I got 3.5 hours of sleep last night. Now I am really tired. When I woke up the first thing I did was wake my computer from sleep, and hit refresh in my browser window. Safari was open to this page. Based on the fact that there were 4 more pages of comments I assumed the Motorola V600 has been released, so I (without getting out of bed, or really rolling over for that matter) picked up my phone and dialed AT&T NBO, and ordered a new phone. It turns out that my company FAN account gives a very good discount, so the phone was pretty reasonably priced, though I would not say it was cheap. It should be here tomorrow.
Between laptop computers, wireless internet, and cordless phones it is apparently possible to buy high tech gadgetry without even lifting ones head off the pillow. I feel like I should have an opinion about that, but mostly I am just tired.
About a year and a half ago I read a draft of a book. It was Like the Red Panda by Andrea Seigel. Once I started reading it I couldn't put it down. The next day Geoff and I had lunch with Andrea at Red Lobster. I told Andrea that I found the book uplifting and happy. She said that was how she felt about it as well, but most people disagreed. The she asked if I was making fun of her ;-)
Anyway, I have been waiting for it to come out, because I have recommend it to several friends. It was supposed to come out in April, but it apparently was released early. I highly recommend it. In fact, if I need to give someone a gift this is likely what they are getting. I have bunch of copies on the way from Amazon. If you want to read it and I owe you a gift (forgotten birthday, whatever) stop by my office sometime after next week and I will give you a copy.
A few months ago I bought a new universal remote control from Harmony, and it is absolutely the best remote control I have ever used. I bought the SST-659, which from a physical standpoint is their best remote, though the SST-768 is more tweakable. All the extra tweaking stuff is purely software differences though, and if I really wanted to tweak it I am sure I could fiddle with the firmware, but thats not the point.
These guys did some really novel things with a remote. First off, they determined that people do not control a component, they perform an activity. So instead of selecting the DVD player to control playback, and then switching the remote to stereo receiver to fiddle with the sound, it knows that during my DVD playback activity that the sound buttons need to send signals to the stereo receiver, and the other buttons have to send things to the DVD player.
They also have a remarkably sophisticated state engine. High end AV gear uses what are known as discrete codes. In other words, there is a separate infrared signal for "On" and for "Off" . Lower end gear is simpler, it just sends a "Toggle" signal which changes it. The problem with that is that in order to switch it to a fixed setting you need to know what the current settings are. This is especially bad when switching video inputs. The harmony remote understands all these states, and it keeps a state table inside of itself, so that even if you do not have discrete codes it can make all the transitions seamlessly.
Finally the absolute best thing about it is how it is programmed. Instead of some arcane manual or being a standard learning remote, it is programmed online. You go to their website and select your peripherals from their database. It automatically builds activity profiles and all the state information for you. Then you download it to your remote via USB. If you have a device it has never seen you can simply plug record the events and their uploaded into the online DB for everyone else. It had my TV, DVD player, VCR, and stereo receiver in the online DB, as well as several highend AV switches (Zektor) I have been looking at buying. Its so much eaiser to configure than any other remote I have dealt with and way more flexible. A bit pricey, but definitely worth it.
I have had this on going issue. I run my own mail server on a Redhat 9.0 Linux box. Redhat uses UW imap. By default UW uses flat sequential files for storing messages. What that means that in order to download the new messages in a mailbox the server has to read through the whole mailbox in order to get to them. For a 30 meg mailbox that takes around 10 seconds, since my server is a blade and therefore is using a slow 2.5 inch hard drive.
The conventional solution that is given for this problem is to move to Cyrus imap. The problem for me is that the migration path is not pleasant, and building it on my system was also not entirely fun. Once I got the thing built I was not entirely sure I could migrate everything in a satisfactory manner. So I went looking for other options, and I found one
It turns out UW imap supports several formats, and they recommend a binary file format that includes some indexing and tables, and results in much higher performance. Redhat does not use it. Now this where the trouble starts. UW has a set of migration tools, and a local mailer that supports their format so that you can deliver mail in the new format through sendmail. Except Redhat does not include any of those binaries. It turns out they are part of the UW imap-utils release.
So I go to see if Redhat has a package, and I find this bug. So I decide what the heck, I will build it. UW imap-utils has this kind of incestuous build process where it needs to use static intermediary objects and headers built as part of the UW imap build. Which means I have to build a copy of UW imap. Its build process is pretty much a circa '92 style multiplatform Makefile, but not to bad. I build it, I turn off sendmail, a convert everything, I change my local mailer in my sendmail.mc, I rebuild my sendmail.cf, I start the server back up, and everything works, a whole lot faster. Sure cyrus would have netted me a slightly higher performance server, but given the fact that my server only vends imap for one user, this was definitely the least disruptive, and thus best option.
I would like to say this is the first time I have seen anything from Redhat that I thought was really stupid/amateurish. They ship a low performance, non-scalable imap solution, and despite the fact that the server has options to deal with it they do not include the extra tools because they don't like the devel process. Well quite frankly, end users don't give a Rat's Ass about the devel process. They should either go all the way include the imap-utils so UW imap is usable, or migrate to another server.
As has long been rumored, Family Guy is been greenlighted for another season.
I recommend you checkout the Standford EE380 page. They have had a bunch of speakers, and have videos of them. I particularly liked the P6 talk by Bob Colwell. A ton of fascinating behind the scenes color on how things work at Intel. Also Kevin McGrath's K8 talk. It is a shame both of them gave their talks before Intel announced IA32e since it would have been fascinating to see some of their insights.