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Open desktop mechanic cat /dev/random | grep "For being ignorant to whom it goes I writ at random, very doubtfully" https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/feed/entries/atom 2011-02-17T23:11:09+00:00 Apache Roller https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/sourcejuicer_in_beijing SourceJuicer in Beijing bnitz 2010-02-11T06:52:51+00:00 2010-02-15T17:28:10+00:00
 While I was in Beijing I was invited to present OpenSolaris SourceJuicer at a combined meeting of the Beijing OpenSolaris User's Group and the Beijing GNOME User's group. (Thanks Emily and everyone!)
 https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/presenting_sourcejuicer_at_dresden_osdevcon Presenting SourceJuicer at Dresden OSDevcon bnitz 2009-10-25T15:39:11+00:00 2009-10-25T22:39:12+00:00 I'll be presenting OpenSolaris SourceJuicer at the OSDevcon conference in Dresden this Thursday, October 29th at 3:00p.m. I hope to see you there! https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/o_reilly_s_beautiful_testing O'Reilly's Beautiful Testing (Thanks Adam, Tim, Emily, Derek...) bnitz 2009-10-20T07:16:22+00:00 2009-10-20T14:16:22+00:00
Emily Chen and I coauthored a chapter in an O'Reilly book entitled "Beautiful Testing" which was edited by Adam Goucher and Tim Riley.

Successful software depends as much on scrupulous testing as it does on solid architecture or elegant code. Beautiful Testing offers 23 essays from 27 leading testers and developers that illustrate the qualities and techniques that make testing an art. Through personal anecdotes, you'll learn how each of these professionals developed ideas of beauty in testing a wide range of products -- valuable knowledge that you can apply to your own projects.

The electronic version is already available here: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596159825
 The bound version should be available in bookstores in the next few days. https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/fixing_a_pentax_ist_dl Fixing a Pentax \*iST DL DSLR bnitz 2009-08-17T16:42:44+00:00 2010-02-11T14:54:39+00:00
 Update: While in Beijing I had the camera professionally fixed twice by repairmen in the basement of Top City electronics. I learned that one additional screw was inside the battery compartment. And I learned that they used a bit of fine sandpaper held between tweezers to clean the contacts.

   In the wake of the cash for clunkers scam, the planned obsolescence of a few million televisions, and some misguided efforts to prevent electronic devices from being reused or recycled outside of the U.S., the obvious solution when my digital SLR began acting up should've been to pitch it and get another one. I'd already investigated and discovered that a newer model could be purchased for less than it would cost to send mine in for repair. But since I had nothing to lose, I decided to give it a try. I'm happy to report that this minor repair was a success! One less bit of e-waste.

 I intend to put more of this kind of content on opensourcemechanic.com so this blog can grow more focused on Sun/OpenSolaris specific issues.
 https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/ca_h_for_wintel_boxen CA$H for Wintel Clunkers and Common $ense bnitz 2009-08-06T07:12:45+00:00 2009-08-06T14:43:10+00:00

 According to a CNN money article on the Cash for Clunkers program:

The trade-in vehicle has to get a combined city and highway fuel economy rating of 18 miles per gallon or less.
The average fuel economy of new vehicles being purchased under Cash for Clunkers is 25.4 mpg
The average fuel economy increase from the old vehicle to the new is about 61%.
 For this 61% fuel economy improvement in a relative small percentage of the U.S. car fleet, $1 Billion has been spent and another $2 Billion may soon be wasted. There are a number of problems with this program.

U.S. fuel economy peaked in the late 1980s and vehicles exceeding 25 mpg have existed since AMC's 1959 Rambler, so only those who deliberatly chose the lowest mpg vehicles can avail of the program.
Those who chose economy cars and other respectably efficient vehicles (Civics, Festivas...) are punished to subsidize those who chose inefficient vehicles (Hummers, Vipers...), in effect it is a regressive tax!
The real mpg/person savings can be negative, for example when an 18mpg 8 passenger vehicle is replaced with a 25.4 mpg 4 passenger vehicle.
The program also ignores the fact that it takes energy to crush an old but serviceable car and replace it with a newly built car.

If the Cash For Clunkers program had instead been directed to encourage companies and individuals to junk their Wintel PCs and replace them with Sun Ray thin clients, there is a potential for a 97.5% decrease in energy consumption. So why isn't there a Cash for Clunkers program for desktop personal computers?
 https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/opensolaris_source_juicer_bof_at OpenSolaris Source Juicer BOF at OSCON 2009 bnitz 2009-07-22T10:19:01+00:00 2009-07-22T17:19:02+00:00
I'll be moderating a BOF at OSCON 2009 in San Jose on SourceJuicer discussing other cloud computing collaborative opensource development environments. For further information, see my post on the SourceJuicer blog.
 https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/so_long_analog_ntsc_t Goodbye to 68 years of NTSC compatibility bnitz 2009-06-12T05:57:05+00:00 2009-06-17T22:12:39+00:00
 This is a big day for technophiles as well as technologically nostalgic. An analog TV broadcast standard which has maintained compatibility for 68 years will end today. A B&W TV designed around the 1941 NTSC standard would have been able to display some broadcasts on channels 2-13 yesterday. A color TV designed around the 1953 standard would have displayed some broadcasts in color yesterday. For anyone who appreciates the engineering required to progress technology while maintaining backwards compatibility, the story of the NTSC compatible color standard is interesting.
...
 Some of the disadvantages are unknown, but here are a few problems I forsee:

Fewer people will have an acceptable picture. (while the coverage will allow some in suburbs to receive a better picture, rural viewers who had an acceptable analog picture might not receive anything at all.)
Portable ATSC TVs will be more expensive and will consume batteries faster.
Since battery powered ATSC digital TVs haven't been perfected, they won't work well in weather or other emergencies. This is important because weather radar and other emergency maps provide information specific to a viewer's locale, this is very difficult if not impossible to provide via NOAA or commercial radio. Internet/cell phone services are often the first to go in an emergency and so they cannot be relied upon either.
Given the amount of time there was to plan this transition, it was poorly managed.
The billions of dollars and years of engineering that went into a slightly higher resolution TV standard could've been been put to a better use. Discounting the money spent by consumers on HDTVs, this project has cost taxpayers approximately $5 Billion. While the recent bailouts make $5 Billion sound like pocket change, this is actually 1/4th the cost of the entire Apollo moon lander program, which was completed in less time!
Many devices will go into landfills before the end of their serviceable life. (e.g. almost all battery powered TVs such as the Casio in this photo are impractical to use with any of the Federally subsidized converter boxes.)
Newscasters must shave and apply makeup more often.
ATSC is heavily encumbered with expensive patents and royalties which, all else being equal, would nearly double the cost of the pocket Casio TV in the above photo. This also means that it may be impossible to create an opensource television or other free (as in freedom) ATSC compatible device (e.g. PVR.)

 This is a big day for technophiles as well as technologically nostalgic. An analog TV broadcast standard which has maintained compatibility for 68 years will end today. A B&W TV designed around the 1941 NTSC standard would have been able to display some broadcasts on channels 2-13 yesterday. A color TV designed around the 1953 standard would have displayed some broadcasts in color yesterday. For anyone who appreciates the engineering required to progress technology while maintaining backwards compatibility, the story of the NTSC compatible color standard is interesting. I'm surprised that modern technology and ingenuity couldn't have kept ATSC (DTV) compatible with NTSC for another decade. This would have been more than long enough for internet video to make DTV obsolete. But despite the 'generous' (taxpayer funded) converter box subsidy, planned obsolescence and DRM trumps consumer convenience and compatibility.

As the earliest color TV standard, NTSC was getting a bit long in the tooth. It earned a reputation for failing to be as good as the newer PAL or SECAM standards. It was said that NTSC stood for "Never The Same Color" or "Never Twice Same Color". It's unlikely that accurate color's reliance on phase stability over a scan line would have made it possible to do this PAL trick of  restoring a color video from a B&W film of a TV screen.

As with any technological change, there are advantages and unexpected disadvantages. ATSC's advantages are obvious:

Higher resolution, more stable, accurate color.
It frees bandwidth for other services.
Resolution is high enough to be used as a computer text display.
More people will receive a perfect picture.
 Some of the disadvantages are unknown, but here are a few problems I forsee:

Fewer people will have an acceptable picture. (while the coverage will allow some in suburbs to receive a better picture, rural viewers who had an acceptable analog picture might not receive anything at all.)
Portable ATSC TVs will be more expensive and will consume batteries faster.
Since battery powered ATSC digital TVs haven't been perfected, they won't work well in weather or other emergencies. This is important because weather radar and other emergency maps provide information specific to a viewer's locale, this is very difficult if not impossible to provide via NOAA or commercial radio. Internet/cell phone services are often the first to go in an emergency and so they cannot be relied upon either.
Given the amount of time there was to plan this transition, it was poorly managed.
The billions of dollars and years of engineering that went into a slightly higher resolution TV standard could've been been put to a better use. Discounting the money spent by consumers on HDTVs, this project has cost taxpayers approximately $5 Billion. While the recent bailouts make $5 Billion sound like pocket change, this is actually 1/4th the cost of the entire Apollo moon lander program, which was completed in less time!
Many devices will go into landfills before the end of their serviceable life. (e.g. almost all battery powered TVs such as the Casio in this photo are impractical to use with any of the Federally subsidized converter boxes.)
Newscasters must shave and apply makeup more often.
ATSC is heavily encumbered with expensive patents and royalties which, all else being equal, would nearly double the cost of the pocket Casio TV in the above photo. This also means that it may be impossible to create an opensource television or other free (as in freedom) ATSC compatible device (e.g. PVR.)

