William Adams' WebLog : On The Home Front

It's that time of the month again!

wadams — Sat, 19 Jun 2004 04:32:00 GMT

This was the headline on an article I read at “The Register”. It's funny how the mind works. My first thought after I read that was, “hay, Anand Tech probably has the new buyers guide for the mid-range system of the month online now”! Are those geek thoughts or what. So, I immediately went on over to Anand Tech, and sure enough, the new mid-range system buying guide was just released!

These guides are great, for those of us who are interested in building the occasional system just to show that we can. Why, I'm happily typing on the little Shuttle system I built a couple months back. Feels good to hear the gentle pur and hum of the tiny titan of a machine that I built with my very own hands.

Now, I'm going for something a bit bigger. I'm back at the “Ultimate Media Server” project. The idea being, I have all my CDs, DVDs, JPEG images, and the like stored on one machine in my house. I want to get at that data from multiple 'clients' and do various interesting things with it. Surely this is something I'm doing to understand the user experience around dealing with terabytes of personal data, and how I can change the programmer's experience based on that... Well, alright, really it's just because I like to think that although my hair is beginning to recede, my knowledge of low down high tech is not going with it. Was that a bit, and byte, or a buzzword?

At any rate, this weekend is father's day. I'm going to browse AnandTech, figure out the ultimate AMD64 system that I want to build, and then give Yasmin the money to 'buy' me said machine so we can do some father daughter bonding to build the beast and play with it. Ah yes, fatherhood is bliss, and once I build the machine, I'll share the experience.

DNA Construction Set

wadams — Sat, 22 May 2004 07:02:00 GMT

It's funny how life has a way to throw inspiration our way from the oddest directions.

We bought Yasmin a ton of computer gear recently because: a) It was her birthday, b) she had a science project to complete, c) I want her to grow up to be as geeky as I am.

So, we put the gear to good use for her recent science project. She was doing a display board on RNA. She learned a few wonderful things through the process. First, she learned that she can type her own stuff, and print it out on her own printer, without much help from me. Not only that, but she actually likes doing it. I think this will increase her desire to actually peform her own tasks, and remove the tedium of hand printing from various processes. It will encourage her to type in stories.

The other thing she learned is that she can fairly easily compose music on her midi keyboard, and have the score print out from the computer. Another boon to her creativity.

One more thing she learned is that Encarta has a ton of answers to almost any question you care to ask. She's a reader, and she'll be perfectly happy sitting in front of Encarta just seredipitously exploring from one topic to the next. She even found the learning game, and started in on that.

Next, she will discover the internet, and then all heck will break loose. I'll have to debate whether to get parental lock, or to just spend even more time explaining how the world works and why she should not click on things labeled “XXX”. I won't even bother show her how to get into chat rooms. We'll save that bliss for the teenage years.

Well, during the RNA project, we discovered a couple of cool pictures out on the web to describe the process by which ribosomes build polypeptide chains by joining amino acids. It talks about the basic mRNA, the tRNA, and the rRNA. Neat stuff. The best thing about it was that I came up with a good analogy for Yasmin to explain it.

Is said, the mRNA is basically like knitting instructions. The individual triplets are just like saying “knit”, “pearl”, and what have you. The ribosomes are like little knitters. They read the instructions, and the “knit” the amino acids together to form the polypeptide chains (proteins). This analogy worked great because we even found a picture that looked like that's what was going on. A good analogy is worth a thousand words!

From there, I got to thinking, “hay, those ribosomes are pretty darned nifty. They're like little nano assemblers. They're reading this 'code', and assembling little lego blocks, that self assemble into larger structures”. Of course any molecular biologist is saying “duh”.

Well, I'm a computer software guy, so I'm thinking, 'how is this like massively parallel computing?'. Well gee wiz. Talk about the ultimate RISC architecture. There are only 20 amino acids. They form into triplets. This is a much smaller instruction set than the x86 architecture, so surely using an x86 CPU, we should be able to easily assemble a human? No? Why not? Oh, I see, we don't understand the beauty and simplicity of the chromosonal based 'computer/assembler'.

In his book “A New Kind of Science”, Stephen Wolfram suggests that the whole of the universe is simply a program. I suggested to him that the trick is not in deciphering the program, but how the 'computer' operates. In the case of RNA, the 'computer' is the combination of a very simple assembler, the ribosome/RNA, and a very complex model, the protein folding.

This inspired me to think of many things from massively parallel computing, to simplified 'computers' that could be the size of cells.

Then I thought, “what is web services all about?” Well, it's nothing more than the communications substrate that is required to begin to get systems to communicate with each other. At some point, enough systems will be able to talk to each other easily such that there will be a sudden emergence of some form of computing that doesn't currently exist.

My next thought was, “any form of computing that relies on strict communications protocols is bound to be leap frogged by any system that relies on more flawed, but resilient communications protocols”. Take biological systems for example. DNA is flawed, there are many redundancies, and the systems aren't static, but dynamic, forming out of 'best fit' energy states between folded proteins and multiple interactions between various molecules. The whole system is flawed, and we're only held together by some insanity of brownian motion that keeps the whole jumbled mass from falling apart and leaving us as a bag of particles on the floor.

So, what's the next leap frog in computing? I think I'll look to the lowly ribosome and mRNA and see what I can find there.

In the meanwhile, Yasmin and I continued to discuss the science fair project, and how proteins work, and the fact that their function is governed by their shape, and that shape is determined by the sequence of amino acids that were strung together. We talked about the fact that the mere shape of the proteins helps determine whether they stitch together as skin, or eyeballs, or bone. This was fascinating to her. As she went to bed, I said, “I found this site on protein folding simulations at Stanford”. She got pretty excited, and demanded that I write it down so that when she hits the internet tomorrow, she'll know what to look for!

Now, that's discovery. I'm banking on the fact that children are even more curious and tenacious in their search for knowledge than most adults. With that tenacity, and the wealth of knowledge tools available at her fingertips, I'm sure she'll be able to come up with the DNA construction kit by the time she has to present her high school science fair. I can't wait to use it. But, that's another story.

