Help Research & People with Your Spare Cycles – worldcommunitygrid.org

I’ve been a proponent of grid computing for quite a while. You can donate spare cycles and help researchers find the cures that will really help people, maybe even someone you know. I participate in the World Community Grid – if you have cycles on a machines or two, why not join? If you do join  – sign up for my team – I’m currently on a project to help out with cancer research for children.

World Community Grid brings together people from across the globe who donate their idle computer time to create the largest volunteer computing grid benefiting humanity. WCG’s work is built on the belief that technological innovation combined with visionary scientific research and large-scale volunteerism can help make the planet smarter.

Donate the power of your computer when it is turned on, but is idle, to projects that benefit humanity! If you join – sign up for my team – it’s quite easy. My team’s current projects are focused on childhood cancer, AIDS research, Nutritious Rice development, and Muscular Dystrophy. My team is “House of Beor”.

GM – An American Embarassment – Fight for Saab

I’ve written about this before – Saab cars are innovative, unique, and a true joy to drive and own.

GM is trying to dump them they say – well dump away I say “winding down” is just crap.

They have several potential buyers, you can find all the details at SaabsUnited. Well – why the “wind down” then? What exactly is the problem? Why don’t they just come out and tell their customers?

What really gets me in how GM is just tossing aside customers and saying “heck we’re not getting what we want so we’ll just shut it down. The heck with customers that bought cars.” Say what you want about Saab, but how’s that for attitude? I’ve got a 2008 Saab – top of the line. Where does this leave me or anyone else that trusted GM to stand behind it’s brand. Some people say the US gov’t is behind the push to just get rid of Saab – because they are “foreign”. Well I hate to  break the news, but there are a heck of a lot of US taxpayers that will get screwed by a shutdown of Saab. If you ask me – I’m happy to see any of my TARP $$$ going to the company that will keep my car running (not to mention the brand I would like to drive for the foreseeable future).

Saab has several buyers ready to go, but all we get is static from GM. This stinks – fight the man – if you have a Saab or even appreciate the innovator starved for cash, struggling to get out products with no funding, and hate the big-cheese attitude of these people so willing throw away customers and to trash 5-10K people’s career’s simply out of stupidity and stubbornness then head on over to www.iwontbuyfromgm.com and put your voice in the queue.

BTW: If you want to see a really great blog and news reporting service on the internet, you should check out saabsunited.com. I have no idea how this guy (swade) gets all his information/news, but he makes the mainstream media look pretty impotent.

Revisiting Galleries with Drupal 6.15

I wrote a post on Drupal galleries for images and photos about a year ago and it remains one of my most frequently read posts. At the time I just wanted something simple to manage sets of pictures of Dior my son. So what’s happened in a year? It seems like a lot has changed. Gone are some of the modules that I reviewed before and new modules that really look cool are out on drupal.org. I’ll take a look at a couple of the tools and work to get them installed on AmonSul (my Mac-based Drupal config).

What looks good?

A quick look on on the drupal.org site and on the drupal modules site turns up a ton of gallery tools. Well I’m not psycho so you won’t get a complete review of every tool. These modules look promising:

• Brilliant Gallery
• CCK/Image Fupload
• Gallery Assist

There are a bunch of other ones on the site so why these? Well I looked at the history of new versions to see which ones are getting updated consistently, I looked at modules where the author committed to a version 7, and I looked for the features I like: lightbox, multi-upload, auto-scaling, and if possible an integration with Picasa.

Before Getting Started
Let’s level-set before getting going. Prior to starting work with gallery tools you need to make sure you have Drupal ready for this. You need to enable file uploads in the admin tool. You’ll also need to bump up the threshold for maximum upload size and for the total MB of uploads for a user. These options are all in Site Configuration, File Uploads. Also – make sure to allow users to use the modules on the Permissions page. I also updated my php.ini file so that I can upload massive images and crap. Be careful how you do this on a production server or you’ll get hacked and killed.

Gallery Assist
This module is new since my review and it really looks nice. I grabbed the Gallery Assist, the Gallery Assist Lightboxes, ColorPcker, and Gallery Assist Support module. I also grabbed the PrettyPhoto lightbox library. I copied all the modules over to the modules directory and then followed the install instructions in the Pretty Photo script library – all you do is copy the prettyPhoto folder into the lightboxes folder inside galleryassist_lightboxes folder.

