Mike Salsbury's Blog

Earlier today, they were handing out ice cream at the office. One of my co-workers saw a "raspberry and chocolate" ice cream item and said something like, "Yuck! Raspberry and chocolate don't belong together." I agreed instantly, because I can't stand any dish that mixes fruit and chocolate, or fruit and meat. Before I start sounding like too picky of an eater, you can feed me almost anything if you manage to comply with the following rules:

• No wild animals. I've had them slip onto my plate at different times and I've never liked any of them. This differs from many of my family members, who enjoy deer, rabbit, goose, duck, pheasant, squirrel, etc.
• Don't mix my meat with fruit. That means no "apple chicken" or "lemon shrimp".
• Don't mix my chocolate with fruit.
• Don't feed me fish. Can't stand it. (That includes trout, catfish, perch, cod, etc., but does not include shrimp, scallops, lobster, or crab.)
• Don't offer me pork, unless it's bacon, sausage, or ham
• Don't offer me the entrails of any creature (I've even been known to pick off a sausage casing if it bugs me).
• No desserts that include cheese, except for the Indian dessert Rasmalai.
• No raisins in anything. Period. Not breakfast cereals, not cakes or cookies, nothing.

That's pretty much it. I'm willing to try almost any food from any ethnic group on the planet provided it fits in with the above list.

The following picture was taken from the car on the way to our hotel in Indianapolis, Indiana, this past Wednesday.  My brother and I were in Indy to take part in the Gen Con 2008 game convention.  We stayed at the University Place Hotel on the IUPUI campus, taking the shuttle (or a cab) into town to the convention center each day and back each evening.  We had a good time and were a little sad to leave because it means another year of "game conventioning" comes to a close...

Earlier this year, I planted pumpkin seeds in the back yard.  They're of a variety designed to generate mammoth pumpkins like you see on contests on TV.  I've been threatening my wife that I would grow a really big one in our back yard, so it was amusing to pass this vehicle on our way to the Gen Con Indy 2008 game convention:

When I first created this blog, I used an open source content management system named Mambo to hold all the articles. Mambo is a free package, reasonably easy to learn, and certainly powerful enough. However, I began to have issues with it on two of my other web sites and decided it was time to look at others. One of my co-workers told me about Movable Type, another free open source package, and I decided to give it a look.

As it turns out, Movable Type needed certain services (specifically, the use of Perl CGIs) that weren't part of my hosting account on any of the three sites I ran with Mambo. I upgraded to the "next level" of hosting, and gained an additional feature - the ability to point all of my domain names at a single account with my provider.

After giving Movable Type a try for a while, I decided to take the plunge and migrate all my sites over to it. The problem was, the two sites didn't have any common formats for exchanging my data. I had to fire up the old text editor and create my own. I wrote a simple PHP program to dump the articles, with a thought to doing some kind of copy/paste arrangement. When I figured out how long that was going to take me, I abandoned the idea. Instead, I decided to try to use the "Import" feature of Movable Type. I looked up the documentation online and create a sample article in the Movable Type editor. I exported that article to get a look at the file format. It looked pretty straightforward.

After studying the PHP code I had written and the Movable Type documentation, I created a PHP program to dump all the content from the old system into the Movable Type format in a text file on my PC. I fed the output into Movable Type and it claimed that everything imported successfully. Unfortunately, when I went to look at my content, there was nothing there.

Finally, I realized that Movable Type is primarily a Linux-based system. Text files on Windows and text files on Linux/UNIX have a different way of indicating the end of a line of text. Since my file was coming from a Windows PC going into a Linux system, the Linux system was having trouble interpreting where the lines of the file were indicated. I found a free program called "EOL Converter" that changed the file into Linux/UNIX format. I imported that, and Movable Type was much happier. This time it actually showed me the names of the articles it was importing. I thought that would be the end of it. I was wrong.

Unfortunately, when I looked at all those articles I'd imported into the system, everything was there except for the body text of the article (i.e., the part you're reading right now). I compared an article I'd exported from Movable Type earlier with one that I'd output from Mambo. Going over it line by line, space by space, I finally found a minor difference. At the beginning and end of the article body, you're supposed to have 4 dashes, to help Movable Type know where your article really ends. I apparently had a mix of 4 and 5 dashes in the output I generated from Mambo. I changed it to 4, per the documentation. That didn't work. I changed it to 5, and it did.

At this point I could import articles from the old system, but I realized that just pulling the HTML over wasn't enough. The old articles had references to graphics files that weren't on the new system. I had to do a huge "find and replace" job over the Mambo output to correct these broken graphic references. I also realized that the links to other articles on my site would be broken as well. That, I was going to have to handle manually because the old content system referenced articles by a number, while the new one uses names.

All told, I probably invested 20-30 hours getting the content from my old systems to the new one. The most visible thing I'll gain from this is a cost savings. I had been paying $4-7 a month to host each of my four sites, totaling around $20-24 a month. The new $6.99 a month account will host all four sites (and more), saving me $13-17 a month in hosting costs. I also gain some consistency, in that all my sites are hosted on a single server with a single content management system. That should make it more efficient to work with.

I've also gained another benefit. I wrote a Visual Basic 6 program that allows me to input articles like this one and output them in Movable Type input format in a text file. That text file can later be imported into Movable Type and the articles posted automatically for me. Using that program, I'll be able to blog anywhere I have a computer (it can run off a USB memory stick)... even if I don't have Internet access. Later, when I'm back online, I can just upload the file and the articles go online.

Well, I'm about to head off to the Gen Con Indy 2008 game convention in Indianapolis. You may, or may not, read more from me over the next few days. Rest assured there will be words and probably pictures when I get back!

Blackberry Cobbler

In less than an hour you can serve this very simple yet excellent dessert. (Serves 6)

4 - 6 cups fresh blackberries
Juice of one Lemon
1 large fresh egg
1 cup white all-purpose flour
1 cup white sugar
6 tablespoons butter

Preheat oven to 375F.

