.  Sheets of ice and snow have a high surface albedo; where as soil and rock have a low surface albedo.  Water, such as ocean water, has a high surface albedo (glare). Not only do we get heat from our star, but we get it from the Earth’s core in the form of thermal radiation.  All of these sources contribute to the average surface temperature of the Earth.

Now you know that the thermal capacity of the evil CO2 is a FOURTH of that of friendly water vapor.  This should give you pause in your appreciation of “Global Warming” alarmists because CO2 is not going to have any significant affect on our atmosphere’s warming.  Rather, your much heralded “hydrogen” car, which emits WATER VAPOR as its by-product, will have 4 TIMES as much global warming influence as CO2 will.  Not only will you be strapping a Hindenburg to the back of your car, but you’ll be polluting the atmosphere four times faster than the gas-guzzling SUV you hate so much. I digress.

The US releases about 40,000 pounds of CO2 per person, per year.  CO2 has a density of 2.814 grams per cubic meter. There are 2.2 pounds in every kilogram, so 40,000 pounds is really about 18,182 kg. That is about 6,461,200 cubic meters per year. The US has about 300 million people in it, so that comes to 1,938,360,000,000,000 cubic meters per year.  Remembering the volume of the atmosphere, which is 51,924,265,160,241,167,534, we can compute the relative volume of CO2 emission per year by the US as 0.003733% of the atmosphere.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_atmosphere

We know that the Earth likes to have a CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, otherwise our plants would all die.  The typical concentration of CO2, for the last 400,000 years, has been between 170 ppm and 300 ppm. The Earth’s atmospheric density is about 1.2 kg per cubic meter at sea level, and quickly becomes smaller as you approach the Karman line at 100 km. If there is 1 million cubic centimeters in a cubic meter, then the US's yearly CO2 charge is about 37 ppm. The continent of Asia is notorious for is CO2 charge, with over 3 billion people on it, all burning oil and gas to live. So what, though, right?

Let’s consider this graph we’ve all seen in the recent news and trade journals:

http://www.technologyreview.com/articlefiles/climatechart.pdf

Here you see about 400,000 years of ice-core data showing the CO2 concentration, sea level, and average surface temperature all nicely correlated.  The graph goes from left to right, with the past on the left, and the present-day on the right.

All of the “Global Warming” alarmists claim that because today the CO2 concentration is at about 377 ppm, and the surface temperature is about 14.5 C, that “Global Warming” is upon us.

Why don’t we look at the graph a little bit closer.  Notice the periodic trend on the graph, starting at 400,000 years ago, when the CO2 concentration was 280 ppm.  Were there any humans driving around in their gas-guzzling SUVs back then? How about dirty coal firing furnaces in China? Maybe India had an abundance of motorcycles back then too, all polluting the atmosphere like crazy?

Jump ahead in time to 325,000 years ago and you find a really big spike in CO2 concentration (at 300 ppm), but with an average sea level 20 meters LOWER than they are today.  Oops, that doesn’t jive with the “Global Warming” alarmists, so we’ll just have to ignore that for now.  Maybe that was the last great human civilization before the glaciation of 260,000 years ago.

Moving ahead in time, at about 240,000 years we see another spike in temperature with a similar spike in CO2.  This one must be those pesky “Grays” that we see hovering around our planet.  Maybe they were driving around in their “Graycedes Model 2000 SUX” and polluting our atmosphere while we were throwing spears at the local Mastodons.  The “Global Warming” alarmists would likely have you think that our cave-man campfires were the cause of that CO2 spike.  It was a great party.

One more move through the graph takes us to about 125,000 years ago when we see a great sea level spike to about 5 meters above the current level, but with a CO2 level that is about 275 ppm, or a whole 100 ppm LOWER than it is today. Well, that doesn’t jive with the first event at 325,000 years which put the sea level LOWER than it is today, while showing an increase in CO2 concentration.

What you really should be concerned about is the 42 year lifetime left in our surface oil reserves, and the 140 year lifetime left in our coal reserves.  That means in YOUR lifetime, you will see the end of oil-based combustion on a global scale.  No matter what happens to CO2, it is guaranteed to lower in the next 100 years simply because its principal source will be gone.

Another guarantee to consider is the next glaciation. In about 70,000 years, this planet’s surface will again be covered by large glaciers and ice sheets that have since receded in the last 25,000 years. Your descendents, if they exist, will enjoy the cold winds, and breathable atmosphere that your ancestors enjoyed 25,000 years ago.  We’re just stuck in the furnace blaming ourselves for something that occurs as part of the planet’s natural cycle.

