David Ernst Chats with the World

Ever since getting a laptop, I’ve pretty much stopped sitting at my desktop. It acts more like a home server these days, and not a very busy one at that. One thing that it has been doing for me, though, is music. It’s right next to my stereo, so I can play music on my computer through my stereo just by short cables running between them.

But, this is now inconvenient. Since I use my laptop much more frequently — including right now! — it’d be nicer to play music from here than climbing up to my desktop. I thought “someone should make a sound transmission system that works like WiFi or cordless telephones.” I could plug a little transmitter into my laptop, and then send the sound signal to a receiver connected to my stereo.

Well, not surprisingly, such things do exist. In fact, they can do audio and video! I don’t have need for the video, but I couldn’t find an audio only version, so I ended up ordering [this one that does audio and video](http://www.x10.com/products4/google/wireless_video_sender.html). Only $50, and that includes free shipping!

So, I was pretty excited when it came last week. I hooked it all up and…. it sounded terrible. :( I was able to deal with many of the sound quality issues, but the one that I couldn’t get past was a fast clicking sound. Naturally, I was disappointed. As I frequently do in such situations, I decided to set it aside, and call the company about it another day.

So, a couple of days later, I called X10. I was on hold for a long time (about 30 minutes, after their phone queue had predicted 10 minutes…). It was long enough to do some more troubleshooting. I found that if I turned off both my computer and my wireless access point (WAP) then the clicking would stop. I actually think the clicking might have been caused by the wireless “beacon”, because that was set on my WAP to go every 100ms = 1/10th of a second, and that seemd to be about the frequency that the clicking was happening. It also makes sense that that would have been sending out a signal on lots of frequencies (changing “channels” on either the WAP or the VideoSender(TM) did not solve the problem).

Whatever the case, I eventually talked with a very nice support provider, and he said that some people had problems with this. He suggested moving the receiver further away from the WAP. My house isn’t that big, and basically, I just didn’t want to do this. He thought that switching to 802.11g might help, but couldn’t answer whether I would have to get both an 802.11g WAP AND a card for my laptop. Whatever the case, I was considering the experiment a failure, and was ready to give up. I scheduled an RMA for the product.

But! It was easy to be willing to give up, because while I was on hold, I had had another idea! Couldn’t I somehow rig something up where I could send the sound over my IP network? I figured I could probably at least set up an X Windows session such that the laptop was running a sound player on the server. I started running google searches for advice, and ended up learning that the [Enlightened Sound Daemon](http://freshmeat.net/projects/esound/) (which I was already running) can be set up to accept sound streams over an TCP/IP port! (16001 is the default port number, for anyone who cares). It turned out to be very easy to do, too. I’m not sure how far I got, but by the time I was done being on hold, I was pretty sure I was going to be able to get it working.

Well, it’s working. Not all sound players support it, unfortunately, but on XMMS it was very easy. So, I’m sitting here now, typing this post on my laptop, watching the activity light on my WiFi card glow warmly as it sends Dvořák (played by The Cleveland Orchestra (conducted by Dohnányi)) to my stereo via my desktop upstairs. Although the technology of it makes perfect sense to me, it still feels pretty much like magic. If I opened a hole in my firewall, I guess I could send music through my stereo from any correctly configured computer on the Internet! Not sure what the use of that would be, although I guess it could be used as a ramshackle VoIP phone. :)

But, yeah, sure am happy that I went this route. I’ll get my $50 back, and the sound quality is better than that other thing ever would have been. Plus I can just marvel at how cool it is! The one down side is that it won’t be as easy to have friends play music from their laptops through my sound system. But if they care enough, I think there’s esound support for windows. :)

(Ok, warning, this message is far geekier than my average blog post.)

I talked with someone who said he kept getting kicked out of a [yahoo group](http://groups.yahoo.com) he was in because his messages were “hard bouncing”. I’ll skip the discovery process, but in the end I found that some (?? Not all!?!) of the mail being sent to him from the group was using the DNS A record for his domain instead of the DNS MX record for his domain.

