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A while back I learned something that I think is interesting for anyone who is interested in reliability. The reliability of solid state components in computers is related to the Arrhenius Equation. The Arrhenius Equation describes how the rate of chemical reactions is affected by temperature. A theory of reliability about solid state components of computers says that the reason they fail (after DOA and child mortality failures) is primarily due to chemical reactions, like oxidation.

In Wikipedia’s inimitable style:

The general rule of thumb, without solving the equation, is that for every 10°C increase in temperature the rate of reaction doubles. As with any rule of thumb, it does not always work.

Theoretically that means that for every 10°C you can cool your computer beyond its nominal operating temperature, you can (according to the unreliable rule of thumb) increase the mean time between failures of solid state components in your PC by a factor of 2. Another way of describing this is that it doubles the reliability of those components.

Now, a question: Should I freeze my backup DVDs?

I work with a US-based manager called Jane with über-project-coordination skills.

One of Jane’s management super hero talents is a tireless ability to bring warring development groups together on the phone and gently negotiate agreement within minutes of observing email sniping or any of the other usual symptoms of project discord.

I watched too much of a TV show during my early childhood called Mr Squiggle. The show featured a puppet character called Mr Squiggle “the man from the moon” who…

…was a cheery, scatter-brained character who would often be distracted and would occasionally go for “space-walks”, and his assistant would need to calm him down to get him to focus on the task of drawing.

Mr Squiggle always had a female assistant to help him, and give the show some narrative consistency. There were several assistants during the show’s lifetime, but the assistant I remember most fondly is Miss Jane.

Even though he was easily distracted Mr Squiggle was a brilliant artist, as puppets go. He could change a piece of paper with some random-looking lines and curves into a complete picture by drawing with his pencil nose while talking about how nice the moon is this time of year.

Before starting to draw he would say “Hold my hand, Miss Jane.”

This seemed such a fitting parallel to our project (as the creative scatterbrain, Mr Squiggle) and our Ms Jane (as a stabilizing influence) that I thought I should share this parallel with her.

I was about to compose a Happy-New-Year-how’re-you-doing? email to Jane with background links to the Wikipedia article on the show when I noticed that there is also a short Wikipedia entry for Jane Fennell, the actor who was Miss Jane.

I read it and decided against drawing any parallels.

Now I think I need someone to hold my hand.

Included with our daily-delivered Denver Post this morning was our first free sample pack.

Shampoo? Dish washing detergent?

It was two Advil sleeping pills, resplendent with 1000-word warnings about potential side-effects and operating heavy machinery.

Sheesh.

Update: Here’s the following Sunday’s haul of news and advertising.
Read the rest of this entry »

Setting aside the strange use of many terms, and the prevalence of management buzzword-speak syntactic sugar, one of the most misused words I’ve encountered since I arrived in the USA is misnomer.

The irony is delicious.

I’m currently in Denver. On assignment!

As my family and I will be here for some time, and we only have the one car, we’ve discussed getting something like a motor scooter for me to ride to work. A moped. Something like a Vespa.

J & I had a discussion about how cheap they are to run and how good they are for the environment.

I used to have one way back when I was in school, so I know the thrill of filling up each week with 90 cents worth of petrol. The slings and arrows of riding a moped in rural and regional Australia just helped to make me stronger. Don’t taunt me again, I could be pushed too far like a moped-riding John Rambo.

Getting a moped seemed like an idea worth pursuing. A potential problem we both noted was that neither of us had ever seen a motor scooter in the USA. We speculated that they’re considered too gay, or French, or both. Maybe, and this was the conclusion we snarkily agreed to, they’re unpatriotic in their frugal fuel use (notwithstanding the huge numbers of hybrids now on the roads).

As if to illustrate why having only one vehicle was a problem that needed solving, on Friday I was supposed to be picked up from work at 4:30 but I had a meeting that ran late. I lost track of time and I had no mobile phone. J waited for me in the car park for a while and then drove home with the kids to wait for my call. It wasn’t for another hour that I got in touch with her to arrange a pickup. We arranged a new time and I headed down to the car park to catch some late afternoon outdoors.

In the car park was the first motor scooter I had seen in America. We were proven wrong, Americans do care about fuel usage and don’t care about looking French, gay, or Italian!

