The Humble Geek

Thirty Ways a Software Grows

Michael Cronenworth — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 17:43:00 -0500

The following recount is rather generic in nature so I do not have to worry about stepping on any toes, but it is all true.

Everyone has a workplace story to tell and I've finally gotten around to writing about my own. I have had a rare opportunity to write and maintain software for a company that has plenty of history. The company I, still, work for has been around almost as long as Microsoft to give you a point of reference.

In The Beginning In traditional fashion of the time, which still holds true today, the company started by buying the rights to a software that someone else wrote. The country of origin: Canada. I do not know much about the company or who were the original authors besides a few names I've seen in copyrights, so unfortunately I do not have any juicy stories to tell about them. They wrote to Minix, which surprisingly still exists today. The data was stored in ISAM databases (Google it), which unfortunately still exists today. The program displayed via a terminal-based text screen with support for input fields and displaying different types of screen layouts, which, also unfortunately, still exists today. The only saving grace was that it was written in the C language.

Abraham Lincoln The company originated in a log cabin, now turned historical landmark. I heard the winters were cold, and the summers were hot. The size of the cabin is about the size of a traditional living room with two whole stories. There was also the shift from Minix to UNIX and DOS operating systems to keep up with growing demand.

Enterprise Split Eventually the software became outdated, in a sense, for the customer base the company wished to sell to. Enterprises wanted a more robust and fully featured software. The solution? Rewrite! The company moved to a different city, but left behind the original software - to live in its own filth.

Dungeon Upkeep Keeping the software maintained to a point people could still use it was the job of a fellow I only met once when I was being interviewed (for an unrelated position!) so I can't tell you any juicy stories about them either. However, I can tell you the software essence remained the same. They continued to use the original UNIX compiler and coding techniques. These techniques include typedefs to normal C keywords and functions. Numerous programs that simply copy & paste code from other programs. Global pointers ruled the entire source code base from top to bottom. Return values were rarely checked. Instead of calling the standard rename or delete functions, system calls were made to the operating system's shell tools. The source control system involved cloning the main source directory per release - some of which I did not find when I took over. Take this scenario for instance: One customer was given a compiled program on Monday but changes would be made to the same program and given to a different customer on Tuesday. Every customer had a unique compiled version of the software. Let that settle in your mind for a moment.

Change of Hands A friend of mine, who has moved on to greener pastures, took over a few years ago. He began a very important and rigorous job of evolving the software into a state that a guy off the street could come in and program to. The code went from 1980s leftovers to 1990s l33tsauce. It was now source controlled in CVS and macros were removed. Some of the copied code were moved into libraries that were compiled against. A small set back to the improvements happened when another programmer was hired and began transforming perfectly good code into obfuscated and over coded code. String pointers were turned into "static const char *const variable;" nightmares. Functions were rewritten to be twice as long and contained bugs that I had to find and fix for about a year.

Modern Tools After I took over we released a major version. This version was the first version where all of the software was released in one update. It was all source controlled, and I implemented a sane update system that insured customers would all be on the same software level. Lately we've moved the code into git and I have been loving every minute of it. The software is slowly emerging from its colorful past.

Over the Rainbow GUI, SQL, Cross-platform. These three words are the embodiment of the future of the company. If I get a chance to finish the project, it should provide the company and its customers with a fresh breath of life.

SSDs Speed Up Anything and Everything

Michael Cronenworth — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 21:54:00 -0500

Computer storage technology was running out of innovation a couple of years ago until the next step, in many steps to come, arrived: the Solid State Drive. Quick summary: Traditional hard drives are spinning discs of a magnetic substance that hold all your precious junk. An SSD is a collection of flash memory modules similar to those found in SD cards for your handheld camera. The end result is RAM-like performance without the con of losing everything when you turn off the power. It's hard to grasp this concept until you've seen the difference first hand.

First up I decided to install Fedora 12 x86_64 and perform a package update. This involves hundreds of packages ranging in all shapes and sizes. On a traditional hard drive I would be dreading the thought of performing this operation as it would most likely take about 15 minutes of my precious time. My mind can now rest at ease with the speed of an SSD:

The target device my SSD was going into was the Sony Playstation 3 as I noticed the multitasking introduced in previous updates caused excessive hard drive usage, most likely by usage of lots of swap space. It's slightly visible in the video below that the performance delta between boot times is different:

In other important news, my Grand Theft Auto 4 boot times were reduced by 20 seconds to 1 minute 37 seconds. A new GTA4 patch reduced that by another 4 seconds. I can also tell that there is some intentional latency programmed into the multi-tasking option. Was the $200 upgrade worth it? Yes ma'am!