Little Legs Like Little Eggs

wadams — Tue, 18 May 2004 06:24:00 GMT

Say that a few times fast, and you begin to understand the fun you can have with a 9 year old with just 5 words of English.

So, build vs buy. Recently I decided to build a PC for Yasmin. I had purchased her one a few years back. It was from a British company I think “Tiny PC”. No longer in business, at least no longer in the mall. It wasn't particularly cheap at the time, and it took a week for them to produce it. That was before the existance of Fry's in the great Pacific Northwest.

That machine was way noisy, not particularly powerful, and I think Yasmin used it a total of less than 10 times in her life so far.

Enter the modern age. Now there's these tiny machines like the Shuttle PC. So, a couple of weeks ago, Yasmin and I headed out to Fry's Electronics and we purchased one of their barebones systems. It was nice because the basic systems is about the size of two shoe boxes stacked atop each other. Maybe smaller depending on your shoe size. We bought the Memorex DVD burner, one of those multi-card readers, and AMD 2600, and 512Mb RAM. We topped it off with a Maxtor 160Gb HD.

This was Yasmin's first build. I let her put some screws in, and she got to see all the various parts of the machine. She was quite proud of her accomplishment, then we turned it on.

The darned thing didn't work! It would come one, then after a couple of minutes, it would just shut down. I checked the bios for the heat shutoff timing, I set that to never shut off. But, the thing just kept shutting off. After a while, it wouldn't even stay on for more than about 30 seconds.

I stayed up all night with this thing. Literally, I didn't get to bed until about 4am. Given my going rate of $50/hour, this thing cost me about $400, and I got nothing to show for it.

Alright. I took it all apart, packed it all nicely back into the boxes, instead of dropping it from my roof, and returned it to Fry's. The return guy said “it's probably a bad power supply, you should just go get another one”. After I got over my frustration, I figured it was worth another try, because I truly am a geek, and I did want Yasmin to have the pleasure of assembling her own PC.

Second time around, no real problems. It all went together nicely, and it just worked as soon as I turned it on. I loaded Windows XP onto it, and then proceeded to download about 100 Windows updates. Yasmin found this rather amusing because the whole process took much of the night, into her bed time, and it caused lots of reboots. It's so amusing that even a child laughs at the process.

But, then we loaded Encarta, MS Works, a Midi Keyboard thing, and a couple of photo editing pieces. Then I topped it all off by giving her my office desk, and the new Canon i900D printer we had recently purchased, and my very own Canon S50 digital camera (yah, it was her birthday recently, and yes she's daddy's little girl). I figure with all that gear, she should be set for producing college quality papers and science fair projects for her third grade class. Never can be too prepared.

Of course, without an office disk, I don't have enough room for the very large PC and CRT that now need to share the smaller desk that are still in my office, so what am I to do?

Buy another one of those Shuttle systems I guess. So, this past weekend we did. We had quite a runaround trying to find the right Sony monitor with speakers, and I finally had to just get it online. It was cheaper by $30, and will ship within a couple of days. That's after going to Fry's and buying their last unit and having exactly 1 pixel not work on the blasted thing!

So, now I have another of those Shuttle PCs sitting on my desk waiting for it's mated monitor to arrive so that I can toss the ViewSonic17PS off the room. I've had this monitor for about 10 years, but when it's time has come, it's time has come.

This is actually a part of the decluttering process. I got rid of a desk (or at least put it into alternative service). I'm getting rid of two CRTs. I bought Yasmin one, and I'm getting one to replace my monitor. That will save on power and waste energy. I'm getting rid of two under powered PCs, and replacing them with two modern day units that consume less power, make less noise, take up less room, and simply look better.

It's like the path in my back yard. Sometimes you've got to build a little to get rid of a little.

I'm sure there's a story in here about software... Oh yah, sometimes you've got to add to your APIs a little to get rid of a little bit of clutter. How can we create the perfect API without introducing the new thing in its perfected form? Trouble is, once you introduce the new one, you can't simply toss the old one off the roof. If only we could...

At any rate, I have a new standard workhorse PC for the home. I can truly see these little boxes popping up all over the house with their attendant wireless mice and keyboards. Some wired, some wireless. Some with TV tuners, some with DVD drives. Some with 5.1 speakers hooked up, some with nice big monitors or projectors hooked up. It's a wonderful world we live in, and all this technical complexity can not match the simplicity of “Little Legs Like Little Eggs”, but that's another story.

Build or Buy?

wadams — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 08:51:00 GMT

That is the question.

Be it nobler to pull up your sleeves than to bow to the will of the component provider?

So, here's the deal. This past weekend, Yasmin and I finished the path around the back yard. It took 20 bags of bark hauled from the hardware store to the back yard. Pouring the bags out, and raking them smooth was a much more enjoyable task than hauling the border bricks, or digging up the grass.

All told, this project cost... I don't know, at least 16 hours of hard manual labor. About $300 in various materials, and quite a few gallons of sweat and peanut butter sandwhiches. If I put my time at about $50/hour, that's another $800. So, a path around the perimeter of my back yard, $1,100. Path around back yard, $1,100, time with Yasmin... Priceless.

I could have hired a landscape person to come do the same thing, and it probably would have cost about $400 or so, but hay, it's my design.

Then, the 18th was the nanny's birthday. Recently Yasmin and I have been taking picutures with the digital camera. This past weekend we went out to Mt Vernon and took a bunch of pictures of tulips. Yasmin's actually pretty good at taking pictures. She's probably better than me, and I attribute it to the fact that she's shorter, so she captures more unique perspectives.

At any rate, we thought we'd use the pictures to make a calendar for the nanny's birthday present.

Build vs buy... Let's see, I can go to Barnes and Noble right now and buy a calendar on sale for about $4. OK. So, that's a starting point.

First, we had to buy a printer that could print nice high quality photos. I have a Canon S50 camera, so I thought I would get a nice Canon printer. Of course I had to have the one that I could plug the CF card into directly. the i900D, cost $250. Then of course the extra paper, ink, and extended warranty... That's another $100 or so, for a grand total of $350.

Alright, now I can print nice pictures, in sizes from 4x6 to 8.5x11.