I waited for 15 minutes for J to arrive, and noticed something odd. The back wheel of the scooter was slowly rotating, as if moved by the breeze. I got closer and realized that the engine had been left running.

When J arrived she said that she had seen it earlier when she came to pick me up and it had its engine on then as well. It had been running for 90 minutes or more.

Was this some form of effete fuel-wasting ceremony designed to exorcise perceived moped-gayness? Was it a French or Italian spy proving themselves to be American?

I could have ridden it away to rescue it into my laté-sipping life of looking like a felonious, gay, French-Italian, greenie, but I think I’ll just get a bicycle.

Some troublemaker managed lead letter in the Sydney Morning Herald today.

As the debate about housing affordability continues, I would like to see more discussion of the attitude towards renters.

It’s like a dirty secret in which we are all complicit. Once we’ve got our own patch, we seem happy to forget about the miseries of renting. There are no substantive policies or meaningful law reform. With renting recognised as the only option available to many over a lifetime, the time to act is now.

Renters are treated like second-class citizens by agents and owners alike. While there are clearly many fair landlords, and real estate agents, we see this as good fortune, rather than a right to expect. I was a good tenant: paid rent on time, looked after the places I’ve occupied, got on with the neighbours and still had humiliating battles to get my bond back.

Managing rental properties would be the lowest rung of real estate business and it seems to fall to the most junior staff. Determining the quality of our steam cleaning was often in the hands of a 20-year-old trainee. As I was young, too, this was merely galling. It must be excruciating for older renters.

Dealing directly with an owner is usually worse. One, when asked to fix the hot water service, launched into a tale of his kitchen renovation woes. Tell someone who cares. Learn a little about your responsibilities.

In a friend’s case, the bond was put into the owner’s business, and had to be paid back in instalments. Just weeks ago, someone else I know had an owner change his mind and tell him to move out just days after he’d moved in. With no lease signed at that point, what was he to do? Although I hear good things about the Consumer, Trader and Tenancy Tribunal, it is still a fight that many don’t have the stomach for.

Renting hinges on a relationship that is fundamentally unequal and is founded on private return to the owner. The expectations of the tenants and their ability to plan and live their lives come a distant second.

Why can a business enjoy a five-year lease, with an option to extend, but the shelter which people need to live can be removed with minimal notice? Until this is addressed, nobody will see renting as an alternative to home ownership.

Kudos to J! It’s the biggest day in letter-writing in our house since J got lead letter, and 2 of the 3 other letters on the same topic were from friends of ours too.

I have vivid memories of talking to our landlord of yore about how we were tired of waiting for some long lost blue-collar member of his family to clear up some time to come fix our hot water service. Two days without hot water in winter would usually constitute a need for “emergency plumbing.” He began to tell me about how his family suffered when they were renovating their bathroom (not the kitchen as stated above — oops). I objected, saying that if we had rented through an agent, or any other landlord we would have at least seen a plumber by now. “Are you implying I’m not a good landlord?” he said. “I’m not implying anything. I’m telling you you’re a bad landlord.”

That felt good, and later that day we had working hot water again. We were informed that our rent was increasing soon after.

I recently discovered that a lot of parents and kids at my son’s school think I work for Lego.

My usual “I’m a software engineer… I do stuff with phones and networking and software and stuff” might be the right mixture of tedious-sounding and insufficiently memorable to cause temporary amnesia in those not learned in the appropriate arts. That state of mind might open the door for the Lego meme to slip in.

My son swears he’s not the source of this rumour.

When I worked with ATMs at a bank, I used to prefer “I’m a software guy” to “I look after the ATM network management software at bank X” based on former allowing me to move the conversation somewhere other than vocation and the latter getting me bailed up with wild-eyed rants about appalling ATM service. Unlike ATMs, I’m not unhappy about being associated with Lego. I just wonder if this will end like the Seinfeld episode where George pretends he’s a marine biologist.

Are there any life or death situations that can only be resolved through encyclopaedic knowledge of the Lego product line?

This is a list of the printers I have owned in reverse chronological order. My recent purchase caused me to ponder just how universally crappy my printer experience has been, except for the laser printers I have owned. I might have been much better off saving $10,000 and buying a laser printer when they first became “available” to SOHO users.