Assert This!

2006-07-18T08:21:00.000-07:00

Long ago we all went to college and learned about the assert() function in C and later, C++. At the time, assert() was a great little tool for quickly bailing out of your program when you thought it could not finish.  I used it when my calls to malloc() would fail.  Lately, though, I’ve seen commercial software vendors proclaiming their use of assert() as a way of writing safer code.  This is madness.

First of all, the assert() function is just a print and exit macro.  Your assertion message is printed to the tty, and then your application exits with an error code.  That’s it, no segmentation fault, no core dump, nothing else, just exit.

Imagine your surprise when your favorite game all of a sudden just exits back to shell right in the middle of fighting the super.  You would likely not play that game again.  When there’s a GUI, the tty is redirected to the /dev/null device, which means there is no output.  So much for that assert message getting to your users.

Now let’s imagine a more sinister scenario that is commonplace today.  You are using a library in your web application that performs something like PDF generation.  It works just great until one day all of your web sites crash for no reason.  If you’re like me, you have them programmed to send you email when they fail, and now you’ve got a thousand emails in your inbox and more waiting at the server.  Plus, your client is calling you asking why your crappy software doesn’t work.  Crap!

No logs are generated, nothing written to the web server’s error log, nada.  Only when you find the system log (or the Event Viewer in Windows), do you see a lone message from your library proclaiming “assert() at line XX in a/b/c/d.c raised.”  Wonderfully descriptive and helpful in diagnosing why the assert() was triggered.

Worst of all, you have to restart the entire web server, kick out what could be thousands of users to your site, and hope that it won’t happen again. To rub salt in your wound, your client has lost what could be thousands of dollars in business.

When this happened to me, I contacted the software vendor about their assert().  They only responded with “give us a sample program that demonstrates the problem.”  Uh, hello? Either they are completely clueless about when to use assert(), or else I am missing something.  The purpose of the assert() is to catch instances where your program can not continue.  That should be less than 0.001% of the processing time.  It would be impossible for me, or anyone for that fact, to reproduce a sample program that exemplifies the assert!  So I pressed them further and made them actually investigate the problem.  In this case, their library could not handle multiple objects with the same name in the PDF catalog.  Instead of throwing an exception, they just asserted!  Yeah, asserted an ERROR condition.

Too many times, young programmers who are fresh out of college think that what they learned can be directly translated to a commercial product. We all know that this is not the way to produce commercial software.  So, bad on me for paying for that software, but bad on them for not knowing better.  The Internet has made it far too easy for mediocre programmers to produce even more mediocre software at a price that is comparable to that paid to exceptional programmers.  The next time you are in the market for a PDF library, stay clear of ABCpdf from WebSupergoo.  They use asserts when they should be using exceptions.  That misunderstanding will cost you more than the $500 they charge for their software.

Roman Polanski's Mystery Apparition

2006-07-10T09:54:00.000-07:00

I recently watched Roman Polanski’s “The Tenant.” This is a 1976 horror film that is more about character development and legerdemain than modern shock-horror. If you like classic movies, such as Salem’s Lot, The Hounds of Basquerville, or the works of HP Lovecraft, then you would enjoy this film.

Should you ever rent “The Tenant,” quickly track forward to time index 41:12. In this scene, the main character is moving furniture around in his haunted apartment. Pay attention to the left hand side of the screen when he places an item next to the mirror. You will see a woman’s body, with black matted hair and a gash in her shoulder. The mystery apparition is facing the character yet he doesn’t notice her. In subsequent footage of that scene, she no longer appears.

The woman who haunts the apartment does not have black hair and is never really shown in the film. This mystery apparition appears to be out of context. I wonder if Roman Polanski meant this apparition as a prop to “shock” the audience, or if there is some other explanation for its appearance.

You decide. Rent this film on DVD, and see for yourself. I like to think there is more of a supernatural explanation for the mystery apparition.

Aide to China

2006-06-09T13:39:00.000-07:00

There’s not a day in the world of money that does not report something about China and its emerging market. Heck, why not, with a GDP of over 8 TRILLION DOLLARS, twice that of Japan, and 6 TIMES that of the United Kingdom. China is definitely a powerhouse economy that is really heating up.