(don’t say I didn’t warn you)

WHAT??! the whole point of an MX record is to tell MTAs where to send mail. When I first learned about DNS 10 years or so ago, I recall that it was common to include a comment in a BIND configuration file before an A record that said: “For braindead MTAs that don’t understand MX records”. Now, ten years later, Yahoo suddenly has such a braindead MTAs?? What is going on?

And then… only sometimes?? In some ways that’s even more baffling. All I can figure is Yahoo has some new or old code running on one of its countless servers, and whenever it happens to hit that one, this problem happens. For most domains, the A record is the same as the MX record, so they probably don’t notice right away. But I sure hope they get a clue. I tried to send them one, but they sure didn’t seem to be welcoming it. My message about their MTA’s handling of DNS records is probably in a pile of queries about how to create new entries in an address book. *sigh* Maybe this blog entry will shame them into fixing the problem….

For the past couple of years, I’ve been given home thermometers with wireless remote sensors for xmas. The reason I keep getting them is that they never seem to work. The indoor one will usually work, but it won’t get a signal from the outdoor one. It won’t even get the signal if they are sitting right next to each other on the same table. I do not know why. I’ve wondered if it’s other wireless stuff (like my WiFi network, or my cordless phone, or what have you), but it doesn’t seem to be. So I don’t know.

Anyway, this year I got two — one from my mom, and one from Kynthia. They both work! That is, they both pick up temperatures from the remote sensors! So that’s good news. Hopefully at least one of them will even continue working.

While I’m pleased to have a working temperature gauges, I also have to pause and chat about the reliability of these things. Typical consumer-grade digital thermometers nowadays give 3-4 significant digits of accuracy… that is, they usually offer tenths of a degree on their display. What’s funny is, the thermometers really aren’t that accurate, as you can easily confirm by putting the display and the remote sensor right next to each other. They almost never show the same temperature, frequently more than a degree off. Since I had been working with both thermometers, I set all four sensors together. Then I even grabbed my kitchen thermometer. Sure enough, the five sensors gave five different temperatures: 63.9 64.6 64.9 65.3 and 65.7 degrees F. Now, the total span here is just under two degrees, so when I am trying to figure out which coat to wear, I don’t think it’ll much matter. However, I do have to wonder: why do they design these things to display accuracy beyond the units’ capabilities? The best I can come up with is that the fractions of a degree matter more in Centigrade mode. I don’t really know, but do remember: if you need to know the temperature to three significant digits, you’ll need a sensor more accurate than these.

I haven’t written much to the blog lately, and I attribute that largely to the holidays. I like the holidays, and they play an important role in my life and the lives of my loved ones. So, I was busy. This is the first weekend I’ve been home in a while.

And, thanks to xmas, I’ve got a bunch of new presents! My family and friends are very generous around xmas. In fact, I am struck by how often when someone asks where I acquired something I own, I say it was a gift. Really, a surprising percentage of the durable goods that I own were gifts. Of course, I try to be generous as well, and so does everyone, so perhaps the same is true of most everyone I’m close to. But I think my aversion to shopping in general probably raises the percentage for me.

Anyway, I think I was particularly easy to shop for this year because of my increasing interest in cycling. So, I had a new:

• handlebar bag;
• frame bag;
• bike gloves;
• long underwear;
• (unbelievably cool) repair tool;
• (and the biggest gift of all) GPS

Well, much to my surprise, the weather was very nice this weekend. Actually, I’ve loved the weather so far this winter… seems like it’s either snowing or clear. Clear, cold, and sunny doesn’t bother me at all, although I admit that cold does not make me excited about long bike rides. But still, what I don’t like (and what we typically get a lot of in the winter) is cold, overcast, and drizzling. Yuck.

Anyway, yesterday was very sunny, and I thought “I could bike in this.” Then, today, it was not only sunny, but even quite warm! It topped 60 this afternoon! Woah!

