Speculations

Some people have asked me of what I think lies ahead... so instead of having to remember what I have told who... here are my wild speculations.

My opinions and speculations:

• We will see $5/gallon during 3Q08.
  
• Federal Reserve base interest rates will rise by 0.5% before end of FY08
  
• Residential property prices will bottom out during 4Q08.
  

MSOOXML has been made an ISO Standard,

Of course, the challenge is to now produce a OOXML document which conforms to the now ratified standard which is capable of thoroughly crashing implementors of OOXML readers, including MS Office, and to create such a document which to fix the problem would require breaking away from the published specification and rendering documents in an incompatible manner.

Given the penchant for largely undocumented binary globs in the file, I should imagine that this should be possible - because by the nature of being undocumented, they are not part of the standard so a document which has an 'invalid' binary glob would still be conforming to the OOXML standard.

Anyways, it is not a disaster - I am sure that there must be plenty of ISO standards which are defunct or rarely used because they are irrelevant or unimplementable. OOXML is likely to become another one. Where people fail to specify exactly which ISO document standard, that is their own problem. Supporters of ODF should continue doing what they were doing - refining their specification and making it good and stop wasting time trying to berate their competitor.

Besides, now you have an easy way to tell PHBs about what each of the two standards are about:

When archiving legacy documents, use ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML.

For all new documents, use ISO/IEC 26300 Information technology - Open Document Format.

I now have Time!

Well, it is done.

I am now officially a jobless lazy bum. On the plus side - I now have time!

Time to think about relaxing properly. Time to read one of those dozens of books I never seemed to have time for.

There are a few things I need to do - but there is no work stress or pressure. This weekend will be the first in years where I have no deadlines to think about. Okay - I did have a couple of deadlines but they don't matter anymore.

Important things have happened - Iain M Banks has published a new Culture novel: Matter. I plan to read it this coming week... but not too fast - I shall wait until I have a nice open slot for that activity so I can enjoy his work fully.

"Chick-Kut-Teh"

Wonderful news: The nearby 99 Ranch Market now stocks the Bah Kut Teh kit near their section for Indonesian foods. No longer do I have to travel to San Francisco's Chinatown just to purchase Bah Kut Teh spices..

This evening, I prepared it using about 2 lbs of chicken with some baby carrots and sliced white onions thrown in near the end (the two vegetables which Katie readily eats). Served with steamed Jasmine rice. Perfect.

Of course, the best is yet to come... Tomorrow, it would taste even better!

Early morning activity...

Waking up and then moving a whole bunch of stuff is not an ideal way to start the day. It's not even 8:30am and I feel tired. At least everything is operational again, For a number of hours from yesterday afternoon, we were essentially offline with not even the house phone nor DSL connected.

Used the opportunity to vacuum the cooler fins inside the Quad G5 - it was truely impressive how much dirt had collected there - amazing that the machine did not suffer badly from overheating problems.

The sorry state of computing literature

While I was browsing a Borders yesterday evening, a revelation came upon me as to an analogy for the computer book situation:

Imagine in a bookshop that there is a "Food" section where there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of books, all quite clearly divided into sections:

• How to eat Pizza
• How to eat quiche
• How to eat soup
• Serving food
• Table settings
• The Art of Plating
• Slicing Turkey
• Serving Pie
• Reheating Dinners

Dozens of sections about food... yet none of them actually tell you how to make anything. No ingredients. No recipes.

That is the state of the majority of computer books and computing magazines today.

Tower of Hanoi

Moving stuff around or even preparing to move stuff around is all hard work - especially when space is limited. Preparing stuff for my new home office and getting things ready... Soon the rest of the furniture and stuff will be ordered. I hope that it would all be done by Christmas.
My arms are aching though.

Leopard Spaces...

I wish that Spaces can use multiple displays ... Having all the 'thumbnails' only on the primary display makes them small and unintelligible.

Book browsing

I went to Borders this evening after work and while I was there, I browsed some books ... My interest today was looking at different scripting languages (yeah computer books, how predicable of me). Had a look at the books on Python and Ruby - It's amazing that none of them are thread safe which makes it impractical for some of the stuff I want to do.
*sighs*
So I purchased a Terry Pratchett book. I much prefer the artwork on his UK books than the artwork over here.