Yet, today you can read about this $100 laptop that is being manufactured by a company named Quanta and distributed by Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child non-profit group. What is the scandal about this laptop? Well, nothing really, except that it is going to be distributed in CHINA, as well as India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria, and Thailand. So what, right? Well, let’s see what the GDPs of those countries are:

China: $8,859,000,000,000

India: $3,611,000,000,000

Brazil: $1,556,000,000,000

Argentina: $518,100,000,000

Egypt: $303,500,000,000

Nigeria: $174,100,000,000

Thailand: $560,700,000,000

The UK has an estimated GDP of $1,830,000,000,000, which is just above Brazil and half of India.  Yet, why isn’t the UK on that list?  The US is only $12,360,000,000,000, and yet it’s not on the list either.

Then I see Nigeria (LOC.GOV , US State Dept) on there, which is very disturbing.  Nigeria is notorious for its blatant disregard for information security.  A vast majority of identity thieving organizations are based in none other than Nigeria.  So now this wonder group of Negroponte’s is going to distribute laptop computers (along with Google’s help) to the very country that has a problem with information crime. Maybe we should give guns to The Mafia too?

Why don’t we look at some other countries too?  For instance, there is Iran, with a GDP of $561,600,000,000, and a huge population of “disenfranchised” (non-Google search making) people.  They could use some laptops, don’t you think? Saudi Arabia has a GDP of only $338,000,000,000, but they’re not on the list. What about Vietnam with a GDP of $232,200,000,000 – oh, they get a bunch of USAIDE money, so they don’t qualify, right?

Hey, we all know Ireland, right?  We love their whiskey and nifty beer drinking songs, but they didn’t make the list.  Their GDP is a paltry $164,600,000,000, which is LESS than that of Nigeria! I don’t think there’s a whole lot of information crime going on in Ireland, so why not give those honest, whiskey drinking, and potato farming folks a chance at Google? We owe it to them for giving us U2.

Honestly, no aid organization in this world should be giving money to any country that has a GDP like China’s.  China can certainly help its OWN people get access to information.  We do not need to subsidize their internet access any more than China is going to help our poor and “disenfranchised” people in the USA.

Negroponte, give me a break.  Go peddle your money and aid to countries that need medical and potable water services, not nifty search engines and access to Amazon.  Your money can be better spent really helping people rather than contributing a huge amount of waste product to the already unmanageable amount of “information age” waste produced today.  How many more dead computers are going to hit the trash in the next year because of Negroponte’s pathetic effort to “enfranchise” these people? I can think of something better to do with $100,000,000 than to give it to China.

(GDP figures are from the CIA World Fact Book   ChinaView - English - reports that China’s GDP in 2005 was 1.3 TRILLION US, with a growth rate of 9.5%)

(The $100 Laptop )

(The China Development Brief)

Host Species Barrier to Influenza Virus Infections

2006-05-31T12:29:00.000-07:00

The title of this entry was taken from a paper written by Thijs Kuiken, Edward C. Holmes, John McCauley, Guus F. Rimmelzwaan, Catherine S. Williams, and Bryan T. Grenfell. This paper appeared in SCIENCE Volume 312, pp 394 – 397. If you have the gumption to really know how viral infections cross the species barrier, then this is the paper for you. It’s written as a “perspective” rather than as a technical publication, which means there isn’t a bunch of jargon in it.

You can also contact the authors of the paper at t.kuiken@erasmusmc.nl.

A particularly interesting quote taken from the paper:

“It is well established that, as the proportion of susceptibles in the population, s, drops (as individuals become infected, then recover), the number of secondary cases per infection, R, also drops: R = s * R0. If R is less than 1, as is currently the case for H5N1 virus in humans, an infection will not cause a major epidemic.” (pg. 312) The value, R0, “is the number of secondary cases produced when an infected individual is introduced into a well-mixed local population of wholly susceptible individuals.” (pg. 312)

When you read this paper, keep in mind the wonder drug Tamiflu is an interferon based drug. There is wide knowledge that H5N1 has a record of circumventing that type of therapy (a case in 1997). For that reason, all of the stockpiled Tamiflu in your closet will do nothing for your H5N1 infection except act like an expensive placebo.

H5N1 AFIRE

2006-05-24T08:39:00.000-07:00

Have you seen the television shows lately on The Bird Flu Pandemic? You can’t miss them; they were running like gangbusters for a couple of weeks. Apparently people are going to wash-up on the shores of Hawaii when this bird flu reaches pandemic proportions. Whales look out, you’ve got competition from beached humans!

