Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in geoffstechno's LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
7:25 pm	They cut my wire too. About two weeks ago, several fiber optic cables across the Mediterranean Sea were cut. Since many companies that do business with Arab countries refuse to do business with Israel, we were lucky and none of the cables cut carried Israeli Internet traffic. This left some of North Africa, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and most of the oil states in the area without Internet access. Israel ostensibly was never affected, our traffic goes a different way, via a company started by Israelis. There have been many culprits blamed for this, including G-D (a storm), an errant anchor, and deliberate sabotage by your choice of Israel, the U.S., Al-Frieda's or some combination of all of them. After a few days, things were restored, via different routes. That is where the trouble lies. Before the cut, I was able to get a ping time (round trip data) of around 287ms (about 1/4 of a second for people who think that way) 24/7. Now instead of being directly routed to the U.S., it is now routed via London. The connection from my ISP's ISP to their ISP (the site I am connecting to is an ISP on their own) is now made in London. The connection must be very busy. Late at night, the ping time has dropped to 127ms (about 1/8th of a second). During the day until midnight, it goes up and stays at about 1.3 seconds. If I were just using it to surf the web, I would not notice, except for the web sites I go to being "sluggish". I occasionally see the FireFox error panel that the website could not be found (DNS service too slow), or that the page does not respond. Now I see it more often, but not enough to worry. Unfortunately I use it for VoIP (an Internet phone). It is now like the old days of satellite long distance calls. If you are old enough to remember those days, for a while long distance calls from the east to the west coast of the U.S. were carried by satellite. There is a long delay as the signal travels the 26,000 miles from earth to the satellite and back around a quarter of a second. This adds up to well over a half a second from the time you finish speaking and the person on the other end replies. It is quite noticeable. AFAIK, what killed the satellite long distance business was MCI. Instead of trying to compete with a satellite network, they built a coast to coast terrestrial microwave network and undercut the price of AT&T long lines. In order to compete, AT&T built their own network. Both are long gone, having been replaced with fiber optic cables. Or maybe AT&T just went to fiber optics, I don't know. However for me, that time is back. Hopefully not for long. Geoff. (Comment on this)
Sunday, February 17th, 2008
11:37 pm	changes to bus routes to my home. I know this will probably not interest most people. Egged, the local bus company is changing the bus routes to my home. I figured I needed to document it somewhere, so here is as good as a place as any. For those that don't know, but are curious, I live in a neighborhood called "Givat Mordechai". According to my son, it means Mordechai's hill. According to the plaque on the wall at the entrance to my street, it means "Mordechai's housing unit", named in honor of someone whose Hebrew name was Mordechai. It also has his English name, which is probably what his family and friends knew him as, but I've forgotten it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Givat_Mordechai Givat Mordechai is built on a hill. A main street runs down it, called Rechov Shachal (Shachal Street). Shachal is one of those meaningless Hebrew words, it's an acronym of an organization's name, Pioneers in service to Israel (or the State, I've heard both). Since it really does not exist as word, it is transliterated into latin letters 5 different ways on the street signs in the area. At one end was a small street, which has now become a major feeder to the Begin (as in Menachum Begin), not as in "start" expressway. It's also were the afore mentioned sign is. The other end is Herzog street a very large street (6 lanes of traffic). At the Herzog end of the street is a statue called "Jacob's Ladder". The artist must have been a Led Zeppelin fan, it really is a "Stairway to Heaven". At that end is also the local fire department. The east side is a valley that is not very noticeable, but it has the main entrance to the Botanical Garden, run by Hebrew University. The University is beyond the north end of the area, on the other side of the Begin. Before the Begin was built you could walk here from the University. The west side is a former orchard, now a valley of grass and trees. It is inhabited by a small herd of Gazelles. If you search the web for it, you can find several people's photographs. In Google Earth it is called both by its proper name, and by Antelope Valley. I've bookmarked about where my house is on Google Maps under Satellite View, I don't know if you can find it or not by looking for me. Now to the bus routes. Currently there are two buses which pass by my home. The 17 bus comes from Ein Kerem, a small village now engulfed by the city. At one time it was inhabited by Christians, but many Jews have moved in as it expanded and became a neighborhood. Nearby is a large hospital run by the Hadassah organization, called Hadassah Ein Kerem. The bus runs along Herzl street, past Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Memorial), and up to Jaffa Road. It turns on Jaffa Road, runs past the central bus station, the shuk (open air market) and turns down King George Street. Eventually it winds through Rechavia, a neighborhood built in the 1930s, by German Jews, which looks vaguely like a pre-depression middle class German neighborhood. Considering most if not all of them in Germany were destroyed in the Second World War, it may be the only existing one left. Then the bus goes near the Kenesset (our house of government), the Israel Museum, The Yitzahk Rabin Youth Hostel, the Botanical Garden and turns on to Shachal street. At the bottom of the street, it turns west, goes to the Malcha Shopping Mall, and goes off into what was once an Arab village on a hill. The village is still there, from the mall you can see the minaret of the mosque, but it is now surrounded by homes occupied by Jews instead of empty fields. The 17 route will not change for now. The 6 bus is a complementary route. It starts at the train station near the mall, passes the mall, goes on Herzog to the Jacob's Ladder, up Shachal and then turns left instead of the 17's right turn back to the botanical garden. It passes Shaare Tzedik, a large hospital and turns right on Herzog and duplicates the 17 route until it reaches King George. The 6 stays on Jaffa Road, and at the old city snakes around it until it goes near French Hill and off to Pisgat Zev. Pisgat Zev is one of those housing areas built after 1967 to create "facts on the ground", taking empty land and putting a whole lot of Jews on it. It has since been annexed by the City of Jerusalem. The 6 is the route that will change. It's going to be split into two routes. The 5 (which now sort of follows the new 6 route) and the 6. The 6 will go from the train station, past the mall, and through Givat Mordechai. Leaving Givat Mordechai, it will turn right, get on the Begin and the next stop is the Central Bus Station on Jaffa Road. It will then follow it's current route except that it will end in French Hill, instead of going on to Pisgat Zev.The Pisgat Zev part of route 6 will be taken over by a new route, 66. Going back, after it leaves the Central Bus Station, it will get on the Begin and the next stop will be in Givat Mordechai. It will then follow the old route to the train station. The 5 bus now goes from the train station, past the mall and then gets on the Begin at Herzog Street. It pops out again at the Central Bus Station and ends. It will now go into Givat Mordechai, and at the north end turn left and sort of follow the old 6 route. It will end on Jaffa Road at the Central Bus Station. Assuming the buses run with similar frequency to the old routes, it will be good news for us and everyone who lives in Givat Mordechai. The people who need to go to Shaare Tzedik (me) or along Herzl will be able to take the 5 bus and get there at about the same time as they do now. The people who go into town (my wife) will have about 10 minutes on a good day, and a half hour on bad day cut off of their commute. Geoff. (Comment on this)
Monday, February 11th, 2008
7:53 pm	New TV Shows Now that the writer's strike is almost over, I'd like to present my ideas for new shows to replace the ones we no longer care about because of the gap. Some of them are serious, some are jokes, most could go either way. :-) The first is the all time perennial favorite Star Trek. With the demise of all of the TV shows, even the worst of the lot, Enterprise, which IMHO had its moments. Bring back the writing and production crew that did the last few episodes, they were along with "Carbon Creek" the best of the series. Buy the team that produces the "New Voyages" and produce a decent Star Trek series. Concentrate on plot, toss in some decent actors and what are now personal computer grade special effects and you would have IMHO a winner. They don't have to dilute the long gone characters, of Kirk and Spock, etc, they can use other ships and slightly later crews. There was 70 years between Kirk and Picard, so there is plenty of room to stick something in. Jericho. I did not like the middle of the first season. It was canceled for good reason, but they were able to recover, change their direction and close out the season with a decent finish. Everyone with a computer or most people that don't but know someone who does has seen the leaked first three episodes of the second season and it shows promise. Meanwhile, there was a lot going on between the explosions and the attack, and it could be filled in with out takes of the main characters and people we have not yet met. Concentrate on the story. Jericho is not "On the Beach" or "Doctor Strangelove" part II, it's about people. 