Well, how could I resist? I installed my new handlebar bag (with my new unbelievably cool repair tool), figured out a way to attach my GPS to it, strapped on the frame bag, donned the gloves and the long underwear, and set off! I rode a variation on one of the easiest routes that I do, one of my “12 mile after work” routes that can be ridden in about an hour. Usually I do these routes for the exercise and the mind-cleanse, so I usually push myself a bit. Today, though, I was telling myself to “play”. Every time I thought of something I might adjust or check with my new gear, I tried to check it. So, definitely a slower ride than usual. And then I went out of my way to go to Staples to buy me a new Flash/USB drive (I should write about that in a different post).

The ride went well, it did feel relaxing. But, part of my excitement to bike was to unveil the new abilities made available to me by the GPS, and some very cool software. So, now, thanks mostly to GPSVisualizer.com here is
a google map version of where I biked today and [an elevation profile](http://www.bloomington.in.us/~drernst/gmaps/20060108-surprise-ride-elevation.png) as well! I found the software and stuff necessary to do this yesterday, and I’ve been very excited about the ability. Very cool.

Furthermore, I’ve been having good luck with finding perl modules and the like to play with the GPS data myself. I was hoping I’d do a total ascent graph to post up here as well. Unfortunately, though, the data is.. not reliable. I have to learn more about some of the stuff that the GPS does with elevation, because it seems to make these corrections, often when I’m standing still. I calculated the total ascent to be about twice what the GPS said it was. I tried to correct for the corrections, but I never got it to within 20% of what the GPS said. And I’m not sure I trust what the GPS said anyway (it said ~1700 feet for this ride, that seems a bit high to me. One of my estimates came back closer to 1400 feet, but I don’t know whether to believe that or not). I wonder if part of the confusion was that it was very windy today, and that maybe the variable pressure confused the GPS’s internal barometer. Weird, I don’t know, I’ll have to research it and/or get used to it.

I could say tons about the bike ride, but I’m trying to get to bed, so I’ll just highlight a couple of things:

* Why did I ever bike up the hill on Old 37 between Dunn and Bethel? I can bike up the same hill on much more pleasant back roads. Doesn’t make the hill any easier to climb, but at least you’re not also worried about cars.
* Both of the climbs I did near Griffy were about 250 ft vertical. So that’s: from the bottom of the dam (~600 ft) to around the corner of Bethel and Hinkle (~840 ft); and from the causeway at Griffy (~650 ft (50 feet higher than the bottom of the dam!)) to the crest of the hill near the corner of Jordan and 17th St. (914 ft! I had no idea there was such a high point over there near the frats!)

Ok, enough geeky reminiscing. I’m going to bed.

Woah, 17 days since my last posting! What’s the matter with me? I don’t know, but I think I’ll once again aim for a string of shorter and more regular entries.

I got a bee in my bonnet about the screen resolution on my laptop. I like high resolutions, and I realized that one of my biggest frustrations with the thing was that the resolution was a mere 800×600, but that I’d never really devoted any time to trying to fix it. So, with nothing much going on for my tonight, I decided to devote some time.

Standard procedure: google for someone else who worked on this (“modeline config file xorg.conf” turned out to be the winning search) and see what they did. The answer: run a tool called gtf that writes config file lines for you (“gtf 1024 768 60 -v” was the actual line that gave me what I wanted) and then paste it into the config file. Restart XWindows, and… voila! It was really just about that simple.

So, if it’s so simple, why did I need to google for the answer and manually edit the file? Why isn’t there a utility that does this in a nice, warm, gui environment? There is supposedly such a utility on my Fedora 4 installation, but it didn’t help at all. It only offered 800×600 and 640×480. This is what’s bad about linux as a desktop platform right now. And, of course, now that I’ve got it how I want it, I have no personal motivation to make something that does a better job. So these things remain difficult.

Idk. I’m hoping that the Linux variants that are being sold on cheap computers these days know their own hardware and thus spare their users of these kinds of frustrations. But, I’ve never used one, so I don’t know.