Problem: Taking out the trash takes a long time to do.
Solution: Install an SSD!

Same Team, Same Game

Michael Cronenworth — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:48:00 -0600

I'm repeating myself here, but it is a new year after all. The Dallas Mavericks have proven to be very reliable at starting strong and finishing flat on their face. Their record is a mask to their ugly underside. Heck even the humble owner knows they suck - at least that's a step in the right direction.

Win one, lose one. If they can win against teams above .5 and lose against the lower .5 teams then they might make the playoffs. Dirk can barely play full games and the rest of the team cannot maintain any sense of consistancy. I hope a smart, talented, and young player replaces the late Hemp Howard. Maybe this year can be saved. Maybe.

Developing Openly on Proprietary Land

Michael Cronenworth — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 10:23:00 -0600

My programming adventures continue. Nokia's experiment into Linux with Maemo is very alluring and since I've applied myself into a few Linux projects, I felt it would be worth looking into what Nokia has put together.

The Maemo SDK runs under Scratchbox, a virtual environment created in part by Nokia. The Scratchbox toolkit can run under any Linux distribution, and it requires it. If you wish to run the SDK under Windows, your only option is to use a virtual machine. Once your SDK is running, it is nearly identical to a running Maemo device. In order to use the SDK, basic knowledge of Linux goes a long way, but since Maemo is derived from Debian there are some distribution specific programs. I've been using Red Hat based distributions for years, so it took some time to get used to using dpkg and apt-get to handle packages. After a few months of using my N900, creating and handling packages takes less work under an RPM system, but it's adequate.

Since Maemo is Linux, any Linux application has a chance of life. This makes building new applications or porting existing Linux applications a walk in the park. You can literally compile any Linux program for ARM and run it, however, the necessary screen space and physical size of a N900 can make it difficult to use a large application such as Open Office, which has dozens of menus and toolbars. This is where Maemo ports come in. A finger-friendly UI can be designed and added, even sent to the upstream authors, and makes the app you port usable everyday on your device.

I started with building a brand new application. A stopwatch seemed like an easy first project. I noticed several stopwatch applications already existed, however they were written in Python or were not maintained in a long time. The Maemo Garage is a center for Maemo projects, so I created my own project page and began work. I decided to write in C, the native language of many Linux core libraries, and use GTK for the UI, a cross-platform, and the native toolkit for Maemo 5. During the programming process, I learned the Hildon additions to GTK made by Nokia, and the dbus methods to activate and listen for accelerator changes to allow my applications to turn into portrait mode when the user turns their N900. Here's the first incarnation:

Other programming projects are endless. I wanted to look at fixing a few usability issues. One was the RSS reader, which used a slider that was too thin for a finger. I submitted a patch to Nokia and it will be included in the next major firmware update. The second was the lack of FLAC tags in the media player. I now enjoy FLAC as my music format of choice, and it's possible to use since the Maemo media player uses gstreamer for media codecs and tracker for tags. In order to add FLAC tags, I had to extend the tracker program to be able to read them. Someone had already created such a plugin for vorbis, and so using it as a template, I made one for FLAC.

There are two Maemo repositories for projects, Maemo Devel and Maemo Extras. Finalized applications live in Maemo Extras, while developers can play with new applications in Maemo Devel Adding my projects to Maemo's repositories was a breeze. Just create a Maemo account and request upload access. I can use scp (SSH CoPy) to send my source code to the Maemo build server and it will package my projects and makes them available on the Maemo Devel repository. From this repository a developer can choose to promote it to Maemo Extras. During this promotion, other Maemo users vote on the application and if enough positive votes are made the project is automatically pushed into Maemo Extras.

Although most of Maemo is open source and source provided through gitorious, there's still a lot left closed - such as the phone, contact, and media player. Nokia's plans include more open source goodness in Maemo 6. The future of Maemo definitely looks bright even if they are forcing Qt down everyone's collective throats.