I need to be able to print monthly calendars. Luckily, I have Calendar Creator, so I didn't have to write that piece of software, although I could have if need be. Now there's assembly.

This is no ordinary calendar. With the high quality pictures that Yasmin took, and the good calendar job, we can just staple the job together like some grade school project. Nope, this will require one of those nice binding jobs like you get with presentations at work. OK, off to OfficeMax/Depot/Staple/Supply center. I just need one of those binders thingies that punches a bunch of holes and helps you put on that plastic spiral thingy. Of course the $50 one is no longer available, so I have to bump up to the $135 model! Just put punch uniform holes and put in that platic binder thing. I am now the proud owner of the GBC Combind C100.

Quick total: Printer and accessories $350, Binder, $135, 12 images at $.50/ea = $6. Time, well, it was around midnight when I finished, and I started at around 7:00, so 5 hours == $250. Grand total... $741

It bit pricey for a calendar, but hay, it's my design darn it!

I know there's a lesson to be learned here about software development, but I'm in sticker shock, and too worried about what else I can print and bind to recoup my recent purchases.

The one good benefit of staying up late night working on high end crafts is that I get to watch the likes of Monster house, Monster garage, and American Chopper.

But, that's another story.

Trouncing Trash Takes Time and Tenacity

wadams — Sun, 04 Apr 2004 05:39:00 GMT

During the winter in my neighborhood, the begetation looks pretty baren. Things become really simple. Everything but the evergreens, loses it's leaves, dries up, and kinda disappears. You can see everything clearly without all the clutter in the way. Without the leaves, it is relatively easy to see the broken and dying branches. You go in with your pruning shears, saw, and whatnot, and you just clear everything out that doesn't look like it belongs. Order is the word for the day, and I am happy.

Spring comes along, and all the plants decide to take on new “features”. All the little blooms are blooming. The grass begins to grow again, the leaves, following the blooms, start poking out again. Soon enough, the inner branches of the trees and bushes will be hidden, their stark simplicity replaced by a cacophony of colors and a blanket of clorophyll producing/consuming energy systems. It all looks good, but man! What a mess!!

Just so you can understand what follows, I will give you a brief inventory of the flora around my house:

5 50 foot pine trees. Always shedding needles, year round. 1 Giant Poplar. 2 dwarf Cherry (Rainier, Bing). 1 Prune plum, 3 large Bogenvalia, 1 large Cherry blossom, several Rhododendron and Azalia, ground cover here and there, raspberries, Rhubarb, a full vegatable garden, some large hedge type bushes (non descript), holly, this that and the other thing... And that's just the back yard.

The front yard is similarly equipped, although the trees are dogwood, magnolia, 20 roses, several fruit trees (apple, plum, pear), and again with the nasty ground cover I'd like to rip out.

The sides of the house feature more Rhodies, bamboo, of a couple different varieties, japanese maples, juniper type stuff, and some pretty flowering weed that I don't know, but they look like peas.

Now. It's almost a full time job to keep up with all this stuff. At least on the weekends. Oh yah, and there's a full complement of grass in both the front and back. Anyway, keeping up with this stuff is a full time job. I have two large 50 gallon “yard waste” cans, and they find themselves full every week. They only get picked up every other week, so there's no way to keep up really. You have to fill up extra bags and put them out, or take them to the dump separately.

What's striking about all this stuff is, during the winter, it's all completely ignored. I mean zilch, zip, nada. After about October, everthing just shuts down. The temperature drops, the plants die off or go dormant as they see fit, and I turn my attention to wood working, and selling off books. But come spring time, Padow!! There it all is.

This weekend, in order to tame some of the beast, we decided to take out some of the grass in the back yard and build in a perimeter walkway. A very nice idea indeed. Since we want to have strolling brunches sampling of the various fruits and veggies in the garden, we might as well have a nice walking path to make the stroll a pleasant one.

Well, this of course takes a trip to Lowe's. We have to look at what type of path trimmings are available that we like. We decide on these scalloped brick things, because Yasmin thinks they will look cool and are more instresting that the plain old ordinary bricks. OK, we don't buy them immediately, but we do buy a ball of twine to mark the path. Then, back home, stake the path, get out the tape measure, mark it all off. Turns out to be about 130' worth of walkway. This all happened after I used the weed wacker and lawn mower to essentially cut the grass down to dirt so we could actually see what the path might look like.

While I'm busy with this process, Yasmin is clipping some of the the bushes away from the path. It's one of the giant non descript bushes that generates white flowers, then red barries later in the summer. That, and the prune plum tree. This generates another pile of twigs and leaves, that of course won't fit into the already full yard waste container. So, they'll have to be stuffed into bags. But, we have a new feature now, it is a staked out path that almost looks like a path. One or two or three more milestones may be needed to finish the task.

Having staked out the path, we went off to Costco to buy a dvd, and then made a side trip to Home depot to see what they had going in the pavers department. Not as wide a selection as Lowe's so back to Lowe's.

Alright. We need exactly 128 of the 1 foot scalloped things, and 24 of the curved ones to make our curves. Just a little more than we need to account for breakage, and design changes. The nice thing about Lowe's is that they help you with “load out”. That is, the nice guy helped me put all those bricks into the back of my truck so I could get home quickly...

And then... All by myself, I had to take all those bricks and move them up a staircase from the driveway, across the front lawn, up the path, into the back yard, and stack them all nice and neat like. Tenacity, perseverance, perspiration, and a sheer determination, and I had the task done in about an hour.

Now what do we have? In order to clean up the trash, that is, in order to eliminate a bit of green from my back yard, I've increased the yard waste, but chopping down some bushes, generated some grass clippings from clearing out the path, put a huge amount of brick dust in my car, and deposited a number of bricks in a pile to be dealt with. Not to mention the introduction of 20 or so stakes and the accompanying twine.

After the next milestone, this stuff will all be put in its proper place, and all the trash will eventually get cleaned up, even if it does take a couple more seasons. In the end, we'll have a wonderfully organized yard with minimized waste, all nice and tidy and orderly.