David

Like most of my geeky friends, I’m darned impressed with google. They clearly have some incredible brain power at all levels of their organization. They do lots of good stuff, useful stuff, they are making a name for themselves by making steak, not just sizzle.

However, I caught a glimpse of them looking like a plain old annoying company this week. The issue was with my gmail account. I’d been receiving a whole bunch of copies of “returned to sender” mail. Apparently my address got used in a huge spam mailing or something, or maybe in a virus or something. Whatever the case, definitely a super-human number of these things, like, in the tens of thousands. This wasn’t me or anyone else sending mail that got returned, this was some computer issue.

All of my email gets delivered to two mailboxes, and curiously my HoosierNet mailbox didn’t get flooded with these things. Maybe some of my filters there caught all of these, but I don’t know. But I did see a lot of them being delivered to my gmail account last Friday.

Well, Monday or Tuesday of this week, I was having some trouble with my gmail account, and I noticed that it said something very much like “You are currently using 2655 MB (100%) of your 2656 MB.” What?? Now, I get a LOT of email, and I never clean it out of my gmail account, so I’m accustomed to there being like 550M or so up there. But….? Woah. Apparently those returned-to-sender messages were worse than I thought!

So, I figure, I just need to delete them. Should be a no brainer, right? Search for ‘mailer-daemon’, and delete all the results. WRONG! There is no “delete all the results of this search” feature. wtf? I mean, every mail program has that, right? If you can figure out how to do a mass “select” then you can do a mass “delete selected”. Not gmail. You can only delete one screen at a time, which seemed to be 20, if I was looking at search results (even though I set my preferences for 100 on a page… search results are still 20. I might be missing something, but I can’t find it if so).

Figuring that this was just crazy, that those smart-apples at google certainly thought of this, and want to make it easy for me… I searched the documentation. Nope. As with so many documentations, it answered lots of questions, but none of them were about this. They did link me to a web forum type place where lots of people were complaining about gmail. Gotta hand it to them for that. But, yeah, there I found lots of people complaining about the exact same issue… no mass delete.

So, I ran through the motions one more time, but decided it was time to contact them. Like lots of websites, they first scanned the question that I’d entered and showed me a bunch of links for help pages that might help. The links were pathetic. They were nowhere near what my problem was. I mean, they seemed just like an average company, but if I worked for google and knew that the world viewed my company as the company who made sense out of web searches, I would be embarrassed to look like such a sluff on this search.

So, I submitted my question. I got an automated response almost immediately, again suggesting that I check out some help pages. I replied and said that they didn’t have anything to do with my problem.

A day or so later, I got a reply that said that they didn’t have a mass delete feature, but thanks for suggesting it, and they are working on it.

The point is not that this is horrible. It’s not that google is evil. The point is… this seems so… typical. Google is the company that my friends and I keep marvelling at that they do everything so well and don’t hand out the typical crap. Well, this seemed like totally typical crap. No worse than average, but if Google ever seems average, they will probably go bust immediately. Their whole business model is based on being better than average. They seemed average at best in this case.

Ok, whatever. I decided I’d delete many screens of the dumb messages and at least try to free up a few MB of space. I did… it was very slow, but I probably did about 1000 conversations. And, when I looked down… 555MB used (20%)! Woah! I don’t know if one of those conversations was a bunch of replies to itself and actually had 10,000 messages in it or what… I wasn’t paying close enough attention. However, I had a working gmail account again! Yay!

As glad as I am to have it working again, I still have to pause and think… “If a HoosierNet customer wrote to use with a similar complaint, we would have temporarily upped their quota, taught them how to mass delete things, and offered to do the mass deleting for them if they seemed confused.” To think that our podunk Indiana nonprofit ISP is offering better customer service for this particular kind of problem than is the mighty Google… hopefully it’s just a soft spot for them and not a harbinger. For all that I love about them, I certainly do hope so.

