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According to Duke Energy, I use a crazy amount of power for just 1,334 square feet:
In other news, their website is completely broken when viewed with anything but IE. You can pay your bill in all browsers, but do nothing else.. coincidence?
Is anyone else getting tired of web analytics causing page loads to never complete?
Stuff like this is a common occurrence for me:
It seems to be getting worse, too. Sites like Juniper Networks and VMware's pages just fail to load, and sit there chewing up browser threads due to unresponsive web analytics. Twitter seems to suffer from this, as well.
It wouldn't be such a nuisance, but most pages have some sort of JavsScript code that's only executed when the page is completely loaded. Like, scripts that change focus or populate certain input fields may be necessary for correct functionining of the page. It's annoying when you've already started to fill in forms, then the page finishes loading and JavaScript code clears out all the input elements for you.
I'm thinking of just starting up a local resolver on my workstation and have it be authoritative for the following:
Then, I figure adding a wildcard record pointing to 127.0.0.1, and possibly running Apache locally might speed things up. It'll also give me an idea of who's using what.
I don't like being a statistic, anyway!
People who smoke cigarettes give people who smoke cigarettes a bad name.
This lady driving in front of me on I-485 this morning flicked a cigarette butt out her window. It was still half lit, from what I could see. It bounced once, and appeared to enter my grill.
I slammed the horn. It didn't make me feel better. These are the times when I think of sterilization.
I think I'm going to be upset for the rest of the day.
I've owned my Kindle DX for almost a month now, and I'm still conflicted about it:
It's large, and it's easy on the eyes. This is a big plus. The technical books I read on the original Kindle displayed graphics and tables poorly, due to resampling effects and lack of decent screen resolution. The Kindle DX doesn't have this problem - charts and diagrams are very clear and the resolution (824x1200) is quite sufficient.
The battery life is outstanding. I took it to California with me last week, and used it on & off for several hours over the course of the week. It's Sunday now, and I've yet to plug it in for charging. The battery graphic at the top right only lost one pixel - so I suspect this is ~ 90% capacity. Not bad. I only had the wireless on for an hour, though.
It reads PDFs. And it does a great job at it, too. I sent a few slideshow-style PDFs, technical documents, and a 3rd-party eBook to the Kindle; all of them display flawlessly. I actually find reading PDFs (even when the same content is available via a native Kindle books too!) much easier than reading native Kindle books. Discrete page numbers are great - makes skipping around a breeze. The "locations" abstraction in the Kindle books really never works for me.
It reads to you. I'm putting this down as good only because the feature exists, not that it's necessarily done well. I tried it out once on an official Kindle book, and although quite understandable (compared to, say, listening to an offshore customer care representative from credit card companies) it wasn't all that decent. It had trouble detecting when to pause in sentences, first off. Sometimes it would just ignore periods or commas and just keep rambling. Other times it would inexplicably stop in mid sentence after reading a word (perhaps to catch its… breath?), then keep going. Additionally, and I don't know if this is a Kindle book problem (several of them are like this) or text-to-speed problem, but sometimes two words will appear sandwiched together on the screen, and the Kindle will read them almost as a compound word. All this is annoying enough to distract from the real content of the text being read. I don't think I'll ever use it.
You can read Wikipedia for free, forever. Amazon isn't charging for web browsing, (yet? look at their new wireless delivery charges) so you can use the Kindle to browse the web and Wikipeida as much as you want. It's really slow, but Wikipedia looks really nice on th e Kindle screen. You can even send tweets from the DX, but I wouldn't recommend it (too annoying).
It's slow as heck. And, I mean slow. If I put the Kindle side by side with my old Compaq SLT/286 running Windows 3.1, the screen redraw will be about the same:
(ok, I didn't actually switch on the Compaq, and no it won't run Linux, I tried)
To elaborate, the screen redraw is pitiful. Compared to the original Kindle, I suppose the per-pixel redraw rate is about the same, but since there's a whole lot more pixels that compose the larger screen, it results in slower whole-screen redraws. Additionally, the user interface feels slower, due to the new Kindle software (again, I'm comparing this to the original Kindle) redrawing pieces of the screen as things happen, rather than waiting for all input to cease, and then redrawing the whole screen at once. There are a couple instances where there's a type ahead-style search that dynamically updates the search results as the user is typing in the keyword(s). It makes the unit feel laggy, since letters don't immediately appear on the screen as they're typed. Also, the removal of the silver LCD navigation gizmo (I don't know what to call it) was a mistake, since now the E Ink screen must complete several partial redraws when scrolling through items or lines of text, leaving a silly-looking trail across the screen as it happens. It's also much slower than the wheel on the original Kindle. There's a number of other supposed UI enhancements that result in tons of partial redraws - and it either just looks sloppy (like a 286) or leaves horrible ghosting effects on the screen.
