Author: Dale

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Into the dark side. Or whatever.

apple-logoMy Droid 3 has been giving me fits for a while.  The phone itself is fine…  there doesn’t seem to be a hardware problem.  A couple of months ago, though, it started nagging me daily to install a slew of app updates, including “Google Play Services”.  Half the apps I use regularly finally refused to run at all until I installed Google Play, which I resisted because it wanted access to everything on my phone.  All data, all history, location, email, everything.  I finally had no choice but to dump the phone or install the damn thing, so I installed it (and the subsequent dozen or so other app updates).  Since that time the phone has been plagued with odd behavior.  It will periodically freeze up, require reboots, not be able to place a call for several minutes after a restart, and I’ve had to pull the back off and remove the battery a couple of times when it froze up and started getting uncomfortably hot.

My employer offers me the option of having a corporate owned cell phone.  We’ve currently got a choice between Blackberry and iPhone.  I can understand their refusal to allow Android phones to connect to the corporate network — the ease with which an Android can be rooted and bent to the owner’s will is great for experimenters, developer and hackers (a term used in the proper, good sense here) – but it also removes any surety that an app can actually be trusted.  Anyway, the Blackberry phones are locked down tight and everything (web, email, etc) goes through the corporate proxies.  The iPhone situation is different; there’s a secure VPN app that handles all the corporate traffic, but outside of that app web browsing and email don’t pass through company servers.

I opted for the iPhone, so as of yesterday afternoon I have a shiny new iPhone 5S.  It is, I believe, the first Apple product I have ever owned, aside from a garage full of Lisas that passed through my hands back in the late 1990s. I have not used any Apple products for more than a few minutes since the Apple ][e.  No iPod, iPad, iPhone, Macs, iMacs, nuthin’ more than a passing familiarity.

So far I’m impressed.  The phone itself is a thing of beauty, which is to be expected of any new cell phone.  The Samsung Galaxy S III that Lisa carries (and the IV and V, I assume) are nice too.  So no big surprise there.  The thing is quite responsive, and almost everything is simple and intuitive.  I especially like being able to uninstall an app without having to wade through setup menus to do it, and the ability to effortlessly pull up the flashlight, timer, camera and calculator without even unlocking the phone — very nice.  It will even show me text messages and the first couple lines of new emails without unlocking the screen.

There are several areas in which iOS seems to really outshine Android OS.  The email client is a bit nicer than any I have used on the Droid.  iBooks has far and away the best PDF reader I have used on any platform.  The voicemail management is so well integrated with Verizon voicemail that I honestly didn’t realize it was there at first.  I see that there is a built-in flashlight app (lacking on the Droids) and timer/stopwatch.  The camera and its app is much better than anything I have seen on a phone before.  Overall, the UI seems a little smoother, a little quicker, a little more intuitive.  I can see why people rave about their iThingies.  And Siri works pretty well.  I even like the Lightning connector, though the cable they included could have stood to be about a foot longer — easily and cheaply remedied on Fleabay.  And while more of a hardware thing, the fingerprint scanning button is slick as all hell.

A few areas could use improvement.  For one, I do miss the “back” button.  I really do.  I get the whole single-button idea, but I’m constantly reaching for the back button.  A nightstand/dock mode like my Droid has would be awfully nice (maybe I just haven’t found it yet).  And for the love of all that’s good in the world, why can’t I just drag and drop files from my PC??  Using iTunes to copy PDFs to the phone is just plain stupid.

Anyway, the message here is really twofold.  First, kudos to Apple — the iPhone is really, really nice.  I don’t know that I would ever have bought one if I had to spend my own money on it, but it’s nice.  Second, shame on Google.  It took a lot to drive me away from Android, a platform I loved for what it was and what it represented.  They just couldn’t leave well enough alone.  They have managed to make it so intrusive and so inhospitable that even I had to walk away in disgust.

Now, about that Macbook Air…  hmmm.