Place the fresh blackberries in a lightly greased 8 inch x 8 inch square baking pan. Sprinkle the lemon juice over top of the berries. In a separate bowl, stir together one large egg, one cup of sugar and one cup of flour, blend and stir mixture until the ingredients resemble coarse meal. Sprinkle the sugar/flour mix over the berries. Drizzle 6 tablespoons melted butter over the topping. Bake at 375F for about 35 minutes or until lightly browned and bubbly. Remove, and let stand 10 minutes. Serve hot with ice cream or whipped cream.

Garnish with fresh mint.

Those of you who can remember back to the days when Mike Myers was a regular on Saturday Night Live may remember him as I do, which is that his skits were either very funny or completely NOT funny. While I've found that opinions are mixed on whether his "Austin Powers" movies are funny or not, I enjoyed them and found them to be pretty funny on balance. I can't say the same for The Love Guru. It's really not funny at all.

Austin Powers used a lot of sophomoric humor that, while a little tired by the third movie, seemed to work. The same type of humor is used in The Love Guru, but it just doesn't work. For example, the joke in Austin Powers about him being "in a nutshell" is corny, but in the context of the movie it works. A similar joke in The Love Guru, where a dessert involving nuts placed inside a piece of pastry are described as "nuts in a sling" falls flat. It doesn't fit the situation in which it's used, and comes across as the writers stretching too far to make a joke.

Similarly, the character of Guru Pitka is inconsistent as well. After telling the hockey star he's supposedly helping that it's important for him not to fight anyone on the ice for any reason, a few minutes later he's giving exactly the opposite advice for no obvious reason. In fact, what I know of gurus tells me that in general they're against violence. For some reason, Guru Pitka starts bar fights, hockey ice fights, etc.

My guess is that someone gave Myers too much control over this film, and he delivered one of those performances that on SNL would have been the "not funny at all" variety.

If you liked Austin Powers, I think you'll be disappointed by this film.

I really enjoy the original "Get Smart" television series, and it's no wonder. There were some amazing acting and writing talents behind the episodes of that show. As Maxwell Smart, Don Adams played a perfect bumbling blowhard who somehow manages to save the day for CONTROL and defeat the agents of CHAOS. I'm not saying it was the ideal sitcom, but it was definitely funny and enjoyable to watch. I can't say that for the new "Get Smart" movie starring Steve Carrell. I'd like to, because Carrell's a nice guy and can be really funny, but I just can't.

I think the reason this movie fails is that it takes the elements that key to the television series and throws them out the window. For example, the "television" Smart might bend down to tie his shoe, causing an enemy agent to trip over Smart and fall off a cliff. The "movie" Smart in one scene uses a fire extinguisher to blind his victims and hits one in the head with the device. The "bumbling oaf" has become a clever and resourceful spy in the film. Unfortunately, this "reasonably poised, reasonably confident, capable agent" can't deliver the classic Maxwell Smart lines the same way, and when he tries, the result isn't humorous.

If you're thinking about plunking down some cash to see this movie, my advice is to save your money and go buy DVDs of the television series. Even at its worst, it was funnier than the movie.

On Bob and Tom today, comedian Drew Hastings compared his past girlfriends to Pringles. First, he said, they're mostly white. Second, they're slightly warped. And Third, it's hard to get them out of the can...

I make no claim to the following. It's a poem by comedian Paul Gilmartin. I heard it again on the Bob and Tom show recently and it cracked me up, so I thought I'd share it with you. If you enjoy it, check out the Bob and Tom site or Paul Gilmartin's site for more humor just like it...

 

A wild rabbit finds himself caught in a trap. The next day, he's pulled out of the trap and delivered to a research lab where he's stuck in a cage with another rabbit. Having tasted freedom, the wild rabbit doesn't want to spend the rest of his life cooped up in a cage being experimented on. He turns to the other rabbit and says, "Don't worry buddy, tonight we're going to bust out of here."

The other rabbit says, "Gee, I don't know. I've spent my whole life in the lab and I don't know how well I'd do out there in the wild."

The wild rabbit tells him, "Don't worry. I've lived in the wild all my life. I'll show you all the best fields."

That night, they manage to escape the cage and get out of the lab. The wild rabbit takes his new companion to a field full of tender lettuce and tells him, "This is the third best field in the world."

Then, they go to another field, where the wild rabbit says, "This is the second best field in the world." It's filled with delicious carrots. The two stuff their faces.

Finally, they arrive at what the wild rabbit says is "the best field in the world." This one is filled with lady rabbits. The two males spend the night doing what male and female rabbits do together.

Finally, exhausted, the lab rabbit turns to his wild cohort and says, "This has been really great, but I've got to go back to the lab."

"Why?" his new friend asks.

"After all we've done, I'm just dying for a cigarette!"

Before this starts to sound like I'm an alcoholic, keep in mind that this list is compiled over a period of many months, a beer or two at a time.  It's not as though I went to the store and bought a few cases, downed them all in a weekend, and wrote this...

Coors Light
Blue Moon (Draft only, the bottled version tastes different to me)
Samuel Smith's Tadcaster Oatmeal Stout
Stone Brewing Company's Arrogant Bastard Ale
Stone Brewing Company's Oaked Arrogant Bastard Ale
Stone Brewing Company's Double Bastard Ale
Leinenkugel's Sunset Wheat
Wittkerke Belgian Wheat Beer
Asahi

I'll add more as I find more beers I like.
 

I first discovered The Proclaimers when they released a 1990 single entitled "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" to some critical acclaim and Top 40 success (it was the #3 single in 1993).  Since then, I've tried to keep up with them and check out their albums as they're released.  While surfing Spiralfrog.com's library, I ran into the 2007 album "Life With You" and decided to give it a listen.

