• SOPA (H.R. 3261) references one and two.
• PIPA (S. 968) references one and two.
• OPEN Act (S. 2029) references one and two.

First, the MPAA says the blackouts were an abuse of power. However, shutting down a site, without due process, because they supposedly host or link to illegal content is not.  This is hypocrisy at its finest.

Second, making viewing or linking illegal content a felony, like rape and murder, is absurd.

Third, the MPAA has given $94M (ninety four million dollars) to politicians in an effort to get these bills passed.  There was one hearing where limited representatives from the opposing view were permitted to speak or attend.

Finally, back to my point about piracy.  If pirating material is easier that using it legally, can you see the real problem?  The industry needs to change to make their products easier and better to use than illegally obtained copies.

Passing laws to supposedly fix a broken industry is not going to fix the broken industry.

#!/bin/bash

ABC_PID=`ps | grep abc | awk '{print $1}'`
DEF_PID=`ps | grep def | awk '{print $1}'`

if [ -z $ABC_PID ] ; then
  echo "ABC PID is empty. Kill manually."
  exit
fi

if [ -z $DEF_PID ] ; then
  echo "DEF PID is empty. Kill manually."
  exit
fi

echo "ABC PID: " $ABC_PID
echo "DEF PID: " $DEF_PID

echo "Killing ABC and DEF with: kill -9" $ABC_PID $DEF_PID
kill -9 $ABC_PID $DEF_PID

exit

Out of necessity I changed the names to protect the … well, stuff.

See a way to improve that? Please share! Have a way you’d prefer to see it done? Share that too! Variety!

The cloud.

A nebulous frontier.

I tried to imagine the data.  What did it look like?  Were the collections like cumulus clouds?  Were the users like sky-divers?  Or were they hapless passengers thrown out the door, free-falling to their demise…

All apologies to Tron: Legacy there.  But I think my parody sums up the wacky vision promoted by so many sales people and executive-level mumbo-jumbo speakers.  They don’t know what it is.  They talk about it like is a the next best thing, but I haven’t yet heard a sales, technical, or architecture person describe it in a way that makes real sense — something that makes it more than just a big blob of storage “out there” that can be used for “lost of cool stuff”.

Then I read this post by Lee Dallas.  Nail, on, the, head … man.  Perfect.  This is what the cloud brings:  data + context, permitting you to use any device to access the same data and have awareness.  Whether it is a book, a paused movie, a spreadsheet, or whatever.  The next step, of course, is full-blown programs that allow you to disconnect and reconnect to their instances from any device.

That makes it sound cool, in a tangible way … in a way that I understand and can explain to others.

I could go off about privacy concerns, but for now I’ll let this serve as a lengthy pointer to Lee’s post which is such a nice explanation of what “the cloud” means.

Sometimes I marvel at the various technologies we have and the ability to receive entertainment through a variety of channels.  I can watch television shows, movies, and other videos on my phone, computer, or television via DVD, Blu-Ray, streaming video from my cable provider or from the Internet.  However, various and frustrating barriers remain preventing this from being easier, more convenient, diverse, and overall, practically useful.

A trivial complaint I have is format.  Be it physical disc rental or streaming content, the need to pay extra for that is ridiculous.  To me, it is marketing inhibiting the industry by making the next step needlessly more expensive.  Again, a trivial complaint, but there it is.  To me, the better solution is nix the premium and stop throttling the adoption of better format due to price — it is not that much more expensive to press a Blu-Ray disc or stream a 1080p HD video.

My phone is a great device for watching things before going to bed (especially given a variety of random sleeping problems).  A lot of content is hosted on Hulu.  They have setup their service to detect phones and prohibit watching of content on anything but a computer unless you are a Hulu Plus member.  So while I have a supposedly state-of-the-art phone, I need to subscribe to Hulu Plus to watch content that would otherwise be free if I watched it on my computer.  Netflix falls in another category as they have failed to maintain or expand their streaming content and are, for me, becoming useless in this regards.