As I tucked Yasmin into bed tonight, we started thinking about the things we'll be doing with our newly organized space. Word of forts, with water features dividing them. Park benches, with arbors, gazebos, and waterfalls. In the fullness of time, we'll actually implement all these features. For now, we're just going to have to deal with all the trash we've just generated.

My Media Muscle Machine Might Make Masculine Movies

wadams — Mon, 22 Mar 2004 05:24:00 GMT

I didn't actually watch the whole super bowl. I watched some of the first half, and walked away as soon as the half time show started to make a phone call. The call lasted through the half time show, and pretty much through the second half, and I got busy doing other things anyway. Luckily, I taped the whole 5 hours though.

Tonight, I'm actually exercising a whole other aspect of my media explorations. I'm taking the tape of the super bowl, and saving it digitally. If I were smart, i would have recorded it digitally in the first place, but I simply didn't think there would be any reason to waste hard disk space on it when it started.

So, I used the video capture capabilities of my ATI All-In_Wonder, and turned the roughly 5 hours into 20Gb of data. Do you ever wonder how a game that has 4 quartes of 15 minutes apiece could turn into 5 hours of boredom?

Anyway, using Sonic's “MyDVD”, I'm importing the whole video in to do some editing. It's a neat program because it will automatically do scene detection, and automatically turn those scenes into chapters for your DVD. You can take scenes out, add your own scene boundaries, and play them in whatever order you want.

I think I'm going to make 7 main chapters: Pre Game, 1st Quarter, 2nd Quarter, Half time, 3rd Quarter, 4th Quarter, Post Game wrapup. I might pull the half time show out separately and further break it down into its own chapters. I'm going to remove all the commercials, and create “special features” out of them, eliminating the duplicates and not so special ones. That should leave me with quite a nice little packaged up super bowl experience.

The one thing I missed was capturing the closed captions. But, wait a minute, maybe I did capture them, and I just need to turn them on... I'll figure that out. If I did capture them, then I'll add them to the database. Of course I can add my own caption information anyway.

So, let's see. I'm hoping that without commercials, half-time, cutaways to the booth, I might actually end up with 1.5 hours of pure football in all it's glory.

My home machine is not very fast, and this whole process will take quite a few hours. It will consume a lot of disk space, eat up CPU, and make my machine bleed for speed and want of more memory. But, I can see this is what a lot of people might be doing with their machines in the future. With more digital photography than ever, the digital shoe box will beg to have the media futzed with.

Disk drives sales will continue, the march for faster machines will continue, the barrage of DVD/Videography software will continue, and the world will be a better place.

I'm going off the St Thomas to fill up 512Mb of compact flash with my camera. But that's another story.

I think I know why computers don't work, that is, epistemologically speaking of course

wadams — Mon, 22 Mar 2004 05:08:00 GMT

As Jimmy Carter used to do, I consult my daughter Yasmin on many an issue of great and deep importance. The subject this weekend was why computers crash, have bugs, and all that sort of stuff. I made a bold statement because I wanted to see where we could take it. I said “they have problems because they have no sense of identity“.

A while ago, she raised the question “Who is the 'I' that says 'I'“. We've gone into philosophical and religious discussions based on this very topic. Today, she basically said, “that's a lot of difficulty caused by a single letter“, and then she went back to reading “Dragon Singer“, which isn't about a singing dragon at all.

At any rate, we went on about our day, and on the way over to Krispy Kreme, we broached the subject again, “why don't computers always work?“ This time, I had an even better angle. I said the following.

“This car is transporting us to Krispy Kreme. Without using the words “I“, “We“, or “Us“, can you describe why this is happening?“. She struggled mightily, figuring, refiguring, recasting, and in the end came up with “it's too hard“. I thought to myself “just like when the WHOPPER figured out that there was no good end in thermonuclear war“. That was just the hook I needed. I said, computer programs are like us in the car without identity. The car is like the computer itself. Or visa versa. It's doing whatever it's doing, no matter what. I said, if the car suddenly veered off course, and went off the side of the road, we wouldn't care, and the car would do nothing to correct its course. We're just along for the ride. Without identity, we can't say things like “NO!! We want to go to Krispy Kreme!!“, and recorrect the errant path. There's no “We“ to express such a thought, and the car has no real will of its own. It's only because I have strong desires to get to the donut place that I will make corrections to the car along the way, accounting for adversities of all sorts as they come up. I am adaptable, and I have desire.

Similarly, I said, there's no sense of identity in the computing system, so when a virus comes along and messes with the program, the computer happily continues to execute the infected program because it has no sense or desire to do anything else, because it has no identity of its own. It's just going wherever the code takes it.

To go further, I described the current state of computing as working very hard to make the car more reliable. Random acts are less likely to take us off course. A popped tire is unlikely. An overheated radiator, a tweaked steering system. But, a random asteroid, or drunk driver can always hit us, and since we're merely passengers, we're not going to do too much to correct our course, because we have no desire other than to ride along with wherever the car is going to take us.

We then worked out that it would be nice to put some amount of knowledge/mind into the machine such that it can make some basic decisions. That's when we stumbled on the word “epistemology“. How do you remember such a word? Well, I said “epi“ can be remembered because it's at the center of things, like “epicenter“ of an earthquake. Then there's stem, which is the center of a plant. Then, ology is easy because she already knows things like biology as being the study of something. So, now Yasmin knows the word epistemology as the study of things that are at the center. Good enough, we'll get to the theory of thinking and knowledge soon enough.

Having planted this seed, I'm assuming that Yasmin will come up with the method and aparatus for infusing machines with a mind. Perhaps we'll follow Freud and create an Id, Ego, and Superego system. Who knows. All I know is that in the past (when she was 4) when she was asking the questions like “why is the sky blue, why does the moon appear larger when it's low in the sky“, and the like, I had to turn to the “Handy Physics Answer Book“. I figure by turning these problems over to her early, we'll get a generational head start on solving them.

Well, we got our donuts, we headed home, and Yasmin finished the “Dragon Singer“ for the fifth time before turning in. I'm glad she's on my side, and I hope the pity she feels for the poor dumb computers leads her to answering the “who am I?“ question for them.

