Bloggers demand working software, strike threatened

Above: Members of United Bloggers Local 107 demonstrate near the Enterprise Record office on Monday

Tuesday, Feburary 20th, 2007

Some are finding the working conditions making it impossible to keep up

Chico, CA - (BP)

Bloggers toiling in unpaid slavery for local media giant the Enterprise Record, recently found themselves without working blog software for an entire weekend. The problem brought to light something each blogger knew individually, but not collectively. The tool they were given, Moveable Type, is as outdated and unwieldy as a Gutenberg press or a hot lead Linotype machine.

Some bloggers who got the software installed early in the game, such as Dan Nguyen-Tan, have few problems, and his features such as scheduled publishing work flawlessly. He is one of the elite few whose seniority gets him special perks. Others such as newcomers Jack Lee and Anthony Watts, find the software often breaks down or doesn’t work at all putting them dangerously close to falling under the wheels of the Media News Group behemoth.

Watts, whom is often thought of as the most technically capable member of the group because he runs his own computer enterprise with dozens of servers and websites was quoted as saying “This software has been broken for some time. We are forced to make our quota, and yet the tools we are given often break down getting us even further behind. I fear that soon I’ll be called into Wolf Rosenbergs office and given 20 lashes”.

Jack Lee, whom tries to Blog every day was quoted as saying that the company that produced the software, SixApart “should be called FallingApart, because the software is not user freindly and breaks often”.

Problems with the software such as features that don’t work for many bloggers, templates that don’t work, a non-existent spell checker, a broken scheduler, and nearly impossible to read 8 point composition font has made keeping up with the blogging quota nearly impossible.

Blogger burnout has been all too common.

Some bloggers who joined in recent months, such as Monte Hill, made just a few entries, and were ever heard from again. Some disappeared even before they got started, such as “Dependency Update”. Liberal Blogger John Drzal, found the problem of keeping his quota so stressful, that he’s been spending his remaining days on a farm hoping to eke out a living.

Talk of a bloggers strike has been circulating around the network. Watts was quoted as saying “We don’t get paid, and they won’t even give us the tools to do our job effectively. Many bloggers have gone missing, and the remaining few are beginning to fear for their sanity because they get chastized for spelling errors constantly. We don’t even have a spell checker, and this is the 21st century!”.

He added “We may ask the Mayor to join our cause and help us stand up to this unfair and uncaring media giant, but if that fails, we may have no choice but to do a blogout”. “A lot of people will suffer needlesly if that happens but its the only tool we have.”

Enterprise Record officials were unavailable for comment as of press time.

Only in the South

From the Buford ain’t taking the rap department:

A Georgia couple, apparently tired of people speeding past their house, installed a camera and radar gun on their property. After it was installed, they caught a police officer going 17MPH over the posted speed limit. They brought this to the attention of the local police department, and are now being forced to appear in front of a judge to answer to charges of “stalking”.

Here’s the story from the Cartersville Georgia Daily Tribune:

My Energy Star featured home leaks like a sieve

Last May I moved into a new Energy Star featured home in a new subdivision in northeast Chico. I appreciated the rating, and my utility bills were lower than the home I sold that I had installed solar power on. The appliances are all Energy Star rated efficient and thats good. I still plan to put solar on this home, but the process takes a lot of planning.

This weekend I decided to finish some work I started in upgrading the light switches from standard to the flat rocker switch stylish models. It also happened that yesterday was a strong north wind. While taking the light switch covers off I noticed cold air coming out of the switchplate holes, and when the covers were off completely, I could feel a significant breeze!

Thinking maybe it was just the one I was working on, I started to check other switches and outlets in the room, then the whole house. Yep, with the north wind pressurizing my attic, it was like having vents all around the room. I had hoped that the contractor would have sealed the hole where wires come down from the attic into the interior of the house. Its easy to do, and takes only a quick shot of sealing foam. No such luck.

The outside air instrusion wastes a lot of energy in heating/cooling, it also brings a lot of dust into the house. Time to get out the Great Stuff. It baffles me that contractors don’t foam seal all utility holes in and out of a home as a matter of course. Its easy and inexpensive, and far easier to do when the home is being built. You’d think any new home built today would have this done standard, especially ones that are touting Energy Star rated appliances and other energy saving features.

Vista Redux

Previously I’ve blogged about the new Microsoft Operating system, Vista. As much as I didn’t want to, I finally had to break down and purchase Vista to be able to test software that my company produces. Even that is no easy task, because in a bizarre hair brained marketing scheme, Vista comes in several different flavors where its predecessor only came in two.

I decided to pick the middle of the road Home Premium edition for my testing. And, since you can’t return software, and because the software costs $200, I decided to buy it pre-installed on a laptop, that way if I need to I can return the laptop with Vista installed. That turned out to be a smart move, as today I’m on my way back to COMPUSA to return the whole mess.