There have been past cases of apparent bird flu transmission from human to human. These cases have been investigated in Southeast Asia. In one case reported in a SCIENCE magazine article, a family member contracted the bird flu while caring for another family member who was sick, and eventually died from it. The other care-giving person in this case survived the evil and devastating bird flu infection. This was reported in 2005. Now, CNN reports a “cluster” of 7 family members all perishing at the wrath of H5N1. Guess what? The family was living in “very cramped quarters … many living in [sic] one room.”

To date there have been 124 deaths links to H5N1. How many people died from influenza A or B in the United States in 2005? Something like tens of thousands. That virus mutates all of the time, and is communicable as an aerosol. Are we scampering to get millions of dollars in flu vaccines out to the world? I didn’t think so. You can’t make any television movies about influenza A or B. What would it be called? “Human Flu – A Global Pandemic” Oh, wait, it already is a pandemic. Moving along…

Didn’t we see this with Ebola and West Nile virus so many years ago? Ebola was a vicious and deadly virus that passed from human to human quite easily. Last time I checked the news, there wasn’t any great pandemic scare of Ebola, and no millions of dollars for vaccines. I didn’t take an Ebola vaccine. The West Nile virus is very serious because it is transmitted by mosquito bites. When was the last time you got bit by a mosquito? Yeah, probably last night. Did you lick any chicken or duck feces lately? I didn’t think so. You might have drank some uncooked duck blood, though.

There are so many lethal viruses running amuck in this world, that it seems absurd to hyper focus on any particular one. HIV is still a global pandemic that is killing millions. The everyday flu that we brush off with Dayquil and reckless arrogance still kills tens of thousands each year. Why are we so obsessed with some off-beat poultry virus that has infected ONLY those people who are in close-proximity to infected bird waste products or blood. Why did this H5N1 virus suddenly appear in China anyway? How is it that it’s so lethal to humans? A common method for growing virus cultures is to use poultry eggs. Maybe there is more human engineering behind this H5N1 than we are lead to believe.

Oh yeah, blood, that’s a serious note, because duck blood is something of a delicacy in Southeast Asia. Do you think maybe these people should stop drinking raw duck blood knowing that H5N1 might be in that blood? Nah, it’s more fun to drink the blood.

Me Too Terrorists

2006-05-24T08:12:00.000-07:00

The latest tape from Osama bin Laden claims originality in their plot to use airplanes as weapons in the 9/11 terrorist attack against the United States. Anyone who has read some history on the Nazi war plans to attack America will certainly roll their eyes at Osama’s blatant theft and disregard for historical truth.

Towards the end of the Reich’s reign in Germany, Hitler’s cabinet planned an elaborate scheme to send airplanes to America on a bomber run. The technology at the time was for wooden frame aircraft, so the Nazi’s realized that they could not get a bomber across the Atlantic and return it home. Hitler didn’t care about that detail, so he decided to let the bombers crash into the skyscrapers of New York City. Thus was born the America Bomber project in war torn Germany.

Needless to say, Hitler’s plan failed miserably. There was no German technology that would allow them to carry any payload and fuel enough to make the bombers lethal in their strike. Even with an attempt to make it a sea-landing plane to refuel, and an ingenious idea to do a mid-air refueling, the German defense contractors could not make it work. To that end, Hitler abandoned the project in lieu of the ever so clever ballistic missile.

“Me Too,” says Osama bin Laden, with his tired old voice. “Me Too.” So desperate for recognition and respect, Osama has to revert back to pre-adolescent vanity to roust his troops and gain more followers for his cult. Osama “Me Too” bin Laden claiming original ownership of this America Bomber plot is a testament to his absurd mental state. Osama regards himself as a master strategist. Yet, his greatest strategy was to steal a strategy from a cabinet of master strategists who were able to conquer nearly all of Europe. How is that masterful? Oh yeah, masterful book reading. Osama “Me Too” bin Laden, master book reader and scholar of historical military strategy. Look out world, he’ll throw his book at you.

Is Osama competing with other terrorist factions to rally enrollment? Maybe Al Qaeda is having a slumping year for the suicide bomber squad and “Me Too” needs to build the public brand. Are we in a “Me Too” state of global terrorism, where each faction must compete with each other to gain more body-bombers? When are we going to get the first terrorist commercial – “Join the holiest of holy body-bomber squad and fight the evil western dictatorships! Our bombs blow better! We have VIP passes in Heaven!” How about Nielsen ratings for terrorist affinity?