Legacy Lags Listlessly Lurching towards the future

wadams — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 07:13:00 GMT

What is “legacy data”? I thought about this because at work we talk about 'legacy data' all the time. As if the data being stored in the future will be current, and the data stored today is old crufty and undesirable.

Having installed another 120Gb in my machine, I rapidly filled it up with some more legacy DVD data. Storing the data itself is relatively painless. A full DVD takes anywhere from 7-20 minutes to archive, depending. Then there's that extra step of trying to get the subtitles turned into text from their bitmap form. That takes another manual tedious 20 minutes.

The sad thing is, I'm sure there are other people in the world who are doing this last tedious step, and in the spirit of friendliness, they've probably uploaded the subtitles in text form somewhere.

Sure enough, there is a site that allows you to search for subtitle files: http://www.allsubtitles.exits.ro They have a web interface, and produce a program called “SubsFinder”. It's a nifty thing because you just type in the title of the movie, what language you want it in, and press 'Go'. If they have it, you download it, and you're all set.

So, now my process for archiving just became that much easier. I archive the disk, which doesn't take very long at all. I do a search on allsubtitles to see if they have the text. If they do, then I'm done. If not, then I spend the extra time later to transcode the subtitles to text.

But, this is all legacy data isn't it? I mean the disks have already been manufactured. Certainly it can't be valuable information. Certainly if it were interesting it would be stored in some database quickly accessible. Certainly we'd have products available already that would seamlessly integrate this information into our lives showing how pertinant it is to our very existance.

I've come to the conclusion that everything on my hard disk is legacy data. No sooner do I archive some content, than someone else somewhere on the planet has already done the same exact thing. Yes, I will have a terabyte of storage, but “my data” won't all be on my machine. In the future, all the data of the world will be 'my data', and I will be able to access it all through the internet. I may store some of the vast pool of human knowledge on my machine locally, but realistically, that's just so that it can serve as a local cache for performance reasons.

There's no such thing as legacy data. There is just data. Whether it was created long ago, or in the future does not matter. What matters is I want to get to it in intelligent ways. I don't want to always move it forward as the 'legacy' label might suggest. I want to access it as it is, in place, using intelligent tools and agents.

I've archived all my CDs. I've made it through almost all of my DVDs (I'll need another 100Gb to make it all the way). Now I'm looking at buying a high resolution scanner to capture my old photo negatives that existed before the dawn of the digital camera age

“Legacy Data” is the world's memory. Making that memory readily available in relatively easy fashion is going to be very interesting.

Archived Media Makes Marvelous Movies

wadams — Fri, 05 Mar 2004 06:18:00 GMT

I've archived a large number of DVDs to my hard disk. If you have non-copyrighted material, say weddings and whatnot, on DVD, you can use DVDDecrypter to store the content on your hard disk. It has this neat mode (ISO Read) that pretty much just copies the entire disk to your machine as an ISO image. You could then write that image file out to a DVD Writer, and you'd have a duplicate of your most precious wedding DVD.

The interesting thing to me though, is the other things you can do with your content. For example, using the same program, you can demux the DVD into its constituent parts. In particular, you can split out the video as MPEG-2, and the audio as .AC3, or whatever the encoding so happened to be. Once you do that, you can do other things.

Now, I'm trying to make my media content available over my home network so that I can watch a movie or play music from anywhere in the house. I want to store it all on the “media server”, which is to be a fairly beefy machine running Windows 2003 Server, with Media Services enabled. The media services basically allow for media streaming, either as broadcast, or unicast.

If I can turn my content into Windows Media Video 9 format, then I'll be golden. It turns out that part of the free downloads for Windows Media 9 is the Windows Media Encoder program. This is a really neat piece of machinery. You simply indicate where your audio is stored, and where the accompanying video is, and tell it what data rate, video sight, and other parameters you like, and start encoding. At the end of what may be a very long session on an underpowered machine such as mine, you will get this nice .wmv file that will be a nice representation of your content in streaming media format.

This is way cool. There is one step you have to perform once you get your content from your original DVD though. You have to convert the .AC3 stream into a .wav file, but there's a utility program called AZid that helps you do that part.

So, I've got a strategy. Copying the original content of my DVDs to the hard disk in the entirety seems like a good idea. It's a permanent record that's a bit more easily accessible than the original DVDs. Since my hard disk is faster than my DVD drive, it makes further processing much faster. It's also a legitimate archiving mechanism because if I lose, break, burn, or otherwise destroy one of my $15 DVDs, I can press a new desk from my desktop. That seems like a good thing. Also, whenever I want to create a movie of a specific size for a specific purpose, I can always transcode from the original sources.

Now, I'm looking back at the 100 or so CDs that I've archived, and I'm thinking I will go through the whole process all over again. When I first archived them, I used one of the lossy compression ratios. I was thinking I would be archiving them for playback. But, after doing this little job on the DVDs, I'm thinking it would be good to have the CDs as pristine copies of originals as well. it takes up more space, but that's why I keep buying 100Gb disk drives.

At the same time that I'm archiving my wedding DVDs, I'm getting the sub title information off them at the same time. I plan on putting those into a database so that I can do content searches to find interesting stuff. Given that the DVDs will be available online, it begins to get interesting. I can imagine being able to archive some National Geographic, or Discovery Channel DVDs and pull up scenes by content for Yasmin's various reports. That will be way cool.

Basically, I'm turing my media into searchable content that can be used for more than just entertainment. This is a good thing for book/learning people such as ourselves, we have ready access to a library of Congress amount of information right here on our little server at home.

So, that's how it is. Rip snortin fast archiving and retrieval of massive amounts of information. I wonder if I can query and present this information in a better way...

I guess that's another story.

Coax Capabilities Come to Computer

wadams — Wed, 03 Mar 2004 05:30:00 GMT

So,

This past weekend, I pushed further ahead with my home office rearrangement project. Having detreasured the downstairs, and having move my center of computing upstairs, there was just one more thing to move. I left one of the computers downstairs (the media archiving PC) because that's where the cable was running. There, and into my bedroom.

I really had no other reason for having the PC down there other than the fact that the cable was available down there. So, I endeavored to install a cable line into my new office space. Seeing as how I did so well while installing the phone line, I figured this would be a piece of cake.