Time Machine

Looks like Apple's "Time Machine" feature can be made to work with a non-Apple fileserver. From the helpful hint at the following URL, I now have it working to my fileserver, a FreeBSD machine with netatalk... http://blog.danielparnell.com/?p=43
Now... I just need some more storage space...

Leopard is a bit spotty

It appears that the formerly excellent X11 support in Tiger has regressed and the X11 support in Leopard, despite being based upon the more modern Xorg codebase, shows significant regression in functionality.

1. Unable to move windows on to secondary displays


2. Unable to be configured to use TCP connections, except by manual startup (Do we really need multiple Xquartz processes?)


3. DPI is fubar - I prefer to set 75DPI even though I have large displays - I have large displays because I want more stuff on the screen!


4. Display feels slower.

Some of the other new features are nice - the new SSH AskPasswd program is a nice new touch but I think I shall just have to bite the bullet and 'upgrade' to the Tiger X11 release. I shall be following the instructions detailed at http://aaroniba.net/articles/x11-leopard.html

Leopard's CUPS defaults

Mac OS 10.5 was not discovering my CUPS printers like how 10.4 was. It turns out that Apple has decided to only discover printers by Bonjour only and has turned off CUPS own detection. This seems like a poor decision.
I found the answer at http://mcdevzone.com/2007/10/28/printer-fix-for-leopard

Leopard Review

Here is my not-very-objective review of MacOS 10.5 aka Leopard.
Installation was pretty painless - I uninstalled things like APE beforehand and after reading the various blogs where people had hanging installs, I am sure glad that I did take the precaution. It feels faster on my Quad-G5 PowerMac - things seem to respond faster. Visually - I'm going to have to change the default background - some of the annoying artifacts on the menu bar are from the background image. The work done to Mail - is excellent. Much improved responsiveness. The iChat improvements are very welcome - it can now be signed-in on multiple accounts.
I have not managed to get Time Machine working from using a FreeBSD fileserver, even when I have netatalk installed and operational - There has been some skectchy reports of workarounds but its not working here. I really don't want to have an external drive for each Mac for backup - I would prefer to be able to back them up centrally over the network.
With respect to software development - time will tell. There is already some indication that the assembler/linker may have some problems with some inline PowerPC assembler which prevents the build of the glib macport from completing successfully.

Mac OS X Leopard has arrived

Actually, the small box arrived about an hour ago. Clearing some old work source repositories from my hard drive and other general 'housekeeping' duties. I haven't eagerly anticipated a new OS release for a long time: I would probably compare this to the time when OS/2 2.1 was released with its full 32bit Presentation Manager or perhaps even OS/2 Warp 3 with its UI enhancements... As to what features I am looking forward to exploiting, I would say in no particular order: Spaces, XCode, DTrace, Shark. There is a bunch of other 'nice to have' features... I guess I will see how well I like it after I install it.

We can smell the smoke from here.

All throughout today and yesterday, there has been ash falling from the sky from all the fires around near Los Angeles. We have had all the windows closed to keep the dust and ash out - going outside for a short while irritates my eyes something awful and that is even though I take a powerful anti-allergy medicine daily.

Today we lean that Microsoft has lost it's appeal regarding their monopolistic practices in Europe. I foretell that Microsoft will continue with business as usual and otherwise completely disregard the ruling and the penalties. So, they may pay the fiscal part of the penalties but the rest of it will have to wait for Satan to get a new job as a snow-plough driver in hell.
What can be done about it? Quite simple. It is within the EU's power to void Microsoft's copyrights, patents, trademarks and all other intellectual property in Europe.
Radical, yes. But it would also serve as a warning for all other companies that they are not above the law. Europe is a big market for Microsoft ... bigger than their American market.
I doubt that would ever happen but it doesn't hurt to dream.

Time to morn the passing of an old friend. My old Pentium 200MMX (SMP 2 Processor) machine would not start up today. The PSU is fine - the DPT SCSI controller can be heard to spin up the hard drives but to no avail - the CPUs failed to start up. No POST beep codes, nothing. No activity.