The display isn't backlit. Even though the original Kindle wasn't backlit (not possible with E Ink, anyway… supposedly?), I still want a backlight. If you know me at all, you know I like it dark. I hate bright lights (sunlight is OK), and usually find it easiest to work in a dimly-lit room. I have to position myself near a light source or turn on the main light to see the Kindle DX. It would be nice if I didn't have to do that. And a silly battery-powered gadget that clamps onto the side of the kindle to provide light is not a viable solution. It was ok back in the days of the Game Boy, but not anymore.
I suppose this is a continuation of previous thoughts: the UI sucks. I find it hard to navigate through books, especially when I have to flip back and forth between chapters and sections (like I was trying to do in Church, today) quickly. There need to be some accellerator hotkeys, like, oh, for instance, the movement keys in vi. For example, I wanted to skip ahead 15 or so pages to step farther into the book of Romans, without going back to the start of the book and clicking the chapter links. I had to sit there pressing the "next" key several times.. slowly, before I got to where I wanted to be. Perhaps if I could type "15" then hit the "next button, it would advance 15 pages instead of just one. I think it would help.
It's a ripoff. Yes, and no. When the original Kindle was released ($399), the protective leather cover and all wireless delivery was included in the purchase. Now, we're at the point where Amazon is charging an arm & a leg for wireless delivery and doesn't include a cover anymore (DX is $489 + $44.99 for the cover). I just suspect they incorrectly estimated the ratio of wireless usage to Kindle book purchases. I really wonder what that partnership with Sprint looks like, on paper.
It's hackable. I used the attachments listed in this thread to enable the USB networking on the Kindle. Yup, you get root shell access, so you can do whatever you want. If you think you can just tether to the Kindle for generic Internet access to download warez and movies, think again. Sprint has everything firewalled except for their proxy server address. Even DNS requests time out to everything else. The proxy server isn't exactly open, either - you'll need an encrypted key to access it. So, after a little toying with tcpdump and SSH, I was able to browse the web from my PC via Sprint's EvDO connection on the Kindle. However, I won't tell you how to do this (it's not too difficult, if you know anything about the HTTP) because if lots of people start using the Kindle as their primary source of Internet access, Amazon is probably going to punish all Kindle users and start charging for all wireless access from the device. Judging from their previous turn-arounds on free wireless delivery, they'll do it. You've been warned.
As you can probably tell, lately I've been redirecting my random thoughts to Twitter instead of my blog ("my news"). I figured blog entries should be for longer announcements or discussions on a particular subject and tweets should be for fleeting throughts or images. This seems to be working out.
However, there seems to be an odd disconnect between blog entries, photos on my photoblog (Flickr), and tweets.
Whenever I create a new blog entry, I'm tempted to send a tweet announcing it. Annoying.
The photoblog problem is exaggerated by services like Twitpic and Yfrog, which both seem to have made their way into mobile Twitter clients. Flickr, on the other hand, seems to have been left out of the mix altogether. It's strange, because Flickr provides the same, but much better, service, albeit without the Twitter integration.
I decided to add some glue in the form of some PHP code and a Python script, in order to automatically send tweets. I used the Services_Twitter Pear package to access the Twitter API from PHP, the Python Twitter wrapper to access it from Python, and the DT Flickr library to access Flickr from Python.
Services_Twitter required me to edit the include_path in my php.ini, which I wasn't too happy about. I'm considering submitting a bug, since instead of Services/Twitter.php, the script is actually in Net/Services/Twitter.php. It might be a problem with the FreeBSD port.