Well, I didn't drill a hole through any existing cables this time, but I did have my challenges. I went to Fry's Electronics because I figured they have everything. I thought I'd pick up the coax cable, the connectors, and the special crimping tool. Well, they had the cable, but it was expensive. They had the connectors, but not the crimping tool. Ah well, why don't I pick up a DeskStar disk drive while I'm here... Nah, it's a wash.

So, off to the Fremont district to look into some hydroponics equipment.. But, that's another story.

So, I eventually went to the hardware store. I was able to get 500' of cable for $38, and they had the connectors, and the special crimping tool. Fry's has dropped in my estimation as the be all end all destination for electronics. I got the cable, drilled a hole in my garage wall, ran the cable up top, into the hole that I drilled, up into the closet. Sounds easy yes? Well, yah, except I initially had the wrong connectors, I cut the cable too short, I didn't have an extension fitting to finish the job, and the computer was downstairs.

Well, today, all is well. I moved the computer upstairs, I connected the extra length of cable that was needed, and now my archiving PC sits, humming peacefully, in the closet, with it's cable attached.

This is really cool because the way things are setup, I can be busily typing on my computer while Yasmin's using the other one at the same time. I can easily watch TV while I work if I like (I could already do this with the laptop anyway), and my basement is devoid of computer equipment.

Now that the basement is more open, having stripped the shelves of aging books, and removed the computers, and other various and sundry items, what will I do?

Well, now it's time to get one of those projectors, some nicer movie couches, and beef up the whole entertainment system with large scale noisy speakers and the like. That, or I'll increase my investment in exercise equipment, adding a rowing machine, and universal weight machine to the bike rollers. That, or rent the space out to a starving artist. That, or setup the hydroponics down there and start growing stuff during the non-sunny season.

Who knows. For now, I have my computing center setup in one place. I have that room nice and decluttered. I'm happy as a pig in slop, and I want to write some code.

From Queen Ida to JaRule

wadams — Sat, 21 Feb 2004 07:49:00 GMT

About 3 years ago I went through a transformation. I discovered that there was a ton of music that I wanted to listen to. I never was much for the Napster craze, so I actually went out and bought a bunch of CDs. I just counted, and I have about 100 of them.

Although I have a pretty nice AV system, it's down in the “entertainment room” (basement). It's nice enough to go down there and listen to things every once in a while, but I find that I want to listen to music everywhere in the house. So, of course I'm archiving all those CDs to my hard disk. I went out to Fry's and bought a 160Gb drive. So far, my music takes up about 4Gb. Not much to speak of so far. Maybe that will expand to about 10Gb.

I struggled mightily about what format to save the music in. As raw PCM data, CDs are roughly .5Gb per disk, depending. So, my library of 100 disks would be roughly 50Gb of data. Maybe that would be an ok thing. The data would be stored in raw form, and I could always recompress to whatever format was appropriate depending on however else I intended to use it. Maybe I'll go through the whole process again, but for now, I'm using Windows Media Player 9 to do my archiving. I chose to store the files in .wma format at 160kbit. This gives a good enough sound reproduction for my purposes, and a better compression ration than equivalent .mp3.

Oh yah, I bought a nicer DVD player recently. It's this panasonic 5 disk changer that will play just about anything from VCD to .mp3 and most importantly .wma. And yah, it does DVDs as well.

At any rate, I'm busy archiving all of my audio files. After that, I'm going to archive all of my DVDs. I have about 40 of those. Each DVD can take up 4.5 to 9 Gb on a disk (in the raw). With my new disk, I can probably store all of my DVDs, but I won't have room for much else. Of course, if I want to compress them, I can get them down to about .5Gb per movie. Then they'd only take up 20Gb. Even if I double their space, which would make them pretty respectable, it would only take up 40Gb. So, that's 10Gb for my audio, and 40 Gb for my videos. 50Gb total.

OK, I have another 10 or so VHS tapes. That ought to be good for a few Gb, let's call it 60Gb total. Now I'm down to only 100Gb available.

Right now I'm watching some Stargate SG-1. Maybe I could record that every week for a while, and maybe I could even download all the NPR shows that I listen to, and then there's the digital camera. At 256Mb per trip out in the wild, that adds up to a bit much, then the digital video from the other camera, and... well, surely I can fill this 160Gb disk in a year or so. I could probably fill another one every couple of years after that. By the time I'm up to a terabyte, I'm sure I'll be able to plug one of those into my machine and keep on filling.

I'm exhausted just thinking about it. The question that nags me most though is this: How am I going to find anything in all that data? I mean, most of the stuff is going to be loaded into Media Player's library. Of course Microsoft software is good, but I don't know how much testing we've done with much data. Media Player is pretty decent with the amount of data that I have in there right now. It has playlists, genre lists, album lists, artist lists, recently played lists, most played lists, and just about any way you want to find anything through a list interface. Then there's the search, if that's all not good enough.

With all that, I'm not sure I'll be able to find that song where they say “jump to the rhythm jump jump to the rhythm jump“. As I get older, I won't be able to remember these sorts of things. And what about that video where all those balloons flew up in the air and the kids spun around and fell down? And what was that song playing during that commercial for the new Honda?

Interesting. Where is all that data coming from? Well, there's MPEG 7, and it's an XML Format, and there can be lots of interesting data in there. I'm sure it will become the broadcast format once HDTV gets into full swing, or at least there will be lots of archived video that will have MPEG7 streams to go with them.

Will there be a new search mechanism to go with it? Is XQuery good enough? Are XPaths something that I will cozy up to while I'm doing my searches? Will my mother want to use this? How about natural language? With that be up to the task? Will it work internationally? These questions keep me up at night. How am I going to find my stuff, once I've found a place for it?

Maybe this has to do with “Trustworthy Computing“. Perhaps my machine will build a personal profile on me over time and know better what I'm trying to find than I do myself.

So, I'll keep archiving all of my stuff, and keep putting all of my images on the machine. As my disk is filling up, I'll think about how the heck I'm going to find my stuff later, and then I'll go back to work and start thinking about how I'm going to help everyone else do that in the future as well.