Once these things are all installed you can create galleries right away. The setup is pretty obvious to perform. Create a gallery and then you can add images to the gallery using a simple form. The gallery will display images in a very basic way  – as far as I can tell there is no slide show mode and no light-boxing out of the box. Images are paginated and they do scale as you stretch your browser. You can control the page view using the layout parameters. This is really a cool feature.  Each content type that has Gallery Assist added to it can have its own layout. So what you can do is create new types and then have different gallery layouts depending on what kind of gallery it is. That’s something I’ve not seen in other tools. Very nice indeed! Here’s how my gallery looks after  I added a few more pics and then messed around with the layout. It would be better if I took the time to make my images all the same size I guess.

Later you can go back and add more details later to your images – check the thumbnail to see that.

As I said I downloaded the prettyPhoto lightbox so the next step is to get that configured correctly.

Ah crap – the instruction videos for this product are wmv format and I’m on a Mac. Darn. Ok – hang on…2 days later…back in action…I had to back off Drupal 7 and get 6 working on my PC…there’s a good video link from the Gallery Assist Lightbboxes module project page. It is pretty simple, install the module, enable it, copy the lightbox you want to use over (prettyPhoto in my case) into a folder of the same name in the lightboxes subfolder of the module (pretty Photo), go the Gallery Assist configuration page, click the Extras tab, pick the lightbox you copied over and bingo! Pretty slick and the ability to use the lightbox that you like is really nice.

This set of modules will be very difficult to beat. 4.5/5 stars from me! Fantastic!

Drupal 6.15 on Snow Leopard

Recently I got my hands on a Mac PowerBook with OS-X 10.6 on it. One of the reasons I’m not too hot on the Mac is that getting non-Apple development tools and software to work on the Mac can be a serious PITA experience. I suppose I could wax elegant about other things I don’t like about a Mac, but it is a nice piece of hardware so it would be cool to see if I can get Drupal installed and working and then be able to really develop on the platform.

Hell and Back with the Panny DMP-BD80 Blue Ray Player

My wife brought home “Drag Me to Hell” – a silly horror movie starring er well no one in particular except the stupid “Mac guy” from the TV ads. Bowl of popcorn in hand, beer sitting next to me, I’m ready to watch this flick. In goes the Blue Ray disk and after getting thru all the menus, pffffftttt…nuttin. WTF? I tried without any luck for about 20 minutes. Finally I noticed a little popup screen that  said something about “this might not work if you don’t have the latest player firmware”. Ugh – not good. Anyway enough of that for the night, I had “V” on the DVR so we watched that instead.

That popup got me thinking. Maybe I should update the player’s firmware. A couple of Google searches found this page:

http://panasonic.jp/support/global/cs/bd/download/bd80/bd80_na.html

Sweet – Panny’s got it going. Ok this looks easy. I follow the directions (I actually had to dig up a blank CD-R), get the CD in the drive restart the player and….ugh. Its not working. It gets about half-way thru, stops, and ejects the disk, and the screen just says “upd ing”. Oh nooo! I google…nuttin…I check the Panny site…no help. I try turning off the unit and back on again and it just wants a disk to eat. Well that’s just great. $200 down the crapper I’m thinking. Argh.

After a lot of searching I noticed several comments about ISO formats and re-burning the disk because of corruption, and eventually connecting the player to the  internet as the only possible way to get this to work, but no concrete solutions. The ISO comments seemed funny/odd to me  – all the instructions said was to decompress the firmware and burn it to a CD-R. The brain is going now – and sure enough they forget to tell you “as an ISO file!”. Duh. That’s an important detail to leave out.

So here’s the procedure I used.

1. Grab ImgBurn  – a great freeware CD burning package.
2. Take the downloaded .exe file and extract it to your hard drive
3. Startup ImgBurn and select the “Create Image file from files/folder”
4. Run the “write image file to disk” and select the image file you just created.
5. Stick that into the BD-80 player and follow the Panny instructions.

That worked – sweet – I had two beers after that to celebrate not destroying my player. 

The firmware really does improve the player too – and yes that movie magically worked after the update. Too bad it is a really stupid movie…the Mac guy survives unscathed which was a real disappointment.

CTIA Fall ‘09 & San Diego

I just returned from CTIA’s Fall 2009 conference in San Diego, CA. The event has a focus on several key area of interest for me: technology, wireless/mobile platforms, and during this conference health care. Given all that I decided to make the trak out to San Siego and check out the conference. It was a great trip for a number of reasons and I learned some surprising things.