Most Blu-Ray players in the mid-to-high-end range have the ability to stream online content.  However, deals have been struck such that, in general, you can only access subscription material.  Therefore I can stream Netflix content if I have streaming access enabled, and Hulu Plus content if I subscribe to that.  Conveniently there is Crackle which may have an scattered and odd selection, but sometimes has something amusing.

My computer generally succeeds where other devices fail … unless the host site is using a Silverlight or ActiveX player in which case those don’t work on Linux.  While I’m not a high-enthusiasm Linux advocate, personally and professionally I am an advocate of online content being accessible by any reasonable device or OS that can get to it.  Linux may be in the minority, but I can watch Hulu content on it — why can’t I watch Netflix streaming or stuff from some other networks?  (I do know some of the answer to this:  Microsoft technology is mostly or completely incompatible with Linux.  Sometimes there is also a simple OS check because the service does not want to support non-mainstream operating systems.)

As for content providers, I’m not sure what they’re up to.  The cable companies charge an arguably ridiculous premium for their streaming content rentals, and a disproportionately higher premium for HD content.  Netflix has changed their pricing and products such that streaming and physical rental, combined, cost more, offer less, and otherwise have not improved (by my observation).  Hulu seems to slowly becoming a subscription service — which is fine, they need to make money somehow, but deliberately blocking devices from viewing their free content is frustrating.

So now to talk like a pirate about the obvious.  Yes, you saw this coming, right?

Pirating content is free.  With a few, well-documented scripts, it can even be hassle-free to convert a file into formats playable on my phone, as a DVD, or streaming to another computer.  The selection is vast, the download rates reasonable, and overall the ability to do searches, automatically download shows or movies and convert these files is ridiculously easy.

But let me be clear, and I’m serious.  Pirating content is wrong.  It is illegal.  Period.  The convenience of doing so does not negate its illegal nature.  Watching pirated content hosted on another computer is still participating in the illegal act.

Yet while I write that, I laugh at the same time.  Stealing this content offers more variety, the best quality, the least hassle, and most convenience when compared to the legal channels.  It circumvents the nonsensical licensing issues that are preventing Netflix from carrying Showtime content, Hulu from having more than one season of Arrested Development up at a time, and other such restrictions.

The industry needs to wake up  and start making the services they pay for just as easy as pirating content.  I do not pay for aggravation, complication, or hassle.  Yet if I want to be a Good Boy, I must.

FWIW, NB, extreme disagreement will be addressed one-on-one.  Posts are moderated, so if you want to share your email with me, I can skip approving the comment and, worst case, I can delete it.

alias u="cd .."
alias uu="u;u"
alias uuu="uu;u"
alias uuuu="uuu;u"
alias uuuuu="uuuu;u"
alias uuuuuu="for (( i=1; i<=6; i++ )) ; do cd .. ; done"
alias uuuuuuu="uuuuuu;u"

All this because I change directory levels like crazy, and often, in the shell. I worked out #6 when I was trying to figure out a way to count the number of U’s I typed. But then I reckoned that was too complicated, but didn’t want to completely lose it.

At least it is amusing to me.

I may try to figure out how to script this at some point and count the number of U’s or pass in a parameter.

1) find your critiera | xargs grep your grep criteria … is nicer to your processor, memory, and quickly returning the results.

2) finding writable files.  This has been particularly useful when using a really backwards SCS that doesn’t integrate nicely, cleanly, or usable with an IDE.

My command:  find . -type f -perm /u=w

So simple. So elegant. So simply says “find all files in this directory, recursively, that are writable by the user/owner”. The one confusing thing I had about this was /u instead of /o. I figured “owner, group, world”, but it is actually “user, group, other(s)”.

Anyway, this has improved my programming life.  Yeah, I’m gonna say it… take that, Windows.

Edit (8/24):  Corrected “iPhone 4″ reference.  Added Amarok2 remote app to the “things I just love”.

Edit (8/24):  Added FTP app (like)!