You don’t want that crazy Jihadist, Osama “Me Too” bin Laden, to come knocking on your door, so you better disavow any support of this posting. If you don’t, then he’ll likely pull some other master strategy out of the annuls of history and lay down the smackdown. He’s really clever like that…

Abortion, Inc.

2006-03-16T21:59:00.000-08:00

I've been closely reading as many articles as possible on the subject of embryonic stem cell research and domestic policy. Thusfar, the research has proven to be quite astonishing. I've read about mice that have regrown nerve cells around broken spines and miraculously regained their ability to walk. I find this research through various mainstream media web sites, the daily business news, and reading Science magazine, published by the AAAS (www.aaas.org).

With all of the successful work with stem cells, why has the US government stymied further publicly funded research? Like many people, I found this apparent lack of vision to be frustrating. Why shouldn't the public be frustrated, with Christopher Reeves passing away, and countless young people resigned to paraplegia thanks to skiing or skating injuries. Who wouldn't want to see these people cured of their physical breaks?

There is some hope for embryonic stem cell research policy. France has lifted its emargo on using domestic stem cells for research, which will likely open more opportunities for further research. France has always been open minded about research, even when controversial in the normative public view. The US, though, is still adamant on not allowing any stem cell research.

What exactly is an embryonic stem cell? For most people in the world, this is just a garble of words that don't mean anything. If you're a fundamentalist Christian, the embryonic stem cell is the smallest proof of divine life. Of course, if you a non-religious person, then the embryonic stem cell is just a biological tool. Quite possibly, after another 25 years of solid research and human trials, the embryonic stem cell could be the answer to physical paralysis or organ transplantation. The bottom line defines the embryonic stem cell as the cell produced after an egg combines with a sperm and has started to divide on its own.

Pause for a second and consider from where embryonic stem cells will come. First, there are fertility clinics with thousands of discarded fertilized eggs, which may better serve the world as subjects of research. Then there are aborted pregnancies, which invariably position the human body as a factory for stem cells.

That a human can be considered a factory for stem cells is a terrible thought indeed. Consider the demand for stem cells if they are proven to be the cure for many physical ailments. How much would you pay to regain your ability to walk, run, or hug your kid again? Once such a demand manifests, the business of aborting pregnancies for stem cell harvesting is not far from thought. It only takes an enterprising business person to pay pregnant women a small fortune of cash in lieu of their aborted embryonic stem cells. Being a natural renewable process, these stem cells from aborted pregnancies would supply an almost instatiable supply for medical applications. The business of stem cells could reach billions of dollars in very little time. Wouldn't you pay tens of thousands of dollars to fix the defect in your heart, permanently?

I'm not writing this to lobby against stem cell research. In fact, I am a strong supporter of such research, because we need to know as much about biology as we can. What I don't support is the business of abortion for stem cell research. If any government is ever going to allow embryonic stem cell research, then it must do so without creating a demand for aborted embryonic stem cells. Research has found stem cells throughout the human body, in a variety of unexpected areas. Adult stem cells spur into life through despecialization, a process by which a specialized cell reverts to its stem cell function. These "random" stem cells are not as medically "useful" as the embryonic stem cell, currently, but that may change with further research.

Care truly must be taken to not marginalize the reproductive process of human procreation. I hope that stem cells are available if I break my spine, or suffer a heart defect. What I would not want, though, is to get those stem cells from a woman who has aborted her pregnancy solely for a cash stipend.

The actions of the US government, and other world governments, to stymie stem cell research is in itself a demonstration of care not only for the holiest of human biological processes, but also for a stable and safe society. Before this research can be freely funded, a good domestic and foreign policy must be in place to control, monitor, and audit its researchers.

The Taxorporation

2006-01-24T08:53:00.000-08:00

As a business owner, I am privy to knowing tax law and loopholes. In my best understanding of taxation, though, I’ve found that its sole purpose is to encourage spending. Governments can’t continuously distribute cash to the masses, so it relies upon taxation to encourage its citizens to spend their cash and thereby reduce their tax burden. That’s a clever use of taxes by the government, for sure, but something else is going on with taxation in the modern world.

