aaron c beals

for a while now, my t42 thinkpad has had issues with the chassis fan — it turns on at the slightest hint of continuous CPU utilization, eventually kicking into a “high gear” mode that involves mind-numbing whirring with an occasional pulse. i’m still working on manual control of the fan, which is normally handled by the BIOS, via an open-source fan control utility. in the short-term, what i needed to do was to hunt down the source of the CPU utilization.

first stop: process explorer, available from SysInternals. from this tool, i was able to determine that the at-fault svchost.exe was tied to the “HP Network Devices Support” service. the service apparently has a bug that HP hasn’t yet fixed. the service doesn’t do much other than locate your networked printer on a DHCP network. ideally, i’d be able to lock the IP address of the printer, but my newer router doesn’t let me do that the way my old Netgear did. so for now, i’ve made the service “Manual” and will turn it on only as needed. result:CPU utilization returned to normal and the fan died down.

next: better management of power and clock settings. in my search for a fan-control utility, i stumbled upon this gem: Notebook Hardware Control. i know that the domain name seems a tad sketchy, but the software does everything promised, with minimal overhead. NHC allows you to track and set clock speeds, power saving modes, and internal temperatures. if you have a laptop, i highly recommend installing NHC and giving it a try.

just in this morning: Microsoft made an unsolicited bid for Yahoo! at a $31/share price premium over last night’s market price. apparently talks of this nature have been going on for a while, but to see something like this go down (and not have Yahoo! immediately throw it back in the face of M$) is astounding.

so let’s say that it does happen. there are so many questions. what will Google’s response be? will they finally purchase a big enterprise shop (my buddy Rob pointed me to this list, which is conspicuously missing enterprise companies/products)? will M$ keep both the hotmail and Yahoo! mail interfaces as separate entities, or merge them while keeping people’s addy’s the same? whose search will win? will Yahoo!’s impressive fantasy sports leagues die a miserable death in the no-fun offices of Redmond?

during the course of my recent investigation into the local startup scene, i came across FlyLite, a non-traditional software(ish) startup. their value prop is simple: flying with luggage is a pain in the neck, so eliminate the luggage and have what you need waiting for you.

to start, you send them a suitcase full of all the things (clothes, toiletries, etc) that you might need on a business trip. they inventory your things and make the list accessible via a web interface. before a trip, you select all the items you plan to use, and they pack up the suitcase and have it waiting in your hotel room. when you’re done, pack it back up and send it off again (they pick it up). as far as i can tell, they even launder your clothes.

i think it would take a rather heavy frequent flier lifestyle to justify this sort of service, but it certainly promises to make your life easier. though i guess your clients may wonder why you dress the same way every time you visit…

photos.
i use Picasa to manage my personal (not professional) digital photos, and it works pretty well. great interface, excellent protection of the original images, great built-in backup, superb image filters for a free software package. it even does IPTC keyword tagging.

the only downside was that it published to Picasa Web Albums (PWA). not that there’s anything wrong with the Web Albums, but i (and most of my friends) use Facebook. the Facebook albums do have their downside (limited to 60 images, no real “export” functionality), but benefits as well (entity tagging, easy comments, images and comments built into Facebook news feed, no apparent storage limit compared to the 1GB for PWA). i argue the benefits outweigh the costs.

after poking around a bit, i found a Facebook / Picasa plugin that gives me exactly what i’m looking for. on the Picasa side, a simple XML plugin adds a button to Picasa that uploads to Facebook. i can edit and make comments on the photos in Picasa, and then hit the upload button. Picasa then uploads the photos to my account in Facebook, including the comments. the Facebook side of the plugin allows you to create new albums and add photos to existing albums.

the only downside to the plugin is the security of the script called by Picasa. essentially, it has to send a request through a script running on the plugin author’s PC. the Facebook login information is passed by his script directly on to Facebook, but you have to trust him. it’s unfortunate, but he’s been open about the risk and claims he isn’t malicious (too bad he doesn’t open the source or i’d just host the script on my own website). i’m willing to take the risk for now because the benefit is greater.

as a result, though, you’ll see fewer photos posted here on my website and more posted on Facebook.

website posts
another crossover point between Facebook and my website are the posts. Facebook has a notion of “notes”, which are like blog posts, but i didn’t see the sense in using the notes when i had a website already. but who actually read my website, anyhow? everyone spends all their time on Facebook now.