If you're not familiar with The Proclaimers, they're a Scottish rock band composed of two identical twin brothers, Charlie and Craig Reid.  Unlike some bands, their Scottish accents come through loud and clear in their music, as do their political views.  They support Scottish independence from Britain and are politically active in that regard.

One of the things I really like about The Proclaimers is their ability to turn a phrase.  Where some bands would take the cliched route in a love song and describe a woman in a red dress by comparing her to a rose or some other red object, The Proclaimers describe a pale woman in a red dress as looking like "blood lying on snow" (in the track of the same name).  While I celebrate this as an interesting turn of phrase, I have to wonder how a woman would react to being described as looking like blood on snow.  But this isn't the only unusual choice of words in the song.  Later, they say "It's taken generations of lucky breeding to make you" to the woman they're interested in. I'm not sure how many women would be swept off their feet by such phrases, but they are fun to listen to.

I found "Harness Pain" to be a very strong track.  The listener is told they must harness pain if they want to hold "the flame" and "tell the truth about love".  They're told that "when you try to succeed you mostly fail" but you harness the pain and become stronger.

"The Long Haul", "S-O-R-R-Y", and perhaps certain other tracks seem to take on the Iraq war and its supporters, saying "I miss the days when the threat to our position didn't come from some religion but from godless communism."  We're told "we're not barbarians like we were way back when, we've learned from history, so we get to go around again" and "tell your sons not to bother with football, get a backpack on and crawl, we're in this for the long haul".

In terms of music and performance, this is as good an album as any other from The Proclaimers.  However, in terms of its content, it's a far more politically charged piece than earlier albums like Sunshine on Leith.  

If you like The Proclaimers' unique sound and can stomach their political views (whether you agree with those views or not), you'll find this an enjoyable album and fair amount different from mainstream pop music.

I was born and raised in a small Ohio town called Portsmouth.  It's the kind of place that rarely makes the news.  Sadly, when it does, it's usually for something goofy like this...

 An Ohio historian removed an 8-ton rock from the Ohio River.  The rock is covered with a variety of carvings, dating to Portsmouth's early days, and perhaps even earlier than that.  That, in and of itself, hardly qualifies as news.

What does qualify as news is that politicians in Frankfort, Kentucky, are up in arms about it.  They're calling it a "raid", as though you could move 8 tons of rock out of a river in the middle of the night with no one noticing.  And as if there were no Kentuckians involved in the "raid".

The more ridiculous part of the story, crazier even than the fact that the politicians are up in arms over a rock, is that they're willing to fight over it in court.

It's a rock, guys.  Not only that, but you can pretty much see Frankfort from Portsmouth.  Can't you guys work something out without a court case?

How about on even-numbered years Ohio displays the rock in a public place of honor, and on odd-numbered years you have a big celebration as the rock is transferred to Kentucky for a display there.  You could turn this into a silly tradition that actually generates tourist traffic and revenue for the businesses on both sides of the river.  No need for a court case!

One of my machines at home runs Windows Vista Ultimate.  Until last night, it had an Asus Striker Extreme motherboard in it, a Core 2 Duo 6400 CPU, 2 GB of RAM, an Nvidia 8800 GTS video card, a PCI IDE card with four hard drives attached, a DVD/CD burner, USB mouse, PS/2 keyboard, dual 19" monitors, and 3 SATA hard drives.  In total it has over a terabyte of disk space.

I chose Vista both for the experience it would provide for work as well as the fact that when you have over about 700 GB of IDE/SATA disk space, Windows XP SP2 starts to exhibit data corruption problems due to some kind of static internal area where disk cache data is stored (I lost a ton of files before digging up an obscure KB article on that).  I spent hours trying to fix that issue and couldn't.  The only solution was a hotfix from Microsoft, which they would not give me because I was using an OEM copy of Windows XP Pro.  They wanted me to go back to where I bought the OEM license, which was Newegg.com, which doesn't offer tech support like that.  So I was stuck.  When I went to Vista, I went with a retail license in case it had the same problem.

Unfortunately for me, over a year later, that Asus motherboard decided to give up the ghost.  It apparently killed a DIMM, which I replaced.  Then it pretty much just died entirely, randomly rebooting and crashing even when just sitting at a BIOS screen.  I decided it was time for a (less-expensive) replacement.  I bought an MSI P35 Platinum and 2GB of matching RAM.  Everything else from the old setup would work with this.

Last night, I received the new parts.  I removed the old motherboard and RAM, installed the new ones, connected everything back up, and fired up the system.  It came to life, then immediately choked with a "BOOTLDR is missing" error.  A bit of troubleshooting revealed what I was afraid of. In the install, Vista decided to put the bootloader on one disk, and the rest of Vista on another.  If you reassemble things such that the bootloader disk is in a different location, the machine won't boot.  I booted from the Vista disc and did a repair.  I rebooted again and got the same error.  Another repair later, the system came up and landed at the login screen.  I logged in and found I had no mouse.

Apparently, the new motherboard uses a slightly newer variety of USB2 ports than the old one did, so there were no drivers on the machine or in Vista itself.  I popped in the manufacturer's CD to load the drivers.  Guess what?  The installer was designed to be clicked on, and there were no keyboard shortcuts available!  With no USB ports, I had no mouse and I had no PS/2 mice in the house to substitute.

Those of you who are computer geeks may be familiar with the concept of recursion already. Those of you who don't recognize the term may need some background. Recursion, in computer programming terms, is a concept where a program repeatedly calls itself to complete a task. Imagine that you were programming a robot to open up one of those little Russian nested dolls. Using recursion, your program might look like this:

Function OpenTheDoll()
Remove the lid from the doll
Remove the smaller doll from inside the larger doll
Put the lid back on the larger doll.
If the smaller doll can be opened, OpenTheDoll(smaller doll)
Otherwise, stop.