The Romans levied taxes on their citizenry as a “tribute” to being Roman, and to pay for their protection by the Roman Guard. During the time of Romans, and the medieval era, there were no nifty accounting systems that allowed us to track where money was exchanged. Sure, the Incans and Chinese were tying knots on ropes as their financial records, but there was no historical archive or traceability. That meant levying taxes on the individual at a fixed rate, based upon their assets. Good thing we don’t do that anymore otherwise most of California would be broke paying their property taxes.

In the modern world, though, we have a variety of taxes. There is sales tax on sold goods, value-added tax on services, tax on your income, and extra tax on those vice-related items, such as cigarettes, alcohol, and gasoline. Then you have municipal taxes for business, property taxes for homes, and capital gains taxes on your investments. Phew! Everywhere you turn there is a tax, and they keep going up.

Even though there are lots of little taxes here and there, the biggest, and most invisible tax, is the income tax. The income tax serves one purpose: to remove money from the economy and prevent devaluation of the currency. This is a good practice for the economy, but really doesn’t do much good for the people who do the most spending. The poorest people in the economy are those that have the highest amount of cash flow. At the end of their money cycle, they have nearly zero residual. It’s these very people who suffer the most double taxation in the economy because of their spending.

Considering income tax, first we have to identify what income tax really is. Income is when money is given to you in exchange for a good or service. The government levies its income tax on that amount given to you. Let’s say you are paid $1 for working and the government levies a 23% tax on that income, so you really have $0.77. You don’t just stop with that $1 and put it in the bank, right? You have to pay your rent, which is $0.10, then your car payment, which is $0.05, and then groceries, which is $0.15, and your credit card interest, which is $0.07, and then gasoline to commute to your $1 paying job, which is $0.06. Let’s add all of that up:

$1 - $0.23 - $0.10 - $0.15 - $0.05 - $0.07 - $0.06 = $0.34

So where did your employer get that $1 to pay you? Let’s say you work at the local gas station. That $1 they pay you comes from the $0.06 you pay them. Well, you and 25,000 other people in your community. The gas station counts that $0.06 as income to itself and has to pay tax on it as well. Fortunately for the gas station, though, it gets to DEDUCT your $1 from its income before computing its tax burden. That doesn’t seem very fair. Let’s take a look at the gas station.

They start out with buying gasoline, which is called COST OF GOOD SOLD (COGS). This is a big deduction for them because it’s income to their supplier. Hmmm, interesting how they get to deduct that from their income, but you don’t. Next, they have their payroll expense, which is that $1 paid to you, which is another deduction. The list goes on for business deductions because they get to deduct outflow that is counted as income to other entities. Their final tax would look something like the following, considering a $0.01 sales tax, $0.02 for COGS, and $0.0015 for payroll:

($0.06 - $0.02 - $0.01 - $0.0015) * 33% = $0.0094

Yet, here you are, paying income tax on $1, which includes the $0.06 that is paid to the gas station as income. That really means YOU are paying the income tax burden for the business, and the business pays another income tax on the $0.06 you paid to it. This is double taxation on your income.

Imagine if you could play like a business and deduct your outflows that are income to your suppliers. What would your tax burden look like?

($1 - $0.10 - $0.15 - $0.05 - $0.07 - $0.06) * 23% = TAX

How much is that? I compute this to be about $0.13, which is significantly less than the $0.23 computed against the $1. Since you are actually reporting a net income of $0.57, your tax bracket would likely go down to something like 15%. That would further reduce your tax burden to $0.09! The new tax figure is a whopping 60% less than the double-taxation figure. Imagine what you could do with an additional 60% of cash in your pocket? You could buy that Maserati that you’ve always wanted!

Anytime you purchase a good or service from a business or person, you should be able to deduct it from your operating income. That way, the final person left holding the dollar will pay the tax for holding that dollar. In this way, the people who spend the most money and contribute the most to the economy will be the ones who pay the least amount of tax. Best of all, the government will only levy a tax on the current cash in the economy, rather than phantom cash from antiquated tax policies.

Consulting 101

2006-01-23T18:46:00.000-08:00

Many of my friends are asking me how to become a consultant. The conversation always starts out as “so how much do I charge?” To that, of course, I always answer “whatever you think that you are worth.” That answer usually gets me a troubled look and a little giggle. It wasn’t until recently that I finally got smart and decided to come up with a formula to determine a consultant’s hourly rate.