The photo above is of a portable NTSC TV receiving a PAL signal. The black-level is wrong, as are the horizontal and vertical sync intervals. There is no color and the sound modulation and frequency spacing are wrong. The fact that it works at all demonstrates just how robust analog technology is. If E.T. were looking for a an easily decipherable video signal from the U.S., she should focus on TV signals from 1941-2009. So long analog NTSC, it has been fun.
 https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/django_framework_a_good_balance Django framework, a good balance of convenience and dicipline bnitz 2009-05-03T06:44:25+00:00 2009-05-03T13:46:43+00:00
 Some of the strongest criticisms of Django come from users of PHP or other frameworks which allow you to do almost anything in the templates. This can encourage developers to put business logic into the presentation layer which eventually results in an unmaintainable mess. It's the web2.0 equivalent of a GOTO statement.

 But on several occasions while working on SourceJuicer it really would've been handy to be able to store or increment variables or directly access a slightly complicated query in the template. For example, I was attempting to pass a list indexed by an existing column (JobID) into a template when I noticed that there was no way to convert the JobID string to a numeric within the template. Then Luis reminded me that if it seems like you're trying to do too much in the template, you're probably trying to do too much in the template. So I went back to the model and saw that I could add the 'slightly complicated' query to an access method in my model. Django does allow you to access methods from the template but it doesn't allow you to pass parameters to these methods. This seems a reasonable balance between strictness and ease of use. It simplified the code while maintaining good separation between business logic and presentation.
 https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/solaris_job_trends_are_up Solaris job trends are up, and other observations about IT's future bnitz 2009-04-26T15:44:25+00:00 2009-04-26T23:17:09+00:00
 A middle school telementor student is interested in pursuing a career in computer science. Her teacher asked the class to clip local job openings in their career choice. Since this isn't a terribly prosperous part of the U.S. midwest, I was surprised to hear that there are a number job opening. But the student learned that inexperienced but highly educated candidates were being brushed aside in favor of those with years of experience. How can I encourage a bright middle school student who intends to pursue an IT career, without being dishonest? I could mention the dearth of IT jobs in the midwest at the beginning of my career and the subsequent boom. I hope career counselors no longer channel students away from their talents towards the "hot job du Jour." My 101 computer science class began with a standing room only crowd, but by the end of the semester it had thinned considerably. Our teacher prided himself on his dropout rate!

 I do see enormous untapped potential in IT. For example:

We've only hit the tip of the iceberg in the application of data mining to epidemiology, economics and security.
Much of the clutter of photos, DVDs, CDs and videotapes will disappear as soon as we can organize this data while keeping the MPAA and RIAA happy.
Governments, law, education and medical professions seem slow to adopt information technology. Prescriptions rely on handwritten records, Governments and legal professionals treat FAX (a technology which dates to the mid 1800s) is treated as a secure document transmission medium, while 128bit public key encrypted and signed email isn't!
Windows PCs still seem a painful hack. Having watched Microsoft Windows languish nearly a decade behind some alternative OSs (Solaris, AmigaDOS, OpenVMS, OS2, NeXT, BeOS), I have to wonder where we would be if antitrust laws had been enforced before it was too late for these companies? We wouldn't go wrong to redesign PCs from scratch.
IT has tremendous applications in transportation and traffic management. Why doesn't my car know what speed I should drive to catch all of the lights green? Why did it take the FAA billions of dollars and more than a decade to replace a dieing air traffic control system?
Take advantage of Internet ubiquity. Why are people building datacenters in places with expensive real estate and expensive non-renewable energy sources when Iceland and other places have abundant renewable energy and relatively cheap real estate?
Sun Ray has been around almost a decade now yet telecommuting is rare even for those in the IT industry.

These are just a few ideas off the top of my head, but imagine my surprise when, to illustrate data mining, I found indeed.com's jobsite trawler which showed that jobs in Solaris are on the increase.

 solaris, aix, hp-ux, windows vista Job Trends	 solaris jobs - aix jobs - hp-ux jobs - windows vista jobs

 How could this be in this banjaxed economy when even Microsoft's Vista seems to have flatlined? Imagine what might happen when we hit the inevitable turn around. Few were prepared for this economic slump even though signs of it have been lurking in the shadows and blogosphere for years. Even fewer will be prepared for the coming boom in technology and eco-efficiency. I wouldn't be at all surprised if by the time this bright student graduates, recruiters will have to work very hard to get her on their team. The same goes for all of the extremely talented ex-Sun employees who've recently entered the job market. There is a very bright future ahead if we can get past these potholes!
 https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/happy_earth_day Happy Earth Day! bnitz 2009-04-21T17:42:42+00:00 2009-04-22T09:24:07+00:00

 We just returned from 9 days in Spain. We traveled from Madrid to southern Andalusia without noticing coal power plants, white skies or other environmental ugliness you'd see in many other parts of the world. We did see lots of wind turbines including one huge wind turbine blade on a semi-truck ready to be installed somewhere.

 We saw these windmills towering over the plains of La Mancha 500 years after Cervantes described these or similar 'giants' in Don Quixote:

 We saw many solar farms. It was really obvious that Spain is a leader in alternative energy technology. Spain already produces more than 16 Gigawatts of wind power and about 1/3rd of its electricity comes from renewable energy sources.

 We stayed at cortijoloslobos, a horse farm in a beautiful unspoiled part of Andalusia. The white roof, thick walls and other design features help keep the place cool in the summer. The owners took it upon themselves to care for and try to find homes for animals left homeless during this recession.

We saw Olive groves and other farms, well suited to the dry Mediterranean climate.   We drove a Citroen diesel minivan which sipped little more than 1 tank of fuel in the several hundred mile journey from Madrid to Andalucia and back. Why don't Ford and G.M. release their small diesel engine powered cars in the U.S.? We saw more of the moorish architecture with deep set (often star shaped) ceiling windows. When my wife saw these in Istanbul, she noticed that they were very similar to the Solatube we had installed in our Wisconsin kitchen in the late 1990s, allowing in light without heat.
 Stars I hadn't seen since my childhood in the southwestern U.S. desert suddenly reappeared in the dark Andalusian night, reminding me that they've always been there just above the smog, clouds and light pollution. Happy earth day! Yes, it is possible to enjoy the best of this earth and still leave something for the grandchildren. https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/sourcejuicer_is_here SourceJuicer 1.0 is released! bnitz 2009-03-24T05:54:43+00:00 2009-03-24T21:09:10+00:00

 The SourceJuicer team has announced that SourceJuicer 1.0 is now available!. SourceJuicer is a web service which facilitates the building and review of OpenSolaris packages. Its goal is to pave the path between building an OpenSolaris package, (which may only work on your laptop) and publishing high quality packages into the OpenSolaris /contrib repository. Here are some of my favorite features:

Sourcejuicer provides a community package review system.
It preinstalls Laca's Common Build Environment (CBE) and developer libraries in a build zone so you don't have to track down all of the build tools and dependencies required for common FOSS projects.
SourceJuicer examples and automatic validation walk me through the required fields in a spec file.
Once a package passes validation criteria and builds, it appears in sourcejuicer's internal /pending package repository and can be immediately installed on a clean QA machine for testing:
  pfexec pkg set-authority -O http://jucr.opensolaris.org/pending jucr-pending pfexec pkg refresh pfexec pkg install {foo}

If the package is clean and passes community review, it can be promoted to the /contrib repository.

 This has been quite an interesting project and I've really enjoyed working with this team on this technology. Because I was focused on authentication, authorization and the (not yet released) bug management components, I didn't get to use the full system until very recently and I found that it really did remove some barriers to building and testing the 'dillo' browser and Alvaro's 'cherokee' web server.

 We're looking forward to hearing feedback as more OpenSolaris contributors make use of SourceJuicer. You can find out more about the progress of sourcejuicer at The SourceJuicer Blog
 https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/numptyphysics_on_opensolaris NumptyPhysics on Opensolaris! bnitz 2009-03-18T15:43:29+00:00 2009-03-18T22:43:29+00:00
  NumptyPhysics is a fun opensource "Physics puzzle" game which uses the same Box2d physics engine as the award winning CrayonPhysics. As soon as I saw it, I really wanted to port it to OpenSolaris. One of my first computer programs (for the Commodore 64) simulated gravitational attraction between sprites and allowed the user to send sprites into orbit around each other. Cumulative floating point errors in my old BASIC program eventually caused orbiting objects to careen off the screen. My Solaris port of Numptyphysics still needs work and cleanup, buy it's a step in the right direction. Right now top priority is getting SourceJuicer out the door so there is a more efficient path between NumptyPhysics runs from my build environment on my laptop to, NumptyPhysics is available as a stable package for the OpenSolaris community.
 https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/coming_soon_sourcejuicer_build_opensolaris Coming soon, SourceJuicer. 'cloud based' OpenSolaris package development bnitz 2009-03-17T05:54:21+00:00 2009-03-18T09:54:46+00:00
 In recent weeks I've been busy working on the bug management, user authorization and authentication components of the SourceJuicer project. SourceJuicer is a Django based web service which will allow developers to build OpenSolaris packages in a standard build environment and put them on a clearly paved path to review and publication in the OpenSolaris contrib repository.