Spring is in the air!!...

wadams — Wed, 18 Feb 2004 16:39:00 GMT

As I look outside into the cold gray sky, I remind myself that it is probably sunny and 80 degress somewhere in the world. With the advent of modern flight, I could possibly be in that sunny warm place within 24 hours if I'm willing to pay enough money.

I was California born and raised, and moved to Washington about 5 years ago. My first winter here I discovered the joys of 6 months without any sun light. I learned a new word “sun break”. That's when the sun breaks through the cloud layer on an otherwise indistinct gray mass of a day.

When I purchased my house in Bellevue, one of the biggest selling features was the size of the back yard. From my perspective, it looked like a park. My lot is 10,000 sq ft, but boy does it look big. In the back, there was this nice garden patch off to the side. At the time, there were remnants of strawberries, tomatoes, squash, cabbage and the like. It turns out the the original owners of the house owned a nursery as well. They put in tons of trees, both fruiting and otherwise, as well as the nice vegetable garden.

Through various circumstances, I was not able to tend to this garden until last year. The year before that, I had put black plastic down to choke out the weeds. Last Year, Yasmin and I rolled back a 10 foot section at a time and planted stuff.

We started off with 4 roma tomato plants. Those turned out to produce a bumper crop of more tomatoes than we could possibly eat, can, or turn into sauce. Good thing I'm a certified canner, but that's another story. Then we planted some bush beans. At first it was just 4 or 5 plants, and I didn't even notice them amongst the rapidly encroaching weeds, until 4 or 5 weeks later. Then we moved on to some carrots, more bush beans, Dahlias, snap peas, fava beans, and the like. At the end of the summer, I put a raised bed into a 6x4 section, and we planted spinach, kale, butter lettuce, and something else I can't remember.

We added a bing cherry, and a rainier cherry next to the italian prune plum tree. This brought our total fruit tree count to about 13, including a few apple and pear trees out front. Add to all that the line of 20 rose bushes, the many azalia and rodies, two large patches of grass, daffodils, and you have quite a lot of yard to take care of. Being the original child laborer responsible for yard work, I feel obligated to actually perform yard duties myself. When I was in California last, I actually hired a gardener. I should probably do that here as well, but it's just so much fun.

Most of the time we were harvesting, or thinking of planting new things, I would constantly tell Yasmin, “next year, next year”. We said this about adding new trees, planting more flowers, and planting different varieties of vegetables.

Well, yes, the skies are gray outside, but spring is definitely on the horizon. That means we have to start buying our plant seeds now so that they can sprout in time to set out in about 6 weeks. So, this weekend, we're going to go to the Maltby cafe, and then we'll head on over to Flower World. We'll pick out about 50 seed packets, get a number of peat pots and whatnot to grow them, and lay out our season's growing calendar. We'll also see if there are any trees worth buying, in particular some pears to replace the spindly little ones in the front.

Spring is not in the air, but it will be in our feet. We spent the last couple of months doing pre-spring cleaning around the house, detreasuring and whatnot. We'll spend the next couple of months preparind to turn our little garden into an explosion of flowers and edibles. Our dream is to be able to have a “garden party” where people can simply stroll around the garden pulling food directly from the plants. I'll let you know how it goes.

De Treasuring

wadams — Mon, 16 Feb 2004 06:02:00 GMT

I've been bumping around the computer industry for about 20 years now. I've worked with everything from a Commodore PET, to a PDP 10, VAXen, Sequent, PCs, and lots of other little boxen in between. I've worked on all operating systems big and small, including NeXTStep, Taligent, BeOS, Linux, DOS, MacOS, OS/2, Windows, and a couple of toy ones of my own. I've created algorithms, ported code, dabbled with audio, video, image processing, UI libraries, databases, and anything else you would expect from a lifetime of hackery.

In all this time, I've accumulated quite an impressive computer literature library. My favorite hot spot to shop used to be Cody's Books, in Berkeley California. Then I moved to the San Jose area, and Computer Literacy became the new hot spot. If they didn't have it, it didn't exist. I used to buy at least 1 book per month, and some times more than that depending on what I was doing at the time. Mind you, these books typically cost anywhere from $35 to $65 apiece, so 20 years of doing this can really add up monetarily, and space wise. I was, and continue to be an avid reader. For every computer book I bought, there were probably another 4 sci fi novels I purchased as well.

Spin forward a few years. I now have a daughter (Yasmin) who is about to turn 9 in April. Reading to her every night since she was old enough to listen has had the intended affect. She is an avid reader. She will read one of those dragon novels (currently Eragon) in a day or two, and then she'll read it a couple more times for good measure. Given her chance, she would buy 5 books a week, every week. Un/Fortunately, I like to indulge her reding habit. So, I buy her books whenever I can. She also goes to the library, and reads whatever she can there.

Now the problem begins. Two big time readers, a finite space in the house, soon becoming cluttered and cramped due to an excess of “treasures”. Something must be done! Last week, we came up with a system. We created what we call the “de treasure chest”. It is a box in her room that contains cash, a ledger, and foreign currency of various types. The idea is, we now have a budget. It outlines monetary policy with regards to going out, buying books, going to movies, and the like.

We started the opening balance by salvaging pennies that we had in two containers at the house. That netted us $20. Then we sold off a ton of books from both of our stashes, another $45. It turns out that children's books in good condition are worth a lot more money than computer books that were written before 2000. Just goes to show how fickle, and short lived our technological knowledge can be. There must be a time value of knowledge lesson in here somewhere. I threw in $10 from loose change, and some more books, and we ended up with $80. Now we have a system. When we sell books to the Half Price Bookstore, we put the cash into the chest. Rules for buying new books: If you want to buy a new book, you have to first cough up 2 old books, and send them the be sold, and then you have to use the money that's in the treasure chest to buy new books.

In this way, we reduce the number of books that are already in the house by a little bit each time we buy a new book. Having to use the treasure money for other desirable things forces us to think twice about buying a book rather than checking it out from the library. It's a real struggle. In addition, we determined that donating clothing to the Goodwill should generate some monetary reward, so $1/garment donated, goes into the treasury.

This weekend, I bought 4 new books. They are primarily on financial management, and family estate planning. That means I have to come up with 8 books to get rid of.