First you start with your current salary. If you divide that by 2000, which is the number of hours you work in a typical year, sans the 80 hours of vacation that you take each year. Also, 2000 is easier to use in division than 2080, so learn to deal with approximations and get on with consulting.

Now that you have a starting hourly rate, let’s talk about costs. First there are taxes for everyone. No matter what country you call home, you have to pay taxes. Remember that the figure you already computed is a pre-tax dollar amount, so don’t start adding in taxes to that rate. What you do need to incorporate is the employer side of your tax contribution. In the USA, we have a “social” tax of about 15%, which is split between the employee and employer. To this end, you would multiply your hourly rate by 1.075 to get your first adjusted rate.

Everyone gets medical insurance, right? That’s probably not true, so you better account for some medical insurance. You are your own product, so in the wise words of my friend Jerry B., “buy as much insurance as you can afford.” For a man, estimate your monthly medical insurance to be $150, which comes out to be about $0.80 per hour. This premium will increase along with your age, so round up your figure to $1 per hour. Now to recap:

HOURLY RATE = SALARY / 2000 * 1.075 + 1

You should always incorporate your business as a Subchapter-S Corporation. That way all of your income to the business will pass through to you at the end of the year and you don’t have to worry about double taxation on dividends. To incorporate, you can either get your best lawyer friend to setup shop for you, or visit http://www.corporate.com/ or http://www.mycorporation.com/. The price of incorporation should be less than $1,000, unless you have a lawyer do it for $3,000. Let’s say $1,000 is the price for incorporation, so that increases the hourly rate by $0.50.

Corporations have employees, and you are no exception. To that end, you need to setup a payroll service so that you don’t have to hassle with making quarterly tax payments to the government. I recommend a company named Paychex. They have very good pricing for the smaller professional services companies, like us consultants. With a payroll service, you pay for each issued check, or deposit, on a monthly basis. For a one-person shop doing direct deposit, you can expect to pay about $100 per month, or $1200 per year. That extra cost adds about $0.60 to your hourly rate. It’s time for another recap:

HOURLY RATE = SALARY / 2000 * 1.075 + 1 + 0.50 + 0.60
HOURLY RATE = SALARY / 2000 * 1.075 + 2.10

If you are setting up shop in the wonderful world of California, then you will have to pay $800 to the Franchise Tax Board every year. This is the cost of being a corporation in California. That $800 will boost your hourly rate another $0.40. Other states and countries will charge you even more money, especially if you are living in a socialist country. Just in case you were wondering, California doesn’t care if you are incorporated in Delaware, Nevada, or Timbuktu, as it will always charge you $800 to play in the California Economy. This $800 is a small amount of money to spend to get into one of the world’s largest economies.

Let’s talk about the benefits that you enjoy at your current employer’s behalf. There is vacation time, which is likely 80 or 160 hours per year. This is a small fraction of the total work time you spend, so it will not contribute no more than 10% of your bottom line. To that end, just multiply your hourly rate by 1.10 to get your vacation adjusted rate. Here is another recap:

HOURLY RATE = (SALARY / 2000 * 1.075 + 2.50) * 1.10

If you wanted to spend 25% of your time on vacation, or more, then your adjustment would be 1.25, or 1.35 for 35%, etc. This vacation adjustment is also a way to adjust for down-time. Don’t expect to work 2000 hours each year, unless you really want to wear yourself out. A down-time rate of 25% is typical in this business, so you should use an adjustment factor of 1.25.

HOURLY RATE = (SALARY / 2000 * 1.075 + 2.50) * 1.25

What other benefits do you have at your employer? How about a fitness club membership? That’s about $32 per month as an individual, or about $0.19 per hour. There are lots of other perks from your current employer, you just need to enumerate them on a yearly basis, and divide that amount by 2000 to get your rate adjustment.

HOURLY RATE = (SALARY/2000 * 1.075 + 2.50 + PERKS/2000) * 1.25

At this point, if you were at a job that pays $65,000 per year and included the fitness club and Starbucks Coffee each day, then your hourly rate should start at $47.85. That would give you the equivalent amount of purchasing power as your $65,000 per year job; give you three months of down-time reserve, and annual revenues of about $72,000.

What about your dream job? You’ve always wanted to be a big shot, raking in a bill or two per hour, right? So let’s see what happens when you want to make $112,000 per year. Your hourly rate would go to $80 and your revenues would be $119,141.