 Christian has a more detailed explanation on the SourceJuicer Blog. The technology behind it is really interesting, it makes good use of ZFS as well as Solaris Containers (a.k.a. zones.) Watch the SourceJuicer blog for more detail as the project unfolds.
 https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/happy_saint_patrick_s_day Happy Saint Patrick's Day! bnitz 2009-03-16T14:44:59+00:00 2009-03-16T21:45:01+00:00
 We had a bad experience with a pickpocket during a Dublin St. Patrick's festival a few years ago. So in recent years we've decided to celebrate in some of the villages of county Meath. Dublin events can be O.K. for families but the parade isn't terribly impressive for anyone less than 12 feet tall, unless you bring a ladder taller than everyone else's. For anyone with young children I highly recommend smaller parades in places such as Skerries, Trim, Baltimore Md. and Denver (free beer and gloriously warm weather during the one St. Pat's day I was in Denver!)
 https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/is_the_recession_accelerating_opensolaris Is the recession accelerating OpenSolaris adoption? bnitz 2009-03-16T08:50:20+00:00 2009-03-16T23:34:20+00:00
 This Slashdot article points to an IT Manager survey indicating that Linux adoption is growing during these difficult economic times. It does make sense that companies and governments which normally spent freely on proprietary software might begin to consider unorthodox, but much more cost effective alternatives now. What does this mean for other opensource operating systems such as OpenSolaris? I think the Google trends graph says it better than I could. Anyone looking for the root cause of this economic mess only needn't bother about property bubbles, dodgy investment shenanigans or massive increases in debt. Just look at the trend line of the third parameter in this Google graph ;-)

P.S.: I compared 'opensolaris' with 'economic downturn' instead of 'recession' because the magnitude of recession searches is so much larger that it pushes opensolaris towards the bottom of this graph. A similar scale issue makes it difficult to see that opensolaris seems to be gaining market share against Windows, Solaris, Linux and some of the most popular proprietary Linux distributions.

Google trends is an amazing tool, but it can't answer all psychohistory questions. Trends for some topics such as 'great depression' and 'great gatsby' are common topics in standardized U.S. school curriculum and therefore searches for these closely follow the school calendar. You'd think with so many students learning about Gatsby's 1920s hedonism and its unravelling during the 'Great Depression', it should be impossible to repeat this history. https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/hacking_21st_century_technology_with Hacking 21st century technology with greatest generation craftsmanship bnitz 2009-02-10T16:36:23+00:00 2009-02-11T00:36:23+00:00
 The times I spend diagnosing, testing, analyzing and documenting system problems are interesting from a scientific discovery/mystery viewpoint, but there is something especially enjoyable about creating new code (of course without any mysteries or bugs for someone else to analyze ;-) During these long winter nights, my wife knits or sews childrens things and patchwork quilts while I take apart a broken toy or patch together some gizmo which could easily replaced for a pittance. Not long ago, my wife bought a toy telescope for 1 euro at a car boot sale. Some toy telescopes have surprisingly good optics in the objective (front) lens and terribly bad eyepieces designed as marketing gimmicks to pretend that they can pull 625 power out of a 60mm objective (defying the laws of physics in this universe) This along with the flimsy mounts on toy telescopes makes them all but useless for learning to appreciate astronomy. I was about 12 when my parents gave me a Skillcraft 2" Newtonian telescope. 2" reflectors with 1" secondary mirrors are diffraction limited even if you use a shaving mirror for the primary! But shortly after Christmas 1976, the mount broke and I had a useless tube. My grandpa was a carpenter, toolmaker and metal worker so he fixed it and with rivets and brass he made the mount look like new. (as though repaired by the robots in Metropolis.) The optics of that telescope weren't great but I did manage to see the rings of saturn by using a paper Dixie[tm] cup as an adapter between this scope's eyepiece and one of my dad's good camera lenses. Because memory of a great depression lasted several generations, my grandpa spent time fixing this $20 toy and my parents hung onto that toy until 2008. I told them that the optics were never good and 20 years of corrosion of the tiny aluminized mirror wouldn't have improved anything so I recommended that they throw out the scope. But I asked if they could send me grandpa's mount. So 9 years after he died, grandpa gave his great grandkids a Christmas gift. I attached grandpa's sturdy mount to the telescope from the car boot sale. Added a 0.965 to T-Ring and T-Ring to Pentax K adapter to my Pentax \*ist DL Digital SLR and, it's almost a respectable 700mm lens:

 Now I only need to wait a couple of years for Saturn to tilt at a nicer angle and my kids will have no problem seeing Saturn through this telescope.
 https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/how_to_find_the_parent How to find the parent global zone bnitz 2009-02-04T03:45:50+00:00 2009-02-04T11:45:50+00:00
 A few nights ago I encountered a problem which required me to find the host name of my parent zone. Solaris Zones (a.k.a. Solaris Containers) intentionally isolate zones from each other and from the root hardware which hosts the zone. But if the zones and the host are on the same network, there is a way. All zones which are hosted by a particular global zone will typically share the physical hardware address as the global zone. So:

 ping the broadcast address of your local network.
arp -a | grep {the hostname of your zone} Now arp -a | grep {the physical address you found}
 This gives the list of the global zone and all of the hosted zones with the same physical network address.
 https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/obama_smartgrid_and_a_smart Obama smartgrid and a smart new economy bnitz 2009-01-20T15:53:42+00:00 2009-01-21T00:01:26+00:00

"This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels."
--Lyndon B. Johnson 1965

  "A new smart grid ... will save us money, protect our power sources from blackout or attack, and deliver clean, alternative forms of energy to every corner of our nation."
--Barack Obama, January 2009

 "The most widely beneficial stimulus investment, however, could be for the government to subsidize the improvement of the electrical infrastructure of the U.S. The grassroots adoption of solar, wind, geothermal and other clean power is stifled by the grid's inefficiency at handling highly variable inputs and transmitting power over long distances. An investment in a 21st-century grid would encourage energy reform without particularly favoring any specific production technology."
--Scientific American How Obama can boost the economy by investing in science.

"Over medium to long distances, IT demand load migration is far more efficient than electrical supply migration. This becomes significant when some locales can produce energy at a lower carbon or monetary cost. The global sale of computational resources is more feasible than the global sale of electric generation. Demand-centric computational resource trading can replace or complement carbon trading and contribute to a more effiient use of both IT and electrical grid resources."
--Me July 2008

 Good luck Mr. President there are plenty of unexplored possibilities for making a more efficient, honest, balanced and free global economy.
 https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/anti_destruction_destructive_dtrace_script Anti-destruction destructive dtrace script and y2k9 bnitz 2009-01-08T06:30:00+00:00 2009-01-08T16:44:37+00:00
A while ago I kludged up this ugly, ugly hack which demonstrates a destructive dtrace script which snapshots the filesystem whenever a destructive command is run (e.g. /usr/bin/rm). It isn't useful except maybe for demos, but the idea could be used for something else. For example, you could snapshot every keystroke on Monday mornings or after a particularly happy New Years Eve especially when transitioning to or from years containing a leap day or leap second...1

 #!/usr/sbin/dtrace -s #pragma D option quiet #pragma D option destructive BEGIN { self->interested =0; } proc:::exec-success /(execname =="rm") && (self->interested == 0) && (dirname(curpsinfo->pr_psargs) != ".")/ { self->interested = 1 ; printf("Someone is trying to delete %s\\n",dirname(curpsinfo->pr_psargs +3)); printf("%s %d",dirname(curpsinfo->pr_psargs+3),timestamp); printf("Snapshotting %s %d",dirname(curpsinfo->pr_psargs+3),timestamp); system("/usr/sbin/zfs snapshot rpool%s@%d",dirname(curpsinfo->pr_psargs+3),timestamp); stop(); system("prun %d", pid); }

 1Sun's JDS 2 Linux distribution was based on a Linux 2.4 kernel and the following version (JDS3 beta) was to be based on a 2.6.19 kernel before Sun decided to drop the Linux kernel and focus on products based around the Solaris kernel. AFAIK the leap second bug appeared in the 2.6.22 Linux kernel. The 5000 year old time keeper at Newgrange also failed to work properly because of a bug caused by the presence of clouds between itself and the sun.

 P.S. Don't ask me why we seem to get reoccurring bugs every decade, millennium, leap year and leap-second in what should have been a few score lines of date related code some of which could have been implemented a couple of thousand years ago Maybe Ptolomy's code was refined over a few hundred years without fear of patent reprisals or maybe he just spent more money on development and QA.
 https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/asc_and_sprintf_s_null asc("") and printf("%s",NULL) bnitz 2008-12-05T14:45:22+00:00 2008-12-08T09:57:58+00:00
 A few days ago I was reminded of one of the differences between Solaris and GNU/Linux which caused a few headaches for Sun's desktop team back in the days of GNOME 1.2. The problem is that while you can printf("%s",NULL); in most Linux distributions, doing the same in Solaris caused the executable to exit and generate a core. There were some debates about the correctness of each approach. Should the program crash to tell the developer that he shouldn't be trying to print a NULL string (the Solaris behavior) or should the program continue happily along printing a NULL pointer? I can see some advantages in both approaches I suspect this and other "Linuxisms" will end up in OpenSolaris simply because they make it more convenient for average coders to throw together a quick and dirty program or for someone to compile and run the thousands of source packages out there which (perhaps unknowingly) take advantage of this Linuxism.