24. I don't know about you, but I think that 24 died a permanent death in the middle of the last season. His father should have shot him and let the series die a merciful death, However Jack Bauer was not the only CTU agent in the country, and there are plenty of 24 shows that could be done with other agents in other cities. Maybe a set of 4-6 hour miniseries, each of which could encompass a full day. Babylon 4.5. I would love to see stories about Babylon 5 which did not go off on the strange alien religious bent. I don't really care about the Minbari and the fact the whole time loop culture, we could spend years watching stories about the station and the people on it without them. We don't even need the crew. It could be set before or after the shows we've seen and if the crew we knew were needed, they could be pieced together from out takes. It does not even have to be on Babylon 5 itself, it could be Babylon 1 or even something completely different. In fact, Near Space 1, a combination of the B5 and Star Trek Universes would be a good combination. Place it in time after Enterprise, but before the Original Star Trek, and in space a few hours from Earth by warp (hyper)drive. Family Guy. Same show, same characters, but make it more "family friendly". Shows that my kids can enjoy without my wife cringing. House. The shows with him being persecuted by a cop in the third season darn near sunk the series IMHO. They seem to have recovered and this season is much better. Right now they have toyed with him having a girl friend by presenting candidates that don't quite make it. My vote is for the "Virgin Mary". Forget the tension between Cuddy and House, it was fun at first, but it got old. By now, we don't want them to hook up. I would love to see the new improved Amber come back. CSI. Now that we know that Sara is coming back and Grissom is leaving, it's time for a new guard to take over. Maybe the best thing to do would be promote Grissom to his boss's job. Then he can marry Sara, she can come back as a CSI, and he only needs to show up for a few minutes the entire year. If the fans don't take to it, the undersheriff can always restructure the lab and bring him back working on cases (and showing up each week). While you are at it hook up Wendy and Hodges. CSI Miami. This is one that is going to get me in trouble. :-) I believe that Delko is really a Jew. His mother is a Converso, one of the descendants of the Jews that went into hiding after the Spanish inquisition, and his father a Russian Jew named Delkowitz. In the series, he claims to be a Catholic, but his parents would not even show up at his sister's wedding to Horatio, who is a good never married Catholic. They did not have the wedding in a Church, and her funeral was off camera. If you look at the graveyard where she is buried, there is not a single cross, statue of the Virgin Mary, or any inscription relating to Christianity on hers or the other graves. From what I can see it's an atheist or a Jewish cemetery. So let's see some shows where Horatio finally finds love, and Delko marries a nice Jewish girl. CSI New York. Doing fine on its own with the fourth season revamped "look". Get Mac to loosen up, maybe bring back Peyton. BattleStar Galactica. Why bother? It was a great show, but it always dies in the middle of the season. It would be good to cut the season to half the shows and get rid of the filler. Torchwood. Not related, it's a BBC series, but come on, everyone liked it better when we thought Captain Jack was bi, and did not have to see it. The season opener would have been much better without the kissing. Geoff. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
1:44 pm	Time to invest in a startup. All investments have a risk. A friend once told me that the best investment for me was to stick the money I had under my mattress. Considering the success I've had with startups, he probably WAS right. I use the past tense. If you follow the value of the dollar, it has gone down almost 10% on the world market. The Sequel has done well so far in relation to the dollar, but as time goes on, it will "adjust" itself. The Israeli economy is based on the Dollar being 4.25 Sequels. More likely, it will be closer to 5 to 1 than 4 to 1 or last week's low of 3.70 to 1. If you have followed other investments they all have been dropping in value. Real estate, both as a short term investment and a rentals have gone down. Many people have mortgages far beyond the current value of their property. Rents peaked here in Jerusalem last summer, when airplane loads of immigrants arrived and not understanding the market went on a feeding frenzy to rent apartments in what they had been told were good neighborhoods. When they arrived and found that they were paying twice as much rent as their neighbors, and that their rent did not include things they thought it would, they passed the word back to the next group. Not only that, but there are very few people coming with large sums of money to spend, and many are arriving, or planing to arrive to escape debt. In the U.S. it is worse in some places, real estate is a worse investment than hi-tech stocks. Hi-tech stocks have always been risky, if you ask someone who invested in CISCO, they tell you how well they did, but what about people who invested in the competition? There was in the WSJ about the difference in value you would have if you invested $1000 in a well thought of router company, or beer. After the bubble burst, if you held on to the stock for a year, or drank the beer, the empty cans would be worth more than the stock. Similar things are in motion now. My last posting was about Crocs, the brilliant Summer shoes, in their winter of (investor) discontent. (sorry, Bill.) Even Apple, which has been a darling of investors since they successfully faced the choice of going bankrupt or giving the company to Steve Jobs. My speculation is that the company will split into a company that makes the iPod, the love it or hate it iPhone, and iTunes which is doing very well, and a computer company, which is doing better than others, but that won't be saying much. So if you have money to invest, either made when the market was hot and is now festering in 2%-3% savings (or going negative in stocks or real estate)? My suggestion is to invest in startups. The risk is high, very high, 95% of all startups (not just hi-tech) exit in failure and loss, and 75% of them do it in the first year. However, the rewards for those that succeed are as great. If you look at it from the point of view of someone with $100m to invest, and I understand that such a person probably would not be reading this blog, and they invest that $100m in a startup, they are likely to loose it all. If they invest $1m in 100 startups, they are very likely to make it back, and could end up making many times their investment. So how does a small investor do that. Look for startups in the pre-seed money phase. Many startups need small amounts of money to get going. Money to incorporate, write a business plan and shop it around, file U.S. provisional patent applications, and feed the people behind it for a few months until they get the seed money. This is not the same as an angel investor, who funds the company well into the development of the product, at least until there is a prototype and enough of a company to go to a VC fund. The point is to never over invest. Don't put in more money than you can afford to loose. I've seen many companies here that call themselves "young", meaning no adults involved. It's usually kids just out of the army, or college and have an IDEA. They convince a family member to empty their savings, mortgage their home, or cash in their retirement plan and angel their company. They don't have any experience working on large projects, doing it all as opposed to one small part (for example programing), and don't have a clue of how to write a business plan, develop a product, or what management they really need. You can spot them easily if their CEO is under 30, no one involved is over 50, and they are looking for a CTO, but have already chosen their technologies. You can also spot them if when they first pitch you their IDEA, they have to ask for an NDA (non disclosure agreement). If they have not already written up a description that tells you what they want to accomplish without giving it away, they it is obvious they did not do their homework, and may not even know that they have to. Here in Israel, you have to avoid pitches for IDEAS from Israelis who believe that an Israeli patent is worth anything, or they can incorporate here with a software only idea and expect a U.S. company not to to a similar thing, only better, and crush them. I have seen many of companies that work that way. Luckily for them, I have no desire to steal anyone else's idea, even if I can see where they went wrong and can make it work. Yes, people really do publish descriptions that are so detailed I can do it. I'm sure if I can, so can 100 other people, and among them at least one who is not as ethical as I am. I have tried to politely (and sometimes more directly) let people know that, but usually I get no response, and if I do, it's a refusal, not always polite. I should point out that this posting is not 100% altruistic, I'm looking for someone to pre-seed a company ($20k-$30k) range, or angel ($250k-$300k) it, and I know several other pre-seed ideas that could become IDEA's with the right funding, and might even make it into products . Geoff. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008
12:15 pm	A day early and a lot of dollars short. P(ardon the spelling errors and typos, I'm using the web interface and can't figure out how to do anything usefull with the spellcheck.) I have been following a web based video program on the stock market called "WallStrip". I found it on YouTube accidentally looking for a video about Israel and they had done a show on a mutual fund of Israeli stocks. I've been watching ever since, but not paying any attention to the stock market. http://www.wallstrip.com In August they had a contest to predict the pric of Crocs (CROX) stock a month later. At the time it was almost $60 a share and flying high. I predicted it would be down to $38 a share in September. I based my prediction on Crocs being summer shoes, although they do sell boots, and the strong Canadian dollar. The season for Crocs to sell their shoes to wholesalers, which is where their profits come from, was long over by August but no one seemed to notice as in the U.S. people were still buying them. retail. A few days later a child in Singapore had a bad accident on an escalator wearing Crocs, but if you read the fine print instead of the headlines, she was wearing Crocs clones, not real Crocs. I figured that with the increase in value of the Canadian dollar which would make Crocs more expensive, the lack of wholesale sales and what turned out to be a public bashing of them in the press, their stock would fall. I was wrong.. In September Crocs stock peaked at around $60 and in October peaked even higher at almost $69. I've since forgotten about Crocs except that I have a pair of them, purchased at a rediculous Israeli price (they are price fixed here) and wear them whenever I go out. Today I was watching WallStrip and noticed in the comments by the person behind the stock predictions of the show that Crocs are now really down and lots of money was lost and made selling them off. So I checked and the current price of Crocs stock is $29.52, up from $28.94 last week. http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/charts/chartdl.aspx?symbol=CROX Oh well,  if only I had the money to invest in them and knew how to make money on a falling stock. Geoff. (Comment on this)
12:14 pm	gmende (Comment on this)
Monday, September 24th, 2007
