Can't Wait For This Season

Honolulu got to see the first hour of LOST season 6 episode 1 on 30-Jan-2010, everyone else has to wait. The hype around LOST is absurd and damned entertaining at the same time. I absolutely love the ridiculous fan speculation and theories and writeups on the Internet. It's hilarious. I personally avoid any of the extra LOST stuff and just stick with the show, but still this is hilarious:

(Found via Jorge Garcia's blog). Yes, there are a lot of questions for the writers to answer and I think it's safe to assume that we won't get answers to everything, so here are my top 5 questions (in no particular order) that I'm hoping to have an answer to:

• What is the smoke monster? And by that I mean tell me what it is, why it sounds like an NYC taxi receipt printer, and where did it come from. The smoke monster first appeared in the pilot episode, so I think we deserve an answer to this one.


• What's the deal with the Egyptian stuff? The statue, the hieroglyphics, and so on. And don't give me a Stargate answer.


• What's the deal with Richard? Seriously, no aging? Come on, explain yourself.


• Who does the glass eye belong to? The what? That's right, the glass eye found in the hollowed out book in the abandoned Arrow station by the tail section survivors early in the series. Yeah, I want to know if it belonged to Uncle Patchy and if so, how'd he lose that eye.


• What do the numbers mean? The numbers had way more screen time early in the series and that's sort of been reduced to occurrences of the numbers in various forms here and there.
  

I could really list a lot more, but those are the 5 that came to mind. Hopefully it'll be an entertaining season.

Three Days With The Motorola Droid

I've had my iPhone for almost 2 years. I was ready for a new device, but not an iPhone upgrade. For anyone that doesn't know, I stayed with the original 2G iPhone for the duration of my AT&T contract. When the 3G model was released, I opted to not spend $99 and upgrade the device.

I bought a Motorola Droid the other day, which means I'm now under Verizon Wireless. Wireless carriers need to simplify pricing. It's unnecessarily complicated right now. I just want to know how much it's going to cost me per month. I don't care about the breakdown.

Verizon was pretty nice to me in the store. I came in asking for a Droid and they asked me if I was switching from the iPhone. They were pleased that yet another customer was switching over to the Droid from the iPhone. They asked what I disliked about the iPhone and/or AT&T and what features of the Droid caused me to choose it over other smartphones. That was fun.

My contract with AT&T is not up until some time in January. I want to keep my cell number, but I won't be able to port it over until the contract is up unless I want to pay a $155 early termination fee. Verizon gave me a temporary number in the same area code, which was nice.

With AT&T, I get a discount on my monthly bill because I work at Red Hat. I mentioned this to Verizon when we were going through the complicated pricing options and they said, "Oh, we probably give you a discount too. What's your work email address?" They looked it up right there and it was in the system, so I get a discount at Verizon too. Nice.

So enough with Verizon, what about the device. What do I like about the Droid so far?

• Physical as well as onscreen keyboard. I like having both. The physical keyboard isn't the greatest, but it's usable unless your fingers are too fat.
• Sync with Google for phone data. I absolutely hated having to use iTunes to sync data to/from the iPhone. The Droid just pulls my info from Google. I keep my contacts current there and all is good.
• Pulls OS updates over the air. Again, skip the iTunes step here to upgrade the phone.
• The Droid works as a USB mass storage device, so plugging it in to a Linux system actually means you can do something with it.
• Support for Ogg Vorbis as well as MP3 files. I just drag the music I want to a folder I create on the Droid and the music player finds the files.
• Notification area. I like this Android feature. Running multiple apps at a time and each dumps info in the notification area. I like it.
• Camera with a flash. Cameras on phones generally suck, but they added a flash, so pictures end up sucking just a little less.
• Video recording capability. Apparently some phones have had this for ages, but this is the first phone I've had with video recording capability.
• User-changeable microSD storage card. It comes with 16GB of storage on a little card about the size of an almond sliver, and the user can upgrade that to 32GB.
• MMS support. Apple only enabled that for 3G iPhones, so my 2G hobo phone still couldn't do MMS.
• A real headphone jack, as opposed to Apple's special narrow diameter countersunk headphone jack.