 

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Seoul Burger

If you like things a little spicy but not too wild, try this…

Your favorite burger patty — home made, or the nice 1/3 lb. Angus patties from Costco
Your favorite bun
Drop on a layer of medium-hot kimchi
Optional: Add a fried egg (which makes any burger better)

I’d post a picture, but mine was very short-lived.  🙂  Simply flippin’ awesome.  For those of us limiting red meat and fat intake due to clogged up arteries, you want to make the most of that rare burger experience.  Even if you’re not a big kimchi fan — and it can be something of an acquired taste — kimchi as a relish on hamburgers or hot dogs is amazingly good.

 

 

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Parker’s Smokehouse

Lisa and I finally got out on the Harley last night and took a ride out to Parker’s Smokehouse.  We hadn’t been there in a while.  The weather was perfect, a glorious night for a motorcycle ride.

Since it was a Monday night, we were able to get a booth without waiting.  We decided to split their sampler platter (an appetizer, but enough to feed two easily) and a couple of side salads.  I have to say, the food has actually improved – and that is no mean feat.  The salads were a couple of notches better than we had had there before; a nice bed of Romaine lettuce, nice toasty croutons, well presented.  We were off to a good start!

I had always liked their ribs.  They have always been very good, but maybe not the most tender I’d had.  Last night they were much more tender and a little smokier than we’d had there before, and seemed to have a little more sweet BBQ flavor as well.  Not overpowering or trying to hide the flavor of the meat, but really good.  We also noticed that there was more meat on the ribs.  I’d say they are some of the best ribs we’ve had in a restaurant anywhere.  The rib tips were also superb, very smoky.  The chicken was very tender and juicy, and the catfish fingers were done to perfection.

We’ve seen a lot of restaurants start out great and gradually decline (like Colton’s, for example, or Millard Road House).  Parker’s seems to be getting even better than they were, which means someone is working hard.

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Halt and Catch Fire premier

Last night I watched the first episode of Halt and Catch Fire on AMC.  I wanted to love it, was tempted to hate it, and in the end opted for neither one.

For those of you who don’t know me, I lived through the period in question, and in the same industry…  although not working for TI, or a fictitious Texas OS vendor, or even directly in the PC end of things.  Still, those were some pretty exciting times.  I was fixing mainframes for a living, but lived and breathed microcomputers every day.  When micros first came on the scene (we didn’t call them “PCs” until well into the 80s), it was like the Wild West, in all the good ways.  There was opportunity around every corner.  I would be hard pressed to count the number of companies making computers in the pre-IBM days; some very cool things were being done by a lot of gifted and smart people.  I remember one in particular, a machine made by Ohio Scientific that had multiple processors (6800, 6502 and Z-80 if I remember right) and could boot different operating systems depending on your mood.

Anyway, the first bit of bad news came during the opening scene — a typed-text description of the “HALT AND CATCH FIRE” machine instruction.  It’s a simple concept, easy to explain and even a little humorous.  And they got it completely wrong.  Stupidly wrong, in fact.  I felt like a doctor watching Gray’s Anatomy or a cop watching Blue Bloods.  Sigh…

It got a little better from there, but there was some really stupid technical nonsense thrown in for no good reason.  Something real and believable would have been just as dramatic, or maybe even better.  You can’t cut a soda can in half with a pencil soldering iron  – and why would you need to to fix a Speak & Spell?  I especially loved the scene where he’s tediously de-soldering connections on the back of the circuit board — then triumphantly extracts the chip FROM ITS SOCKET.  And then of course there is the biggest non sequitur: ALL of the IBM Personal Computer’s schematics as well as the complete assembler listings for the BIOS were readily available from IBM, in the IBM Model 5150 Personal Computer maintenance manuals that anyone could buy.

So building a clone of the IBM PC was really pretty trivial from an engineering standpoint, and other manufacturers jumped in early and often.  Most tried to build better machines that ran their own version of MS-DOS, and most used the same bus so that expansion cards were interchangeable.  It took a while for the tyranny of the marketplace to grind everyone into making exact clones of the IBM machine, other than some speed improvements and of course much lower prices.