Thus, on the first time through, our imaginary program will open up the outermost doll, remove the smaller doll from it, put the lid back on the larger doll, then call itself to open the smaller doll. When it calls itself, it opens the smaller doll, removes the "even smaller" doll, closes up the original doll, and tries to open the "even smaller doll" and so on until all the dolls are opened.

A function like the one above could open a nested doll whether it had only one smaller doll inside it or a million, since it will keep calling itself as many times as it has to in order to get to the point where the doll can no longer be opened.

Now that you hopefully understand the concept, let's apply that idea to dreaming, with a real-world example. Last night I had a dream that my wife woke me up to tell me it was time to get ready for work. In that dream, I fell asleep and had a dream. Thus, this last dream was "recursive" in that I was "dreaming that I was dreaming"... I can't begin to tell you how confused my brain was when I woke up from two levels of dreams. It took several seconds for "reality" (whatever that is) to sink in.

Because I run a game news site, I use Google Alerts to scan the Internet for gaming news and deliver me a list of potential articles by email each day.  Today's list of potential material included the following listing (modified slightly to fit this site's format) about a new Nintendo Wii (pronounced "wee") game that cracked me up.  When I read Google's excerpt from the article, it just got funnier:

If you don't get the joke, read this site's entry for the word "wee" (which sounds like Wii).

Then consider the site's definition for "whack off".

Then put the two things together...

Then read the article excerpt for an added laugh, talking about allowing the player to have an artificial sensation based on arm and hand movement...

The laptop experiment continues.

I realize that earlier I didn't explain why this laptop is going to be running Linux. I looked for a system capable of running Mac OS X 10.3 and there weren't any on eBay, even some that needed work, in the under-$100 range I was aiming for. Otherwise, I would have considered picking up a Mac so that I could continue to find Mac-related topics to write about here, since I'm doing less Mac work at the office now. (However, if you have such a laptop lying around that you'd like to give me, by all means feel free to so. My email address appears in the "Contact" section on this site. Let me know you want to send me a Mac laptop and I'll give you the address to send it to. If it's one of the Intel models, I'll even refund your shipping via PayPal.)

I could have considered running the "Hackintosh" (i.e., hacked OS X) environment on a non-Apple laptop, but that would have meant not only breaking the law (which I wasn't about to do) but also acquiring a system with at least a Pentium 4 CPU (to have SSE2 and/or SSE3 instruction sets needed by OS X). The only laptops in that performance range on eBay when I looked were well outside my $100 budget constraint.

In fact, the only laptops within my budget constraint were Pentium III and below. In the Pentium III category I found several in my price range, including the one I eventually purchased. It had 128MB of RAM, a 10GB hard drive, no battery, no CD-ROM or DVD drive, no AC adapter, no carrying case, and no operating system or operating system sticker on the bottom. Fortunately, I had a couple of used batteries that were compatible in my basement from when I used to repair Dell laptops on the side. I also had a "universal" laptop power adapter that could power the unit. I even found a 64MB SODIMM to boost it to 192MB of RAM. I also had a PCMCIA wireless card I picked up a couple of years ago, made by Hawking. Amazingly, it all worked smoothly together and I was able to cobble together a dual-battery wireless system with only $46 out of pocket.

The only thing missing at this point was an OS. I think I still had a Windows 98 license around somewhere, but I didn't have a legal license to Windows 2000 or Windows XP, so I couldn't load those on the machine. Windows 98 is no longer supported by Microsoft and isn't such a great OS for random wireless browsing anyway. That left options like ReactOS (which is a Windows clone that isn't quite yet ready for primetime, but getting there), BeOS, Linux, and the like. Linux has the best hardware and software support of all those, so I opted for Linux. The next question was which Linux "distro" (distribution) to get. I already had CDs/DVDs for Red Hat Fedora Core, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Linspire, Debian, Gentoo, and 1-2 others I'd made for past experiments around the house. I ended up trying several of them. Ubuntu would boot into Live CD mode file, but the CD-ROM drive just ground and ground on the copies I had. Eventually I gave up because I would click an install option and have to wait an hour to see the result. For whatever reason (and I admit that it makes little or no sense to me), Kubuntu 6 worked and Ubuntu 7.04 didn't. So I chose Kubuntu because my copy of that distro's disk happened to be the one that worked.

Now that my eBay Special was up and running with the latest Kubuntu release, I was ready to start actually trying to use it. I was able to connect it to a nearby WiFi network successfully after loading it with Kubuntu, a Ubuntu Linux variant. While connected to the WiFi network, I upgraded it to the latest Kubuntu release (7.04 - though a newer one is about to come out) using instructions I found online. At that point, I was ready to begin loading it with applications, and I have to tell you it was easier than than either OS X or Windows would have been... by far!

To get the apps I knew I wanted loaded on the machine, I launched the Adept Installer, selected those applications from a list, and clicked "Apply Updates". Kubuntu obediently downloaded the applications and their dependencies, and installed them for me, all from that single click. Within minutes, I had FireFox, Scribus, Inkscape, and all the other applications I planned to use on the machine running for me. It was very slick and very impressive. And the apps all seem to work.

I loaded FireFox with some of my favorite extensions, including NoScript, AdBlock, Extended Copy Menu, DownThemAll and a few others. I populated it with bookmarks to all my sites (like this one) and some of my personal favorites like woot.com.

To make it completely usable for all my web work, however, I would need to find a Linux replacement for a tool I use to monitor game manufacturers' web sites for my game news site, gamerhotsheet.com. The tool I had been using up to this point was written for Windows using one of the Microsoft visual development tools, so it would not run as such on Linux (at least without WINE, which I would consider if I couldn't find a good alternative).