so luckily, the developers at Facebook built an extension to the notes that allow you to import from a single RSS feed… in this case, my website. it grabbed my last 10 posts and in the future will update automatically with each new post. problem solved.

on my recent trip to San Francisco, i had the opportunity to catch a Giants game at AT&T Park, which is a phenomenal place. of course, it doesn’t have the old-school charm of Fenway, but this also means you’re facing the diamond in every seat and there’s enough legroom. the park is right on the water, which means the views from the top deck are excellent. anyhow, this post isn’t about that.

the issue i had was that i only had our Canon Elph point-and-shoot, rather than the 5D or 20D with a wide-angle or fisheye lens, so i couldn’t capture the entire park in one shot. (and honestly, i still think that it would have been tough with a wider lens.) so instead, i took a series of shots with the intention of stitching them together later. now, i’ve done this before (during our trip to France in 2003, for instance), but what ends up happening is that the individual pictures sit around on my hard drive waiting for me to go through the painstaking process.

in order to avoid repeating this scenario, i did a little searching online and found that there are two options:
1) do it yourself with Photoshop
2) use Panorama Tools

seeing as option #1 wasn’t working for me, i decided to explore option #2. it turns out that the Panorama Tools software is a set of open-source libraries created by Helmut Dersch and released under the LGPL. they’re very powerful, but unfortunately are also very hard to use, as they have to be configured and accessed programatically. as fun as per-job script-writing is, i decided to keep exploring.

what i found were two very highly-rated commercial UI’s built on top of Panorama Tools: PTgui and PTAssembler. they are both powerful, simple, and even automate much of the manual work required. unfortunately, both of these tools are not only commercial, they are expensive. before shelling out money, i wanted to see what else was out there…

…and i found hugin. this is a free, open-source software package that provides much of the same functionality as the commercial products. it even integrates with other open-source plugins for edge blending and automatic connector point generation. the latter is the real time-consuming and difficult part of the process: identifying points on different images that represent the same location in space, so the software knows how to overlay, modify, and connect the images. you can do this manually, but the plugin does a very good job of auto-discovery.

see for yourself:

two posts in a week… what in the world is happening here?!?

(well, the deal is that i got around to linking to the “post” page from my blackberry, meaning that i can post from pretty much anywhere i get cell reception. however, i can’t promise this streak will continue indefinitely…)

this past thanksgiving, my younger cousins convinced me to join Facebook, something i had avoided for several reasons:

1) it started after i left college, and at first was limited to college students, so joining would have required some sort of email trickery.

2) i mentally grouped it with MySpace, that blight on the face of the web that managed to single-handedly resuscitate 1994-era monolithic webpages complete with blinking text, poorly laid-out pictures, and blaring music that starts upon page visit.

3) i didn’t see the benefit in social networking outside of my current utilities: my website, email, and instant messaging. i was using (and still use) LinkedIn, but that is more of a professional social networking tool rather than a personal one. i figured that i was connected enough.

what i didn’t realize at the time was that Facebook was built properly, with an eye to privacy and scalability, and seemed to be designed with simplicity in mind. luckily, my cousins managed to convince me, and i joined.

what i also didn’t pick up on at the time was that while i was freely sharing information about myself via my website, very few of my friends were doing the same. i could get information from those who had sites or blogs, but most of the rest didn’t have the time/money/patience/interest in something as heavy-duty as a website.

enter Facebook. it reduces the problems of website management and provides simple input for information from status updates to photos to contact information. my friends who didn’t have the incentive to run a website suddenly had little excuse not to sign up … and with all of them on there and updating, i instantly had a single source of information about what my friends are up to.

i’m not going to keep singing the praises of Facebook — like any time-consuming activity it does have its downsides — but will instead leave that to fanatics like Scoble. (90% of his posts in the past few weeks have referred to Facebook in some way, shape, or form.)

so i’m fine with taking some of the information i’d usually put on my blog (longer process, more thought-out content) and instead post bite-size pieces on Facebook. however, there are now ways of posting information on a more-constant basis. imagine a text-message-sized chunk of information about what you’re up to, updated several to many times per hour, and available for all your friends to see.

this approach has been called (appropriately, i think) micro-blogging, and there are no shortage of tools for sharing the minutia of your life with those who care to listen: Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, and Tumblr are the main ones. the distribution methods for micro-blogs are slightly different than blogs and social networking (which rely on site visits and RSS feeds). the information in micro-blogs is text-message sized, which means that you can sign up to have all info piped into your cell phone.