The list of ridiculously stupid technical gaffes is pretty impressive.  The scene where they start reading out the BIOS?  Well, first off, there were no white LEDs in 1983.  You could have any color of LED you wanted as long as it was red, green or yellow.  And binary 1101 is a hexidecimal D, not B.  PC motherboards don’t arc and spark, and if one did it would be dead, dead, dead.  His oscilloscope was displaying a stupidly Hollywood-ized pattern, and why would they need to use one  anyway?  Could they not read the pinout from a common EPROM data sheet?  He’d just finished explaining how all the parts were off the shelf common stuff.  And why would such a hotshot engineer not rig up an interface to his TRS-80 to read out the BIOS chip?  For that matter…  why not just type in a few lines of BASIC program to read out the BIOS and save it to disk, print it or display it on screen?

From a technical standpoint the show is senselessly over-dramatized in ways that really spoil a lot of the “geek appeal”.  If you know much at all about the technical matter at hand you’ll spend half your time shaking your head and saying, “Wha??  No…”  They did, however, seem to do a fairly decent job of catching the general tone of the period, and the story line (other than the glaring issue of the whole made-up BIOS thing) has potential.  I just wish they’d have hired an actual technical consultant, or listened to him if they did hire one.

 

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Improving the Neato vacuum

If you have a Neato XV series robotic vacuum, and you don’t already have one, you need to switch to the curved/spiral brush.  This is the one Neato ships with the “pet” versions of the vacuum.  It’s far quieter than the one with the parallel straight rubber blades.  The sound of the vacuum is reduced from a dull roar to a far less intrusive sound.  I can barely hear it when the vacuum is running downstairs and I’m in my office.  I’ve also noticed that it also seems to pick up a lot more dust and debris.  Overall it’s a huge improvement.

I ordered mine from Crucial Vacuum, part number 945-0002.  Best 25 bucks you can spend on your little robot friend.

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Updating the anti-SIP attack script

The anti-SIP attack script has been doing a great job, but I did note a few shortcomings I wanted to fix.  For one thing, I was noticing a few “clusters” of networks that justified (to me) blocking larger networks.  No one outside the US has any reason to connect to my server, for example.  I can block entire /8 networks…  but doing so manually was cluttering up the iptables rule sets.

I modified the script to store a little more information in the text file, so i can go through it manually from time to time and make changes.  It’s easy to run the file through sort -n and see if it’s time to block a /16 or /8 network.

#!/bin/bash
/bin/grep "No matching peer found" /var/log/asterisk/messages|cut -d "'" -f 4 | \
   cut -d "." -f 1-3 |sort -n |/usr/bin/uniq >> \
   /root/anti-sip-attack.tmp
for d in `cat /root/anti-sip-attack.tmp`
do
  if [ `/sbin/iptables -L -n | grep -c $d` = "0" ]; then
    /sbin/iptables -I INPUT -s $d.0/24 -j DROP
    echo $d.0/24 >> /root/anti-sip-attack.txt
  fi
done
rm /root/anti-sip-attack.tmp
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Exploring Mars

Last night I took Lauren (my grand-daughter) to the National Geographic Exploring Mars presentation at the Holand Center.  Kobie Boykins was the speaker; Kobie is originally from Omaha and manages the engineering team that designed and built all of the moving parts of the Mars roving science lab Curiosity.  Pretty awesome evening!  Lauren and I both enjoyed it.  Many thanks to Lisa Van Stratten for providing the tickets.  After the presentation Lauren got to meet Kobie and had her picture taken holding one of the wheels used for testing a couple of the earlier Mars rovers.

2014-04-22_21-54-41_943

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AWESOME garbage collection job!

Man, the City of Omaha and Deffenbaugh are aces.  What a fantastic job of not only picking up the garbage, but making sure our street stays nice and quiet…  since you cna’t drive down it without zig-zagging around the chicanes.

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Back to building

Between HR 3708 and S.2103 and the FAA’s recent decision to look at some easing of the third class medical requirements, I am hopeful enough that I will be able to fly the RV-7 that I’ve decided to keep it and continue building.  I’ve ordered the fuselage kit and am finishing up the wings while waiting for it to arrive (which will be 8-10 weeks).

I was just about to pull the trigger on a Champ to fly…  but just couldn’t do it.  I’ll have to content myself with flying with a CFI for a while, and/or bumming rides whenever I can.