I've also decided that the 128MB of memory (plus another 64MB SODIMM I had lying around) wasn't going to be enough to keep this system running at peak efficiency. In fact, it seemed to be a bit sluggish already. I found some 256MB SODIMMs on eBay going at below $20 each and bid on those. If I get them, I'll be able to max the system at 512MB. That should help performance.

I've also decided that since this machine might be banging around in the car a lot, it might be good to ruggedize the data storage. Toward that end, I found a CompactFlash to 2.5" IDE adapter online and bought one. I'm hoping later to pick up a good-sized, fast CF card to place in it, then replace the old internal IDE drive with the adapter and CF card. That should minimize the potential for shock damage, at least to the data. To protect the screen, I ought to be able to find a decent-sized sleeve to put it in when I'm not using it, maybe something made out of thick neoprene.

To this point, I've spent $46 for the laptop, including shipping. If I can get the SODIMMs cheaply, I should be able to go to 512MB for $40-50, keeping inside my $100 budget. However, to implement the CF-to-IDE idea, I'm going to have to go over budget. The adapter was only $16. The CF card, though, could be a lot more - especially if I choose something like a 16GB Ultra III, which is perhaps the right thing to do. First, I want to test the adapter with one of my existing CF cards to see what the speed is like. If the adapter with an Ultra II flash card performs reasonably well, then it's worth investing in the bigger card. If it is too slow to be usable, then I can abandon the adapter and look at other options (like a decent backup or a spare drive).

I should point out that I am still waiting for word back from Dell on the master BIOS password to the unit so that I can fix some of the errant settings in the machine, such as date/time information and boot order.

Earlier this year, in my work as a system administrator, I was assigned to investigate why approximately 40 co-workers (out of 1700 using a PC or Mac) were having USB optical mouse issues. The symptoms were generally the same. While using the computer, the user's USB optical mouse would simply stop working. If they flipped the mouse over, it was as though the mouse was powered off. The laser would appear to have shut off. If they unplugged and re-plugged the mouse, it would nearly always come back to life. Only once in a while was it necessary to reboot the machine. Once in a great while, the USB keyboard would stop working as well. Again, unplugging and re-plugging seemed to fix it.

When I went through my first round of problems early in the year, a lengthy investigation proved that all of my 40 cases could be solved by performing the following steps:

1. Update the system BIOS from the manufacturer's web site. Sometimes this corrected the issue and no more work was needed.
2. Update the motherboard chipset drivers from the manufacturer's web site. Sometimes this corrected the issue and no more work was needed.
3. Update the mouse drivers from the mouse manufacturer's web site. Again, sometimes this corrected the issue and no more work was needed.
4. Replace the mouse with another mouse from stock.
5. Replace the keyboard with another keyboard from stock.
6. Install a self-powered USB hub between the computer and the mouse/keyboard.

The above 6 remedies seemed to take care of all 40 users.

Then, about 3 weeks ago, the problem reared its ugly head again. This time, the above 6 steps didn't work. People who were run through all 6 of them still had the problem. Our help desk bumped the problem back to me to resolve, since I'd handled the one earlier in the year.
This time I went through a pretty thorough search on the web, Microsoft's knowledgebase, Dell's knowledgebase, etc. What I learned was interesting. When I searched for mouse failures as a whole, probably 99% of the time it was an optical mouse that failed. Moreover, it was almost always a USB optical mouse that failed. This was true on Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, and one or two other lesser-known operating systems. The brand of mouse didn't seem to matter, either. I read about the problem existing with every major brand and even some generic types. It made me wonder about the reliability of USB optical mice.

As a troubleshooting step, I suggested that we identify 1-2 of our users who were having the most "mouse failures". We swapped them with some new mechanical (i.e., old "ball style") mice from stock. The problems vanished for those users. As a follow-up step, I attacked the users' former optical mice to my system. Sure enough, I began seeing the problem myself.

An interesting observation occurred when we had one user who wanted to attach both an older mechanical mouse and an optical mouse to his Windows XP Pro system at the same time. He found that his optical mouse would fail, while the mechanical one kept working normally. (And again, when I swapped his optical mouse for mine, I began to see the problem myself.)

Another interesting observation was made after we installed Microsoft Windows XP Hotfix 914015 and 918365 on the affected systems. Occasionally the mouse would stop working as before, but within a couple of seconds it tended to come back to life on its own without any effort. (Please do not ask me for these hotfixes. If Microsoft won't provide them to you, I can't help as it would be illegal to do so.)

So it appears to me at the moment that we may have two separate issues here. The first issue is that there is a bug in the Windows XP Pro USB stack that causes a mouse to go offline if it asks to have the USB controller reset due to an error. The Microsoft hotfix takes care of that. The other issue is that we seem to have quite a few defective USB mice on-hand. In fact, I pulled one randomly out of stock and tested it, and it turned out to be defective. I confirmed this by attaching it to a Mac OS X system (in addition to a Windows XP system) and finding the same result, the mouse quit working.

I have a suspicion that the reliability of USB optical mice is not as high as we all might think. Just gauging from the numbers I'm seeing at our site, as many as 3% of the optical mice in use are in fact defective. Whether this is just the failure rate we should expect or whether it's symptomatic of a widespread defect in USB optical mice, I don't know.

In any case, it's caused me to add a few items to the above list of 6 steps:

7. Apply Microsoft Hotfix 914015 (if it's a Windows XP system).
8. Apply Microsoft Hotfix 918365 (if it's a Windows XP system).
9. Test the user's mouse on a system that isn't currently experiencing the mouse issue and give the user a mouse that hasn't been shown so far to have the problem.
10. Swap the optical mouse with a mechanical (roller ball type) mouse.
11. If the system and mouse support it, try installing the mouse on a PS/2 port instead of USB. We didn't see these issues with PS/2 mice on any platform.

Those steps, so far, seem to eliminate the problem in all cases. Perhaps they'll help you if you're experiencing a problem with your USB mouse.