Logistics were fairly simple – I was going regular coach and staying in a Courtyard Marriott just outside the Gaslamp district (the “old” section of San Diego).  I flew US Airways out there and United back. I sure liked the seats on the US Airways plane – an Airbus A320 plane – better than United. On both flights I had the option of shelling out $7 for a crummy sandwich.

I highly recommend staying at the hotel I used, the Courtyard Marriott on Broadway. It is a great location: walking distance to both the Gaslamp District and the Padres stadium – and of course the convention center. Since it is just outside the historic center you get a break on the rates, but the building itself is a very old building – a bank in fact and this gives it some character.

So this isn’t a travel site so now to the conference. It was a bit smaller than I expected, but there were some interesting things. I’ll summarize these quickly in a bullet list:

• When in San Diego go to the Yard House – it is on Broadway and has many many beers on tap – 175 of them. Yum
• Samsung (“Moment”) and Motorola (Cliq) showed off next generation Android phones – very impressive. The most impressive thing to me was the Bluetooth functions. As with iPhone I thought Bluetooth was not in for the OS. Sorry iPhone lovers – I’ll give iPhone 1/2 support for bluetooth…enough to do well er nothing much for me. It remains to be seen what the support really is on these phones (SPP, OBEX?) . I did successfully pair a phone with my b-berry and I have pinged people at both companies to get more details.
• Wipjam: Sound kinky but this session was the best of the conference I think. A twist on a panel session, the talks here were billed as the “unpanel” talks (“anti-panel” {reminds me of anti-matter} would be better). Any talk that starts with serious threats to de-tie people works for me, but I think it did fall a bit short of the “developer” focus at this conference since there were a lot of upper execs that might have been coders a while back but obviously are no longer.
• Smart Grids: Ok – has nothing to do with me, but it was really interesting to hear about the developments in the energy and power control industry.
• Mobile Sorcery: These guys make a C/C++ mobile application development and porting platform. They’ve gone open-source. Looks interesting – I met the head of the company. A pretty funny guy with some good insights on mobile development. I think you write a base in c/C++ and then the tools will port out to different platforms like J2ME, Symbian, Android, etc.
• The keynotes were ok, but I’m not much for all that kind of stuff. The most interesting was actually the FCC chairman giving a bunch of stats on mobile use.  I didn’t get all the stats, but the one I remember is that every day 4.5 billion SMS messages are sent in the US. That’s just amazing.
• Eclipse Pulsar is getting better so this is something to keep an eye on. I met the head of that project and talked to him for a bit.
• There were some sessions on healthcare applications and requirements, but really if you are in that space then they were pretty boring and “no duh” kind of stuff. The last event – the “fund fest” – awarded a project developing an M2M glucometer as the best commercial idea. Hmmm….their business model will be to make money on the strips…ummm….and the guy running the project was the White House appointee to write the White House official report on healthcare and how to fix it. I guess he missed the whole shift away from strips to A1C testing.

I’m sure I’ll find some more things that were cool at the event and add them in here, but that’s what I can get down quickly on paper. Sorry I didn’t take too many pics. Overall a good conference, but I guess I prefer more developer focused conferences where there is coding. Another bummer was the limited WiFI support…kind of stupid for a conference about wireless to not have wireless everywhere.

Kudos to the Courtyard Marriott (530 Broadway). I have to say the staff is really friendly and had great tips on restaurants. I don’t think I’ve ever thought that about any hotel I’ve stayed at really. Sometimes they are nice – but these guys were great.

La-Z-boy’s Lazy Construction – Literally

What guy wouldn’t jump and run to the store when their wife asks if it would be ok to have home theater seating in their living room? Cupholders, black leather, reclining seats, and no pillows! Well I guess I’m one of those guys

So off we went to the La-Z-Boy store and sure enough they had some really great – albeit expensive stuff – but what the heck this is going to be football heaven. The product is the La-Z-Boy Matinee Home Theater seating.  So we ordered the stuff and 2 months later it arrived. Fantastic! The pieces arrived in good shape and right when they said they would arrive. Pretty nice; a great buying experience.

Things were great for a couple of weeks but then I started to notice problems. The wedge pieces have armrests – makes sense – so that when you recline there is somewhere to put your elbow. What I noticed was that the place where you put your elbow was starting to push in. Fearing some kind of defect I immediately called La-Z-Boy and demanded a replacement. They agreed and ordered replacement units:  no charge and no question!