So, if everything works right, whenever I add a blog entry, a tweet will be sent from my Twitter username. Whenever I add a new photo to Flickr, within 10 minutes a tweet will be sent.
I was thinking of interleaving my Twitter timeline with my blog entries on the My News page, but I decided not to. The tweets would be overwhelming!
Some folks in Vietnam really need to learn how to create meaningful PTR records:
traceroute to srv-pvm.vinaren.vn (119.18.142.195), 64 hops max, 72 byte packets 1 voxel.prolixium.net (69.9.189.181) 0.618 ms 2 0.ge1-4.dsr1.lga6.us.voxel.net (208.122.5.41) 0.481 ms 3 0.te6-3.tsr1.lga3.us.voxel.net (208.122.5.229) 0.492 ms 4 0.te6-1.tsr1.ewr1.us.voxel.net (208.122.20.129) 0.704 ms 5 0.te1-2.tsr2.iad1.us.voxel.net (208.122.44.106) 5.473 ms 6 ve16.tsr1.sjc1.us.voxel.net (208.122.63.234) 81.998 ms 7 hgc.com.hk.any2ix.crgwest.com (206.223.143.114) 80.938 ms 8 218.189.5.170 (218.189.5.170) 83.446 ms 9 d1-21-224-143-118-on-nets.com (118.143.224.21) 248.452 ms 10 218.189.5.7 (218.189.5.7) 239.733 ms 11 218.188.104.178 (218.188.104.178) 234.869 ms 12 203.162.217.25 (203.162.217.25) 265.917 ms 13 222.255.165.33 (222.255.165.33) 267.334 ms 14 203.162.231.33 (203.162.231.33) 288.420 ms 15 localhost (123.30.63.18) 271.116 ms 16 localhost (123.30.63.42) 283.224 ms 17 203.162.248.54 (203.162.248.54) 277.992 ms 18 119.18.142.153 (119.18.142.153) 297.088 ms 19 119.18.142.61 (119.18.142.61) 278.816 ms 20 srv-pvm.vinaren.vn (119.18.142.195) 278.602 ms
I don't know what's worse. That, or the PTRs of just a '.' name.
It's not all Amazon's fault, some of it is mine, too:
I preordered the new Kindle DX back on May 13th with (free) super saver shipping. I usually don't get overnight or expedited shipping because I'm patient, and there's a minimal risk of the world exploding if I don't get my stuff quickly. Amazon then sent me an eMail on the 2nd of June saying that my Kindle DX and case will arrive between June 22nd and June 26th. Cool, so far.
Here's where things started to get strange. On June 11th, one of my friends from work said he looked on Amazon's site the night before, and found that the Kindle DX was in stock, so he ordered one with overnight shipping. Yup, it did indeed come that day for him. From my perspective, it appeared that the customers who preordered the Kindle DX got shafted in favor of the folks who order with expedited shipping. I wrote to Amazon:
06/11/09 05:20:53
Your Name:Mark Kamichoff
Order Id: XXX-XXXXXXX-XXXXXXX
Comments:Hi -
I pre-ordered a Kindle DX on May 14th of this year, and its expected ship date is June 15th according to your website. However, one of my coworkers ordered a Kindle DX last night (June 10th) with overnight shipping and it is already on track for delivery today (June 11th).
Is there any reason why the pre-ordering of items is not given priority?
Please let me know, otherwise I will refrain from pre-ordering items from Amazon in the future.
Thanks.
- Mark
And, they responded:
Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:33:28 +0000 (UTC)
From: "Amazon.com Customer Service" <cust.service03@amazon.com>
To: "prox@prolixium.com" <prox@prolixium.com>
Subject: Your Amazon.com Order (#XXX-XXXXXXX-XXXXXXX)
Hello,
Thank you for contacting us regarding the Kindle DX order.
I apologize for any misunderstanding you have about the shipment.
I see you selected our free Super Saver Shipping option for order #XXX-XXXXXXX-XXXXXXX. It may take an extra 3-5 business days for a Super Saver Shipping order to ship from our fulfillment center(s). This extra time allows us to ship your order in the most cost-efficient way possible so we can pass the savings on to you in the form of free shipping.
Click here to see your order:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/css/summary/edit.html?orderID=XXX-XXXXXXX-XXXXXXX
We hope to see you again soon.