Given that WiFi seems to be proliferating throughout the areas where I live, work, and vacation, I thought it might be nice to have a laptop I could keep in the car with me and pull out whenever I happened to be stuck somewhere bored and do some blogging, writing, or whatever. My requirements for the system would be the following:

Total expenditure: $100 or less. That way, if someone breaks in the car and steals it or I smash it in some way, I'm not going to be too devastated since I will hopefully have gotten my $100 worth out of it.

Technology: Needs to be WiFi capable. Needs to be able to run something "reasonably current" in terms of operating system (e.g., Windows 2000, Mac OS X 10.3 or later, Linux 6.x kernel). Needs enough storage to hold a basic set of applications, including but not necessarily limited to the OS, an Office Suite (probably OpenOffice.org), web browser(s), GIMP, and other apps useful to me in blogging and writing.

I began searching eBay for used laptops. The ones listed as being in actual working order were all close to $200 when they sold. That was way out of the budget for this little experiment. Eventually, I settled on a Fujitsu LifeBook S-4546 that was listed without a hard drive or power adapter for about $40. I managed to win the auction and receive the laptop. Unfortunately, it's either dead or I haven't found the right power supply for it. I put it aside when I found that it also was missing a hard drive interface cable.

I searched eBay again, and managed to get a Dell Inspiron 3800 for around $50 shipped. Like the Fujitsu, it was missing an optical drive, battery, and AC adapter.. However, unlike the Fujitsu, it happened to use parts I had on hand from an old Dell Latitude CPxJ 750GT that I once used. I slapped a battery and DVD-ROM drive into it. Unfortunately, some idiot left an admin password in the BIOS and I couldn't convince it to boot from an operating system CD.

Since I work with Dells a lot, I know that they have a "master BIOS password" that can be used to unlock a system if you forget the password you (or someone else) has set. To get that password, however, you have to be able to prove ownership and possession of the laptop. I started a chat session with a Dell tech and managed to convince them to have someone look the password up for the system. Unfortunately, the techs who did that particular task were gone for the day.

The next day, I chatted with another Dell tech. They went to get the password for me, but found that their internal communication system was down and they couldn't reach the appropriate person(s).

Later in the same day, I chatted with another tech, who told me that they were having internal communication issues and she couldn't get the password either.

In the chat log she sent me, there was a reference to an address I could email to get help if the chat system wasn't doing it for me. I compiled all the information Dell's technicians had previously asked me into simple paragraph and emailed it to that address last Friday. It's late on Monday and no response yet.

In the meantime, I borrowed a Dell Latitude CP laptop (which is very similar to the Inspiron) and swapped hard drives with the Inspiron. I planned to load Ubuntu 7.04. Unfortunately, something about Ubuntu 7.04 just didn't get along with that laptop. It literally took 5-10 minutes to boot (from multiple copies of the CD). I then tried Linux Desktop XP 2006, which worked fine but I decided I didn't like. I then tried the new Vixta.org distribution, which loaded fine and looked great, but wouldn't install for some reason (even though the system met the specs). I pulled out an old Ubuntu 6 CD and booted from that. It installed without a hitch. I put the drive back in the Inspiron and it was once again functional as a laptop.

Ubuntu had appropriate video drivers, keyboard drivers, mouse drivers, sound drivers, etc. Everything seemed to be working properly when I went to bed last night.

The next step will be to plug a Dell wireless card I have into the machine and see if I can make it "speak WiFi". If so, I'll move on to working with the software configuration on the machine.

Consider this a "cautionary tale" about rental cars... Names are being altered to protect the innocent and not-so-innocent...

Earlier this year, my wife and I rented a mini-van from an outfit we'll call "Nifty Rent-A-Car" (though that's not their name). We picked up the vehicle at a nearby Nifty rental office and headed off for a vacation. The next day, at our destination, we were rear-ended by a young driver. He was going so fast in the 35 mph zone that he knocked our stopped mini-van into the vehicle in front of us, knocking that vehicle into the car in front of it, and spinning his own vehicle two lanes over and in front of the three others. In other words, it's unlikely he was going anywhere near 35 when he hit us.

The damage to the back of our rental van and his vehicle was extensive. The rental van and the two other cards were drivable. His car had to be towed. We were all shaken, but fortunately there appear to have been no serious injuries... at least nothing that has shown up yet.

After getting the police report, having breakfast, and going back to our rented condo, we called the rental car company to tell them about the accident, provide police report information, etc. We also contacted my insurance company to have their involvement. The insurance company, which I'll call "Commonwealth Ranch" (though that's not their name), treated me extremely well. They spoke with me at length about the accident, explained what I needed to do at each step of the process, etc. I have always been pleased with that insurance company and this didn't change that.

Nifty Rent-A-Car wasn't quite so easy to deal with. We left messages, called various numbers, and asked to have the car swapped with another since the tailgate in this one was no longer usable. After several very frustrating calls, we were given two options. One was to continue driving the van, but if Nifty's people spotted it and decided that it was in their opinion "disabled" they would tow it away and we wouldn't have one. The other was to drive 3-4 hours away to their nearest location and exchange it. Since I was on vacation, the last thing I wanted was 6-8 hours in the damaged van doing nothing else, after having had an 10 hour drive to get to the vacation destination. So I opted for option one and made the mental note never to rent from Nifty ever again.

The next day, someone else at Nifty got one of the messages we left on their voicemail. This person must have been having a better day. He not only volunteered to replace the car, but offered to send someone to us to pick up the damaged one. It was a total 180-degree turnaround from the earlier frustrating calls. (Can you say bi-polar company?) The driver showed up when he promised he would, with a van that was comparable to the one we had originally, though not in quite as good a shape. But hey, it was an improvement and it wasn't wrecked, so that was fine with me. We swapped vehicles, I filled out some paperwork, and we finished our vacation.