1:08 pm	While I was sleeping While I was sleeping the U.S. economy has slid into a deep hole, and seems to be going further. I've been here trying to lose weight (try the South Beach Diet) and slowly recover. Meanwhile things do not look good for the U.S. economy. Since this is an Israel and technology based blog, I'll try to keep focused on those things. In the last few years the real estate boom in the U.S. has fueled a very specific kind of oleh (immigrant). People have come here with lots of money from the sale of their home. Instead of coming here when things were bad, and hoping to send their children to the cheap colleges here, people were waiting until their children reached college age, selling their home and using the equity to buy a cheap apartment here and pay for their children's education. Now things have changed, the same people no longer have large equity in their homes. Without cheap mortgages, no one will pay those inflated prices of a few months ago. Since most people have adjustable rate mortgages, as the rates are adjusted, they will go up. It's impossible to predict how far, but it looks like they will double in the next year or two. If inflation continues like it did in the Carter administration, they could jump from 4% to 20% per year. Already, many homes are being foreclosed upon. Before the rate hike of the last few weeks, in some areas it was already happening. A friend who lives in rural Colorado said she has been seeing foreclosures starting around a year ago. Even with cheap money people could not keep up with the payments. They banks were happy with this, if they held on to the property for a few weeks, it would go up again, assuming they could find a buyer. Now all of that has changed. People who were not in bad situations last month will soon be. Builders will stop building new homes and may be unable to complete ones they are working on. People who bought houses before they were built will not be able to pay for them when they are. I saw an article on an online news site about housing developments in the U.S. where there are two houses in the development still occupied. Where do these people go? I expect that some of the Jewish ones will come here. They won't be like this summer's olim, complete with large sums of cash and a willingness to pay U.S. rents for apartments while they look for a house to buy. Rents here are much less because you get less. By the time you are done paying the taxes and other bills at the end of the month, a $1,000 a month rent is closer to $1,500. There are no real estate taxes here, instead there is an occupancy tax, which is payed by the occupant (tenant). Other taxes and utilities are paid by the tenant and if it is an apartment in a building, you pay a fee to the "building committee". This fee ranges from very little in a building where the committee only lights and sweeps the stairways, to much higher if the building has a garden, elevators or communal heating. Years ago people came here and stayed in absorption centers. The first ones were tent cities for the olim from the Arab countries and were leaky muddy places with nothing. They are well documented in the comedy film "Sallah Shabbati" which stars Topol (of Fiddler on the Roof fame) when he still had a first name (Chaim). The absorption centers are much nicer than that, sort of a old creaky graduate dorm. Most people from the U.S. did not want to go to them because they were crowded, dirty, had small rooms and were loaded with foreigners. Two adults got two rooms, a living/dining room/kitchen and a bedroom. Often two singles had to share a two room apartment. A family also got a two room apartment unless they had many children, then they could get three. There are laundry facilities in the basement. Recently you could sign up for cable TV and Internet. Most olim from the U.S., coming here with lots of money, did not want to go to them and the money used for their rent was converted into a cash benefit instead. Some of the centers were closed and the rest are not open to olim from the U.S., Canada and the U.K. Recent olim preferred to ship all of their belongings except for their cars and appliances because the appliances would not work here and buy new ones. A private organization called Nefesh B' Nefesh (soul to soul) also gave them large cash payments. The actual amount they get is not known, but the maximum they give is $5,000 per person, or $20,000 a family. It's a loan for three years and if you are still here then it becomes a grant. IMHO those days are gone. People will not be able to sell their homes for the inflated prices they had been and many will be coming because they lost their homes and or jobs to foreclosure. They will no longer be waiting for their teenaged children to "leave the nest", so there will be many teenagers coming. Teenagers often have difficulty adjusting to new situations and a totally different social structure and language will really causes problems. My expectation is there will be a requirement for new absorption centers, school programs for teenagers that don't speak Hebrew and jobs for their parents. In the first Internet bubble, you could get a job without speaking any Hebrew, but those days are passed. Many people who speak English but not Hebrew work at call centers. Working at a call center is a good job for someone with the right personality and skills. If you are good at it you can make 2-3 times the national average wage ($1250/month) . People who are not, and are just a low level "answer the phone person", make less. Taxes are high here, so take home pay is much less. It does include nationalized health insurance and in most cases it is better than the health insurance in the U.S. Obviously some people in the U.S. have better coverage, but most people don't. So as the old song goes. "The Times, they are a changin'." Geoff. (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 24th, 2007
1:08 pm	Jericho The U.S. television show Jericho is coming to Israel. Jericho is about the life in a small Kansas town, called Jericho, after a nuclear attack by terrorists. Jericho suffered from the "new" scheduling that has since failed tried by CBS and other U.S. networks. Since most people in the U.S. are busy doing other things instead of watching television from Thanksgiving to New Year's, they stopped showing new programs. Some programs were repeated, some just disappeared. Unfortunately, so did the viewers. When Jericho came back in the spring, the viewership, which was small before, was even smaller. If that was not good enough, there was a change in the direction of the show, and a major character became a different person. I was not happy with it happening, and so were some of the other viewers. CBS also make a scheduling error. The worst TV time slot is against American Idol. It is so popular that Star World shows it live (at 3am in the Pacific Rim) and again that night. Both YES (which does not carry Star World anymore) and HOT, which does, show it on Saturday night. To be quite honest, the other networks could show dead air during that time, they get so few viewers and no one would notice. While Jay Leno is always commenting on how few people watch NBC these days (his is one of the most popular programs), all the other networks compete with them for the bottom when American Idol is on. That's when the new Jericho was shown. While I am sure many more people watched Jericho via recordings, it does not count for viewership. In the final episode of the season, the famous reply "nuts" from the "Battle of the Bulge" in World War II is featured. Unfortunately for the program a major character dies in that episode. Although they had promised a new season of Jericho after the numbers came in, they canceled it. IMHO the only thing they could have done after that episode, which to me really was bad (sucks is too kind), was to put it out of our misery. Fans in the U.S. were far more taken with it and started a letter and email campaign to keep Jericho. The also sent nuts to CBS. Twenty tons of them. With such a loud and vociferous following, CBS announced that they would show the current season again during the summer on a different night. The night does not matter that much, American Idol is off for the season. They also promised a "mini season" next year and a full one if the viewership improves. The letter from CBS to the fans ended with "P.S. Please stop sending us nuts". In the life imitates art department, in one episode the Chinese parachute containers of food into Jericho. They also send blankets, a generator and fuel. Another town says their shipment came from Germany. Friday's Jerusalem Post had a story on the front page that the IDF (Israeli Air Force) is considering parachuting food into Gaza. If they do and the civil war spreads to the "West Bank", there may really be food parachuted into Jericho. Geoff. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, April 30th, 2007
2:51 pm	I'm back I've been "off the air" for a while. I had some health problems which resulted in early February with a minor heart attack. I was lucky, while it happed at 3am, I was able to wake up my wife who called for paramedics. At no time did I loose consciousness, and I was in the hospital for less than a week. More about that later. It was brought on by my weight which at the time was 185 kilo. (405 pounds). I'm doing much better now. I'm following the South Beach Diet. Since I don't have a scale that can weigh me, nor does my doctor, I have no idea if I lost any weight. I think so, but can't say for certain. I'm eating more healthy food now, sleeping more and am able to move around more. So far, I've been on the diet for a month and a half, hopefully I'll stick with it. I was not blogging because I did not want the stress involved with it. Most of my readers were helpful, friendly and supportive, some where not. Just thinking about them bothers me, but I think I can go beyond them and start over. I have a question though. I'm still into getting my old Macintosh computers going and I found a mailing list that I thought would be useful to me. It's a low volume, members only list, provided by a large organization. The list is not actively moderated (you post and if the owner does not like it, he complains or removes you) and he pays the organization nothing for the use of their computers, bandwidth etc. I joined the list, which you need to do to see the archives. I went back and read all the messages from the beginning of the year. One of the threads was about donations. The "owner" of the list was soliciting donations to "keep the list going". I simply don't "get it". Their only expense is their personal internet connection and computer and few minutes a week to read the postings. There is no real management time, no administrative work, no mainframe to support. If there is, then the organization running the list incurs them and he is not passing the donations on to them. I assume since the list is just a few emails a day, he spends most of his time online doing something else. Since he is a "computer geek", he would have the computer and internet access anyway. So what are the donations supporting? It's not this list alone, I see it on many lists, including Yahoo lists. Yahoo lists allow donations to the list "owners", but they do not allow charging membership fees or selling advertising. I can see from the lists that I am on that they don't police them very well and if someone is found to be reselling the lists (by selling their own advertising), they are told to stop, but never checked again. One list I am on had the advertising disappear for a few weeks and now it is back again. It's interesting to note that the most active list I am on is moderated and is trying to make a business out of itself. The second most active list I am on is run by two people who contribute several times a day. At no time have they solicited donations, sold advertising, etc. Then there are some lists, which the organization that runs the list itself charges nothing for their services, does not solicit donations and the moderator is not paid for their services. I guess like the rest of the world, it takes all types. Geoff. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 6th, 2007