Samsung CLP-300N.

Networked colour laser printer. I picked up the 300N last week for about AU$1.10 per N. This is the first colour laser printer I have owned, and certainly provides the best $/kg value of any printer I have owned. It takes four toner cartridges which are rated at 2000 pages, and cost around $70 each. It’s fast, and while it isn’t the world’s best colour printer by a long shot — it works with Windows, Linux and Mac, and doesn’t require turning on a PC to use. So far, for the 5 pages it has printed, it rocks.

Dell Photo All-in-One Printer 922.

USB-connected Windows-only, colour inkjet, scanner and copier. This printer cost me nothing. It was practically thrown at me when I was buying a Dell laptop for a relative. While discussing the hilarious prices ink cartridges sell for the salesperson cannily told me I’d probably be ready to buy a new laptop next time I ran out of ink anyway, so why quibble over cartridge prices. That didn’t end up being true, as the “introductory pack” of black ink ran out very soon after it was set up and I felt the touch of Dell’s conveniently located “buy more ink” service right alongside the friendly graph showing just how out-of-ink I was. Buying one black cartridge was a complete rip-off, and buying two lowered the unit price by 40% or so, so I planned ahead and got two black cartridges for marginally less stupid prices.

Eventually, my kids’ readily accessible source of paper for aeroplane construction, drawing, and origami boulders grew tired of having the paper ripped the wrong way past its feeder rollers. It began its rebellion by feeding between 0 and 10 pages at a time, with 0 and 10 being the most likely values decided. Out of warranty, I declared the printer dead. Does anyone want to buy some ink cartridges?

Having a scanner and copier on hand was undeniably useful. I’ll have to find a reasonable replacement for the scanning capabilities at least.

Panasonic KX-P6100.

My favourite printer ever. Purchased in about 1999 and still going strong. The KX-P6100 is small parallel interface Windows GDI-talkin’ monochrome laser printer that inspired the “toaster” building at Sydney’s Circular Quay, I’m sure. It’s about the size of two reams of A4 paper and stands “upright.” Panasonic no longer have a printer division — this was the printer that broke the mould. Panasonic apparently didn’t “get it” like other printer manufacturers do. They seemed to think that there was nothing magical about their toner so they didn’t use much and sold it cheap! $25 per ~2500 pages cheap.

Unlike a bubblejet, the KX-P6100 can rest for months without printing and work perfectly when you pull it out of mothballs. I still have it waiting in the wings, but driver support is getting a bit shaky with the arrival of Vista.

[...Time passes, and Chris & Jessica own a series of anonymous colour bubblejets...]

Canon Bubblejet BJ-10 & Apple Stylewriter

When Bubblejet technology hit the big time and Canon released the BJ-10, I was employed, relatively flushed with funds, and eager to torture my dot matrix printer collection to death and dance on their grave. I had been dreaming about bubbles and jets since I read about them in Byte magazine so I snapped one up as soon as I could.

The BJ-10 was a dream — relatively fast, black, laser-like printing on ordinary paper with a little bucket of ink which it could inform you was empty (or could it?) and no nasty ribbons. Sure bubblejets need to be used constantly or they jam up. And they need to be used sparingly or they fuzz up. But they were still way better better than dot-matrix dinosaurs.

Owning a Mac meant owning the Apple-branded equivalent of the BJ-10: the Stylewriter.

Epson LQ-500 & Epson LX-50. 24 and 9 pin dot-matrix printers.

I’m guessing here. I think I was the proud owner of two ribbon-chewing, mis-feeding, very rugged and noisy Epson printers during early university days. The two features I recall being impressed about are speed and price. Not having to wait a week to see hard copy of a 500 word essay was pretty novel. I recall printers being staggeringly expensive for something that you rarely used, and paper and ribbon prices seemed sky-high too. I guess the people I shared my university accommodation with probably recall an overwhelming sense of knowing which very early mornings I had assignments due, from the fantastic cacophony that accompanied the completion and near-completion of any assignment. I bet they marked the date when graphical fonts extended the printing time on dot matrix printers nearer to the upper thresholds of noise tolerance.