 But thinking about this reminded me of a similar "bug/feature" in my very first computer, the Commodore 64 back in 1982 when 64K seemed an unbelievably excessive amount of memory for a computer which cost only $595. The built in blitter and 4 channel 16 bit synthesizer made it a really fun computer for me to write simulations and sound generator programs for my father's physical science class. If you look closely at many of the programs which were published for Compute! and other magazines of the time, you might notice something strange. When a character was read from the user (e.g. via get (a$) ), the asc(a$) function would convert the character to its numeric ASCII value. But in the code you would usually see something like this:

 n = asc(a$+chr$(0))

What is going on here? There was a bug/feature in Commodore 64 BASIC V2 which raised an "Illegal quantity error." whenever a null string was passed to the asc() function. The Commodore 64's 6510 processor had the unusual ability of being able to peek the ROM and write to shadow RAM which shared the same address space and then disable ROM so that BASIC was running from RAM. This allowed modifications to the BASIC interpreter. Jim Butterfield, a Commodore expert and author once demonstrated a one byte poke which fixed this asc("") bug. Ever since I learned of this simple fix, I wondered why so many BASIC's had this same one byte bug. The Commodore 64, Vic-20, Atari, Amiga, and at least some versions of the Apple and IBM PC Basic's shared this same bug! What was going on? Well, as it happens, a little company known as Microsoft wrote versions of BASIC for nearly all 8 bit computers of the 1980s and 1990s. Was this one byte bug overlooked by Microsoft and propagated to all Microsoft inspired codebases or were Microsoft's developers following the same purist philosophy as Solaris developers who assert that "good coders shouldn't pass NULL into string functions?" Either way, when such a company grows to what it has now become, it can decide that this one byte bug is actually a feature.
 https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/good_news_about_a_bank Good news about a bank bnitz 2008-11-24T05:36:56+00:00 2009-03-18T09:54:10+00:00
 We often teased the shyest member of my family by reminding her of the bad joke about the kid who didn't speak a word until he was eating breakfast on his 7th birthday when he said, "My porridge is cold!" When asked why he never spoke before, he said, "Up until now everything has been alright." This is how I felt about the silence which followed my work on a project which installed and provided support for over 7000 opensource JDS desktops at a bank.1 We called the customer occasionally to see if everything was O.K. We helped them through one upgrade which was necessary because the Linux kernel needed to be upgraded to support modern hardware but didn't have a stable ABI so the entire application stack also had to be upgraded. After the upgrade, one of our customers gave us some upgrades/minute statistics that were well beyond what is possible given network bandwidth limitations so I'll just say that the upgrade went well.

Shortly after the upgrade, we helped solve a peculiar focus bug whose root causes were spread across gtk, Java, Firefox and Star/OpenOffice. But overall things were very quiet. Sun was also quiet about this deployment, first of all because we hadn't yet finalized the disclosure agreement and later because Sun decided to drop our Linux-based desktop product and focus on OpenSolaris. So between our "are you still there?" pings to the customer's 2 person technical support staff, I was left wondering if no news is good news?

Then when I gave my presentation at the Irish Opensource Technology Conference, I noticed that two knowledgeable IT managers from this bank were giving presentations on their opensource desktop (a.k.a. JDS) roll out. I finally had the opportunity to be the "fly on the wall" and hear how things really went. I don't have links to their presentations, but these gentlemen said that the project was a success, that the deployment saved money and IT support costs compared to traditional Microsoft Windows based desktop solutions. They said the project completed ahead of schedule and under budget and that they were telling other banks the secrets of their success. I don't know if the other banks were paying attention to the potential savings in deploying opensource alternatives back when easy money was still flowing, but I would think they should take a hard look at such cost-effective alternatives now. In any case, it seems likely that the number of successful cost-saving "invisible" opensource deployments is understated.
 "The art and science of interface design depends largely on making the transaction with the computer as transparent as possible in order to minimize the burden on the user" -- S. Joy Mountford

 "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic!"
 -- Arthur C. Clarke.

 1 The deployment was of Sun's linux based "Java Desktop System." If we were to do it now, the obvious choices in Sun's product portfolio would be Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris. Since the customer's network is now fast enough to support Sun Ray over WAN, we could potentially save them another $500,000 in annual electricity costs by deploying their desktop via Sun Ray clients instead of X86 PCs. https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/django_newbie_gotchas Django newbie gotchas bnitz 2008-11-13T04:01:59+00:00 2008-12-06T13:07:33+00:00
 I'm working on a project which makes use of the Django framework. Django is a web framework which abstracts the back-end database away from the python object and view models which use that database. Since (aside for a small netbean project) I've stayed away from web development for several years, I seem to have missed a lot of noise around ASP, Perl and PHP web development. I hope I haven't missed much. From the looks of the internet, It wouldn't surprise me if only half the web-developers out there only understand half of what they know about web development. There is more than a grain of truth in the saying "If cities were built like web sites, the first woodpecker would destroy civilization".

 I'm finding Django 1.0 somewhat challenging, but I'm also finding that I can pull off usable web pages and forms without too much trouble. The django documentation is well above average (especially djangobook.com), and the IRC and mailing list communities are active and helpful. I did run into a few gotchas. Here are some of them:

 I'm working on a project which makes use of the Django framework. Django is a web framework which abstracts the back-end database away from the python object and view models which use that database. Since (aside for a small netbean project) I've stayed away from web development for several years, I seem to have missed a lot of noise around ASP, Perl and PHP web development. I hope I haven't missed much. From the looks of the internet, It wouldn't surprise me if only half the web-developers out there only understand half of what they know about web development. There is more than a grain of truth in the saying "If cities were built like web sites, the first woodpecker would destroy civilization".

 I'm finding Django 1.0 somewhat challenging, but I'm also finding that I can pull off usable web pages and forms without too much trouble. The django documentation is well above average (especially djangobook.com), and the IRC and mailing list communities are active and helpful. I did run into a few gotchas. Here are some of them:

Confusing oldforms, newforms and forms. Djangobook Chapter 7 explains this. If you google information on google forms, you might find 'forms' describing complicated pre-0.96 form API. You might find 'newforms' describing the post 0.96 API or you might find 'forms' describing the post Django 1.0 form API (which is almost exactly the same as 0.96 newforms.)
Model form weirdness. I got some unexpected results using model forms which I can't explain in detail here. So I decided to code my own forms and do my own mapping between form views and model.
settings.py path issues. Django was installed for me on a zone on one of our OpenSolaris servers. I decided to also install django on my opensolaris laptop so I could work with it while I'm offline. It seemed that when my browser was accessing django remotely (served by apache2.2 on the server's zone), I could break things by changing my local settings.py file or other local django python files! It is possible I had one of the settings.py files pointing to the wrong DATABASE_HOST or wrong MEDIA_URL so be careful!
Apache/Firefox cache issues: O.K. This one is easy for anyone who has done web development, but I hadn't since the days of netscape and IE in the mid 1990s so I had to remind myself to svcadm restart apache22 and clear the browser cache after every change.
Permission issues: This kind of problem should be obvious to old time web jockeys, but what caught me was this. If you're running django, then make a change to settings.py, urls.py or one of your view.py files and that change causes that file to become unreadable, django continues running with the previously loaded version.
Debugging:I haven't yet found out how to access stderr and stdout from the python views or attach pdb in such a way that I can access a console and step through the views or models as they are running.
Subclassing: I tried to subclass something in my models.py like this:

 myclass is defined in models.py Elsewhere I try this: class mymetaclass(myclass): {additional methods}
 This didn't work.

 After a bit of frustration getting over the things I didn't know about web development and sql, I'm finding django to be fun to work with, and it's only at version 1.0!
 https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/ideas_for_a_sustainable_technocracy Visions of a sustainable technocracy bnitz 2008-11-07T16:02:43+00:00 2008-12-06T00:24:12+00:00

Barack Obama's team seems more technologically savvy than his predecessor. In the mid 1990s when George W. Bush was governor of Texas, I was surprised to learn that he didn't have a public email address. At the same time, George W. Bush's democratic Lieutenant Governor Bob Bollock did have a public email address. Obama's recently launched change.gov website provides a more scalable framework for public input than any past president has ever deployed. I hope he and his staff are able to manage it well. I submitted some of these suggestions to change.gov:

Restore the technical advisory counsels that Reagan sacked in favor of lobbyists. Consider appointing optimistic, far-thinking visionaries such as William McDonough and Bill Joy.
Rebalance the fiscal value of education and research with the societal value, so basic research on energy, health, economics... and other areas of science which are unlikely to boost an individual stock price in the next 91 days, won't forever sit on the back burner while Europe, India, China and Japan leave us in the technological dark ages.

Barack Obama's team seems more technologically savvy than his predecessor. In the mid 1990s when George W. Bush was governor of Texas, I was surprised to learn that he didn't have a public email address. At the same time, George W. Bush's democratic Lieutenant Governor Bob Bollock did have a public email address. Obama's recently launched change.gov website provides a more scalable framework for public input than any past president has ever deployed. I hope he and his staff are able to manage it well. I submitted some of these suggestions to change.gov:

Restore the technical advisory counsels that Reagan sacked in favor of lobbyists. Consider appointing optimistic, far-thinking visionaries such as William McDonough and Bill Joy.
Rebalance the fiscal value of education and research with the societal value, so basic research on energy, health, economics... and other areas of science which are unlikely to boost an individual stock price in the next 91 days, won't forever sit on the back burner while Europe, India, China and Japan leave us in the technological dark ages.
Treat universities as long term societal investments, not short term fiscal investments. Our great universities are decaying into trade-schools and country clubs because of thier focus on short term money. U.S. university cost has risen at three times the rate of inflation over the past two decades. This forces bright students to abandon "slow payback" fields such as basic science, medicine and instead choose degrees such as MBA, Law and Computer science which provide quick payback but tend to be valued only during short periods of peak demand immediately after graduation. It also leaves behind many intelligent but poor students who could better themselves and society if they were able to afford more high level education.
Fix the SEC rules so they don't punish companies which invest money in research where the payoff is more than 91 days in the future.
Use a six-sigma approach to all aspects of government (including voting). If the quality level of our hospitals was as low as what we accept in vote counting, at least 500 babies would go home to the wrong parents every day.
Tag all funded research with the funding organization so we know how many grains of salt we should take before we believe studies telling us that toxic waste is good for us.
Focus government funding on areas of science with a longer term societal and fiscal payoff. We shouldn't be spending $1 of our tax money funding R&D which only helps the stockholders of one company for one business quarter.
Any intellectual property resulting from projects partially funded by government should belong to all of us. This means patents, scientific research and software.
Set some "before this decade is out" goals. We have several equivalents to sputnik right now, global climate change, energy, education, healthcare. These are areas where we are falling behind our potential. We have targets, we only need leadership... and in some cases we only need the government to step out of the way.
The 800 billion going to failed investment banks would be much better spent rebuilding our infrastructure. Create a technological WPA/CCC to rebuild our infrastructures in a green, sustainable, efficient and cost effective way. Anyone can sail when there is wind, but our economy is stuck in the economic doldrums until we become smarter and more efficient.
Restore normal relations with the citizens of Cuba and end the embargo. This anachronistic policy dates almost back to the McCarthy era and is a terrible failure compared to our policy of engagement, diplomacy and trade with China. Arrange for a doctor/medical technology exchange program so our sagging healthcare system can benefit from Cuba's supply of well educated doctors. The Castro brothers will be gone soon and an exchange that is good for the people of Cuba will also help U.S. baby boomers find affordable health care in their retirement years.
Create a multipartison office of public science which explains scientific research and decisions to the public so we can all make more informed decisions about science.
Create a program which rewards companies for investment in efficiency technology. For example, why does a company get a per mile tax break for employees who drive but not for those who telecommute the same distance?
Revamp the Bush/Bernanke/Paulson fiscal bailout plan which at best can only reanimate a handful of Wall Street firms. See this for alternative ways of blowing $800 billion.
Don't try to reinflate the property bubble. It had the following negative impacts:

It led to sprawl from cities to suburbs to exurbs and enormously increased our dependence on oil.
It rewarded highly leveraged debt and unsustainable speculation while punishing non-REIT businesses, anyone who saved money, anyone who can't yet afford a home, and future generations.
It increased our average personal debt load to the highest level since the Great Depression.
It allowed state governments to become drunk and bloated on the excessive property tax revenue which was based on imaginary valuations.
It left millions at risk of foreclosure or in negative equity which will prevent labor from moving to where the jobs are.
It harmed U.S. competitiveness. An office worker in CA where typical house prices exceed $300,000 can't possibly compete with a worker in China, India or Mexico. The Internet allows information technology and office work to flow to wherever the cost of labor is lowest and it is impossible to sustain a low cost of labor with a high cost of living.

 These are just a few ideas off the top of my head. I'm sure some of these ideas are controversial and all need polishing. But some of these are certainly more feasible than some of the half-baked schemes that have been pushed through congress in recent months.
 https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/800_burning_a_hole_in $800 Billion burning a hole in your pocket? Spending ideas bnitz 2008-10-30T17:44:51+00:00 2009-09-10T15:34:54+00:00

 Against the better judgment of hundreds of economists as well as the vast majority of the voting public (those annoying constituents), Congress approved Henry Paulson's bailout plan. Now Paulson's appointed "bailout czar", Neel Kashkari has $800 billion tax dollars burning a hole in his pocket and he is trying to figure out how to spend it. My wife was a loan officer and defacto credit counselor way back in the late 1900s when most banks and credit unions still carefully considered credit ratings, debt/income and debt/asset ratios. She often helped people understand how to prioritize their spending. Sometimes little changes such as forgoing the daily cappuccino were enough to lift people out of debt and improve their credit rating. Our bailout czar's job is slightly different. In order to efficiently bail out failing financial institutions, he must invest taxpayer's money on assets that no one in their right mind would buy with their own hard-earned money. I personally don't think this is a good plan. At best it is a temporary patch to a deflating asset bubble. If the bailout czar really wishes to use tax money to improve long term American economic growth and competitiveness, he should consider the following options for spending 800 billion dollars:

Bailout Chrysler 800 times (in 1979 dollars). This cash flow diagram indicates that, not so long ago, Detroit fueled a huge portion of the U.S. economy.
Repeat the Apollo moon lander program (including R&D from 1961-1969) 32 times (8 times in 2008 dollars).
Install photovoltaic solar roofs on 32 million homes (1/5th of all homes in the U.S.)
Pay full (unadjusted) tuition for their first year of Yale for 70% of 18-25 year old Americans. (Quoted tuition is for Yale medical school, but Yale has other specialties which could prepare students to become business leaders, presidents, senators, economists...)
Fund the National Cancer Institute for 165 years.
Provide microcredit loans for the world's $1 billion working poor.
Fund UNICEF for 266 years.
Buy every possible ticket combination in the Florida Lotto for 57142 weeks, which means Paulson could hold a winning Florida lottery ticket every week for 1098 years.
SETI. Wisconsin's former Senator and spendthrift William Proxmire once awarded his famous "Golden Fleece Award" to project SETI. Paulson's bailout money could fund project SETI for 160,000 years.

 I'm confident that any of the items on my shopping list would give U.S. taxpayers more bang for their buck than the current plan to reinflate the property bubble, an asset bubble which caused a massive misallocation of financial and intellectual resources and actually works against U.S. global competitiveness.

Incidentally, $800 billion is a lot of money, but it isn't an infinite amount. Unfortunately it isn't enough for the following:

$800 billion won't buy enough Starbucks cappuccino to fill Lake Erie, the smallest great lake. However, if you combine all of the recent Fed and treasury bailouts, you could buy enough instant coffee to flavor the Great Salt Lake. You could also buy enough cheap off-brand root beer or Kool-Aid to fill Lake Okeechobee. Wouldn't this be a nice modern variation on the Boston tea party?
$800 billion could easily fulfill Herbert Hoover's promise of "a chicken in every pot" (in fact everyone's pot could contain 666 $4 chickens), but to put "a car in every garage" as he also promised, you'd want slightly more money unless we're willing to settle for a used or economy car in every garage.
$800 billion would fill a bag with about 80 billion decent ACE hardware hammers but apparently only 1.3 Billion military grade hammers.
If you sent $800 billion to the International Star Registry, they would only name 22 Billion stars after a loved one in their "official" book. But the Milky Way galaxy contains at least 200 billion stars and there are billions of other galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of nameless stars. So at best, only about one in every 10 stars in our galaxy could be named "Henry Paulson".

 https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/2_pcs_day_stolen_in 2 PCs/day stolen in Racine schools, why not try Sun Ray? bnitz 2008-10-13T05:26:04+00:00 2008-10-19T17:40:40+00:00 Sad, school has only been in session a month and already 68 computers (enough for two or three classrooms) are gone... Educational PCs tend to be underutilized for a couple of years and just when teachers begin to understand how to integrate them into their curriculum, some local politician will push an agenda "IF only we used PC instead of Mac, Windows 98 instead of Windows 95, Apple IIe, Apple instead of Atari... then Johnny would be able to read!" I've heard of brand new computers sit in boxes for two years, becoming completely obsolete before they are ever used. It's possible that the excellent Apple audio/video capabilities which made these computers so attractive to thieves hadn't been used in the classroom yet. Some of these computers were purchased under a grant for the purposes of exam administration. I happen to know that the deployment/upgrade system was really well designed (by my brother ;-) and similar to a system I helped put together for an Irish bank. But Sun Rays might have been better for some of these purpose and would free up the Apples for the multimedia functions they excel at. Sun Rays have a much longer "shelf-life" than a typical P.C. or Mac. The first ones made in the late 1990s would be able to administer exams and display XP, Vista, Linux, Solaris applications just as well as the brand new ones. Upgrades would be system-wide and nearly instantaneous. Bad or stolen hardware could be swapped out by the teacher and ready to use in less than 5 minutes. The fact that Sun Rays are useless without a server should make them less likely to be stolen...
 I saw this in my hometown newspaper the other day:

 RACINE — Eleven computers were stolen from two Racine Unified elementary schools Monday night, bringing the total to nearly 70 computers taken from schools in a recent rash of burglaries.

Sad, school has only been in session a month and already 68 computers (enough for two or three classrooms) are gone. The Racine school system is already facing budget shortfalls and declining tax revenue in light of the recession (which always hits Racine at least 4 years before Wall street notices.) The unfortunate thing about this and similar Federally funded educational computers systems is that Federal funds seem to focus on hardware and completely ignore software, systems integration and training. Educational PCs tend to be underutilized for a couple of years and just when teachers begin to understand how to integrate them into their curriculum, some local politician will push an agenda "IF only we used PC instead of Mac, Windows 98 instead of Windows 95, Apple IIe, Apple instead of Atari... then Johnny would be able to read!" I've heard of brand new computers sit in boxes for two years, becoming completely obsolete before they are ever used. It's possible that the excellent Apple audio/video capabilities which made these computers so attractive to thieves hadn't been used in the classroom yet. Some of these computers were purchased under a grant for the purposes of exam administration. I happen to know that the deployment/upgrade system was really well designed (by my brother ;-) and similar to a system I helped put together for an Irish bank. But Sun Rays might have been better for some of these purposes and would free up the Apples for the multimedia functions they excel at. Sun Rays have a much longer "shelf-life" than a typical P.C. or Mac. The first ones made in the late 1990s would be able to administer exams and display XP, Vista, Linux, Solaris applications just as well as the brand new ones. Upgrades would be system-wide and nearly instantaneous. Bad or stolen hardware could be swapped out by the teacher and ready to use in less than 5 minutes. The fact that Sun Rays are useless without a server should make them less likely to be stolen (with the caveat that Racine thieves tend to be extremely stupid, the last item stolen from me there was the back wheel of a rusty 35-year-old Schwinn bicycle.)

 When an Apple Computer or Wintel PC is stolen, the data usually goes with the hardware (unlike Sun Ray which retains no data!) So be on the lookout for "like new" iMacs, iBooks and eMacs containing files, student names or other references to Racine Unified's standardized test system.
 https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/edison_bulbs_banned_in_ireland Edison bulbs banned in E.U., why not ban PCs too? bnitz 2008-10-12T15:58:57+00:00 2008-10-21T11:03:31+00:00
 I can almost understand why governments are trying to force us to use CFs. CFs are functionally equivalent to incandescent for MOST applications while using 1/5th to 1/3rd the wattage. But if we can overlook edge cases, why stop with light bulbs? Sun Rays are functionally equivalent to desktop PCs for MOST applications while using only 1/40th the electrical power. Replacing PCs with Sun Rays would saves between 8 and 13 times as much as moving from incandescents to CFs. So why not ban desktop PCs?