3:24 pm	Conspiracy theories and the Internet What seems like a long time ago conspiracy theories abounded. Most of them were never heard of because people had no way of spreading them. The paper press existed along with radio, and TV news, but they would only carry those stories that were within the bounds of "good taste" and checked for accuracy. The New York Times had the motto "All the news that is fit to print". Their counterculture competitor, The Village Voice, started publication in 1955 with the motto "All the news that fits". I could site examples for hours of how the print and network media has gone from one to the other, but that is not the point of this posting. At one time radio programs were meant to be of value. In the United States, every time a radio or TV station renews its license it must show proof that it serves the "public interest". These days it's just a formality left over from a time long gone. Music and entertainment radio always had news programs of some sort, in the 1960's all news radio debuted. All news radio had a problem, it ran out of news. If you watch any of the all news TV networks, you see that while they do cover the news, there are all sorts of special reports and other fillers. This did not work for radio because in essence most of them are too boring to the news radio audience. If they wanted entertainment, they would listen to different stations. A marketing genius came up with the idea of talk radio. Talk radio is like having a conversation with a many people, and if you have a telephone you can join in too. There are radio psychologists (remember the character from the "Big Chill", or Frasier), sports radio, political radio, Jewish radio and so on. If there is a subject that you can talk about, there is a radio show for it. Technology has advanced, you can listen to the radio programs on your computer over the Internet. If you don't want to sit around to hear them, or are busy when they are on, you can download them for later listening. This broadcasting to iPods (and other pocket audio/video players) is called "podcasting". It was popularized by Apple adding the capability to its iTunes product. It's not the only podcasting tool, but it is one of the best and most popular. The concept has been expanded. I suggested about a year ago that programs should be available for download to seed interest in them. Other people have had similar ideas and a system called Democracy TV was created (I had nothing to do with it). Democracy TV is a product of the Participatory Culture Foundation. http://participatoryculture.org/ To the user it's a big glitzy front end to all sorts of video players and content providers. If you have a fast enough computer, a fast enough Internet connection and a lot of patience you can look at hundreds of programs from "classic" (out of copyright) movies, to news reports, to video weblogs, and so on. I'm sure you could find all of the content presented more easily with a search engine, download tools and video players. The advantage of Democracy TV, is that you don't need them. It combines them all for you. You can search lists of programs, and see them arranged by "channel". There is even a preview channel which lets you see 30 seconds or so of random programs to whet your interest. Once you have chosen something to watch, it downloads the programs for you in the background and notifies you when they are ready. It will also play them in a unified player, so the programs look like programs on your TV, instead of several players that have different looks, and different controls. Bringing us back to the topic of this posting, I saw a post on a mailing list for one of those conspiracy radio programs. This one claims that John Lennon was killed not by Marc David Chapman, but assassinated by a person who worked for a company employed by the CIA. The assassin may have been working as the doorman where Lennon lived. The advertisement for the program goes on to name other cases where the New York Police department arrested and then the courts convicted people having nothing to do with other murders, possibly also CIA assassination victims. I'm not going to bother to listen to the program, IMHO the person who killed John Lennon was Yoko Ono, whoever shot him was just finishing what she started. Geoff. (Comment on this)
Sunday, February 4th, 2007
10:55 am	More on the 18 year old Macintosh. I previously mentioned and 18 year old Macintosh SE that I have been playing with. Except for the hard drive, it had been given to me a few weeks ago in working condition. No surprise about the hard drive, a Macintosh repair book, called "The Dead Mac Scrolls" so old that the publisher included instructions on how to order it in the Soviet Union, had several pages devoted to those particular drives. By 1991, they were problems and many had been replaced. The author of the book suggested that one could mix and match parts from dead drives to make a working one, but one needed many drives to do it. I guess that's why you don't have a MiniScribe hard disk in the computer you are reading this on. The hard disk was 20 megabytes, and keeping with the theme of the day, I replaced it with a 50 megabyte drive. I could have gone much larger, as much as 20 gigabytes (100 times the size of the original), but left it close to what it had. The computer has a SCSI disk port, so I can always add an external drive. The original Macintosh up to the Macintosh Plus, used a strange keyboard. To force use of the mouse, it had no arrow keys. Otherwise extremely well designed and built, it was poorly designed in one very critical point. It used the same coiled cord as a telephone handset. However it was wired differently and if you used a telephone cord, you would destroy a chip inside the keyboard, and it cost about $100 to repair it. That's were books like the Dead Mac Scrolls would come in handy, the replacement chip was less than $5, and if you had the instructions, you could replace it with a screwdriver. The Macintosh II had a much better way, it used a serial bus, similar to today's USB, called the ADB (Apple Desktop Bus). Apple used the ADB until the iMac (a span of over 10 years) when it replaced it with the USB. The SE was the first compact Macintosh to use the ADB. While ADB keyboards are no longer made, and are difficult to find in computer stores, there are many of them on the used market. My favorite is the 1995 Apple Extended Keyboard, called the Enterprise. It was named after the Aircraft Carrier Enterprise, because it was so long. When they first appeared at Apple, employees parked small model airplanes on them as a joke. The name stuck. It's a wonderful keyboard, with a good feel, good spacing between the keys, and yes it has arrow keys. It also has a numeric keypad and function keys. Since it is ADB, it works fine with my 1988 Macintosh SE, even with the much older application programs and operating system. The second thing I added was a printer. A co-worker bought an iMac to replace his old Macintosh Duo laptop which had been stolen. The Duo used a 680x0 (Motorola design) processor, the iMac used an IBM designed PowerPC processor. For many years after switching, Apple included software compatibility, so you could run 680x0 programs on a PPC Macintosh, but by the time he bought his iMac, it had been dropped. The iMac also dropped both the ADB and serial (as in modem and printer ports), replacing them both with USB ports. This left him with an early version of Microsoft Word, which he could not run and a 1992 Apple StyleWriter II printer. I had at one time a StyleWriter, they were nice little black and white inkjet printers. Made by Canon, they worked well, and for the time (1990 or so), produced decent printout. I don't know what was different between them, the StyleWriter II looks the same, but it uses different ink cartridges and has a function to clean the print head. They use the same driver and look the same. It's a "dumb" printer, it has no ability to print text or anything else. It can only print a bit map set up exactly for the printer itself. While printers going back as far as the original Epson printer relabeled IBM, and sold with the PC, printed bit mapped graphics, they all printed text by converting the characters to bit maps in the printer. This type of printer became popular after Microsoft Windows on the PC replaced DOS. They use Windows functions to generate the bit map, and if you run a DOS program under Windows, it intercepts the text going out and converts it for you. Since the text conversion functions already were part of the Macintosh design from the beginning, it was simple to use it for printing. Microsoft was in on the game. By the time the StyleWriter had come out, Apple had licensed Microsoft's TrueType technology. Adobe pioneered the concept of fonts being programing instructions, not bit maps. An Adobe PostScript font was a set of instructions on how to draw a character, instead of just little bit maps of what it should look at. Adobe kept their technology well hidden and for many years, if you had a PostScript printer, you needed both bit mapped and PostScript fonts. Microsoft and Apple changed this. Note that Microsoft Windows was still in its infancy at the time. TrueType did the same thing in a different way. Apple included programing to generate characters as they were needed using TrueType technology. The advantage of this was that you no longer needed a PostScript printer and lots of screen fonts to get a decent printout or display. Adobe later countered with Adobe Type Manager, which did the same thing. ATM was bundled with many word processing programs in the mid 1990's almost five years after TrueType was part of the Macintosh Operating system. In the Macintosh operating system of 1984, or so, there was no TrueType, and programs of that era did not support TrueType fonts. So when I connected the StyleWriter II to the Macintosh SE, and tried to print out a test page using the 1985 vintage MacWrite 2.0 I had, it would not print well. It used the screen fonts, and as everyone knows by now, what looks good on a screen looks terrible on a printer. Since I had been given his copy, along with his license to Microsoft Word when I bought the printer, I installed it and printed a test document using TrueType. Not bad for a 15 year old printer. Not as good as a modern inkjet printer, but certainly passable. So while it's relatively slow and lacks memory, it still is a usable system, capable of word processing. I wonder how many '286 computers are still around and as usable? Geoff. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 31st, 2007