Vista is, well…I’ve searched for the appropriate words to describe it, and there are just so many it’s rather hard to choose. But I’ve decided on the phrase eye candy.

Pilot 1 Hijacker 0

Spanish security forces surround a hijacked Air Mauritania Boeing 737 passenger plane after it landed at Gando airport in Las Palmas on the island of Gran Canaria in Spain’s Canary Islands yesterday.

Ya gotta love it when some hijacker gets what’s coming to him like this one did.

Fast-thinking pilot foiled hijack
February 16, 2007

TENERIFE, Spain (AP) — A fast-thinking pilot, with the help of passengers, fooled a gunman who had hijacked a jetliner flying from Africa to the Canary Islands, braking hard upon landing then quickly accelerating to knock the man down so travelers could pounce on him, Spanish officials said Friday.

A lone gunman brandishing two pistols hijacked the Air Mauritania Boeing 737, carrying 71 passengers and a crew of eight, Thursday evening shortly after it took off from the Mauritanian capital of Nouakchott for Gran Canaria, one of Spain’s Canary Islands, with a planned stopover in Nouadhibou in northern Mauritania.

He wanted to divert the plane to France so he could request political asylum, said Mohamed Ould Mohamed Cheikh, Mauritania’s top police official.

The hijacker has been identified as Mohamed Abderraman, a 32-year-old Mauritanian, said an official with the Spanish Interior Ministry office on Tenerife, another of the islands in the Atlantic archipelago. He spoke under rules barring publication of his name. Mauritania has said the hijacker was a Moroccan from the Western Sahara.

The hijacker ordered the pilot to fly to France, but the crew told him there was not enough fuel. Morocco denied a request for the plane to land in the city of Djala in the Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara, so the pilot headed for Las Palmas in Gran Canaria, the original destination.

Speaking to the gunman during the hijacking, the pilot realized the man did not speak French. So he used the plane’s public address system to warn the passengers in French of the ploy he was going to try: brake hard upon landing, then speed up abruptly. The idea was to catch the hijacker off balance, and have crew members and men sitting in the front rows of the plane jump on him, the Spanish official said.

The pilot also warned women and children to move to the back of the plane in preparation for the subterfuge, the official said.

It worked. The man was standing in the middle aisle when the pilot carried out his maneuver, and he fell to the floor, dropping one of his two 7mm pistols. Flight attendants then threw boiling water from a coffee machine in his face and at his chest, and some 10 people jumped on the man and beat him, the Spanish official said.

Around 20 people were slightly injured when the plane braked suddenly, the official said.

Spanish officials — and some passengers — had initially been concerned that the hijacking was terrorism-related; it came on the day a trial began of 29 people accused of the 2004 Madrid train bombings.

“We were afraid. We thought it was people from al-Qaida or the Algerian GSPC who were going to cut our throats,” said Aicha Mint Sidi, a 45-year-old woman who was on the plane. The GSPC is a Muslim extremist group.

“I trembled during and after the hijacking. I thought the plane was going to blow up any minute, either in mid-air or on landing,” said another passenger, Dahi Ould Ali, 52. Both spoke after returning to Nouakchott.

The hijacker was arrested by Spanish police who boarded the plane after it landed at Gando airport, outside Las Palmas.

Air Mauritania identified the heroic pilot as Ahmedou Mohamed Lemine, a 20-year-veteran of the company.

The Original Star Trek - Now CGI Overhauled

This past weekend I stumbled across an old original (or so I thought) Star Trek episode called “The Doomsday Machine” where a big ugly “horn-o-plenty” looking space robot goes around munching up whole worlds for the sheer mindless fun of it. (Insert your own Wal-Mart joke here)

My 3 1/2 year old son William, who has never seen Star Trek, was immediately mesmerized by the episode, and he and daddy played “space rock monster” using a brown blanket after seeing the evil beast, which looked in the original series like a paper mache’ horn-o-plenty, like you might make in first grade around Thanksgiving, suspended on strings with model space ships around it over a star background. In fact, it was exactly how that was done.

You could always count of the original TV show looking a bit cheesy in the effects department. It goes with William Shatner’s anguished overacting perfectly.

But something about the episode I saw this weekend on Channel 30 caught my eye…lo and behold, the cheesy effects were gone! And while the ‘horn-o-plenty turned space beast’ was still there, it now took on some new 3 dimensional qualities…and then I saw some 3D flybys over the wrecked hulk of the USS Constellation, which also figured in this episode…and to my surprise…IT LOOKED REAL.

Holy cow! Even the view-screen scenes from the deck of the Enterprise look different! Whats going on?

Doing a little web searching I found this: CBS Paramount Confirms Original Star Trek Episodes Have Been Remastered and Updated - High-Definition version of the 1960’s series, featuring new special effects to air soon

Irrigation most likely to blame for Central California warming

A few folks have mentioned to me over the years that they thought we haven’t been getting as many frosts and freezes as in the past, that mosquitos were worse than in years past, and that it seems more humid than it used to be.