When we returned home, we received a call from Countrywide Insurance (not their name) saying that they were accepting fault for the accident and would cover the costs of the claim. "Good," I thought, "that will be the end of that."

It wasn't. Last week I received a letter from Nifty, telling me that the insurance companies had paid all they were planning to pay and that I still owed them $5200+ for repairs to their vehicle. If I "agreed" all I needed to do was give them a credit card number or check. That didn't sit well with me. It didn't sound right.

I called Commonwealth Ranch (my insurance company) and checked in with my claim adjuster there. She looked up the records and said that the insurance companies were disputing Nifty's claim that $4800 worth of damage was done to the van. She told me that they're aware that car rental companies negotiate repair parts and labor discounts with body shops, and that while it might have cost you or me $4800 to repair the damage done to the van, Nifty probably paid a bit less. She said they'd asked Nifty to provide an invoice showing the "actual" amount of damages to the vehicle, but Nifty had not provided one, so they naturally had no paid.

She also told me that some car rental companies, and apparently Nifty was one of them, would try to get the customer to pay money if they didn't like how fast the insurance companies were or weren't moving. Essentially, if I had paid the $5200 Nifty was asking for, I was paying for the repair, their "loss of use" of the rental car, and various other fees, which were the responsibility of Countrywide Insurance. Countrywide had by no means told Nifty they wouldn't pay what they owed them, they just wanted proof that Nifty had paid that much to fix the car. As soon as they provided that proof, they'd get their money. So the request they sent to me was essentially an attempt to scare me into paying for the damage in lieu of the person who caused the accident and their insurance company.

Uh, no, Nifty... I wasn't at fault for the accident, my insurance isn't finished with you, and the driver who was at fault has insurance which hasn't paid you yet. When you've gotten what you can from the insurance companies and the other driver, we'll talk about what I might owe you - but I think that will be a big fat zero.

It should come as no secret or surprise to you that the Chinese are not known for having great respect for intellectual property laws. For years, they've flooded the world with bootleg music CDs, video games, DVDs, etc. They've also cloned popular pieces of high-tech gadgetry, such as the iPod. Korea and Japan were known for doing the same thing in prior decades. However, Korea and Japan were chased down by American (and other) intellectual property attorneys and eventually stopped (or at least radically decreasde) their efforts to pirate high tech inventions. In fact, they soon developed the expertise to develop and improve on those inventions, doing our own inventors one better in many cases.

There is a great deal of effort being poured into stopping the flood of illegal Chinese copies into the rest of the world. That pressure will inevitably give the pirates pause, and cause them to consider producing truly innovative goods as the Japanese and Koreans did before them. With China's abundant human and natural resources, they'll have the ability to crank out their goods more cheaply and in more quantity than perhaps any nation on Earth.

That's what I mean when I say that American industry could be shooting itself in the foot. By chasing down the Chinese outfits that are reverse engineering and cloning products like the Apple iPod and iPhone, they are in fact pushing the Chinese to develop their own technological expertise and design know-how. There is evidence, in fact, that this may already be happening.

Consider the Meizu miniOne, a phone patterned after the Apple iPhone. It's not a knock-off, per se. It doesn't run OS X, but Linux (or Windows CE according to some reports). It doesn't pretend to be an Apple product. Its specifications are impressive. The screen is 3.32 inches versus Apple's 3.5. Its resolution is 720x480 (standard DVD resolution) versus Apple's 320x480 (VHS resolution). The miniOne will be offered in 4, 8, and 16GB sizes. It will feature a 3 megapixel camera versus Apple's 2 megapixel camera. It will be the same thickness as the iPhone, but shorter and narrower. It doesn't use the potentially problematic MultiTouch display but a standard touchscreen.

Why is the miniOne significant? Consider several key points about it. First, it isn't just a feature-by-feature clone of Apple's iPhone. It's actually a different technology, utilizing design concepts inspired by the iPhone. But it also goes the iPhone one better. It will include a user-removable battery and a variety of functions the iPhone doesn't offer, such as the ability to work on any wireless carrier's network. Since I haven't gotten to play with an iPhone or a miniOne, I can't offer more of a comparison than the links I've provided above, but I can tell you that given the choice between a miniOne and an iPhone, I'd rather have the miniOne hands down. Regardless of whether it's based on Linux or Windows Mobile, I'll have much better odds finding and installing any apps I want on the miniOne.

If the Chinese can continue to innovate in this way, they won't need to be "cloning" our products in the near future. We'll want them because they're actually better...

A couple of months back, Woot.com offered the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet for around $135. I was looking for a portable device that would allow me to browse the Internet via WiFi networks, check my email, etc. It seemed to be a perfect fit. This device was definitely pocket-sized, ran a "real" OS (Linux), offered a true web browser, and a decent-sized display.
I received the tablet a few days later and was quite impressed. It took me maybe 5 minutes to get used to the user interface, and another 15 or so to have it visiting my favorite web sites, checking my email, etc., over my WPA-based connection at home. Because it's a Linux-based device, there are plenty of third parties willing to create software for it and port existing tools over to it, so I found several useful software gadgets within a few hours and had them all installed and running.

My only real complaints with the device were that the on-screen keyboard was a pain to work with using the stylus, and that it seemed a bit slow if several things were running. Battery life was pretty good, the display was bright and clear, and it generally did everything I needed it to otherwise.

Unfortunately, after handing it to my brother to use for a while back in July, something went haywire with the display and it became unreadable. I need to send it back to Nokia for repair but I've not done it yet.

In the meantime, I've learned about the Nokia Internet Tablet N800 which is the next-generation version of the device I already had. The N800 seems to have resolved every problem I had with the 770 and improved on the features I liked.