Is there anything I dislike about the Droid so far? Yes:

• Some of the built-in apps on the iPhone I had gotten used to having and the Droid is missing a few. For example, there is no built-in app to track stocks. I can find one in the app market, but I don't want to go through the many available to find the one I like and that works reliably (anyone want to recommend a good free one?). Another I can't find on the Droid is the world clock and timer. The iPhone's clock program was a world clock, which was useful for me. The timer functionality is super simple, but was handy for things like laundry and whatever we just put in the oven.
• No "Old Phone" ring tone. Stupid, but I liked that my iPhone rang like an old MaBell telephone.
• The eBuddy IM app looked really cool at first because it sounded similar to Pidgin, which I use on Fedora. eBuddy does work, but it drains the battery like crazy. I want AIM capability, but not something that tanks the battery.
• I liked the iPhone weather app for traveling. I just need to find one for the Droid, unless someone wants to recommend one.
• The Droid doesn't actually come with headphones, so I guess I have to get those (or stick with the iPhone ones). Not that I want new headphones, I just think phones should come with some sort of hands free device to encourage people to be slightly less stupid with their phones while driving.

I would like to have sshd running on the Droid so I could scp things back and forth more easily.

And that's it for 3 days of having the Droid so far. I like it.

FUDCon Toronto 2009

I have not posted anything here in a while, so here are some comments about FUDCon Toronto.

Given that I live in Hawaii, getting to FUDCon can be a challenge. I have been able to make it to a fair number since I moved to Hawaii, mostly due to aligning personal trips to back up to work trips so that the cost of my travel is significantly lower than travelling from Hawaii. To date, the longest I've gone to make it to a FUDCon was travelling from Honolulu to Brno for FUDCon Brno in 2008. That was 28 hours of flying travel, an overnight in Vienna, then a train to Brno.

FUDCon Toronto was great. The facility was nice and there were a good number of talks across the board. I was able to go to a lot of sessions and number I wanted to go to but couldn't because of schedule conflicts was higher than it had been for me at previous FUDCons. I feel that FUDCon is starting to mature in terms of how things run and the information presented. Early on they were pretty disorganized, but things seem to work well this time.

The hackfest days were also productive for me, which is usually not the case for me at FUDCon. I think what worked well this time was that we all didn't try to do too much during the hackfests. Keep the scope down and just really work on the one or two things at the hackfest and it can be really productive. For me, I liked hashing out the plan for testing anaconda in the israwhidebroken.com project. I'm looking forward to working on that.

With all FUDCons, there are areas for improvement. Both as a conference as well as what I can do to better prepare. Namely:

• It should have been called FUDCon Vaughn. While I liked the facility for FUDCon, the location of the hotel left few options for people wanting to socialize after a day of work.
  
• Better coordination from the airport to the hotel. A $45 cab ride is sort of a waste for one person. I could have done better trying to find people to share a cab with.
• POWER STRIPS AND EXTENSION CORDS! This plagues every gathering of hackers with laptops, no one ever brings enough methods to distribute power. I will start bringing an extension cord and at least one power strip, thus doing my part to help the situation.
• Hotel wifi was weak. Everyone at the hotel would jam up the connection and no one was able to use it. Worked fine if no one else was at the hotel. The wifi at the university was good over the weekend, but it was really hard to use on Monday.
  

In short, it was a great FUDCon and I was glad that I was able to make it. I am on my way home now. To make this trip cheaper for me, I backed up FUDCon to my Thanksgiving trip. My flight back home is scheduled for tomorrow from ATL. In the past 21 days I will have flown over 11000 miles (17,703 km) and passed through 6 different airports (HNL, LAX, ATL, RIC, JFK, YYZ) and 2 countries.

I'm ready to get back home. Anyone else up for FUDCon Honolulu next year?