New Face, Same Blood

Michael Cronenworth — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:41:00 -0600

Hi there. You may remember me from such blogs as The Humble Geek. Due to a recent Blogger change, I've had to set up shop using server-side software. I looked at three different projects and ended up with Dotclear. I'll break down my selection pro/con list:

Wordpress

The big man in town. Unfortunately it uses MySQL for a backend and my server is PostgreSQL territory. Poor security is another minus. A Wordpress blog has probably been defaced by the time you've read this sentence.

blosxom

I saw this recommended as an alternative to Wordpress. It's Perl based and writes to flat files. Not very flexible for my taste.

Dotclear

Written in PHP, supporting PostgreSQL, themeable, plugable, and more. I couldn't ask for anything better. I have customized my own theme and added some plugins. The built-in functionality also allows me to add the Geek Tip as a widget. I don't have to manually edit the template as I had to with Blogger.

I may write about my Maemo programming shenanigans next, but don't hold your breath.

Belated Christmas Gift Ho-down

Michael Cronenworth — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 04:32:00 -0600

Now I can barrage the Internet with my own crappy drawings.

Powered by Wacom, the Gimp, and of course, a penguin. For less than a hundred dollars, you too can have a very thin time waster.

Maemo, Smaemo they Say

Michael Cronenworth — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 20:28:00 -0600

The world welcomes another Linux phone. This time around we have something a little more mature and more appealing to the eye. Behold, the Nokia N900:

As with all my blog posts, I won't bore you with details. Google is your friend. After handling the N900 for a week, I begin my review:

Hardware

Feel

Plastic encased all around, the feel of the phone doesn't feel like plastic. It's a refreshing, solid, stout feel. When I first picked it up it felt heavy, but now I hardly notice the weight. The slider is solid and does not wiggle. It slides in and out of place securely. The keyboard keys are just the right size and it feels great to type on it, but if you don't want to slide out for it, an on-screen keyboard is available.

Screen

Judge for yourself.

CPU/RAM

The included Cortex A8 is in fact the same as the iPhone and is plenty fast. I have yet to benchmark it, but I have yet to find anything that stresses it too much. The phone remains responsive at all times no matter what you are running. Even when someone calls you.

RAM isn't too much of an issue as it includes 256 megs of hardware RAM and partitions 768 megs of swap memory on the embedded flash drive.

Battery

Lifetimes of the battery depend on what you do. No news there. Comparing to my N95, I get about the same battery life. One day if I am making calls, surfing the web, and using apps, or two days if I limit my usage to a phone call or two. The included micro USB port and cable allow you to charge anywhere there is a USB port and extra batteries are dirt cheap on Newegg. Battery life isn't too much of a concern to me for how much I get in return out of the device. Software

Linux

Nokia has made Maemo their Linux distribution and left most of it open source. Maemo 5, included with the N900, provides kernel 2.6.28. However, Nokia felt that IPv6 support was "bad" and left it out of the provided kernel. There's a bug report for it on Maemo.org. It was included for the WiMax N810 tablet, but now it is removed. Quite a head scratcher, especially since Nokia's Symbian OS has provided IPv6 for a long time.

All of that aside, if enjoy what Linux has to offer and want that same freedom on your phone that is supported by a major corporation, this is your dream come true. Nokia has stuck with a standard Linux environment instead of building their own, and if you are already familiar to Maemo this isn't news to you.

Multi-tasking

Switching between apps is a breeze and is as simple as if you were using a PC. The included compositing manager allows fancy transition graphics and live resizing of windows so when you view all open windows, you can see what is going on without having to bring them up fullscreen. This technology has been present with Compiz (and now finally Windows 7) so nothing too new, but it is great to have it on a device that fits in one hand.

Application Compatibility

Any Linux app will run on the N900. People have Quake 3 or Duke Nukem 3D running on it. Granted, the screen resolution isn't the same as a PC, so some apps are not usable on a small screen. In that case forks of the UI's for some apps are rewritten and made useable. A big example is Firefox. Mozilla's Fennec is Firefox with a UI for mobile devices. It is a full-fledged copy of Firefox and will render every web page exactly the same as if you were on a PC. All other phones include browsers that render differently and do not provide support any where close to Fennec. In fact, I have installed Adblock Plus on my N900. It works identical to my PC. No ads! This is the first device to provides this sort of environment. Not the iPhone, not the Pre, not even the Android phones can hold a candle to it.