 It looks like Ireland along with the rest of the European Union will soon ban the sale of most traditional incandescent light bulbs. I've been using Compact Florescent (CF) bulbs where possible since the early 1990s but I have mixed feelings about government's one-size-fits all energy micromanagement. I don't think the fact that my neighbor uses CFs to illuminate his garden gnomes, eves and driveway 24/7 makes him environmentally greener than the doctor, dentist, mechanic or person with visual difficulties (e.g. cataracts...) who chooses incandescents for applications where they excel.

 Mini screw mount CF bulbs only became available in Ireland about 1 year ago. Most stores here still only carry the bayonet CF bulbs. I haven't yet found any dimmer capable CFs in Ireland. We did find 9 watt CF bulbs which fit in the 240V/40W GU10 halogen sockets but I find that a combination of 40W halogen and 1.6W LED bulbs is more effective for some applications because both halogens and LEDs focus the light better than CFs do (. The "soft focus" of CFs actually worked to their advantage in our kitchen where they eliminated harsh shadows thrown by the spotlight bulbs but they still work best when paired 2CFs for ambient light and one incandescent for directional task light (cooker, table and counter.)

The CFs also flicker more are bluer and take much longer to reach full brightness. The (very difficult to find) Edison screw CF bulbs which fit our bathroom fixture only operate in that cool, damp environment for a few weeks before burning out. Fortunately, Ireland's new light bulb law requires merchants to take back duds. The average lifespan of brand name CF bulbs seems nowhere near what it was in the 1990s.

 I can almost understand why governments are trying to force us to use CFs. CFs are functionally equivalent to incandescent for MOST applications while using 1/5th to 1/3rd the wattage. But if we can overlook edge cases, why stop with light bulbs? Sun Rays are functionally equivalent to desktop PCs for MOST applications while using only 1/40th the electrical power. Replacing PCs with Sun Rays would saves between 8 and 13 times as much as moving from incandescents to CFs. So why not ban desktop PCs?
 https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/does_anyone_think_wall_street Is Wall Street welfare a good idea? bnitz 2008-09-24T16:31:52+00:00 2009-04-27T12:47:21+00:00
While discussing the U.S. government's relatively harmless economic meddling (Cheese subsidies) during the Reagan/GHW Bush years, a friend suggested that the government should buy computer chips and bury them in order to prop up the falling domestic chip market. Since then, inexpensive imported chips led to the personal PC market, the cell phone market, the video game market, the associated software markets and the internet economy. None of this might have happened if the government had imposed tariffs or burned chips in order to prop up that part of the economy. A few years later, this Bush administration tried and failed to meddle with WTO-defying steel tariffs which theoretically might have saved a handful of steelworker jobs while irritating the US's staunchest allies and endangering hundreds of thousands of domestic auto industry jobs.

 A few aspects of U.S. life make it onto CNN, google news or other worldwide news services, but sometimes I miss the sensible realities I only get from talking to people there. Some friends and family advocate the small government conservatism which seems to have fallen out of fashion with the Republican party. Others support progressive environmental and humane health policies. A handful of friends almost fit into the R and D stereotypes which fit neatly into blue-state red-state dichotomy which makes for colorful TV graphics. But I haven't yet met anyone who thinks using $700 billion of taxpayer money to bail out bad Wall street bets is a good idea. Why is Congress even considering going against the wishes of nearly all of their constituents and following the singular advice of treasury secretary Paulson, who along with Bernanke, Greenspan an other so-called experts obviously misjudged the way a free market economy should work? Time and time again I hear these powerful men speak as though the core problem is that house prices are falling. They are completely oblivious to the fact that these prices rose too high in the first place, a problem that the Paulson bailout prolongs by using tax money to play "stupid buyer" and purchase assets for far more than their fair market value.

 While discussing the U.S. government's relatively harmless economic meddling (Cheese subsidies) during the Reagan/GHW Bush years, a friend suggested that the government should buy computer chips and bury them in order to prop up the falling domestic chip market. Since then, inexpensive imported chips led to the personal PC market, the cell phone market, the video game market, the associated software markets and the internet economy. None of this might have happened if the government had imposed tariffs or burned chips in order to prop up that part of the economy. A few years later, this Bush administration tried and failed to meddle with WTO-defying steel tariffs which theoretically might have saved a handful of steelworker jobs while irritating the US's staunchest allies and endangering hundreds of thousands of domestic auto industry jobs.

Now Congress is trying to reinflate an asset bubble which desperately needs to deflate. Taxpayers may soon own a million foreclosed homes which were priced far beyond local wages in water depleted deserts and hurricane-prone lowlands. There is an old saying which goes back to the 1925 Florida property bust, "How would you like to buy some swampland in Florida?" If "heads gamblers win, tails taxpayers lose" is the new economic paradigm, why not put taxpayers on the hook for $700 billion dollars worth of tulips or dot coms while you're at it and re inflate those bubbles? Are any IT companies in the magical "Too big to fail" category? Many well known IT companies have a market cap and asset/debt ratios far better than Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.

 Why is it that what seems so obvious to the person-on-the-street, "governments shouldn't pick economic winners and losers", is being debated in Congress? We've learned this lesson before, the people of the former U.S.S.R. learned it. A forced market economy doesn't work and it never will.

 ...And the failure hands over the State like a great sorrow. The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene spayed over the golden mountains.
 - From "The Grapes of Wrath", John Steinbeck 1939
 If the taxpayers are forced to own millions of overpriced vacant foreclosed homes, won't there be a temptation for the government to destroy these homes in another misguided attempt to prop up a single favored industry. That's my $.02, ymmv, this is simply the opinion of a single disappointed voter and is not intended to represent Sun Microsystems or anyone else.
 https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/what_lies_beyond_the_archaic What lies beyond the archaic 8 char FAT filesystem limit? bnitz 2008-09-24T07:43:43+00:00 2008-10-03T10:07:29+00:00
 I took my family out to the Donegal this weekend. By coincidence my Pentax digital camera "rolled over" from IMGP9999.PEF to IMGP0001.PEF just before I took this picture:

 So now I must move all new files to a new folder or change the names before I rsync to my photo backup space to avoid overwriting old files. Whoever decided 10,000 photos was a sufficient limit for a digital SLR never had kids or lived in such a beautiful country. I'm still amazed at how many modern standards (e.g. ISO-9660, DCIM, DICOM) still bow to the 8.3 limitations of Microsoft's old FAT filesystem. As far as I know, DOS and RT-11 were the only popular operating systems made after 1970 with such a SHRTFLNM.LMT. Solaris, AmigaDOS, VMS, Gem, Geos, even the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 filenames exceeded this limit! Yes, it's possible to work around this limit with CLVRABRV.NMS or DIRECTRY STRUCTRS, but it seems that of all of the Digital camera manufacturers, only Casio, HP and Kodak have reasonably long term naming conventions, but none of them is as forward thinking as ZFS would allow them to be.

 We really enjoyed our stay at the friendly family run Ocean Spray Bed and Breakfast on Muckross head, just east of the Slieve League cliffs in Donegal. The fact that there were no nearby restaurants or other late season tourists contributed to that "edge of the earth" feel of Donegal.
 https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/kitesurfing_bull_island_dublin Kitesurfing Bull Island Dublin bnitz 2008-09-09T16:28:41+00:00 2008-10-03T10:10:02+00:00

 A couple of weekends ago we saw more than 20 kites and kitesurfers packed onto a stretch of beach on Bull island, a short distance north of Sun Ireland. I don't know how they avoid getting their kites tangled. Twenty years of windsurfing has biased me towards what seems a gentler, safer, easier sport, especially with the big old floaty boards and the Aquaglide Multisport inflatable sailboat windsurfer I picked up last summer:

 The sail is tiny and it isn't terribly fast, but we get plenty of wind here and it goes upwind about as well as a small catamaran. I like that it folds down into something the size of a golf bag that I can carry home.

Note: The sky looks threatening in this photo and the next day a rare lightning storm and heavy rain flooded this part of Ireland, but this was about the nearest thing we had to summer in 2008.
 https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/is_sun_behind_more_than Is Sun behind more than 1/2 of all corporate OpenSource contributions? bnitz 2008-09-09T15:56:24+00:00 2009-03-16T16:33:48+00:00

 The EC's Study on the Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU is an interesting document. I was fortunate to attend a presentation by one of the authors at an OpenIreland event a couple of years ago. The above StarCalc graph uses corporate FOSS contribution numbers from this document. A picture is worth 1000 words, isn't it? This study was published in November 2006, the same month Java was GPL'd so I doubt the Java codebase was included in these calculations. The open sourcing of Solaris was also in early stages. Add these and the MySQL code and it wouldn't surprise me if more than 1/2 of the corporate contributed OpenSource code is from a division of Sun Microsystems. I know we can do better. But quite a few big FOSS consumers (e.g. those selling beautifully branded FreeBSD or web services) are notably absent from the top 10 corporate contributor list. What percentage of corporate FOSS contribution would quench some of the hottest alternate kernel fanboy flames? 60%, 75%? Is it sufficient to contribute to the whole software ecosystem Joe sixpack thinks of as "Linux" or do you have to commit directly to Linus's kernel? What does it take to be cool? Are we there yet?