I marked the advent pf graphical fonts by allowing several times the printing time to get my assignments in on time. Sitting for hours between midnight and dawn waiting for the printer to jam, or screw up the feed hole alignment so you could restart the page over and over is not a fond memory. These were awful, awful printers.

When I first started working at the Commonwealth Bank, I was given a tour. My guide showed me a large room which was wall-to-wall dot-matrix printers making paper copies of every ATM transaction made in the region for dispute resolution. Even as I stood in the door to that room, watching two operators fumbling with printer ribbons or jammed paper, I estimated I could see 5 or 6 other printers with similar problems.

Commodore 1520 Plotter. Centronics-connected 3(4?)-pen plotter.

I didn’t own one of these, I just convinced my school to buy a few of them for the (don’t laugh) Vic 20 lab. They had fantastic text quality and quiet operation. This made the 1520 stand out very favourably from the early dot matrix printers that were common at the time. It was trivially easy to apply basic maths to generating colourful spirographs and other sophisticated-looking graphics. The downside was the paper was a roll that was only about 3 inches wide and had to be ordered from Commodore. The pens held a minuscule quantity of ink too, and guess who you had to talk to about acquiring new ones.

Knowing we would be without kids over the Easter weekend, J and I decided to treat ourselves to a meal at one of the restaurants in Sydney’s foody stratosphere.

We ticked off Tetsuya’s (been there for many fantastic meals when he was in Rozelle) and Guillaume (no space for us) eventually deciding on Quay (never been there before).

At $175 each for a four course a la carte meal, and a public holiday surcharge we didn’t want to think much about money once we were there. We wanted to sit down and forget about our wallets and take in the magnificent views and sumptuous food and pretend we’re DINKs for a few hours.

The menu opened into four panels. We got to pick one dish from each panel. The food was amazing. The ingredients include truffle, abalone, hand-shelled crab, figs, squab… a cornucopia of rare and expensive ingredients artfully assembled into exquisite food.

But what’s this? One dish includes lobster, and for some reason it’s an extra $20.

Suddenly we feel like we’re at an expensive RSL.

Aliens are invading our front yard at the moment. Aliens that look like this:

I found quite a few of these growing in the new mulch we had spread on our front garden.

Curious, and a little nervous that this might be a sign of the apocalypse, I put out a “what fungus is this?” email to a family email list. Pretty soon someone had located the fungus at a site where it had achieved “fungus of the month” status — a high honour for a fungus whose name (Aseroë rubra) literally means “disgusting red.” It also goes by the name “Anemone Fungus” but I think Aseroë rubra conveys its evil intentions more than adequately.

This charming little fungus is part of the Stinkhorn family (caution, link is NSFW if your workmates have poor eyesight). Aseroë rubra emits a spore-filled goo (spore mass) that mycologists say smells like rotting corpses (You have to wonder how they know). This goo attracts flies, slugs and snails. You don’t want to know how effectively.

As attractive as this little alien sounds, I don’t think it’s the ground cover we’re looking for.

Moral: From now on I’m going to carry a spare memory card or two with my camera, and swap them around every now and then.

I recently took my son and one of his friends to Roar and Snore at Sydney’s Taronga Zoo for his birthday present. As a relatively fresh owner of a Nikon D40 digital SLR I saw this as an opportunity to give Mr 7 a birthday to remember, and my new camera a good work-out.

Roar and Snore is a chance to see nocturnal animals and the early morning feeding routine up close. There are very few people there other than you, the keepers and the security guards. You sleep overnight in tents pitched for your convenience in the zoo’s Education Centre area.

Our evening started at 6:30pm Sunday night with snacks and the chance to learn about and touch echidnas, pythons, shingleback lizards and wallabies. Many great, once-in-a-lifetime photographs of kids and animals were taken.

The next part of the evening we all went on a tour of the zoo with red torches to see the nocturnal activities of the animals. In this part of the tour flash photography is prohibited. I had prepared by bringing my tripod, a by-product of owning an Astroscan portable telescope (I hadn’t brought the telescope to the zoo).

In minimal lighting with a tripod I was able to take some quite clear photographs of elephants, anteaters, zebras, and tigers. Thankfully the night was overcast and there was a little ambient light, and the animals I was taking photos of were not moving around much. Non-SLR users marveled at my ability to get photos when their cameras were just refusing to operate without flash assistance. “I guess it must be the five second exposure with 1600 ISO,” I bluffed. Many once-in-a-lifetime photographs of animals were taken.