11:04 pm	Faith in the future Not that the world will exist in 10, 100, 1000 years, or that we will all be flying in rocket cars before the end of the decade, or there will be a base on the moon, with scheduled Pan Am flights, on anything like that. Something simpler and so common place that people may not bother. We have a tangerine tree in our yard. It's now fruiting. Far more tangerines than we can do anything with. Last year, I made dried tangerine peels and froze the fruit. I still have most of the peels and all of the fruit. I bought the dryer to capitalize on the cheap vegetables and fruits in the summer. Buy them cheap, dry them and eat them now. As you all know it never happened. The war destroyed the crops in the north and there were shortages instead of surpluses. So now I am wondering what to do with the tangerines. I have found out from experience that canning supplies and equipment are not sold in Israel. The closest you can get are the fancy glass jars with wire bales and rubber seals. The kind you see in a kitchen holding old pasta, and dust, mostly dust. They are not even usable for canning, they are made out of glass that is not heatproof. They will crack and break if you heat it too quickly or put near boiling liquid in them. I decided to use them to my advantage. I had three of them, two one gallon and one about a half gallon, tall and thin, for storing spaghetti. Unfortunately, they have sat around for so long the gaskets have rotted. My wife went looking around and I asked on several mailing lists for names of vendors of replacement gaskets. I was told to try 4Chef, www.4chef.co.il a store with a good website that sells all sorts of kitchen items. I could not find them in the web pages, though I found the jars, and an email to them was answered within 24 hours telling me they did not sell them. The other place is called Pilpell (pepper) here in Jerusalem, and they had the jars, but were out of the gaskets. They suggested to try again next week. They also had jars similar to the ones that Hellman's mayo used to come in before they switched to plastic. The empty jars cost more than the full ones did. Using my inventiveness and understanding that they will have to stay refrigerated, I sealed the jars with plastic wrap and rubber bands. What I made was brandied tangerines. In each gallon jar I put 2 kilo tangerine segments, 1 kilo sugar (which is too much it seems), and 3/4 liter of brandy. I cooked the peels in water until soft and added them on top and covered them with the water. The smaller jar was made with just peels. I filled the jar, and put in a half kilo of sugar and a half a bottle (375ml) brandy. I took the leftover peels in water, brought them to a boil and added 2 kilo of sugar. I cooked them down until the peels were candied and the water was mostly gone. I put them in mason jars I found. I did not have bands or lids for them either, so they were sealed with plastic and have to be refrigerated. Luckily last summer we bought a used Coca-Cola style refrigerator. The kind with the big glass doors and a large compressor. It worked fine when we bought it and a few weeks ago stopped working. It was warmer inside than outside (75F/60F). We had it repaired and now it works fine. I'm scrounging around for more mason jars, but I'll probably have to buy the lids and bands overseas and have them sent by mail. Geoff. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 25th, 2007
10:44 am	Yes, it's really a computer Before Apple made the Macintosh, they made the Lisa. Some people have heard about it, and often it is touted as a marketing disaster. IMHO it was a victim of Moore's law. If you sit on something too long, eventually the technology will pass you by. As the Apple II was old technology, rehashed in the II+, IIe, IIc and eventually the IIgs, Steve Jobs was already thinking of what to do with the future. He had brought computers to people's desktops. The Apple II, was the most successful home/office computer until the IBM PC was cloned. When IBM developed the PC, they had anticipated a market of 250,000 computers. Their machine was higher priced than the Apple, and they did not think that it would compete in places that price mattered. Jobs decided that he would make a computer everyone could use. The Apple II was just too difficult for the average person to use. The graphical user interface had been invented around 1968. It featured pictures, images of actual documents, and a pointing device, now known as a mouse. The Xerox Corporation expanded upon their work and published their research. Jobs thought this was the way to go, and started development on the Lisa. Xerox's own GUI based "personal computer" was never sold. It was to be manufactured by the division that made typewriters, and fearing that it would kill off his division, the person in charge prevented it from being made. Development proceeded well on the Lisa, until Jobs was able to arrange a tour of the Xerox development labs, called PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). When he saw what they had done, he called a halt to development of the Lisa GUI, and wanted it redesigned to match the PARC one. This delayed the development of the Lisa, and later the Macintosh, which was a stripped down Lisa. Bill Gates, ever the smart negotiator, had a contract to develop software for Apple which included the ability for Microsoft to offer a competing GUI product for the PC one year after their products were released for Apple, or by a certain date. Apple missed their target by enough time for Microsoft to come to the market first without violating their contract. However most people believe that until Windows/95, the Microsoft GUI was by far the lesser of the two. The Lisa was an expensive machine. It had a megabyte of RAM (more than a PC was capable of), expandable to two. The original Lisa prototypes used 5 1/4" floppies, the later ones used the then brand new Sony 3 1/2" ones. It had a hard drive, something which made the original IBM/XT a very pricey computer. All in all the Lisa sold for about $10,000 when it came to market. A similarly equipped PC/XT was in the $7,000 to $8,000 range. It was just too expensive and lacked applications. It did not sell well. It was not the GUI, it was the price. in 1984, a stripped down Lisa, called the Macintosh, with 128k RAM, and no hard drive, sold like hot cakes at 1/4 of the price. Apple released a product called MacWorks, which let a Lisa run Macintosh software, and the second generation of the Lisa was remarketed as the Macintosh XL, but it did not sell well. A large quantity of Lisa's were sold to a company on a close out, who ended up dumping them in a Utah landfill. Many of us live in hope that when the owner of the company dies, his will will be read and it will reveal that they were placed in an old mine shaft and will all be found, brand new in the box. The ones in the landfill were old ones stripped for parts before dumping. Not very likely. What exist are it, and they are deteriorating with age. Many parts are no longer made and can not be found. A Lisa fan decided that he did not want the the Lisa to die and for the last six years or so, has been working on a Lisa emulator. This is a program that will run the Lisa operating system and programs on a modern computer. Besides all of the technical issues, there are legal ones. The Lisa ROMs (Read Only Memory) chips, containing the programing to start up (boot) the computer have been disassembled and published. This means you can read what instructions are in them and how they work. However, they and the Lisa operating system (called the Lisa Office System) have never been released to the public. You can see how it works, but you can not legally distribute the files needed to make the emulator do anything. While many of the companies that made computers in those days are long gone, Apple is alive and well. The copyrights are still in force, and there is someone around to enforce them. Until the development of an emulator, it did not matter. Even if you took the files and made your own ROM chips, the only thing you could do with them is install them in an existing Lisa. You simply could not build your own (for any reasonable amount of money). Now there is a demand for them and a demand for the Lisa O/S and the ROM images. Maybe we will be lucky and Apple will release them to the public. BTW, I'm not going to point you to the emulator. The first release, which came out a few days ago, is full of bugs. Now that they've been spotted, let's give the developer time to fix them. Geoff. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 24th, 2007
9:08 am	It's only a picture of a robot, dear After a Winter break Battlestar Galactica is back. It left with many unanswered questions, and returned with more. For those who have not been following it, it has become the Sci-Fi hit of the decade. Loosely (very loosely) based upon the 1970's TV series, it takes a different turn. In the original series, a race of lizard people created robots called Cylons. You probably will recognize them, they have no eyes, instead they have a short, but wide red window across their face, with a red light that moves back and forth in time to the appropriate 1970's robot scanning noise. There was a war with the humans and all that was left was a fleet of ships, led by the Battlestar Galactica, looking for a new home with a lost colony called Earth. The new series starts out on another footing. Man created Cylons as a race of intelligent robots to work for them. They rebelled and after a war there was a truce. Blade Runner, anyone? 50 years later, the Cylons are back, this time they are not all robots. They have created a sub race of organic Cylons. For some unfathomable reason, the organic Cylons are all good looking women and handsome men, and what is truly puzzling genetically compatible with humans. Not identical but genetically compatible. It's never discussed, but did they leave out appendixes? A uvula? And the silliest question of all (which you will see why it's silly soon), if they are all grown in a tank to maturity, why are they mammals? Or have sexes? In the beginning, being machines, they have no names. One of them, played by ex-model Tricia Helfer, is model number six. Or as she puts it, "there are 12 models, I am number 6". If you are over 40, you get the significance of that, if you are not, you probably don't. Since they were so physically compatible with humans, they infiltrated the humans. To the point of having affairs with them. Number 6, on purpose, to gain access to the human's defense mainframe on their main planet, called Caprica. Another posed as a human named Sharon. She was a model number 8. Sharon did not even know she was a Cylon, but after random acts of sabotage were committed on Galactica, she began to suspect. She is told he baby died, but in reality it is taken from her and hidden among the humans. Later the Cylons capture it. Being machines, Cylons don't die, when their body is destroyed, their consciousness is downloaded into another body. In the second season we end up with two Sharon's (as opposed to number 8s, of which there are many), the 6 that was on Caprica is called "Caprica 6" and a new Cylon (possibly number 1) is called "Diana", played by Lucy Lawless, of Xena fame, without the fake "American" accent. The problem with two Sharon's, is that somehow there are two, both of which remember being on Galactica. One was resurrected back in the Cylon fleet, one was on Caprica before the other died. The one on Caprica becomes pregnant by a stranded Galactica officer. They go back to the fleet and later she joins the human military. However, more importantly to our story, is number 6. There are several. One exists only in the mind of another character. The one who is the Cylon hero of Caprica, "called Caprica 6", hangs out with him and Diana. Meanwhile there are many 8s, now referred to as Sharon's, lots of 6's and a Diana or two. A 6 appeared on Galactica, sowed some fears and dissent and disappeared. Another showed up later as a prisoner of war, and killed herself with an atomic bomb on a well populated human ship. Now the third season is back in swing, and without giving a away a too many details, Sharon (the mother) is back among the fleet, having retrieved her daughter from the Cylons. She brought with her Caprica 6. Diana decided that her quest in life was to see the face of G-D (the Cylons are monotheistic, the humans are pagans). This was precipitated by Lawless leaving the series. Timed just to peak interest in the new (half) season, Playboy magazine has a several page spread of Tricia Helfer (Number 6), most of it nude. I'd give you more information, but you are not going to get any. Geoff. (Comment on this)
Thursday, January 18th, 2007