Thank you for choosing Kindle DX.
While I'm still annoyed, I suppose their explanation is valid. However, one of my other friends (who had preordered the Kindle DX with super saver shipping as well) used different language when writing to Amazon, and got his order bumped up to 2-day shipping for free. I probably could have chosen my words differently - I'll remember that for next time.
The next day (June 12th), I received an eMail from Amazon saying that my order was shipped via USPS, and was set to arrive in Charlotte on June 18th. Great, I thought - it'll be held at the post office and I'll pick it up. I watched the progress of the shipment on Amazon's site over the next few days, because plugging the tracking number into USPS's site resulted in a "no such tracking number" error. I'm not sure why that was the case, unless Amazon is retaining exclusive rights to tracking information for their shipments. Seems evil.
Today, I checked out the shipment tracking status, and there was an update yesterday saying "incorrect address" for the destination. I looked at the destination address, and sure enough, I typo'ed on the ZIP code. I put the ZIP code of the office where I work instead of my home ZIP code. After some head smacking, I sent Amazon a note, asking what I should do:
06/17/09 10:31:46
Your Name:Mark Kamichoff
Order Id: XXX-XXXXXXX-XXXXXXX
Comments:Hi -
I preordered a Kindle DX back in May, and by mistake put the wrong ZIP code for the destination address. The USPS tracking says "incorrect address."
What do I need to do to get the address corrected? The CORRECT ZIP code for this order should be 28277. Full address follows:
[ address listed ]
Thanks.
- Mark Kamichoff
I got a reply in the afternoon:
Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2009 03:55:59 +0000 (UTC)
From: "Amazon.com Customer Service" <cust.service03@amazon.com>
To: "prox@prolixium.com" <prox@prolixium.com>
Subject: Your Amazon.com Kindle Inquiry
Hello,
It looks like there's an address problem with order #XXX-XXXXXXX-XXXXXXX, and it's being returned to us.
We'll issue a full refund to your card when it's processed by our Return Center, and we'll send you an e-mail when that happens.
If you still want to get Kindle, please place a new order. You may need to check or update the shipping address when you place the order or make changes to your Address Book in Your Account at www.amazon.com/your-account.
I hope this helps. We look forward to seeing you again soon.
I was a little disappointed, and planned on ordering it again when I was back home. However, I just checked my eMail and became quite confused:
Hello from Amazon.com.
We're writing about the order you placed on May 13 2009 (Order# XXX-XXXXXXX-XXXXXXX).
USPS was unable to leave the package at your delivery address as per their delivery policies. The package will be available for pick up at your local post office. Please visit http://www.usps.com and click "Locate a Post Office" to find contact information for your local post office or call 1 800 ASK USPS. The items listed below are included in this shipment:
"Kindle DX: Amazon's 9.7" Wireless Reading Device (Latest
Generation)"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0015TCML0
"Amazon Kindle DX Leather Cover"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001T0HYCM
What the heck? So, I look at the tracking information on Amazon, and see the following:
Date Time Location Event Details June 18, 2009 10:19:00 AM CHARLOTTE NC Delivery attempted June 18, 2009 10:19:00 AM --- Available for pickup June 18, 2009 08:58:00 AM CHARLOTTE NC Arrival Scan June 18, 2009 08:58:00 AM --- Delivered June 17, 2009 07:59:00 AM CHARLOTTE NC Incorrect address June 17, 2009 07:20:00 AM --- Arrival Scan June 15, 2009 09:27:00 AM --- Arrival Scan June 11, 2009 07:16:35 PM Campbellsville KY US Shipment has left seller facility and is in transit
(had to preformat it to keep the spacing)
Massive props to USPS if they did what I think they did. I suppose they actually bothered to look at my street address, and realized that there's only one street with the name in Charlotte, and it's in 28277, not 28217. They then probably moved it to the Ballantyne post office and tried to deliver it, left a sticky note on my door, then brought it back to the post office. Hopefully I'll be able to pick it up, soon!
In other news, I gave my old Kindle to my mom, and I think she likes it, so far.
So, I'm running the Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard developer preview on my Mac mini. It's speedy, so far, but that's one of the few good things I have to say about it. There are a number of annoying features I've discovered.