Maemo Garage

Nokia is even providing an Ovi Store for Maemo apps so businesses who wish to sell apps can do so. All of this is centralized through the app manager and relies on Debian-derived repositories for searching and installing apps. It's brain dead simple and keeps your phone clean for easy installing and uninstalling. You don't have to google search for apps.

Phone

Contact support is brilliant. It merges traditional phone contacts with IM contacts and uses the open source libraries of telepathy to do so. I have my friends with not only their phone numbers, but AIM, MSN, Skype, and Jabber accounts all on one contact. This bleeds over into a conversation app that keeps SMS and IM conversations together. It's dead simple and brilliantly put together. The phone can take contacts off of Ovi or S60 phones so I was able to easily sync with my old N95 and get all my contacts and all their details (address, birthdays, etc).

It's not perfect though. You can't assign a ring tone per person or use provider numbers to check minutes or data information (bugs in maemo.org for them).

face detection

Future

GTK/QT

Maemo was originally designed for the GTK graphical interface toolkit. Nokia spent many man hours developing special add-ons to GTK for better tablet support, called Hildon. This past year, Nokia purchased Trolltech, makers of the QT graphical interface toolkit. Starting with Maemo 6, QT will take GTK's place. It was purely a high-level business decision as Nokia, with all businesses, are looking to make a profit. Nokia wants to keep Symbian and they have already invested time in bringing QT support to Symbian. With the Trolltech purchase, Nokia hopes to build a cross-platform design with QT so that all their devices they sell can run the same apps. This helps the small amount of businesses still investing in Symbian... because most of them have left to work on iPhone fart apps or work for Google now. All in all, I don't see this move as a bright business decision. I hope GTK still remains prominent in Maemo as it is the toolkit of choice for my programming both at work and at home.

Community

It's a widely known fact that the Maemo distribution is gaining presence. Several Nokia employees have stated that the maemo.org site has seen huge increases in traffic with the release of the N900. Their garage and other sites have sometimes been susceptible to the heavy loads and become unresponsive. Nokia has stated they do plan on moving to better servers and better hosting ASAP. If you've skipped to the bottom, screw you. My choice to buy this phone was a good one. I see it being a long time device in my collection, that is, until a faster one comes out. There's so much more to write about the N900, but I want to get back to my life now.

Sports Check, 1, 2, 3, Check

Michael Cronenworth — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 03:44:00 -0600

Let's go over some sporting events and teams I watch, mk?

Dallas Cowboys
Possibly a terribly good season ahead. Romo set a new personal record with three consecutive games without an interception. Good job, ol' chap.

Texas Rangers
Another positively rough season is over. Pitching improved over the season but faded with the batting towards the end of the season.

Dallas Stars
Good losses early in the season already. I don't really care any more. Retire already, Modano.

Dallas Mavericks
Old people throwing a ball around have yet another season to play. There's some nice rotations with the new players instead of the same ol', same ol' rotation, but there's no defence.

Formula 1
Decent season with interesting twists that was different then the previous year. Next season will be completely different as well. Maybe HD video feeds (if pigs fly) are coming soon. I would die a happy man after seeing a grand prix in HD.

College Football
Nuke the BS^H BCS. Favouritism helps no one. I'm looking at you USC.

How-To: Earn Your Carbon Credits

Michael Cronenworth — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 05:38:00 -0500

The past few years have showed us a boom in the fad of "going green" with everything from automobiles to your home. Some people have taken advantage of the situation and claimed the need to put a price on the amount of carbon emissions each individual puts in the air. Everyone should be given a quota and if you go over that quota you need to buy "carbon credits" otherwise you face "penalties." I'm glad we haven't reached la-la land just yet, but there are simple ways to go green without going overboard.