1:32 am	An 18 year old computer Yesterday I was talking about the old Macintosh computers I was given. Today, I actually did something worthwhile with them. I have a friend who will be dropping by some old hard drives he has, so I was waiting for him. He was not able to come by yesterday or today, and I used what I had. The SE came with a 20 megabyte SCSI drive inside which was dead. It also came with a 50 megabyte drive in an external case, which still had its termination resistors (terminators) on it. The drive that was in the PowerMac did not. This is backwards, external drives should not have termination resistors. Either the case they are in has switchable termination, or you add an external terminator if it is the last device in the chain. Internal drives must have termination resistors on the last one. Of course, the drive in the case used different termination resistors than the one in the computer. The one in the case was 50 megabytes, the one in the PowerMac was 2gigabytes. So I took the internal drive that was in the PowerMac and put it in an external case I had. Booting the PowerMac from a MacOS 8 CD in an external drive (the internal one is bad), I was able to install System 6.0.7 onto the drive. It would not let me install System 7.5, but I copied each floppy to a folder on the hard drive. Note that although I could install System 6.0.7 on a hard drive via a PowerMac running System 8, it would not run 6.0.7. I then connected the newly formatted and installed external hard drive (with an external terminator) to the Se. It booted fine. Under 6.0.7, the System 7.5 installer ran and found the files in the folders instead of asking me to mount floppies. That was good, the SE has an 800k floppy drive, System 7.5 was only released on 1.4meg floppies. I found out the hard way, you can have two system folders on the same partition, and use various programs to switch between them BUT if you have one system folder in one partition and another in a different partition, you can't switch. The SE boots from the first partition by NAME on the drive with the highest SCSI address. With all of that sorted out, I wanted to replace the dead hard drive in the SE. The 2 gig drive would be nice, but since it was missing its terminators, I could not use it. The 50 megabyte drive was more in keeping with the drives of the times, so I decided to install it. To open the old single unit Macintosh computers, you need a special tool. It has a long Torx T10 screw driver on one end and a special device to pry open the computer without damaging the case. It's soft plastic and a screw driver would chip pieces out of it. Luckily had still had mine. It took a while to find it, but I did. For those of you who have never stuck your hand inside an open monitor or TV set, it has hidden dangers. There is a large vacuum tube which can easily shatter sending little pieces of glass all over the place at a high velocity. Luckily I have never done it, but some people have. The other problem is that the tube has a very high (about 15,000) volts on it. It can give you quite a shock, possibly fatal if you touch the high voltage section with the power on. It holds its charge and can give you a shock for days. The SE and the later compact Macs have special devices in them to "bleed off" the charge, so they are safe in about 15 minutes, but I would never trust them. :-) Home fixit books back in the old days suggested that you used a screwdriver with a wire attached to discharge the tube, and I've done it my fair share of times. Often with a big bang. However you never want to do it in a Macintosh, to do so would burn out a chip which at this point is impossible to replace. You need a special tool to do it. It consists of a high voltage probe, a high value resistor and a wire with an alligator clip attached to it. These are the clips with serrated jaws you often see on battery jumper cables, but much smaller. For some odd reason, here they are called "crocodiles" instead of alligators. I don't have an official one, but I made my own about 15 years ago. I opened up the SE, and found that I was not familiar with them. I have never seen the inside of an SE before, all I have see where the SE/FDHD (SE's with 1.4m floppy drives) and SE/30's. They use a different method of attaching the drive bracket. The SE/30's bolt it to the front with two bolts. This SE bolted the drive bracket with four bolts over the motherboard. To get to them you had to disconnect all of the connectors from the motherboard and remove it. The two bolts on the front were there, but the held they case to the metal frame. The drive inside was a MiniScribe drive made in 1988. Presumably it was installed by Apple at the factory, so the computer is 18 years old. Then I made a starling discovery. The compact Macs before the SE used a 5 volt alkaline battery to keep the internal clock running. The SE used a lithium battery. SE/30's used a 3.6 volt battery in a socket. The battery is half the length, but the same width as a AA battery. I've replaced many of them in my time, but since they are hard to get here, I usually use 3 volt CR-2 camera batteries. Eventually they fail, but it takes several years. Since I had been using the SE, I noticed the clock was correct. The internal battery was ok. Good thing. It was soldered to the motherboard. Ouch. Since I had gotten a spare CR-2, I was planing on replacing it, but for now, I'll leave it. I'll have to look up how to just in case. I put the "new" drive in, and found the screws do not line up. It's in with two screws instead of four, which means a sharp bang, or dropping it could cause it to bounce up and break the CRT. Not very likely, I hope. For some reason, when you add memory to these old computers there is a problem with voltage regulation and the screen shrinks. On the Plus and older, you have to adjust the voltage with the computer apart, on the SE, all you have to adjust is the screen hight. Since I am a coward around high voltage, I cheated. I marked where the height control was set and moved it a little to the "higher" side. I closed the computer up and it looked ok, and booted ok. I went to put in a floppy and it would not go in. I tried to wiggle it and could get it in, but the shutter would stick. I shut it off, opened it up and played with the position of the bracket. No matter what I did, it would still not work. I took the drive out and it was stuck in "floppy inside" mode. Oops. Since it was out of the computer, I released it with my finger and put a disk in. It had stuck due to hardened grease from lack of use. By putting in a floppy and popping it out by hand, I was able to get it to work normally again. I put everything back together, and checked it out. The drive booted, the floppy worked, the screen was a little small, but looked ok. I think if you make it much larger, it starts to look distorted. Another thing to look up. Now I have a working, usable 18 year old computer. Geoff. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 16th, 2007
11:32 pm	It's timing that matters I have been going through my things to collect all of my Macintosh software. I have disks and backups going back to 1990 when I bought my first, a "Mac Classic". This was Apple's first move into the low cost market. It was an almost obsolete, but still usable Macintosh SE for less than half the price of an SE. There were lots of models of SE's from the cheapest, which had one meg of RAM and two 800k floppy drives on up. The biggest difference to users over the previous model, the Macintosh Plus was that it could be expanded and used a serial bus, called the Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) for it's keyboards and mice. The original Macintosh up to the Plus had an annoying habit with its keyboard. Not only did it not have arrow keys, but it used a cable that looked, and in a telephone, worked the same as any handset cord. Plug it into a Plus as the keyboard cable and you would burn out a chip in the keyboard. The chips cost around $100 from Apple, who was the only supplier, plus labor. Since it was caused by user error, it was not covered by the warranty. The ADB is very similar to the USB now in vogue. You just plugged devices in (but not with the power on) and they would tell the computer what they were. I have ADB keyboards, mice, and a trackball. There were also ADB modems, and other devices, the one that comes to mind was a small scanner, I don't remember if it scanned documents by waving it over them, or business cards by feeding it, I never had one. The SE was also available with up to 4 megabytes of RAM, and an internal hard drive. Some people with double sided tape and guts made a 2 floppy and hard drive SE. Later they were upgraded to use 1.4 megabyte floppies. The best of the all was an SE/30, which was an SE with what started out life as a Mac IIx motherboard and was redesigned to fit the case and use the SE power supply and display. In the late 1980's the SE/30 went for well over $5,000 and in many ways was worth it. It had four memory slots that would each take 4meg of RAM, and later when 8 and 16 meg memory modules became available, a company called Connectix sold a patch to allow it to use up to 128meg of RAM. It also had a Motrola 68030 processor, which had extra instructions, was twice as fast and included the capability for virtual memory. That capability was not used for several years. The SE and the SE/30 had an expansion slot. It was a NUBUS slot similar to those on the Macintosh II, but instead of the socket being on the long edge of the card, similar to an Apple II or a PC, it was on the short edge of the card. The cards also had to be smaller to fit into the case. There was no hole for a connector to the outside world, so they had to have a special connector on a cable which was fastened to the back of the case. I had one with an Ethernet card. there were also cards to add a color monitor. The Classic had no such aspirations. If I remember correctly, it came as a single floppy unit with a 20megabyte hard drive and sold for $1,000. For another $100 or so, you could get an upgraded package, which had two meg of RAM, and a 40meg hard drive. This was a good deal, because you could not upgrade the memory directly on a Classic. The SE had four memory slots, the Classic had none. The memory was permanently attached to the motherboard. If you wanted to upgrade, you either bought an upgrade Card which sold for about $100, or bought a 2m version to start with. Along with the bigger disk, it had the memory card installed, and two empty slots. For $100 total, you could go out and buy a pair of one meg memory modules (that's what memory cost in those days) and put them in yourself. It was an interesting time for Apple, people had complained that their computers were too expensive. New users could not afford them, old users could not upgrade. When they released the Classic, people complained that they had bought their old machines with the anticipation of a high resale value, and now they were worth a third of what they had cost. Apple also came out with an LC, which was a small pizza box computer, with color capability (16 colors?). It used a faster processor, a 68020, and was limited to 10 megabytes of RAM. No competition to the faster more expensive machines with 68030 processors and much bigger memory limits. The LC had it's own expansion slot. It would take a regular NUBUS card with an adapter. No need for special cards. But there were several I know of. One was a cache card for faster processing, another had a 68030 processor and or a floating point processor (used mostly by Excel at that time). There were also ethernet cards. But it's shining glory was an Apple IIe card. Add the card, plug Apple II floppy drives into the back, and you had a combination Macintosh and Apple II. Almost everything that ran on the Apple