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Nyon - Real Madrid coach Jose Mourinho is appearing before UEFA's appeal panel to challenge his five-match ban from Champions League matches.
Mourinho accused UEFA and its referees of a long-standing conspiracy to help rival Barcelona after his team lost 2-0 in a semi-final first-leg match in April.
He was also sent from the dugout during the game.
UEFA's disciplinary body said the Portuguese coach made "inappropriate" comments.
Mourinho is currently banned from entering the stadium and communicating with players and coaches at Madrid's next three group-stage matches.
He was banned for the return leg in Barcelona and another match of his ban was suspended for three years.
UEFA's verdict is expected later on Friday.
Under UEFA rules, Mourinho can later appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport if his final sanction is at least three matches.
Mourinho's rant at the European football authority and its referees came after his team was outplayed by Barcelona at its home Santiago Bernabeu Stadium on April 27.
His outburst helped ensure that media coverage of an eagerly anticipated, but one-sided, match focused on him as much as his team.
In a post-match news conference, Mourinho listed the referees who he said gave Barcelona favourable decisions in UEFA matches.
"Every semi-final the same thing always happens. Why? I'll live my whole life with this question but I hope one day to get the answer," Mourinho said.
Mourinho described it as a "scandal" that Chelsea, his former club, was denied penalty appeals against Barcelona in 2009.
It was a "miracle" that Mourinho's 10-man Inter Milan eliminated Barcelona in the semifinals last year, he said.
Mourinho was angered when Madrid was reduced to 10 men early in the second half when midfielder Pepe was shown a red card for a challenge on Dani Alves.
German referee Wolfgang Stark then dismissed the Madrid coach who was also seen on television directing sarcastic comments at the fourth official.
A volatile encounter between the Spanish rivals also saw a scuffle between players from both teams behind the dugouts as they left the field at half time.
Barcelona advanced to the final after the return leg was drawn 1-1.
The Catalan club won its third European title in five years by beating Manchester United 3-1 in the final at Wembley Stadium.
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Join Date: May 2007
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Mom to:
Three big girls (10) + (almost 9!);
One little boy (6) and a full on toddler (8/12) born with TAPVR (repaired at 6 days old).
I'm at the point now where I feel too guilty to use up house space to store items for years that *might* be used someday when I know they could be put to good use right now in somebody else's home. Add to that the issue of toy safety, things breaking down over time, not wanting my kids to feel like I expect them to have kids someday, worrying about more to lose, the whole emotional baggage that goes along with gifting some cherished item to another family member -especially a child, and to me it all just ends up making more sense to pass things on today, knowing they will be appreciated and desired, not a potential burden.
Mom to DD1 (11/1999), DD2 (07/2003), and DS (11/2012), all born at home and cloth diapered.
I think this sort of thing only works if you are *very* selective and only keep a small number of things. Otherwise, as others said, it gets overwhelming to have a large number of old hand-me-downs passed on. Especially when you factor in the guilt of "mom/MIL saved these for me for X decades so I can't just get rid of them".
I think some is nice though. Just not boxes full.
|with the possible exception of the Playmobil collection
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Translation of care home in Spanish:
- (for old people) residencia (feminine) de ancianos
hogar (masculine) de ancianos(for mentally ill people) psiquiátrico (masculine)
hospital (masculine) psiquiátricoExample sentences
- They have tried in vain to find a respite place in a care home with suitable facilities.
- Many years ago, I accompanied a friend to visit her rather confused great-grandmother who had recently moved to a residential care home.
- Pensioners living in care homes could lose part of their Pension Credit, under measures proposed by the Department of Health.
Definition of care home in:
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= trending


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SEJONG, April 1 (Yonhap) -- Profits and sales of South Korea's top four business groups have grown much faster than their smaller competitors over the past five years, a report showed Monday, indicating a further concentration of wealth in a small number of top-tier conglomerates.
According to the report by the Fair Trade Commission (FTC), the four -- Samsung, Hyundai Motor, SK and LG -- saw their combined net profit account for 79.8 percent of the total racked up by the country's 30 largest conglomerates this year. This is up from 70.5 percent tallied in 2009.
Since 2009, their combined sales have also grown at an annual average rate of 16.9 percent, faster than the 14.5 percent for those ranking fifth through 10th and 7.7 percent for those ranking 11th through 30th, the report showed.
As a result, the sales of the top four made up 53.2 percent of the total this year, up from 49.6 percent in 2009, the report showed.
Over the past five years, their assets expanded at an annual average rate of 19.8 percent, compared with 11.9 percent and 10.6 percent gains tallied for the business groups belonging to the subsequent two lower categories.
The faster growth resulted in raising the ratio of their combined assets from 49.6 percent in 2009 to 55.3 percent this year, the report showed.
Meanwhile, their financial status also remains in relatively better shape. The average debt ratio of the top four conglomerates stood at 67 percent this year, which is lower than 96.5 percent and 141.9 percent for those belonging to the lower two categories, according to the report.
<All rights reserved by Yonhap News Agency>


text:
Is anyone loosing hair since your are BFing. I am loosing like hell and literally afraid to comb my hair. Anyone doing anything to reduce hair loss?
Hair Loss!!!!
Comments (7)
Its not b/c your breastfeeding, its b/c you had a baby.
When pregnant you basically quit shedding hair entirely and as such after your LO is born, about 3m PP your body sheds like crazy to make up for 9mo of basically holding onto all your hair, you know hence why you have a beautiful head of hair when your pregnant.
Don't fret it will be fine, I know it is alarming and I know with my first I was panicking about it and hated seeing all the hair on my baby and everything else, but there is nothing you can do to stop it.
J: Loving Mummy to
Miss M. 8/06 Platinum; Sweet S.10/08 DIAMOND; Lovely L. 06/11 DIAMOND
It's a post-preggo thing and not at all related to breast feeding. For most women it stops around 6-12 months post-partum, depending on the natural growth cycle of your hair.
I started shedding at about 4 months PP. I am now 5 months PP and am still shedding!! I literally have baby fuzz all over my scalp and can see it around my face. Thank goodness I have a lot of hair! The same thing happened with my last baby and the amount of hair I had grow back was alarming. I had spiky hair along my part and had bangs cut in because I had so much growing in along my hairline.
i'm almost 7 months pp and still shedding! I use plenty of conditioner in the shower and don't brush my hair. i let it air dry and don't use a flat iron or curling iron.
I didn't notice it with my first, that I remember, but the other day I noticed a clump of "baby hair" near my hairline because I lost so much in a short time (and I a shedder ALL the time, it's just extra extreme now)!
Colleen (38)
Caroline (10/2007) & Caitlin (2/2012)


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I've googled, searched the forums and want to know if this is even possible with wordpress; I need to create a page where i am passing certain data elements and expect to receive the results. BTW, I'm not a programmer so please go easy on me. Example: I am creating a form with 3-4 input fields for my users. Step 1. I need to log into the 3rd party site and pass usrnme & psswrd. Step 2. user enters data in form Step ( 3-4 input boxes). 3. Data transmitted. 4. Results displayed on page or new page if necessary?
Thank you


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The latter Im afraid. Non-conistent, it just happens.
Type: Posts; User: pddnos
The latter Im afraid. Non-conistent, it just happens.
Other forums report the same thing. It would be nice to have some kind of response from Philips.
What quality BD player do you recommend?
Hi Toengel,
and it´s the silver version (sl)
I´ve got a BDP7500 dated Dec 2009 with latest FW 1,1 from Nov. 2010.
Problem is that the unit is losing all my settings every now and then (language, loudspeaker settings etc etc).
When the...