The "lock screen" option of the keychain access menu doesn't just show the screensaver, now, it immediately shuts off the display. Not a big deal, but if I want the display to stay on and just see the screensaver - looks like I'm out of luck. Haven't found an option to get the old behavior back.
I've crashed Dock.app a few times so far when using Spaces and multiple Terminal.app windows. If I open two Terminal.app windows in space 1, then drag one to space 2, the whole screen locks for a bit, and the dock reloads. I'm assuming it's crashing, and restarting, but I don't know enough about the internals to really tell.
Speaking of Spaces, whenever I do a software update and reboot, the hotkeys for spaces are unmapped. I have to go into system preferences and remap them again. 10.5 had this problem, too.
Safari 4.0 sucks. Okay, it's not 100% suck - the HTML 5.0 video works well (http://www.youtube.com/html5). Everything else about it is a bit disappointing. The "top sites" is a nice idea, but it just seems too slow and laggy on the Mac mini. The autocomplete in the address bar doesn't wait for a pause before trying to autocomplete, and results in a flickering effect as the URL is being typed. I think it's the autocomplete that sometimes chops off the last character of the URL typed, but maybe that's some other bug. Also, repeatedly hitting command+l to move focus to the address bar sometimes results in the address bar not being able to receive focus at all - requiring a restart of the browser. Sorry Apple - Safari 4.0 just isn't too nice.
MacPorts doesn't build some things correctly. Specifically, MPlayer won't build due to some problem with libmad:
fixed.c:1: error: CPU you selected does not support x86-64 instruction set
Not really a Snow Leopard problem, but still an annoyance (might have something to do with the -march=i486 being passed to gcc - hmm!). I'm sure the MacPorts folks will have it fixed in no time, though. At least coreutils builds.
64-bit. I'm not sure of the details, but it seems that most things, including the kernel, are still 32-bit:
(fuzzball:21:43)% uname -m i386
And the compilers that Xcode (3.2) installs only seem to support i386 (i686) and ppc:
% ls -la /usr/bin/*gcc* lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 7 Jun 16 19:10 /usr/bin/gcc -> gcc-4.2 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 97392 May 18 13:27 /usr/bin/gcc-4.0 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 166128 May 18 14:13 /usr/bin/gcc-4.2 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 369696 May 18 13:27 /usr/bin/i686-apple-darwin10-gcc-4.0.1 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 816560 May 18 14:13 /usr/bin/i686-apple-darwin10-gcc-4.2.1 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 373792 May 18 13:27 /usr/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin10-gcc-4.0.1 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 820496 May 18 14:13 /usr/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin10-gcc-4.2.1
Not sure what's going on with that.. it seems that all binaries on the system are universal with i386 and x86-64, though.
The desktop icons are completely gone, now. With 10.4, in addition to the HD icon on the desktop, I would usually get an icon for my NFS volume that I usually mount on login. With 10.5, Apple ditched the NFS icon on the desktop. Now, with 10.6, I have no icons on the desktop. What's going on?
Apple still hasn't fixed the sound issues that were in 10.4 and 10.5. For example, if I'm in a terminal and do something that generates a system beep, my default sound will play. However, there's a nice delay often accompanied by a little 'pop' sound before the default sound plays. If I keep generating the system beep within a couple seconds, there is no delay in the sound, and no pop. However, if I wait 30 seconds to a minute - and then generate a beep again, the delay and pop is experienced. This also happens when I adjust the volume control via the keys on the keyboard (my Sun keyboard, but they still work). It's really annoying.
For the good, now…
It's fast. Applications seem to start up much faster than on 10.5, and the system seems much more responsive. I haven't bothered to do any benchmarking, but it certainly seems like an improvement.
I guess the dynamic columns in top(1) are nice. Depending on the $COLUMNS of the terminal, top will display more and more detail about the processes in the form of additional columns. Not bad.
I don't recall if 10.5 had this, but there is a nice GUI (wow, usually I don't say nice when using GUI in the same sentence) SSH agent password prompt. Looks like I can now unlock my private key, keep it in memory, and allow multiple applications access to it. I wonder if there's a similar one for GPG.. I am betting not.
Ok, I think that's it… maybe these things will be fixed by the time it's officially released!
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