*sighs*

It was a trusty workhorse, from 1997 to 2007.

Only one question plagues me.... What machine should I butcher in order to have a working OS/2 machine or do I wait until eComStation goes GA and buy a modern machine?

I am not happy. As to why I am not happy, lets consider a hypothetical situation: Imagine you have purchased a new computer and while it was in warranty, it kept crashing and working slow. The manufacturer of the computer thinks that the CPU may be a little faulty so they want you, the end user, to take out the CPU and ship it to Intel for diagnostics. And while you are at it, maybe you should send the video card to Nvidia, just in case.
Would you accept that kind of situation? I doubt it. You purchased the computer whole and complete from one vendor, you do not expect to go to the suppliers of the computer's vendor in order to have it fixed. You'd think it to be unacceptable... What if there was a faulty diode on the motherboard... Would your PC vendor expect you to go to IR for a replacement diode?
Ugh!

Anyways.... Our car has been having problems. It isn't even two years old yet but it has already spent about two months sitting at a Saturn dealership. It has had 3 steering columns replaced. 2 drive wheel bearings. a transmission control modules and an engine management module ... and thats only the expensive parts. Now, we have had the driver's side front drive tyre blow out two times in as many months: Both times, the tyre failed in an identical fashion. Now we (the end user) must send the tyre to the manufacturer to be examined for defects... The first tyre came with the vehicle, the second was purchased from a Saturn dealer.. ie. Both failed tyres came to us via Saturn. WHY DO WE HAVE TO TAKE THE TYRE TO THE MANUFACTURER? Absolutely non-existent customer service: They should be bending over backwards for us, especially when you consider the entire catalogue of faults that this vehicle has had to date.

I am not a happy Saturn customer.
I cannot in good consciousness recommend anyone else to buy a Saturn vehicle.

I wish I had purchased a Volkswagen.

Something seems a bit fishy in Redmond Land.... As many people who know me know, I don't use Windows that often but I do mostly for my work and I'm typically using Visual Studio C++. Only yesterday, I fired up Windows XP and after a couple of hours of use, up popped up the dialog for installing updates. I simply closed what I was doing and let the updates occur.
Windows XP rebooted and I began to use it but when I copied files over the network, I had a nagging feeling that the performance wasn't quite up to par.
Today, I have tried transferring larger files and I notice that it appears to stall frequently while performing the file transfer. So I started "ping -t" ... and wouldn't you know, this machine which used to have no problems is now dropping about 1 in 10 packets over my fully switched network. Just in case it was a faulty port on the switch, I changed the port and ethernet cable. No change.
Is this some sinister plot to make Vista "better" by crippling older XP installations?
In any case, it is stupid - and dropping that many packets causes a lot of problems. I cannot believe that everyone are experiencing this or else there would be a worldwide outcry - a revolt. Perhaps its just a coincidence that the network card is now faulty but it's a bit awkward to resolve as the NIC is the on-board integrated port on a laptop. I guess I will have to try with a PC Card device and see if that rectifies it.

I was wondering around a superstore the other evening when the black Windows Vista box caught my eye... It says there, right under where "Windows Vista Ultimate" is written, "The most complete Windows ever" or something like that.
What I would like to know is.... Why would anyone want an incomplete operating system? I don't care if it is the "most complete". I want an operating system which is "complete".
Still, I have to admit that the most expensive software purchases I have personally paid for in the past couple of years has been 2 retail boxes of Windows XP Professional. Of all the people I know personally who have tried Windows Vista (usually bundled with their computers), almost all of them have either purchased Windows XP or have somehow acquired a DVD. One person even considers installing XP Home an upgrade over the bundled Vista Home Premium. For all of Windows XP's flaws, it never drove people to install Windows ME. I have to confess that I haven't actually used Vista long enough to be as frustrated with it as those people but to be perfectly frank, Windows XP Pro does everything I need out of an OS when I need to use it.
There are a few new pieces of software which I will purchase in the near future when they are released: Mac OS 10.5 which I will probably buy the family pack and the expensive one: eComStation 2.0 - partly for nostalgia's sake but I also have a unopened, still in shrink wrap, Hopkins FBI for OS/2 which I have been thinking about trying for the past couple of years.