Of course it would take another 4-6 weeks to get the units. So we waited…sure enough the stuff arrived and a technician replaced them. One curious thing was that the guy had to rip the cup trays out (with a screwdriver) and glue them into the new units himself. The guy luckily had a tube of epoxy glue in the van, but he had no way to clamp the trays in. I had to pile paint cans and dumb-bells up on them to hold them down tight while the glue dried overnight. Well – problem resolved I hoped.

La-Z-Boy wanted to leave the old pieces here for me to throw away – strange but ok.. I wanted to see why this problem happened anyway – was it bad assembly or something worse. Was it a defect in my pieces or was it a design defect?

I did a little dissecting project and what I found was really amazing. The area in question is the wedge piece armrest. See the pic below for the exact location.

In my basement I flipped the unit upside down and cut through the felt on the bottom. Straight off I was a bit shocked. The piece is plywood and some bracing. The flat back of the unit is made out of shirt cardboard. I could not see the top because there was a plywood brace across the top. Naturally I was thinking that was the actual top, but I could not see any signs of damage or movement. Then I decided to cut through the leather on top.  What I found just amazed me. The top of the piece is also made out of shirt cardboard – right where your elbow goes. So you have the leather, a thin piece of foam, and then crappy cardboard. There is nothing but air supporting that cardboard.

Here’s a detail shot of the cardboard to give you a sense of how cheap this stuff really is:

That’s just amazing to see I think. One of these pieces is about $1200 USD so by no means is this a low-end piece of furniture. You can see in this pic that the cardboard comes up the back side and wraps across the place where your arm would rest. Any pressure at all and this will start to sag in – a no brainer. This is a serious design flaw. It is so bad that it cannot have been made by accident. Any slight testing in the shop would show that this is not going to work and given La-Z-Boy’s “expertise” in recliner systems this can only be a cost vs. quality gamble that people will not notice until warranties run out.

I’ve gone back and google’d the web and not found too many people mentioning this problem so either I’m the only idiot to buy this junk or other people have not had the furniture long enough to develop the problem.I thought I would at least write this post to give a shout out to people considering this furniture. If you considering this furniture just go into the store, recline, and lean on your elbow and you will feel the cave in starting.

I’m going to give a call into La-Z-Boy and see if I can get my money back. I think this is a design flaw that should either be corrected or I should get my money back. I’ll follow up with their response.

Alfresco 3.2 – Creating a Better Collaboration Experience

I’ve been using Alfresco for quite some time as a document management and “collaboration” platform. Alfresco works with documents as one would expect, but as a collaboration tool it lacks many of the things we would like to have. We are looking to bring in things like blogging, wiki-ish functions, and more functions that expose what other people are working on and contributing to the repository. We would also like to have some way to see things happening in other places – for example commits to our SVN repos. Let’s see what’s new in the 3.2 community release.

USA Beats Spain – Confederations Cup!

I’ve played soccer all my life (yes the sport is very popular in America!). The US national team beat the #1 team in the world tonight. A huge win over Spain in the Confederations Cup.I almost knocked over the dinner table jumping up  when the report came over the news.

Here’s the best link: http://soccernet.espn.go.com/report?id=270153&cc=5901

That’s just fantastic! Great job guys! Spain is a great side; they haven’t been scored on in like 17 games and has won 35 straight. I didn’t even watch the game – didn’t even record it.

I sure hope it gets re-broadcast. The final is this weekend in South Africa.

Out with the Old in with the…VirtualBox

I’ve used VMWare on and off ever since it first came out. Both the server and workstations products revolutionized the data center and brought huge power to a developer. These days I’m back into more pure software development so a desktop virtualization product that I can use to have multiple OS configurations for running servers, databases, or experimental tool configurations is a must have. My base OS is Win XP Pro running on an IBM ThinkPad T61p.

I’ve had the latest version of VMWare’s free Server product running on my laptop, but I’ve had it. I use my laptop as a…well a laptop and it seems that VMWare Server is not capable of playing nicely and EMC seems rather uninterested in fixing it. What’s the issue? If you take a laptop in and out of standby every 10th time (an average estimate) you will get the glorious BSOD. I’ve poked around the internet and forums and stuff without coming up with a solution. Even a complete disable of the VMWare services did not stop this issue. Before you say “Hey Beren you idiot it must be something else.”; I uninstalled the product and not a single BSOD since in about 4 weeks.

No BSODs == good

No VMs == bad