Near the end of the evening we stopped at a spot where there was a clear view of the Sydney CBD, taking in the Opera House and Harbour Bridge from Woolloomooloo to Kirribilli. There was a storm passing by to the South (or so I thought) so the city had a backdrop of impressive clouds and occasional lightning strikes. I took many once-in-a-lifetime photos of Sydney at night with an impressive thunderstorm as a backdrop.

We retired to the camping area, had cups of milk and tea, brushed teeth and went to bed in our tents. Then the most violent electrical storm for years hit Sydney, and us.

Thankfully the tents held out. The kids and I were kept up until about 2am by nature’s disco lightning and percussion solo. No roaring or snoring was evident.

We emerged from out tents at 6am to be treated to breakfast and photo-ops with very friendly hand-raised Koalas (you’re only allowed to hold a Koala if you’re an accredited animal handler).

“Quick! Take a photo of us with the Koala” said Mr 7.

“Memory card is corrupt, please insert a new card” responded my Nikon D40. Many once-in-a-lifetime photos were suddenly gone.

“Hmm,” I thought. I’ll swap out my 4 Gig card for the old 256 Meg card I always carry with me and diagnose the problem with the giant SD card later. Hmm… I don’t appear to be carrying my spare.

So I went through a morning of getting up close to giraffes, zebras, chimpanzees, zoo food preparation, tapirs, thai swimming cats, elephants and birds without being encumbered by a camera.

The SD card is officially dead and took all of my photos with it. A month earlier it had become corrupted in such a way that I had been able to get 99% of the images off it before reformatting it. I didn’t think it was anything more than a temporary glitch at the time.

Yesterday I was hunting through my wallet and my 256 Meg SD card fell out. It was with me all of the time I was at the zoo.

Oh well, it was enjoyable and memorable even without photos.

I recently purchased a shiny new Dell Precision 390 Workstation. I usually don’t buy name brand systems, but Dell’s price and their fancy quiet cooling system convinced me to acquire my first brand name computer since my Amiga 3000 was reborn as an Apple Powerbook 170.

I’m very happy with my Precision 390. It’s fast, quiet, cool and cheaper than any equivalent PC I could create from parts.

To beef up disk storage I decided to transplant one of my existing hard disks into it. Because mounting screws are sooo five minutes ago, the Precision’s hard disks are mounted in little plastic sleighs that slide into a cage on the bottom of the case where the air is fresh and cool. After sliding my additional drive into place and locating its power connector I discovered that the convenience of access came with a design compromise. To get the side of the case on again I had to use a rarely sighted SATA cable with a right-angle connector.

The next day I called Dell spare parts. I had forgotten to bring in my service tag number so they refused to deal with me for my own protection. I rummaged around the office and jotted down the service tag of a Dell Precision 380 workstation, which is practically the same case configuration. I called Dell for a quote on a cable with a right angle connector suitable for the Precision 380. The response was AU$24.05 delivered.

That’s not what I’d call a bad price, but it’s well into brand name exploitation range. I decided to defer my purchase decision and see if there were any local retailers with right angle SATA cable stocks. There weren’t.

Today I called Dell spare parts and this time I used the real service tag for my Precision 390. The woman I spoke to (I believe she was in Malaysia or Singapore) was very helpful and took note of my parts requirement offering to email me a quote when she had found the right part to save me time.

Five minutes later I received an email. She wasn’t sure if I needed the 400mm cable or the 700mm cable so she had sent a quote for both. Total price for both cables delivered was AU$4.40 — $1.10 for a 400mm cable, and $3.30 for 700mm. The material required to stretch a SATA cable over 400mm is obviously quite expensive.

I quickly wrote back that I would buy both and that she should call me for my credit card details. Five minutes later I had a call on my mobile phone that lasted more than four minutes. The call was extended because I joked that I wanted to increase my order to 1000 cables and my spare parts dealer took me seriously enough to talk me through the logistics of building an order for 1000 cables. It took a minute to explain that I was being ironic.

There is no way Dell is making any money out of this transaction. Are they buying my loyalty two SATA cables at a time?