II, II+, IIe and IIc ran on it. If you ran ProDos instead of AppleDos, you could use part of the hard drive and dispense with the floppies. Since most people had floppy based games, the disk drives were very popular. CD-ROM games were not popular, a CD-ROM drive was well over $1,000. AFAIK, no one ever produced a CD-ROM drive/controller card for the Apple II series while they were made. You can now buy a card that goes into a real Apple II (not the LC though) that connects it to a microdrive or memory card. Compared to the five year product life of the SE/30, the Classic and the LC were gone quickly. The Classic became the Classic II, which was an LC motherboard scrunched into a Classic case (still black and white with no gray), the LC became the LC II (same computer with a 68030). The Classic II became the Color Classic which was an LC II, scrunched into the Classic case with a small color screen, and there was an LC III, but I can't remember what was different from the LC III. At some point the LC III (and maybe the LC II) were put in a large case with a real color and sold as a Performa. The Performa line went on for a long time, until it was dropped for the iMac, and then brought back as the eMac. I had a good year or so with my Classic, eventually trading it and some cash for an SE/30. So now as I am trying to piece my life back together as it were, or at least the Macintosh software part of it, I find that I need old computers to make sure things can be read. Once I read them, I can move them to newer computers and burn CD-ROMs. I may need the old computers to run the programs. Apple has changed processor architectures twice since then, from the Motorola 68000 line to the IBM developed PowerPC line, to the current Intel line. At one time you could run 68000 programs on a PowerPC, in fact the first PowerPC ran at 66mHz and emulated a 68020 faster than a real 40mHz 68040 ran its programs. Since the extra instructions provided by the 68030, 68040, and the doomed 68060 were used only by the operating system, no one missed them anyway. It also according to rumor, as no commercial machines were ever produced, ran them faster than a real 68060. Up until MacOS 8.6 came out, the 68020 emulator was built into the operating system. With 8.6, you could no longer run the 68000 programs. I have an emulator called Basilisk II, which runs under Windows (now XP) and I think there are ones for the Macintosh. Now that Apple switched to the Intel processors, they included a PPC emulator, but not a complete one. It will run on OSX PPC programs. Enough to keep people going, but not for those with "history". Motorola manufactured the PPC chips for Apple, and could never produce low power G5 chip at all and had so many production problems with their G5's that Apple never bought any. What the bought was produced by IBM, and they were not cheap. Compared to the IBM G5 chips, the Intel ones are cheap. The first Intel iMac, came out at half of the price of the best iMac, and was almost four times the speed. It had a better screen, better graphics chip, a bigger and faster hard drive, etc. I feel sorry for all of those people who insisted on buying a G5 computer between the time Apple announced the Intel machines and actually delivered them. You had to really have needed one. But I'm back in the saddle you might say. Night before last someone dropped off an SE. It was marked that it had 1 meg and a 20 meg hard drive. It actually had four meg of RAM, installed by someone who did not know you had to tweak the screen, or it "shrunk" and a dead hard drive. An external hard drive (50 meg) came with it and so did a 7200/75 PPC Power Macintosh. That one had a working hard drive, but a flaky CD-ROM. The computers were free, but I had to promise to back up the data on the hard drives. I've finished backing them up. I installed a copy of TOAST, the famous CD-ROM burning program, hooked up a SCSI CD-ROM burner I had, and since the SE only had an external drive, hooked that up too. I had some problems due to the internal drive on the PPC not being terminated. It came from a external case and the person who installed it did not know it needed to have terminators on it. But it was done. To be paranoid, I made two copies of each disk, each on a different brand of blanks, and verified them. Now as long as I don't loose them, they people will have their files back. Last week, I was going through my Macintosh repair book collection and noticed one was missing. It was called "The Dead Mac Scrolls", a pun on the Dead Sea Scrolls. My wife went to see where the original were found on her Christmas break. She works for one of the few schools in the country that is closed for two weeks at Christmas. That's not why she works there, it's also one of the few schools in the country that has an English language library and a real certified teaching librarian (her). I did not have to go so far, I found a copy of "The Dead Mac Scrolls" in a bag with the keyboards. Geoff. (Comment on this)
Sunday, January 14th, 2007
12:28 am	A career limiting move for the CEO of YES. YES, the local satellite company is definitely dropping Star World. To me this is a CLM (career limiting move) for the CEO of YES. HOT has established that they will not listen to what customers say, YES, could of had the opposite. Why they choose to also take the attitude "we don't care, you will take what we have to offer" is beyond me? Dropping Star World makes good business sense. It was giving away for free what people wanted and now will be forced to pay for. Not Star World itself, but bits and pieces, chosen because the company wants them, and provided with the extra feature of Hebrew subtitles. Why give away for free, what people will pay for? Why show unsubtitled programs when you can get a much bigger audience with them? In the real world it simply does not work that way. For example, people want to see programs when they are current. No one wants to watch "American Idol" (I should just leave it at that), but they do. And they want to see it when it happens, not read about it on the Internet and see it next week. Leno, is 3 days behind. If it's on at night in the U.S. on Monday, the same show, with subtitles, is aired Wednesday night at 11:30. Why isn't it on Tuesday night, a few hours after being shown, and at a more reasonable hour? So that it can be subtitled? But who cares? The jokes just don't translate. The subtitles show that the person who writes them is fluent in Hebrew, but does not understand English. No one wants to listen to an interview and have what the person said translated into the "same meaning", instead of the same words. It just makes no sense. I can see someone talking at the water cooler, "Joe Shmoe said ......... on Leno last night". Until someone who speaks English comes up and says "no he didn't, he said ........, don't you understand English?". Suddenly from cool to fool. Instead of being a smart person who follows the world at large, he seems awfully provincial, stupid and ignorant. The same with American Idol. Star World shows it twice, in real time as it is being broadcast for people who want to stay up, and at night for those who don't. But the delay is a matter of less than a day. From 3am Israel time until 8pm. Not three days. Star World shows the Simpsons five times a week, the tax payer supported Channel 1, shows them once a week. Nowhere else in the country are they shown. Star World shows "Enterprise", no one else shows any other Star Trek, and what was shown, years ago, was never finished. If it wasn't for other sources, I would have never known how the last three years of Enterprise went (until Star World picked them up), or how Voyager or Deep Space 9 ended. They also show TNA Wrestling, popular with teenage and older boys. Many comedies end up here, usually two years behind on Star World, often 4 to 5 years behind on local TV. IMHO, it simply does not matter. The people who want the programing are willing to pay for it. They don't care if it is subtitled or not. The mother of a friend of my 11 year old was interested in the Cartoon Channel because watching will help her son learn English. She was complaining at the parent teacher meeting that the school does not spend enough time teaching their fifth grade students English. Everyone educated here in public schools for the last 30 years speaks English. Often not well, but speak it they do. Many want to see English programing because being able to understand English makes them more marketable for "high tech" jobs. Jobs that pay far more than the average wage of about $1500 a month. People who spent their lives in religious schools and don't speak English, are of no consequence in this case, they won't own a television set and therefore won't buy premium channels. So how will this be a CLM for the CEO of YES? Simply that people are now more aware of what they are getting for their entertainment shekels. They are both more aware and less satisfied. I was quoted in an article in Haaretz as saying: "Mendelson, a YES subscriber who lives in Jerusalem,is also considering a private satellite dish and says that in the meantime, he will go over his YES bill "with a fine-tooth comb. I'll probably drop a lot of the extra packages so that I'm not paying for stuff I don't want."" http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/812658.html The article also said "Other furious customers predict that these recent decisions will only step up the amount of illegal downloading that takes place here. "People will realize that if they have an Internet connection, it doesn't cost them anything to bootleg," said Geoffrey Mendelson, who immigrated in 1996 from Philadelphia." This sentiment was echoed by the Jerusalem post, without quoting me, but giving a URL to find the downloads. I'm sure every customer of YES who hears about this will be doing the same. In the end, if customers do drop HOT and migrate to YES, they will pick up more customers. The problem with that is more customers means more expenses, but not more profits. What makes profits (or offsets losses) are sales of premium channels. IMHO there will be a lot less of them. People who have long term commitments to HOT or YES, will keep them to avoid cancellation fees. If they do, they will most likely reduce their packages to reduce their expenses so that they can use their money somewhere else. This will reduce profits. I'm old enough to remember cigarette commercials on television in the U.S. (dropped in 1963). One I remember was "Are you smoking more, but enjoying it less?" It was an inducement to switch brands of cigarettes. Now that we will be paying more, but enjoying it less, we are likely to kick the habit. Or at least, get the programs we want, when we want them, from somewhere else. Too bad I don't have the time and money to start a service that delivers TV programs via the Internet. Geoff. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, January 8th, 2007