Like the 770, the N800 is Linux-based. It connects to WiFi networks, or cell phone data networks via BlueTooth. It has an integrated webcam, a 4.1" touchscreen display, a full-screen keyboard (instead of the little mini-keyboard), and two memory card slots for expansion via SD/MMC/miniSD/microSD. The display resolution is 800x480x65k colors.

I placed my order for the N800 today from Amazon.com, and should have it within 48 hours. I hope to write a full review after it arrives and I've had some time to fiddle around with it.

(Note: This article contains medical and other information which should be taken for illustrative purposes only. You should always seek the advice of a competent medical professional if you suspect you have any sort of illness.)

I was diagnosed with sleep apnea several years ago. Sleep apnea, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is a condition where your airways relax as you sleep and close off. When they close too much, you aren't getting enough oxygen into your body and you wake up, causing the airways to open back up. A person with sleep apnea will be pulled out of "restorative" sleep many times in a single hour. They wake up exhausted, go through their days tired, tend to be depressed, and have other problems like high blood pressure. It's not a great way to live.

I spent several nights having various readings taken of me sleeping at night, during the daytime, with a CPAP machine at various settings, etc. When it was all said and done, my neurologist prescribed a CPAP machine as a solution.

For those of you who don't know what a CPAP machine is, it's essentially a big air compressor that pushes air out at a specific level of pressure, into a tube which is connected to a face mask, which is connected to a harness of sorts, and is strapped to the patient's head while the patient sleeps. The theory behing the CPAP is that by pushing air through the person's airways at a continuous pressure as they sleep, you will keep their airways from closing shut while they sleep.

Some patients see the CPAP machine as a godsend. They feel better, wake up refreshed, and in general are thrilled with the device. As for me, it was not a godsend. I felt no better on the device than off. Worse, I couldn't sleep in positions I felt comfortable in because they would dislodge the face mask. When that happened, it blew air into my eyes, which made them burn and dry out. The mask itself, if not washed every day, made my face break out. Then there was the fact that you had to keep distilled water around for the device's humidifier, and wash the whole thing once a week. For me, these added troubles were more than whatever benefit I might have been getting from the device.

After around 3 solid months of faithfully using the device, keeping it on all night, etc., I felt no better. Not a bit. In fact, because I'd had to sleep in positions I wasn't comfortable in and deal with the mask, I now had backaches and facial acne that I didn't before. I asked my doctor if there wasn't some other solution. He referred me to an ENT (Ear, Nose, Throat) surgeon.

The surgeon felt I was a good candidate for surgery, and I was fortunate that my insurance covered it. I underwent the surgery and resulting pain, and for a while things were much better. That might have been the end of the story if I hadn't gained about 40 pounds and, it seems, negated the effect of the surgery. I was back to snoring and apnea again. They (my neurologist and general practitioner) wanted me back on the CPAP. I told them, quite honestly, that if the CPAP added 20 years to my life, the hassles it brought with it weren't worth the 20 years.

I've tried different masks, and in fact have on order an expensive mask that claims to be more tolerable than any other. We'll see about that. I'm not optimistic. (And no, in the meantime, I refuse to use the darned thing.)

I read earlier today that a group of researchers, concerned about how many people (like me) give up on the annoying CPAP device, is working on a different device. Unfortunately, it's more of the same. This one inserts a single tube into the patient's nose and uses airway pressure along with extra oxygen. They claim it will have better compliance than CPAP. Maybe.

To me, with an engineering mindset, CPAP and other air pressure machines are not fixing the problem, but the symptom. It's like solving a leaky tire by hooking up a battery powered air pump to the wheel. Sure, the tire's not going to go flat, but it's still a leaky tire. You're going to have to replace that battery, keep the pump maintained, etc. The oxygen machine is like adding a little fix-a-flat in with the air pump. Still, there's a hole in that tire that needs repaired.

What amazes me is that no one seems to be thinking of THIS solution... If you have a blocked artery or vein, doctors will insert a device called a "stent" into the artery to prop it open and allow blood to flow through. They don't insert miniature pumps to push more blood through the blocked area, or give you drugs to make your heart pump harder. They fix the blockage. Sleep apnea is essentially the same thing. It's an airway that becomes blocked.

Why not a surgical implant, or implants, which can be inserted into a patient's airways to make them stay open? No worries about patient compliance because the appliances are installed by a surgeon and don't come out. No issues (probably) with the patient (like me) gaining weight because the devices prop the airway open. The solution should be permanent (unlike a CPAP, that wears out eventually), fixes the problem (closing up of airways) rather than the symptom, and should have all the same health benefits. I confident that we have materials from which such supports could be made, which aren't rejected by the body and which are durable enough to last a lifetime (or at least a few decades). I'd jump at the chance to be in the trial group for such an appliance. I suspect many current and former CPAP users would, too.

What about it, medical researchers?

Since last week, we've adopted two new family members, in the form of two Bengal kittens named Londo and Tigger Woods.  Londo, Tigger Woods, and our original Bengal, Bogey, all have the same father in spite of their different physical appearances.  This brings the total number of cats in our household to 4, to the chagrin of the human children in the house.

Our "oldest" cat, Sox, seems to be taking the situation pretty well.  He hisses if any of the new guys get near him, but otherwise isn't bothered by them:

Bogey, the youngest cat of the four, but with us the next-longest after Sox, is still adjusting:

Londo's color is described as "flame tip" and is somewhat rare for a Bengal.  (The reason there are more pictures of Londo than the others is that he happened to be playing in front of me while I was fiddling with the digital camera and the others weren't.  And BTW, his eyes are actually light blue, not "demonic red".)  Londo's name comes from a character on the Babylon 5 TV series.

Tigger Woods (below) is several colors of orange all swirled together (his eyes are green, not evil green glowing).  I'm not sure what his coloring is called, but it's said to be the rarest of the three we have.

I'll probably be posting some more/better pictures once I get a chance.