So what’s the big draw of making a high hourly rate? I’ve known consultants who charged as much as $1000 per hour for their time, and others as low as $4 per hour. Is there an optimal hourly rate that makes you comfortable? That’s ultimately up to you and how wisely you can manage your money. I’ve compiled a simple table of target salaries and their respective monthly cash money in the USA. How well you manage and spend money through your corporation will determine how much liquid cash you have each month.

Salary: $50,000
Rate: $37.77
Monthly Cash: $3,068.91

Salary: $75,000
Rate: $54.57
Monthly Cash: $3,887.98

Salary: $100,000
Rate: $71.37
Monthly Cash: $4,638.73

Salary: $120,000
Rate: $84.80
Monthly Cash: $5,512.16

Salary: $150,000
Rate: $104.96
Monthly Cash: $6,822.32

Salary: $200,000
Rate: $138.55
Monthly Cash: $8,139.96

Pandemic Profiteering

2005-11-09T19:28:00.000-08:00

The buzz in the business world today is this avian flu. Countless experts have parlayed their opinions on how this is going to be some great pandemic. Really? When was the last time you played footsie with a chicken, or ate undercooked duck? How many people are regularly exposed to chicken excrement and do not cleanse their soiled hands afterwards?

Then there are the numbers. Something like 160 people have contracted symptoms as a result of avian influenza (H5N1 to be exact) over the last two years. But where were these people? Yup, China, the worlds most heavily populated country. Claiming over 1.3 BILLION people in their country, China is definitely a contendor as ground zero for a pandemic. Yet, 160 people out of 1,300,000,000 have been affected. What does that come out to? 0.0000123% of the population. OOH, that sounds like a pandemic to me. Oh, and of those 160, or so, infected souls, only about 60 have died. 60 people dying is unfortunate and nothing to make light of, for sure, but it's 60 people in over two years, which is statistically insignificant when considering a pandemic threat. How many people die in the USA during the "regular" flu season?

Could this big scare just be another attempt to funnel pork money into the biotech economy of the USA? We are certainly spending millions to make sure we have enough Tamiflu to stave-off the H5N1 infection threat. What will that do? Make 4 million government fearing citizens ingest a vaccine that they do not need. Yummy. All in the name of prevention, right? I think not. My uninformed and conspiratorial opinion is that this is just a Bush attempt to get money into the hands of his constituents and spread the US dollar even thinner.

Does anyone remember SARS? I do, and many an expert thought that a pandemic was at hand again. Uh, okay. Here we are today, years later, and yet only a few thousand people developed SARS symptoms, mostly in China (again).

Why are our supposed experts so quick to play the pandemic card? Is there not enough biotech research money and so they need some "cause" to which they can rally and suck down more NSF and NIH money? Do we really need to have such a great vanguard to protect us against the boogey-man virus that passes from migratory bats to ducks, chickens, and eventually humans?

The Spanish Flu of 1918 was a serious pandemic because it incubated for a long period of time, which allowed the human vector to migrate across continents. Why should I mention the Spanish Flu? Well, our experts, yet again, claim that the H5N1 flu strain shares a significant amount of genome with the Spanish Flu virus, therefore in their minds it will be just as infectious. Well, guess what? Humans and chimpanzees share over 90% of their genome, so does that make a chimpanzee a candidate to become the next multizillionaire? You be the judge...

Why haven't we heard much about the H3N8 virus? If you are a dog lover, you should be concerned with H3N8 because it's the panzootic dog virus that has passed from equine to canine. When was the last time you hugged your dog? Yeah, two minutes ago? How's that for a nasty vector? There is documented precedent for human flu infections that pass on to canines. In that same twisted avian flu logic, the canine flu has a significant chance of becoming a human pandemic vector. Cheerful thought.

There is definitely a pandemic at hand, but it's not of the biological species. In this pandemic, ignorance guides the invisible hand to throw money at unseen blights and boogey-man biotechnology. We are witness to the pandemic spread of reactionary policy that serves no good but to the bottom line of pork-belly pharma.

Ground Zero

2005-11-08T10:36:00.000-08:00

Why do we blog? Why should I blog? Very little of what I say has any value to anyone but myself. My friends laugh at my quips and chastize me for being cynical and judgemental. I live, I question, and I form strong opinions. This blog won't be for the faint of heart, nor the needy of mindless dribble and clever euphamisms. I tell it how I see it, which is likely not the way it is. I am my own filter, my own critic, and my own inspiration. This is the trickling madness of a cynical solipsist.