5:16 pm	Sit down, I'm not buying this gadget. If you know me, you know that I like kitchen gadgets. Sometimes too much. I buy them and they languish. Part of it is that I am too lazy, and too well trained to set them up. For example, we rarely use a food processor. We have two, one for meat (which was a kind gift from someone going back to the U.S.) and a dairy one which came as a package deal with our Kenwood mixer. I'm too lazy because I don't like to take the effort to disassemble them, clean the dust off of them and then do it all over again to wash them when I'm done. I always had trouble at work with espresso machines. The machines could be gray from old coffee and the milk steamers brown from rotted milk, and no one would clean them. I ended up cleaning the machine twice every time I would use it. I had to scrub it before I would make a cup of coffee and because it was dirty, clean up after myself. No wonder I often drank tea. I'm too well trained because I went to school to learn how to cook Chinese food professionally. In 1975, a Chinese chef chopped all their vegetables, fish and meat by hand. Mixers were used for dough, and grinders for ground meat, shrimp or sausages, but chopped things were done with a cleaver. I've never gotten over that, and still to this day, chop things by hand. Whether it's a single tomato and a cucumber for salad, or food for ten, it gets chopped by hand. During the summer there was a mayonnaise shortage. We only buy Hellman's mayo because we like the taste. Israeli mayo is sweet, like Miracle Whip. Too sweet for our taste. So sweet that when I make macaroni or potato salad, I add mayo, vinegar, pepper and sugar to it, but the Israeli mayo is too sweet even if I don't add any sugar. The shortage may have been caused by the war, but more likely it was caused by a change in packaging. Hellman's mayo used to be packaged in these nice glass jars with plastic lids. They were great for storing things that did not need to be heated. The new package is a plastic jar like peanut butter. However they are so flimsy, they melt in the dishwasher. I think the reason the Hellman's disappeared from the shelves was that the importer wanted to sell out all of the glass jars so that when the plastic ones appeared, people would not complain. That's the way Israeli's think, sometimes I wonder if Eric Blair, who under the pen name George Orwell, wrote "1984" was Jewish. His "Big Brother" would have made a perfect Israeli bureaucrat. ironically, his anti-hero "Emmanuel Goldstein" was Jewish. I'm not sure whether it was a reflection of the antisemitism of the 1930's and 1940's or something more. One of my favorite scenes from the movie (beside Suzannah York in the woods), is a discussion at the communal lunch table, where someone is saying, "I hear they are going to increase the chocolate ration to 25 grams next week". Then Winston Smith, the protagonist, goes back to work at the Ministry of Truth and has to change an back-dated newspaper article announcing the chocolate ration being set at 30 grams to saying it was set to 20 grams. Same here with mayonnaise. If you don't see any glass jars you can't complain the jars were glass. Both YES and HOT are about to pull the same trick. The Ministry of Communications says it's OK by them, you pay for a package, but no one ever guarantees what's in the package. Written contracts and promises made by salesmen, web sites, etc. don't count. The lack of decent mayonnaise led to my asking around for any local substitutes. I never found any, nor were any recommended. One brand I tried had some sort of oil or additive I was allergic to. It also tasted awful, and was runny. Many people suggested that I make my own. I did a lot of research by STFW'ing, and found it was easy, but not cheap. Hellman's uses corn oil. As long as I was eating their product, I wasn't going to change it. If I was going to make my own, I'd have to use olive oil. Tastes better, less fattening, but very expensive. Twice the price or more than corn oil, which is already expensive because it has to be imported. There is just not enough corn grown here to make oil from it. Gearing up I bought a hand blender. Those things that look like a stick with a motor on one end and a blade on the other. Actually, I did not buy it, my wife did. I let her decide what to buy and she bought a very nice Braun one. 300 watt motor. The stick part along with the blade comes off in a twist and can be put in the dishwasher. The important point though is that since I did not buy it, I did not pay attention to the price. Eventually, a hidden voice decrees "the mayonnaise must flow" and it magically reappears on the shelves. Expensive compared to the local stuff, but cheaper than buying the corn oil and making my own. Therefore I never make my own, and the hand blender sits in anticipation of its use. I have wanted to use it a few times, but since it was not used, I had to decide whether to make it meat, milk, or parve (neutral). Since I wasn't sure and did not know the price, I was waiting until I really needed it. Friday afternoon, on a mailing list, someone advertises a new hand blender made in Switzerland for sale here. To avoid the limitations on posting outright "for sale" ads by businesses, they post it as a "service". Normally I ignore those types of ads. But I bite, I emailed back and asked for a URL. The person providing them as a service, replies. I look at her specs and the specs on the website. They have 4 models, none of them match. The website lists things like power (is it output or consumption?) of the motor, weight, etc. It's so vague that when she emails me exact model, I can't tell if it is 140 watts, or 200 watts. They have submodels but don't tell you which. It's a nice unit, the mixing part is stainless steel instead of plastic. It comes with removable blades and a Plexiglass little food processor brown. Having made a lot of money doing contract programing for Rohm and Haas in the late 1980's, I'm partial to Plexiglass. The package price, including VAT, is 700 NIS, about $160. The same unit in the U.S., made in Switzerland with special 120 volt motors, sells for $135. Considering we have a 16.5% VAT and some sort of luxury tax on Swiss kitchen appliances, the price is reasonable in comparison. The Braun unit came with one permanent blade, a wall bracket and a plastic tumbler type thing. It's at least 1.5 times, maybe twice as powerful as the one I'm looking at. Over the weekend I look at adds in the newspaper for similar items. No, I can't read a Hebrew newspaper, but I can tell a stick blender from a TV star. One place has a cheap to the point of being disposable, unit for 20 NIS ($5), if you buy more than 100 NIS ($25) in other things. Decent looking ones are around 150 NIS. Today, I take the Braun unit down from the shelf and look it up on the Internet. I go to zap (http://www.zap.co.il) and do a price comparison. Zap is like every other online price site. No one has it at that price for real, but you can get a good idea. Zap had several dealers selling the Braun unit for 137 NIS (under $30). If I really could get them for 137 NIS, I can buy five for the price of the Swiss unit. Well, I don't need or want five, but I might by two. One for parve and one for dairy. Whatever I am going to do, I'm going to start using the Braun unit for dairy. Now, if I could just figure out what I want to make with it. Geoff. (Comment on this)
Sunday, January 7th, 2007
9:28 pm	More on my friend's horse. My friend bought his race horse last month at what was called a claiming race. Most harness races (the kind with the little buggies pulled by the horses) are claiming races. The track sets a price for the horses. If you like the horse and want to buy it, you claim it. This is good and bad. It prevents people from racing horse in a group with horses that are not as good. For example, if your horse is worth $35,000 or $50,000 you won't race it in a $25,000 claiming race. You also won't race a $15,000 or $5,000 horse in a $25,000 claiming race because it has little or no chance of making you any money. The bad part is if you bought a horse, someone can buy it out from under you. This is what happened to my friend. His horse did not make him any money last month because the driver steered him into the rail. The horse was not hurt, but he was dazed and confused and did not come in well enough to make any money. The trainer, who is hired by the owner to feed, exercise, house and race the horse, fired the driver. While it would seem obvious that a driver who can't get a horse to finish, or drives him into the rail would be soon unemployed, he was back in the same race as my friend's horse. This time he did two things. One he convinced a friend to claim their horse. The other is he used his horse to "box in" my friend's horse, so he could not run as fast as possible. Even with the sabotage, he came in fourth which paid $1,000. The bad news, is although he got the money, he lost the horse. I can guarantee you that he spent far more than $1,000 on the horse in the process of buying it and owning it for a month. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be anything he can do about it. There is no code of ethics for drivers, no policing authorities and if there are, they don't say it's wrong to deliberately drive badly. The claim was legal and the only thing they can do, is if the horse is raced again in a $25,000 claiming race, claim him. I looked up the rules and there is an interesting twist to the claiming rules. If a horse is claimed, it becomes the property of the claimer the moment it leaves the starting gate. However if the horse wins any prize money, it goes to the old owner. This does leave some interesting questions, what happens if the horse drops dead on the track, or is injured beyond the ability to heal, such as a broken leg, during the race? Do you buy future horse ownership insurance? What would have happened if the driver had injured the horse while preventing him from wining? Would the owner of the horse who paid $25,000 because the driver told him it was a good idea, loose the money? Would he treat the driver the way the driver treated my friend? Geoff. (Comment on this)
1:06 am	More ketchup After it has aged for a while, the ketchup is getting better. The one without the extra salt is still too sweet, but it does not taste bad, and is better than "store bought". The one that I tried to unsweeten by adding salt made a good French dressing. I had some garlic marinating in olive oil in the refrigerator for at least a month (yes, I DID forget about it), but it was still good. I added some of the salty ketchup to it, vinegar and water. It's really odd though now, because French dressing in a bottle from the U.S. is a tomato and oil and vinegar product, while in the local restaurants, French dressing is vinegarette. (oil, vinegar, garlic, salt, mustard, pepper and sugar). Since it did improve with age, I'll call it "Burma Ketchup" in honor of Burma Shave, which only went to market because it improved with age. I'm now looking to find some "vinegar mother" to make my own wine vinegar. You start with wine which is not very good to drink, and add the mother to it. The wine should be low in alcohol and without sulfites. The alcohol is converted to acetic acid (vinegar) by the bacteria in the mother, but too much alcohol or any sulfites kill it. That's why wine is sulfited in the first place to prevent it from becoming vinegar. The way it works in nature is that both the yeast and the bacteria grow in the grape juice. As the yeast converts the sugar to alcohol, the bacteria convert it to vinegar. Without the yeast the bacteria would have nothing to convert. Eventually, the yeast run out of sugar and die or go dormant. Since I am starting with wine, I need to provide my own bacteria and it should be the one that I want, not some random bacteria out of the air. I rarely throw out wine anyway. I just keep it in the refrigerator and use it for cooking. Not that we drink much wine, we have a little of sweet wine to usher in the Sabbath, but occasionally I like some good red wine with dinner. It should be interesting to see if I get anything out of it. Geoff. (Comment on this)