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|Dennis Seidenberg skates again, Peter Chiarelli says Bruins aren't counting on his return
|04.14.14 at 12:06 pm ET
Dennis Seidenberg skated Monday at TD Garden as he remains ahead of schedule in his recovery from ACL and MCL surgery, but Bruins general manager Peter Chiarelli cautioned against expecting Seidenberg to return at some point during the playoffs.
The B's have not ruled out a postseason return for Seidenberg, however, after initially declaring him out for the season at the time of his injury in late December.
"We're not counting on Dennis to be back," Chiarelli said Monday. "We're going to be very cautious with his injury. He has been skating and that's pretty much all I can say on it."
Adam McQuaid also skated Monday in his comeback from a quad strain that limited to 30 games this season. Multiple setbacks in his recovery led to the team shutting him down for about a month in early March. Chiarelli said there isn't much clarity on his situation.
"Not really, no," Chiarelli said. "'¦ We want to be careful on it. It's not a major injury; it's a soft tissue injury. We've been doing OK with the D we have, so we want to be cautious with it."
Given the emergence of Kevan Miller, it's unlikely a healthy McQuaid would be needed unless a right-shot defenseman struggles or is injured.
Daniel Paille left Saturday's game with what appeared to be a head injury, but Claude Julien told reporters Sunday that Paille was feeling "much better" and was day-to-day. Chiarelli said following his updates on Seidenberg and McQuaid that he hadn't intended to give injury updates (common practice in the postseason) and as such did not offer an update on Paille's status.
For more Bruins news, visit weei.com/bruins.
|Report: Dennis Seidenberg, Adam McQuaid begin skating for Bruins
|04.09.14 at 12:12 pm ET
According to the Boston Herald, Bruins defensemen Dennis Seidenberg and Adam McQuaid skated Tuesday at Ristuccia Arena.
Seidenberg was ruled out for the season after tearing his ACL/MCL on Dec. 27 against the Senators, but he is well ahead in his recovery from surgery and the possibility exists that he could return late in the playoffs.
Bruins general manager Peter Chiarelli had told the Boston Globe last month that Seidenberg might begin skating later in the postseason, but Steve Conroy of the Herald reported that the veteran defenseman skated for 15 minutes and that "it's not known just how well his knee held up." It is also unclear when he will skate again.
"My guess is, if we go deep, he'll start skating at some point and we'll just see how he is,' Chiarelli told the Globe on March 21. 'We've been very cautious in the past with the injuries and coming back.'
McQuaid, meanwhile, has been out since Jan. 19 with a quad strain. The team decided to shut him down in early March after he suffered a setback in his attempted return. Conroy reported there is no timetable for either player's return to the lineup.
For more on the Bruins, visit weei.com/bruins.
|Adam McQuaid still not skating; Claude Julien not ruling out defensive rotation in playoffs
|04.05.14 at 4:46 pm ET
Bruins coach Claude Julien said Saturday that he is not ruling out a rotation of defensemen going into the postseason.
Matt Bartkowski and Andrej Meszaros figure to be in the biggest positional battle for the left spot on the second pairing along Boychuk, and the two have taken turns playing that role in recent games. Bartkowski played with Boychuk in Saturday's win over the Flyers, while Meszaros played with Torey Krug on the third pairing and struggled.
"It doesn't have to be a set six," Julien said. "It could be, and it could also be a rotation as long as everybody's good enough to be in that rotation. So no, and I don't see any rush for that decision to be made yet."
The idea of a rotation is intriguing given that Bartkowski and Meszaros have both spent time in and out of the lineup this season and might be better prepared to avoid rust, though for consistency's sake the B's would be wise to nail down a steady second pairing that could continue the play they got from the Andrew Ference – Boychuk pairing of postseasons past.
Kevan Miller seems to have solidified a place in the postseason lineup, as he played 33 straight games for the B's leading up to his day off Saturday. His competition would be a healthy Adam McQuaid, but Julien said prior to Saturday's game that McQuaid, though getting better, still is not skating. McQuaid has been out since Jan. 19 with a quad strain that has plagued him throughout the season, as he has been limited to 30 games.
The anticipated postseason pairings at this point figure to be Zdeno Chara with Dougie Hamilton, Bartkowski with Boychuk and Krug with Miller, though that could change depending on who they end up facing.
|Adam McQuaid isn't skating and Claude Julien isn't set on Bruins' playoff defensemen
|03.28.14 at 1:26 pm ET
WILMINGTON — Adam McQuaid is still not skating, and it's unclear when the defenseman, who was shut down three and a half weeks ago to rehab a quad strain, will be an option for the Bruins this season.
B's coach Claude Julien said Friday that though McQuaid remains off the ice, he is doing more and more in his workouts.
"He's being ramped up right now off-ice. He's going in the right direction as we speak," Julien said. "I don't know exactly when we're going to see him on the ice, but right now things are going well for him."
Asked then whether he would expect to see McQuaid back on the ice before the end of the regular season (McQuaid was supposed to get back on the ice after two-to-three weeks), Julien said he didn't know.
"I don't know. I just change lines and I put my lineup together," he said with a grin. "When those guys are injured they belong to somebody else. Until they tell me he's going on the ice, I really can't answer that.
"All I know is they've told me he's doing well off the ice, and at one point they're going to tell me 'within a few days we're probably going to put him on the ice.' I'm certainly not going to hold that back. When I find out that [he's] going to go on the ice soon, I'll certainly let you guy know."
So, with the playoffs nearing and McQuaid still not in the picture, it becomes increasingly likely that Kevan Miller or Andrej Meszaros will stick in the lineup for the Bruins to begin the postseason. The B's currently have eight healthy defensemen, but with all due respect to Corey Potter, there are seven players legitimately contending for spots. That number will increase to eight once McQuaid is healthy.
The B's have rotated players in and out of their blue line since acquiring Meszaros, with Dougie Hamilton, Torey Krug, Matt Bartkowski and Meszaros seeing time in the press box. Julien said his opinion of who will be in and who will be out come playoff time has yet to fully form.
"I'm not there yet. I don't like to look too far ahead," Julien said. "Right now I'm looking at whatever we have left in the regular [season] schedule. We'll deal with that stuff. We always do it that way. As time comes along, you hear, you find out more things and you just deal with the situation as it comes, because you never know. You may not even have to deal with it, so I'm not going to waste time dealing with it right now."
|Adam McQuaid still not close to return for Bruins
|03.26.14 at 12:23 pm ET
WILMINGTON — All healthy Bruins were on the ice for practice Wednesday at Ristuccia Arena. Unfortunately for the Bruins, that's a group that still doesn't include Adam McQuaid.
B's general manager Peter Chiarelli said earlier this month that the team was shutting McQuaid down for two-to-three weeks to rehab a quad strain that has hampered the defenseman throughout the season. Wednesday marked three weeks since Chiarelli announced the plan, but Claude Julien said Wednesday that McQuaid remains off the ice.
"No, nothing," Julien said when asked for an update on the player. "He's still working out off-ice, but he hasn't been on the ice yet."
McQuaid's continued absence increases the likelihood that the team might have to use Kevan Miller in the postseason. Miller has played well and has seen his minutes increase over his 39 games for Boston this season.
McQuaid has been limited to just 30 games this season and has not played since Jan. 19.
For more Bruins coverage, visit weei.com/bruins.
|Johnny Boychuk returns to practice
|03.20.14 at 4:03 pm ET
Johnny Boychuk practiced with the Bruins in Denver Friday, marking his first time back on the ice with teammates since suffering a lower-body injury last Saturday against the Hurricanes.
Bruins coach Claude Julien suggested to reporters after the practice that Boychuk, who was termed day-to-day after he crashed into the boards feet-first, might not be an option to play Friday against the Avalanche, however, saying, the team will "evaluate him day by day, but if he's not 100 percent there's no reason why he should play."
Boychuk had tried taking part in Monday's morning skate, but he was too sore. The team has played Andrej Meszaros the last two games with Boychuk out, while Corey Potter played Tuesday when Matt Bartkowski served as the team's healthy scratch against the Devils.
Thursday marks just over two weeks since Bruins general manager Peter Chiarelli announced that the team would shut Adam McQuaid down for two-to-three weeks in order to aid his recovery from a quad strain. Julien was asked about McQuaid Thursday and gave little update, though he did tell reporters that the player has been "working off ice longer and longer every day."
For more on the Bruins, visit weei.com/bruins.
|Adam McQuaid has quad strain, Bruins will shut him down for two to three weeks
|03.05.14 at 5:43 pm ET
The Bruins will shut Adam McQuaid down for two to three weeks as he recovers from what Peter Chiarelli finally revealed to be a quad strain. McQuaid has missed 31 games with what the team had previously only called a lower-body injury.
'We're going to shut him down for two to three weeks," Chiarelli said. "His injury, while it keeps healing, he has setbacks, so we're going to give him rest two to three weeks and see where he is after that."
McQuaid was close to returning to the lineup last week before suffering his latest setback. He hasn't played since Jan. 19 against the Blackhawks.
"He's got a quad strain. He was really close — you've heard Claude [Julien] say [he was] ready and ready to go and stuff, and he had good sessions over the break. He just reaggravated it."
Chiarelli said that the team is not currently considering surgery. The Bruins GM compared McQuaid's situation to that of Jared Knight a season ago. Knight dealt with a hamstring injury last season that limited him to just 12 games last season between the AHL and ECHL. The team ended up shutting down Knight for a two-week stretch after a reaggravation.
The Bruins acquired a pair of defensemen Wednesday in Andrej Meszaros and Corey Potter. Both can play the right side, though the team currently has Kevan Miller playing on the third pair in McQuaid's place.
For more Bruins news, visit weei.com/bruins.


text:
The Red River Rivalry between Oklahoma and Texas highlights week six of the 2011 college football season. Other big games include Florida at LSU, Iowa at Penn State, Auburn at Arkansas and Ohio State at Nebraska.
ESPN Gameday will broadcast live from Dallas, Texas, the site of the game between the Oklahoma Sooners and the Texas Longhorns at the Cotton Bowl.
Listed below are the games with TV and times:
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Friday, October 7, 2011
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Smoke ND to SEC as 14th member.
Air Force at Notre Dame – SEC Network (HD)/ESPN3;
Notre Dame game is on NBC at 3:30 ET
SJSU – BYU…..should be a good one!


text:
American astronaut Dr. Jack Schmitt - the last living man to walk on the moon - is the latest scientist to be added to the roster of more than 70 skeptics who will confront the subject of global warming at the second annual International Conference on Climate Change in New York City March 8-10, 2009. The conference expects to draw 1,000 attendees including private-sector business people, state and federal legislators and officials, policy analysts, media, and students.
Schmitt, who earned a PhD from Harvard in geology, resigned in November from the Planetary Society, an international non-profit organization devoted to inspiring "the people of Earth to explore other worlds, understand our own, and seek life elsewhere." He is the twelfth person to walk on the Moon; as of 2008, of the nine living moonwalkers, he and his crewmate Eugene Cernan were the last two to walk there. "As a geologist, I love Earth observations," Schmitt wrote, "But, it is ridiculous to tie this objective to a 'consensus' that humans are causing global warming when human experience, geologic data and history, and current cooling can argue otherwise. 'Consensus,' as many have said, merely represents the absence of definitive science. You know as well as I, the 'global warming scare' is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making..."
Schmitt will be joined by more than 70 other economists, public officials, legal experts, and climate specialists calling attention to new research that contradicts claims that Earth's moderate warming during the 20th Century primarily was man-made and has reached crisis proportions. Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute, producer of the event along with more than 30 co-sponsors, explained, "At the first conference last March, we proved that the skeptics in the debate over global warming constitute the center or mainstream of the scientific community while alarmists are on the fringe.
"Now in the past nine months, the science has grown even more convincing that global warming is not a crisis. Also suggesting this 'crisis' is over are opinion polls in the U.S. and around the globe and political events, including the decisive defeat of 'cap-and-trade' legislation in the U.S. Senate last spring. The crisis has been cancelled by sound science and common-sense."
In additon to Schmidt, speakers will include Dr Richard Lindzen of MIT, Dr. Roy Spencer. Dr. William Gray, John Coleman, Dr. Paul Reiter, Dr. Bod Carter, Benny Peiser, Christopher Monckton, Dr. Ross McKitrick, Stephen McIntyre as well as Anthony Watts.
(more at icecap.us)