Battery Life

The battery life really sucks if you leave the screen brightness on, up, or on automatic.  I’ve found I have to put the handy control bar on my home page so I can turn up the brightness if I’m outside and want to use the phone, and then turn it down again.  As a result, the battery life went from lousy to insanely good.

Keyboard

It’s a little different from the iPhone.  The big thing is to learn how to use the help and understand that you can tap on any word and alternate spellings will be shown for you.  This trumps the iPhone (3G?) soundly in this regards.  Updates in Gingerbread (see below for that awesomeness!) made word highlighting even better.

Rampant Tasks

Being Linux-y, this is more like a pocket computer.  Tasks start and they run until you stop them.  If you don’t stop them, they can suck up memory, CPU time, and power.  However, the built-in task manager has an auto-kill list that works nicely.  There are some things you shouldn’t put there (like anything that looks like a system application) and so far learning-by-mistake has not resulted in a dead phone.

Multiple Screens

I disliked that I can’t control the number of screens (or pages, or whatever they’re called).  I’d like to reduce them and have my own… and start from the left and have the others “to the right”.  The fix was to get used to it and organize my information better and more usably.

Randomly Stops Playing Music

I ride the train to work.  I have found that as the phone switches cells this causes some kind of connectivity issue for the phone and the music player will stop playing.  I’ve filed a bug on this.  The solution is to connect to the train’s wifi.  No ideal, but works for now.

. . .

In addition to the things I had to fix, there are things I just love about this phone.

FTP App

There’s are FTP applications that will let me SFTP files from my phone to my computer.  I can cut and paste files from my phone to my desktop computer over my wireless network.  This right here is a “technology is awesome” moment.

Netflix Streaming Content

For various reasons, being able to be entertained while trying to fall asleep is sometimes helpful for me.  Being able to watch streaming content on my phone is far more useful, far more amusing, and getting far more use than I ever thought it would.

Google Contact and Calendar Sync

For a long time I resisted putting much information into The Google.  This, however, has become very handy.  One place to keep my contact information and if I change my phone, sync’ing is supremely easy.  Convenience won out here.  As for the Calendar, I keep everything really vague and in my own short-hand.  I’m the only person who is (or should be!) looking at it, so that works for me.

Fingerprint Scanner Unlock

This is just way cool and it’s hard to find more words than that to say for it.

Variety of Weather Apps

I’m not a weather junky, but I do need to know the weather for two, well-separated regions (home and work).  Being able to do this easily is nice.  Accuweather on the iPhone was crashing often for me and some of their updates to it had removed usefulness.  Perhaps it was the older phone itself, but this is something this move/upgrade resolved for me.

Calendar on the Home Page

I ask the same question every day:  what am I doing?  As long as I remember to put things in my calendar, that question is easily answered.

It’s Still an MP3 Player

Yay!

There’s an Amarok2 Remote App

I run Linux at home (Kubuntu) and use Amarok as my music player.  I’ve been looking for a way to remote control it because I use a KVM which has my connect-to-work laptop on it too.  That there is an app to remote control Amarok is awesome.  I’ve heard there is something for iTunes on the iPhone which is also cool — but my use case is Android+Kubuntu, so this app won a little piece of my heart.

OS Upgrade Didn’t Nuke My Info

One thing I had accepted, which appeared obvious from other android phones, is that I was going to be stuck with this OS version unless I wanted to jailbreak the phone.  Apparently Google and AT&T decided to change this approach and are now pushing out OS updates to the phones.  So not only did I get upgraded to Gingerbread (2.3.4), but NOTHING got paved like how things would happen with iOS upgrades.  My contacts, email, music, calendar, apps, etc. were all intact afterwards.  That was just freaking awesome

. . .

The Bottom Line

If a person wanted an Android phone, I would have no problems recommending this unit.  However, I would otherwise recommend something from Verizon if good nationwide coverage is what you need.