faaaaaantastic. how are we actually supposed to get anything accomplished if our time is sucked up writing about what we’re doing and where we are at any given moment and reading the same from hundreds of our friends? can you imagine how rapidly this would break down? (“reading the news”…”driving the car”…”working”….”surfing the web at work”…”reading Twitter messages”…”writing this message”…”reading messages”…”writing”…”reading”…”writing”) it’s like hooking straight up to someone’s mind, but without any sort of filter. frankly, i think it would be mind-numbing.

in my opinion, the line between Facebook and Twitter is the line between sharing and over-sharing. (but who knows… i once said that Facebook was a total waste of time. in a year, i might be posting about how i couldn’t imagine life without micro-blogging.)

stumbled across these two cool product designs the other day.

the keyport is practical and solves a problem that has been bugging me for a while — how to keep my keys in a simple, non-leg-jabbing container. there are some downsides, such as the loss of the ability to remotely open your vehicle (though they’re supposedly working on that) and the lack of jingly-ness (useful for entertaining pets and very small children), but i think that in general this would lighten load of the keychain and make it much easier to find the key you’re looking for. apparently this is going into production soon — i look forward to it.

   

the book-style remote control is just a concept, but it’s a cool one, taking the idea of the universal remote to a new, tab-indexed level. i think this would be cooler if it had rings along the edge, like a binder, so you could add custom remotes for any gadget in your arsenal (assuming the existing remotes didn’t do the job).

i’ll be the first to admit it — i used to be a real gadget-head. if something new, shiny, and electronic came out, i knew about it. i talked about it, read everything i could about it, and saved up for it. most of the time, i ended up owning it. heck, i was single. what else did i have to spend money on?

over time, my position on gadgets has changed. i still like to learn about them, but i’m more of a cautious observer from afar. i have neither the money nor the desire to buy the top-of-the-line, latest and greatest techno-crap. i think that the latest post by Joel Johnson [Gizmodo] pretty much sums up my current line of thought on the world of gadgets.

and for the record: yes, i own a Blackberry — but only because my company pays for it.

A few months ago, Laura informed me that the old computer just wasn’t cutting the mustard anymore, at least when in came to photo processing. I guess 8 hours was a little too long to wait for a process to run. I spec’ed out a PC online, but discovered that for about $700 less, I could build one myself — and with higher quality, quieter parts. Sure, it took me a little longer to build it, but it was totally worth it.

Before I get started, I’d like to thank my beautiful wife for making this project possible for me — without the motivation of her small business, I would have had no reason to build this machine (other than uncontrolled gadgetitis, but that doesn’t really fly anymore).

It’s good to be back. [Click here for photos]

So I got the new site up with the main intention of starting to post more, but clearly that well-laid plan failed. Ah, well, there’s always tomorrow.

The good news is that I turned on registration, so if you’ve been itching to comment on posts (the old ones are coming, I promise) you can go ahead and do so. Just click on the “Comments” link below, try to log in, and click “Register” on the login page. You’ll need a valid email, but fear not — I won’t spam you.

Because my night-owl ways have returned for the week, here are some thoughts and links:

• My buddy John introduced me to a new web comic recently — and of course I had to go back and read every strip in the archive. This is by no means the first incident. Ctrl-Alt-Del is similar to Penny Arcade in premise and focus (video-game-centric) but the method of delivery is different (plot vs loose association).
• The Celtics 2006-07 schedule just got released today, and the home opener is against … the Hornets?!? What kind of old-school rivalry is that? The last two years they’ve kicked off the season against the Knicks and Sixers. And before that, it was the Heat, Bulls, Cavs, and Raptors — at least they were in the same Conference. It still frustrates me that teams play divisional rivals (against whom they’re vying for divisional titles and playoff spots) no more often than most other teams in the league. It’s all about marketing to the NBA; gotta make sure the big names hit all the cities to get those butts in the seats, as opposed to, say … playing engaging basketball and building rivalries?
• I have restrained myself thus far and have only made two purchases off of Woot, both of which are getting steady use around here.
• Some day, I’ll have one of these… but until then, I’m going to have to keep using these lesser devices. At least I’ll soon be making one upgrade.

More to come…