What Goes Here

I've had a web site for myself in at least some capacity since 1995 or so. Either hosted by an ISP or running off my own hardware. This was all before the notion of 'blogs'. I say a lot of things, but (a) most people don't care and (b) is this page really a good medium for the things I say?

Most of my commentary is centered around work or technical issues, something that causes a lot of shit from friends and family. I'm on Twitter and Facebook as well, plus I have a photo site. But really, the things that I take time to write now--meant for other technical readers--is in source code commits to various projects. Those are almost like a blog, really.

After talking with Logan (who has long since shut down his space on the web and decommissioned the remaining hardware that was once snarf and/or penfold), I have decided that this site is no longer necessary. Instead of hosting a blog, I want it to pull in my information from other sources. I have no idea yet how to accomlish that, but I'll figure something out.

Migrating Data From Other Operating Systems

Zoltanh721 posted on his blog today about migrating data from other operating systems when installing Fedora. See the post here.

While I agree that migrating data for users is something that would be of value, having anaconda do it is not really a great idea. I view migrating data as a different task than installation. Knowledge of where settings are stored and what data is actually important or what the user cares about is very application and OS dependent. It's not something we should do during installation, but rather offer it as something the user can do after installation. They may find that Fedora is not even something they want to continue using.

We already set up dual boot systems in Fedora just fine. Creating a new tool that can handle data migration would be helpful for users, but definitely out of scope of the installation process. When I start thinking about migrating data from another operating system, I think about these questions:

• Should each application know how to import data from other, similar programs?
• Should there be a central system that knows how to migrate data between operating systems or environments?
• Really, aside from files such as documents and music (i.e., files that can be easily moved between platforms without much hassle), what things are we talking about migrating?

The Mozilla software on different platforms can import data from other similar programs, which is handy. Maybe a tool that exposes the data from the other platform and then launches the application on Linux to do the import would be useful. But again, this should happen once a system is already installed. You may use entirely different programs than I and want or need data imported differently.

Zoltanh721, good idea but I'd like to see implemented outside of anaconda. Oh, and if a project like this takes off, don't rely on partition IDs to determine what other operating systems are on the system. They mean nothing. libblkid will be more helpful.

Getting Autodialer Calls About Insurance, Mortgage, Your Wife?

Over the past couple of weeks, autodialer calls have started up on my cell phone...again. The numbers are all over the place as usual, but the caller ID is not blocked. The recording is roughly the same. It announces itself as Donna or Deborah and tells you to press 3 to have your number removed from the list. Then it tells you they have been trying to reach you about your wife for some time and if you have questions about insurance (???) to press 1 now. Press 1 now to speak to someone. Press 1. Press 1 for information about how you can save. Press 1. Press 1.

Choice seems fairly obvious. Pressing one routes you to the next available unlucky bastard who tries to sell you something related to your mortgage. It's email spam in phone form. I hate this stuff.

These calls are no different than the extended vehicle warranty calls from months ago, except this time I found the company behind it. And I called them. And they called me back and apologized and said that all of their clients would remove their number from their lists. Would you like to know more? Press 1. Wait, no.

Call 877-646-7319 and leave a message. I asked if this was the company behind the autodialer calls I just explained above. I asked for my number to be removed from ALL client lists and I want confirmation that my number was removed. I told them how to reach me and sure enough they called back and said my number would be removed and they even apologized for the calls.

I wanted to throw out some opinions about what a sleazy business model this is and it's really just a waste of time and money for everyone, but I decided not to. If the calls don't stop in 48 hours (the amount of time they asked me to wait in order for them to contact their clients), then they will get another call.

The company claims to operate in the central time zone, but I got a call back today at 3:00 PM Hawaiian time, so go figure.

Spread the word. This sort of behavior must not be tolerated on phones. They are getting you to pay for their advertising efforts.

All Photos Moved To SmugMug

I have completed the move of my photos from Flickr to SmugMug. My Flickr account no longer exists. My new photo site is http://photos.burdell.org/.