The short story is this:  diff -w -B -y -W 200 {file1} {file2}

Now some of you are reading that and saying, “No kidding.  Welcome to the real world.”  The rest of you may be saying “gonk… gonk… goo gonk.”  So to quote the help on diff:

• -w:  ignore all white space (like tab expansions and changes to white space)
• -B:  ignore changes whose lines are all blank (just in case the above is finicky)
• -y:  output in two columns
• -W 200:  make the output 200 columns wide (this permits both files to be displayed in full width, with room, assuming 80 char width)

I have yet to find a graphical diff tool that can manage that so nicely.  The side-by-side output is very clean and I can redirect it to a file if I want to.  Smooth, simple, elegant.  And if there’s a way to improve on this, I hope a casual passerby will comment!

Ciao!

Because I’ve been burned by stale links, I’m going to repeat some information here.

Netbook:  Acer AspireONE D255

Wireless (lspci):
01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications AR8152 v1.1 Fast Ethernet (rev c1)
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation WiFi Link 1000 Series

The steps:

1. Go here (http://linuxwireless.org/download/compat-wireless-2.6) and download “compat-wireless-2.6.tar.bz2″
2. Run the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential
cd ~/Desktop
tar -xjvf compat-wireless-2.6.tar.bz2
cd compat-wireless*
scripts/driver-select atl1c
make
sudo make install

At this point a reboot should load the network driver.  For me, the “sudo make install” took a very long time.  Well, 10 minutes.  But it felt like an eternity.

If a reboot doesn’t load the module, try “modprobe atl1c” (that’s ay-tee-el-one-cee).

And that was it.  Lovely!  Again, I can’t promote the friendliness and helpfulness of the Ubuntu community enough.  They have been great.

Update 2011-03-30: I had to repeat these steps after upgrading to kernel 2.6.32-28 or -29.  But it worked.

First, technology!  See Mike Code, is cool.  It is a way an interviewer can ask simple questions over the phone and see the person write the code.  That gets a darn cool in my book.  Perhaps it is as modern as VHS is these days, but who says a technology needs to be on the order of Star Trek to warrant recognition?

Also, I recently found this:  http://formatmysourcecode.blogspot.com/.  It is excellent for automatically formatting HTML/XML and code for posting in a blog.

Beyond the technology is the questions I have either been asked or found in my own prowling around.  These are thing ones I find to be the most interesting.

Practical Questions:

• fizz-buzz, written in any language — basically, for some multiplier of a loop print “fizz”, for a different multiplier write “buzz”.  For a multiplier equal to one divisible by A and B, write “fizzbuzz”.
• given two lists (e.g., friends lists), and assuming list-2 represents changes affected upon list-1, who was added, who was removed, who is the same.  Written in any language.
• Extend a standard Java class (e.g., HashMap) such that it meets new constraints such as, and using HashMap as an example:
  • limit the number of values that can be stored popping off the oldest when a newer one is inserted
  • disallow overwriting an existing key; key/value must be removed first
  • lock the list if three unsuccessful attempts are made to retrieve a value
  • lock the list if three unsuccessful attempts are make to insert a value (e.g., inserting an existing key)
• web application to retrieve basic statistics from somewhere like flickr, using web app technology of choice

Conceptual Questions:

• What information should a bug tracking system have?  How should it be stored?
• What project did you make the most difference on?  What did you learn?  What would you do differently?
• Create an interface from a legacy system to a newer UI.  Assume an API or web service exists.  Describe the architecture you would use; describe high-level design considerations; define milestones.
• A database has been demonstrating progressively degrading performance (either via an application or reports).  What diagnostic steps would you take?

Mean Questions:

• I file lists like this as mean because they contain a lot of questions that either a person knows from practical use, or can look up.  To put someone on-the-spot to answer deep details like this in an interview is merely a test in making the interviewee squirm.  To me, these questions are a lot like asking a mechanic about metallurgy — while they use metal in their daily work, but they don’t need to know the minute details about the metals they use to get their job done or do their job well.