Of course the reaction could be to say “Global Warming”. But you’d be surprised (as I was) to learn that there may be another reason. Irrigation. Rice Fields, cotton fields, nut orchards, and other agricultural enterprises have grown (pardon the pun) dramatically in the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valley in the last century. A University of Alabama study found that Irrigation was likely the cause of increased overnight temperatures.

Intrigued, I decided to lookup and plot the minimum temperature data for Chico University Farm, which is the station of record for climate here to see if it showed the same trend. It did. Here is the results of data from 1900-2000:

And to be consistent, I also plotted the maximum temps too, which was surprising:

And even more surprising was the Mean Annual Temperature:

If anybody wants to check my data, I’ll gladly make it available. Here’s the article in its entirety:

Irrigation most likely to blame for Central California warming From: University of Alabama, Hunstville
http://www.uah.edu/News/newsread.php?newsID=293

The same irrigation that turned California’s Central Valley from desert into productive farmland is probably also to blame for summer nights there getting noticeably warmer.

Irrigation has turned much of the San Joaquin Valley’s dry, light-colored soil dark and damp, says Dr. John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). While the valley’s light, dry desert ground couldn’t absorb or hold much heat energy, the dark, damp irrigated fields “can absorb heat like a sponge in the day and then, at night, release that heat into the atmosphere.”

Teraflops

The “Big Ben” Cray XT3 at University of Pittsburg Computer Center runs at 10 Teraflops

Ok if you aren’t computer savvy. you might think “tri-tera-flops…a dinosaur?” or maybe “Tera Flops” which could be a headline about a movie star with a bad gig.

But FLOPS which stands for FLoating Point Operations Per Second is a measure of the numerical calculation power of a computer, be it a PC or a mainframe. Supercomputers are often measured in Teraflops or Trillions of Flops per second.

And now, its all in one chip. Intel has produced a prototype, shown below:

The Teraflops chip is built on a single die composed of 80 independent processor cores, or tiles as Intel is calling them. The tiles are arranged in a rectangle 8 tiles across and 10 tiles down; each tile has a surface area of 3 square millimeters. And that isn’t all, in a unique manufacturing technique, each die is “stacked” in 3 dimensions, making the chip multi-layed with components not only in breadth, but in depth.

The chip can operate at a number of speeds depending on its operating voltage, but the minimum clock speed necessary to maintain its teraflop name is 3.13GHz at 1Volt. At that speed and voltage, the peak performance of the chip with all 80 cores active is 1 teraflop while drawing 98 Watts of power. At 4GHz, the chip can deliver a peak performance of 1.28 TFLOP, pulling 181 Watts at 1.2Volt. On the low end of the spectrum, the chip can run at 1GHz, consuming 11 Watts and executing a maximum of 310 billion floating point operations per second. Heat dissipation for this chip will be huge, so I expect a water cooling system will be used to acheive the peak performance.

It may be 1 or 2 years, but you’ll soon be able to have your own Teraflop Desktop.

Space Junk Box Score

Due to the interest in my space junk entry below, I thought I’d provide an up to date list of all the objects in low earth orbit and who the countries are that launched them or discarded them. The US and USSR are the two biggest, no surprise there, but the USSR leads the way in space debris, 2-1. Mr. Putin, take out your garbage!

The big table of space junk follows….

An end to space travel?

The picture above shows space junk being tracked by NORAD radar

This is one of the most depressing pieces of news I’ve read in awhile. It means the beginning of the end for space travel, and possibly global cooling. The New York Times reports in an article on the amount of space junk in Earth Orbit that we may be past a point of no return.

According to NASA officials, the amount of discarded rocket and satellite debris we’ve put into Low Earth Orbit is at critical levels. Recently nearly 1000 new pieces resulting from testing the new Chinese anti-satellite weapon put the amount of space debris that is trackable, at over 10,000 pieces, and there may well be 100’s of thousands of smaller bits. With that much space junk, its now only a matter of time before collisions between two large objects (like a couple of old rocket boosters) will start an uncontrollable cascade of new collisions.

The litter is now so bad that, even if space-faring nations refrained from further interference, collisions would continue to create more clutter just above our atmosphere. It is like a nuclear fission chain reaction, with each bit of junk crashing into another breaks off dozens more bits, which careen in new orbits, eventually becoming a cloud of metallic debris like a shell around earth. As the bits get pulverized to smaller and smaller pieces, it may also become dense enough to start blocking a significant amount of sunlight. I’m not joking when I say it will solve the global warming problem, but it could also create a whole other series of climate problems too that may take centuries to solve.

Space debris is a very difficult problem to deal with, and some say its impossible. It will likely hinder future space exploration. Your kids and grandkids may never know the wonder of space exploration or even space tourism. It means the International Space station may come down, and the shuttle may never fly again if the problem gets worse.