I run a server at home for routing, web, email, files, and almost any little idea I think of. Now that I've told you I will have to kill you as ISPs frown on this freedom of expression. Anyway, this server has been comprised of spare parts and/or whatever I could buy for $20. Now that I have a decent job, I decided I wanted a computer I could call a server and stand by it. It also had to draw less electricity and put out less heat and noise. Let's compare my setups:

Junker

1.4ghz "Tualatin" Pentium III-S
512mb PC-133 RAM (i815 chipset limitation)
ASUS TUSL2 motherboard
320gb Seagate 7200.10
Intel 100 mbit and 1000 mbit PCI cards
$50 case with 350watt PSU (all-in-one)

Upgrade

1.86ghz "Lynnfield" Xeon L3426
4gb DDR3 1333 ECC RAM
Supermicro X8SIL-F motherboard
2x1TB Seagate 7200.12 (RAID 1)
Dual on-board Intel 1gb NICs
Antec MicroATX case + SeaSonic 500watt 80 Plus Bronze PSU

The junker runs at a nice loud, slow pace. PHP and any disk intensive request was a several second ordeal. Most of that is due to the limited amount of RAM. I hooked up the Kill-a-watt power meter to the junker to see how much electricity I'm wasting. 62 watts - at idle. The computer is lifeless and it's eating enough energy to power an old school light bulb. Think of all the nuclear power I'm wasting; I can't sleep at night.

Putting the new server together was the fastest assembly for me yet. Most things are now on-board and the only power connections were for the motherboard and hard drives. Hitting the power switch brought forth... silence. Ah... What's this? A BIOS prompt. After installing Fedora 11 x86_64 using my USB drive (no CDs or floppies were hurt in this process, something other OSes can't say), I ran the power meter on it. A whole... 40 watts at idle. With more than 10 times the computing power (and 1 vs 4 cores) and an additional hard drive, the new system was eating 22 (woot math) less watts! Just to put this in an even more interesting twist, my one year old desktop computer pulls a hefty 96 watts out of the Earth. It has a 9800 GTX+ helping it get that high though.

What's the meaning of all this? Well, I should get some nice medal from Al Gore for saving the planet, right? Heck, I'd take just a letter. Now get out there and green up your computing environment. Doctor's orders.

Slackers 'n Motherboards

Michael Cronenworth — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 02:35:00 -0500

Go to an online computer hardware retailer and click over to their motherboard section. What will you find? IDE ports and, what's this? Floppy ports? Yes, you will in fact find a 3.5" floppy controller on a brand new Intel Core i5 motherboard made in the year 2009. The news gets worse when you find this on a micro ATX motherboard. Yes, a motherboard you would be putting into a case that has no room for a floppy. Were the electrical engineers trying to be funny?

This brings us to the almighty point of the blog post. It seems motherboard manufactures are continuously living in the past for no reason. There is no need for a floppy port, coaxial audio out, PS/2 ports, PCI slots or even firewire now. Yet you will still find any and sometimes even all of those outdated technologies on boards put out within the past few weeks. Let's not forget that all of this stuff is powered by BIOS technology dating back to the very first 286 PCs. That's over 15 years that the BIOS has not changed! For frakks sake let's get up to date with some EFI BIOS motherboards! A Google search will reveal MSI's feeble attempt at releasing one EFI motherboard that seemingly never made it into the hands of a real consumer.

ASUS, DFI, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, and XFX please listen good. Here's what should be on a motherboard made in the year 2009: Eight USB ports, two powered eSATA ports, optical out, dual Intel or Broadcom LAN (not Realtek), 1-3 16x PCI-E, 1-4 4x/8x PCI-E. EFI BIOS. That means no IDE controllers, no PCI slots, no PS/2 ports, and no floppy controllers. Oh, and lower power consumption while you're at it. I'm sure you'll find lots of nice savings by removing that legacy hardware.

Just Say No

Michael Cronenworth — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 03:30:00 -0500

... to Government healthcare. I should not have to even take this time to write a post about this subject, but leave it to the powers of Government wanting more power to force my hand. If I dare write another sentence (positive or negative) it will just fortify and aid the power grab of the 2008-2012 American Government. Do yourself a favor and write your congressman, senator, and the President of the United States and tell them you are a voter and you will not re-elect them if they pass a healthcare bill.

P.S. I'm a healthcare software programmer by trade. I have an eye inside of the system.