Well, I've already gotten rid of a couple hundred of my best treasures over the past couple of years, so what could possibly be left to get rid of? Surely what's left will be classic, and I'll lose wisdom if I part with them!

Well, there are some gems, and I will be sad to see them go, but I came upon an idea. Instead of just letting them slip below the waves, I'll catalog them as they go so that I'll have a record of what I was into at one point or another. Since I work in the world of XML, I thought I would catalog them by making little XML entries in a file. Of course, I don't just want to use any old schema, I want to use a schema that other people have already created to represent books. So, I went to the OASIS website, and I saw a schema for DocBook. http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.2/index.shtml

This is apparently a well known document format from the SGML days, and there is now an XML representation of same. I'm going to spend the next few weeks cataloging at least the books that are on the 'cut' list. And then I'll see about the rest.

On the way out the door this week are titles such as:

Design Patterns, File Structures, C++ FAQs, Inner Loops, JavaScript, The Computational Brain, A Retargetable C Compiler, Seminumerical Algorithms, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Cryptonomicon, Signal and Image Processing with Neural Networks, Nanosystems, The Stanford Graphbase, Literate Programming, The Giant Black Book of Computer Viruses, Morphing Magic, Ants at Work, Ruminations on C++, The Best C/C++ Tips Ever, More Effective C++, C++ IO Streams Handbook, The Annotated C++ Reference Manual, The draft Standard C++ Library

If you look at the list, you'll see some old standards, and some wacky out of the way inspirationals. One thing they have in common in many cases is that the subject matter is available online, or it's simply been subsumed in some other work that is available online, or it has become irrelevant.

Another thing I noticed is that a lot of the people who have written these books now work as my peers in the industry, and in some cases for Microsoft directly. It becomes harder and harder to read meaningful books about the future of computing when you are responsible for creating the future of computing. Snow Crash probably had more to do with the current distribution of network gaming platforms than any of my CS books.

At any rate, cataloging and perhaps making available in a web service, might be an interesting exercise. Of course, since Amazon plans on digitizing 10 million books over the coming years, my efforts will be fruitless. At the very least, I'll know what journey I took to where I am today.

These books are like the stuffed animals of childhood. They comfort and whatnot, and at some point, it's time to let them go, face forward, and move on. The treasure has become clutter, and that clutter will be turned into cash, so new treasures can be purchased.

Next, we will be purchasing seed catalogs to germinate our garden!

How Wireless broke my HVAC

wadams — Mon, 16 Feb 2004 05:22:00 GMT

I live in a two story rambler sort of house. I have MSN Broadband at home, and I use a LinkSys wireless router thingy to allow me to get on the internet from anywhere in the house, from 3 or 4 different computers. In the beginning, I had the broadband hooked up down in the basement, along with the computer that was hooked up to the cable tv line.

Recently, I decided there's really no need to have the wireless access point down in the basement, and it makes it hard to get the signal in the back or front yard anyway. So, I switched the wireless to be upstairs in my bedroom where my phone is. Of course that's all fine and dandy, but a recent home office rennovation made me think the proper place for the wireless was in the home office. It's more centrally located than my bedroom, and that's where the computer with the printer attached is located. The only problem is, I don't actually have phone line running into the home office room (a converted bedroom).

I'm a handyman, and of course I have a plethora of tools in order to help me solve such situations. The floor of the bedroom is partially over the garage, and the it must be a simple matter to just drill a hole, and run a little wire up into there. And look, in the closet there are already a couple of wires running up through the floor that do exactly that. They are there for the alarm system, and the digital thermostat.

So, I picked a spot that was close to those other holes, and I thought I would just drill one more little hole next to them. No problem, I'll be done before the dust can settle...

Well, it turns out that the hole that was drilled for the HVAC system was not exactly vertical. So, the hole that I drilled cut right across the path of the wayward cable. As I was drilling, I was feeling, “ah, this is so easy”. Then, I saw some little metal flakes coming out of the hole, and I thought “this can not possibly be good”. Sure enough, I pulled the drill bit out of the hole, and wrapped all around it were 5 or 6 pieces of bare wire knotted up in some plastic insulation. What a mess!

I tugged on the wire that was leading to the thermostat, and sure enough, it was completely severed! Mind you, my house was originally built in the 50s, and it can sometimes be scary to think you have to replace something as esoteric as electrical systems. But, luckily, the heating system had been upgraded from it's oil furnace some years back, so the wiring was fairly new. It was only 6:30pm, and luckily the local Loew's hardware store is open until about 8pm I think. So, I dashed over there, with a small section of the wire in hand. This wire had 8 leads in it! That's quite a lot for a heater and air conditioner. The guys at Loew's thought, 3 ought to be enough, but I thought I should have at least 4 just to be safe. Most of the wire they had was 3 leads, except the phone wire which had 6. Well, 6 is better than 3, unless I have to run it twice.

So, I got 50' of the 'phone' wire, and got back home and started to work. First I pulled the thermostat off the wall, and it turned out that it only used 4 wires. More than 3, less than 6, so I was safe. I pulled the wire through the wall, and ran it down through the new hole that I had drilled for the phone cord for my DSL line. Down through the garage, through the heater, onto the various terminals on the heater, and that part's done. Then back upstairs, hook up the wires to the thermostat, flick the switch on the heater, cross fingers, hope for the best, and... YES!! It works.

Now, back to the movement of the DSL line. It's extremely hard to find flush mounted wall plugs for phones. But that's what I had in the kitchen, so I pulled that off the wall (I don't have a phone hooked up in the kitchen anyway). I put that on the wall in the closet, ran the phone cord down through the crooked hole that the thermostat cable used to run down, then into the garage. Hooked it up to a little phone junction thingy that the alarm is hooked into, and tada! Back in business.

Now I have the wireless sitting in the closet, with the DSL modem next to it. I have most excellent wireless internet reception throughout the whole house, without having to buy a booster, and my heating system is back to normal.

Not bad for a few hours' work. Now I'm going to go play with that new DVD 'archiving' software that I bought at Fry's and see if I can fill up that 160Gb hard disk that I bought.