I’ve never liked the “touchpads” that are the norm on laptops these days. I’m always accidentally clicking somewhere with them while I’m typing, or accidentally moving the mouse, or something. On my old thinkpad, I had one of the little nipples, and I liked it quite well. But when that laptop died, I gave in and got one with a touchpad. I’ve been dealing ok, thinking it wasn’t that bad, and I was very glad that with only a normal about of linux-user trouble (meaning, I had to do a web search and edit a config file) I was able to turn off the “click by tapping” feature that causes me so much trouble while I’m typing. So, I was dealing.

But I had trouble. In particular, there’s some feature on there that allows one to go “back” in a web browser window by dragging to the left along the bottom of the touchpad. Well, I activated this a lot of times accidentally, and it caused me a good deal of frustration. Most notably, several times while I was making some of my [gmap pedometer](http://www.sueandpaul.com/gmapPedometer/) maps, I lost all of my work because “forward” didn’t take me back to the correct link. Ugh.

So, I thought, I should get myself an “external” trackball. So, while I was out shopping tonight, I looked for them. The one I really like was still $30, which is about the same as what I paid for it like 8 years ago. And then I got to thinking… I already have a trackball that I like! Why not buy the cheapest mouse they have, put that on my “server” machine (at which I rarely sit anymore) and move the trackball to my laptop (at which I sit a lot anymore).

So, now I’ve got the trackball on my laptop and… oh… why did I wait so long? It’s already brightened my entire experience of working on this computer! I had totally underestimated how much I was being frustrated by the touchpad. Now it’s so easy to point, to wheel, to center click, and so on… Such a simple move… But, yeah. Wow.

I know a number of people who don’t like trackballs. They are so used to physically moving a mouse that they can’t get used to rolling the ball with their thumb. I can understand that, it’s hard to change habits. But, wow, I really prefer the trackball. I barely have to move, and I’ve got excellent accuracy. So, there’s my publicly viewable opinion for the day. :)

I also bought a suit and a magnetic knife holder. Isn’t that nice?

Got home from work today and there was another box on my porch. This was my new (used) turntable! Sadly, my old turntable, which was awfully cool when my brother Allen bought it ~1980, started having serious trouble. I eventually took it apart and discovered a [broken piece of plastic](http://www.bloomington.in.us/~drernst/broken-turntable.jpg). Dang. I didn’t want to mess with it, I have enough projects going on. So, I found [one on eBay](http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5805930634) and bought it. The seller was fast, it was here surprisingly quickly!

I opened it up, the whole thing was wrapped in bubble wrap. It was hard to get through it all, but I did it! But what I found was that the [needle was totally broken off](http://www.bloomington.in.us/~drernst/dscf0012.jpg)!! Ugh. I wrote to the seller, and he wrote back *amazingly* quickly and took responsibility and said he’d send me a new needle. Kudos to him. So, I’ll be waiting on that.

Meanwhile, though, still playing with the last shipment, I found a [list of stuff to take bike touring](http://gorp.away.com/gorp/gear/packlst_bik.htm) online, written by the same guy that wrote the book I liked! I put that onto my Palm (using a [nifty little palm app that converts memos to todo lists](http://rickyspears.com/articles/convert_palm_memos_2_todos.html), via a [nifty little basic implementation for PalmOS](http://www.hotpaw.com/rhn/hotpaw/)), and packed up my panniers with just about everything I’ll need for an overnight. It’s a bit heavier that the simple test from Tuesday, I think I’ll still be under 30 pounds, doing pretty well, I think. I then put some directions onto my palm… I’m pretty much all set for that adventure!!

Now I have to convince myself to go to bed. I’ve sure been staying up late this week…

Jeremy recently passed along to me a conjecture that he’d heard:

>if you shuffle a deck of cards well, then it’s likely that never in history has a deck of cards been in that exact order.

I mentioned this to Sue, Michael and Megan in Portland, and there was general disbelief. I hadn’t done the math, but was inclined to believe it, because I knew 52 factorial was a really big number. Well, here’s the math, I believe the conjecture.

(more…)