I Cannot Tell a Lie

Michael Cronenworth — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 04:00:00 -0500

Stating the obvious is what I do best. You see, on the Internet you cannot tell a lie. If it isn't the slack-jawed yokel who is one out of a million and knows the truth or that die hard fact checker who has sixteen Google extensions for Firefox you will be found out. Please think of the children before you make a comment on a web site. From common knowledge to the tiniest detail in quantum physics, someone is on the Internet that knows exactly what you are talking about. The Internet itself may try to lie and you might come to the conclusion that the Internet is just one big lie, but you would be wrong on both counts. Fact checkers lurk around every corner and are waiting to strike. Will your comment be next?

Surrounded by Annoyances

Michael Cronenworth — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 04:32:00 -0500

Four year olds cannot edit photos. How do I know this? I used to be four years old. When you are that age computers are not on your mind let alone using a laptop and moving photos from a camera to the laptop, opening them in an image editor, doing complicated image touch-up, and printing out to a printer. Not going to happen folks.

How about a monthly music plan that's "awesome yo!?" Microsoft is hitting a double whammy with a series (read: one) of commercial that has been playing non-stop for over a week in-between any show on TV about the Zune monthly music "awesomeortunity" that some poor girl gave 30 seconds of her life to act like a normal person. Yeah, the economy is hitting rock bottom (don't let the 2 hour waits at restaurants tell you otherwise) and $15 music plans are just too "awesome" to pass up. Oh, what's that? Your music is DRM'd and in a proprietary Microsoft format? I'm just Joe Consumer though so I'll buy anything if it's "awesome." Awesome. What's that? You wanted to keep that music you just listened to? Be careful, you can only save 10 of them. $15/month for 10 highly compressed and degraded songs or $15 for a CD-ROM of uncompressed audio with more than 10 tracks. I'll pick the awesome buy.

Back to Windows: How about a 7 year old?

Has three years allowed us the ability to print now? No. How about a 9 year old instead? Maybe after 2 more years instead of just editing a picture they can connect a laptop to a HDTV and edit and play movies! Yea^H^H^H No.

I'd like to meet the parents of these poor children. Was the money worth it? String your child up for a cheap buck? Status of parenting on planet Earth: Non-existent. I'll save this thought for another time.

It may seem like I'm picking on Microsoft, but don't worry there are some Blackberry commercials I'm not fond of. The most annoying one's I've seen lately made my blog today. Today, my hatred for the entire marketing world is rising to even higher levels. Come on "Marketing Majors" post in my comments. I dare you.

Chug, chug, chug, chug...

Michael Cronenworth — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 19:45:00 -0600

How on earth does the world use Vista? Yes, Microsoft Windows Vista. Backstory: I received a new laptop two days ago. An ASUS N80Vn-X5. It came with Vista Home Premium 64-bit. This is my first copy of Vista as I run Linux on all my machines. I did have a copy of XP but I stopped using that a few years ago. Why did I stop using XP? Because I wanted something more out of my computer. XP is fine and all, but I can accomplish more with Linux - not just because it is free.

Unpacking:
I unpack it from its box and I plug in the AC adapter and boot the thing. Vista starts to load - and load - and load. 10 minutes later I get to the desktop. Why on earth did it take that long to get to my desktop? Wait a minute... the hard drive is still chugging. Why?

Configuring:
The first thing I do is kill the hideous sidebar that takes an extra 5 minutes to load on startup. Gone. The second thing I do is disable automatic updates. Now, I realize some readers will think better of themselves and call me an idiot, but I rarely use Windows and I know how to update it so I'm quite OK running updates when I should instead of having Windows do it for me.

Updating:
It came with SP1 so I figured it should be pretty harmless. Where to update this thing? Hm, I don't see anything. Ah, I'll just use IE's "Windows Update" link. Oh what's this? There's an update to Windows Update. Oh! It requires a reboot. *Reboot* Ah, that was a nice 10 minute reboot. Windows update has about 30 updates for me. Fine. Downloading/updating takes about 15 minutes thanks to the attrociously large 100 meg .NET update. I'm on 20 megabit Internet mind you. Rebooting again. Seems that I'm up to date now, or am I?

Playing:
The only thing loaded on this thing is about 5 ASUS utilities for the fingerprint reader, webcam, and some software that looks like it encrypts files. Grand total of hard disk space in use? 20 gigabytes. That alone is enough for me to be offended permenently because what does that 20 gigabytes net me? A video player, picture viewer, a web browser, and a movie maker. The features don't match the disk space requirements. It's also using 1 gig of RAM with no programs running. Yes, I uninstalled the Office 2007 trial.

Why would I be offended? Example: My default Fedora install cost me 4.5gigs. What did I get besides the stuff already in Vista? Full office suite, photo manipulation, SELinux, bittorent, GPS mapping, SIP phone, Pidgin, GCC, and a few other of my programming utilities, not to mention Wine, which will allow me to run Windows apps.

Time to reboot just to see that reboot time again. *clicks Restart* "Configuring updates stage 2 of 3..." What's this? WHAT'S THIS? I have updates turned *OFF* and Windows is installing updates. Stealth updates - w00t. The little trust I had with Microsoft is completely gone at this point.

I let it reboot and go back into Vista just to find that after I log in the hard drive is chugging - and chugging - and chugging. 10 minutes later it finally quiets down and I decide to reboot to get into Fedora. *Clicks Restart* "Configuring updates stage 2 of 3..." Yeah. I'm done with Microsoft.

Small Worlds Collide

Michael Cronenworth — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 04:24:00 -0600

Surprises come electronically these days. I received one a few days ago when out of the blue a childhood friend of mine e-mailed me. Vincent was my first best friend growing up, but since I moved away just after elementary school we had no realization of the situation. Remember this was before the Internet. I was just getting on AOL (ugh) and surfin' the keywords. Cell phones were still carried in bags. Anywho, it was cool to get in touch and catch up.

If any more of my childhood friends or enemies find me, be sure to write!

Recreational Programming

Michael Cronenworth — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 21:43:00 -0600

Usually the best products come about when someone is fed up with the current process of operation. Something like that happened when I was fed up using the command line interface for "uvcdynctrl," which is a tool to manipulate the settings for my Logitech QuickCam 9000 Pro. Fortunately Logitech was kind enough to provide a developer for building an open source library called "libwebcam" that would allow me to build my own interface using GTK+2. Here's the result:

Download: uvcdynctrl-gtk-0.1

I used the git source code management tool for this project so you can grab the latest source (LGPL'd) from my gitweb interface. You will need libwebcam, GTK+2, and gstreamer development libraries and headers to build it.

Please feel free to add any feedback. I also have RPM spec files for Fedora to build libwebcam and my program if you want them. Thanks should really be given to the GTK, gstreamer, and Logitech folks for making this possible.

Christmas Time at Last

Michael Cronenworth — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 19:06:00 -0600

An awesome friend of mine has made me a scarf. It arrived just in time as the weather is turning colder next year. I should be very warm indeed.

In other news, Dr Pepper came through on their free drink offer. I can finally quench my thirst. Since the US economy is "so bad" a free drink may be the only way I can afford one.

Happy New Year!

Words Cannot Describe Such Incompetence

Michael Cronenworth — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 04:38:00 -0600

Whoever thought the zone defence was a good idea should be shot. Everyone that believes it in today should be shot. Football plays are decided in milliseconds not seconds. When a defender is in a zone, it takes him seconds to react and move in to a tackle. By the time they react, the offensive player is gone. In other times, multiple defenders are standing around helpless because they had to stay in their zone to defend the precious grass that no offensive player would ever enter.

I do not think I could even be sarcastic about how awful zone defence is. Any football team, college or pro, who continues to use zone defence as their strategy will never have my support. Sure, I may have never coached a football team, or even played a game, but one does not need such experience when it boils down to common sense.

Presidents are for Suckers

Michael Cronenworth — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 02:36:00 -0600

Aye, another election passes and it's quite decisive instead of controversial this time around. While I liked neither Hussein Obama or McCain, Obama seems to want to turn our country into one big handout. With his win today, and all of his democratic party winning control of the House and Senate, he, and his party, will have complete reign to do whatever they wish. With all this free money coming from the government soon, what will happen to the national debt? What will the value of the dollar do?

How did BO win? It seems ACORN was a deciding factor. They pushed registration in areas Republicans did not. Voters turned up to vote blue, possibly twice, and that's how it's done. Hopefully the next four years are quiet, smooth, and successful for us, but somehow I fear that will not come to pass.

New Family Member, Rawr

Michael Cronenworth — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 04:42:00 -0500

Long story short, I have a new cat.

Sup, Chloe.