Snowflakes in Hell

New York Times need to learn that neurosurgeons are not cancer experts or cell phone experts:

Last week, three prominent neurosurgeons told the CNN interviewer Larry King that they did not hold cellphones next to their ears. “I think the safe practice,” said Dr. Keith Black, a surgeon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, “is to use an earpiece so you keep the microwave antenna away from your brain.”

These are people that operate on brains.  They are not experts on things that cause cancer.  Their opinions should carry little more weight than any reasonably educated person you pull off the street, which is to say very little.   They do get this right:

Cellphones emit non-ionizing radiation, waves of energy that are too weak to break chemical bonds or to set off the DNA damage known to cause cancer. There is no known biological mechanism to explain how non-ionizing radiation might lead to cancer.

That is pretty much it, end of story.  Basically, cell phones use a weak microwave transceivers to get signals to and from a cell tower.  If microwaves cause cancer, we’re doomed, because they are all around us, all the time.  Cell phone transmit microwaves at fractions of a watt.  A typical civilian marine radar transmits microwaves at 4000 watts of power.  Yet you don’t typically hear concerns about fishermen getting cancer from the boat’s radar unit, or people living near airports getting their brains cooked by the tower’s radar dish, which is even more powerful.

Hat tip to Instapundit

I’ve decided it’s high time to get rid of some of my old hardware I’ve been keeping around for sentimental reasons, and not much else.  Here’s what I have:

• Two NeXT Monochrome Mexapixel Displays.  They both work, the natural rubber pads on both have gooed off by this point.
• Three 68040 25MHz NeXT Cubes.  One has a bad SCSI HD, the other is missing RAM.  One boots up, but needs to be booted into single user mode and have all the Netinfo crap turned off.  None of them have the Dimension color board.
• One 68040 Turbo slab, monochrome.  Missing RAM.
• One Mac IIcx, no monitor.  Seems to work.
• One Mac IIsi, w 12″ monior.  Missing HD.
• I seem to have keyboards and cables to go with all this stuff.  I think I have some NeXT software and optical disks too.  No clue whether the optical drives are still functioning.

If anyone wants them, they are free to a good home if you want to come pick them up.  If you want them, but don’t want to pick them up, let me know where you are and I can see if I plan to be by that way any time in the NeXT year (ha!), and I might be able to deliver.

UPDATE: Looks like Tam and TD are interested.  Now I just need to figure out how to get the machines to them.

Greg says he’d never eat it.  I’m more open to the idea if it tasted good.  If I couldn’t distinguish bacon that didn’t used to oink from bacon that did, I wouldn’t care too much, especially if it were more economical than farming.  I will give PETA credit on this one, it’s research that I have no problem with, because if you can grow a filet mignon, you can probably grow a kidney or a liver too, and that will help a lot of people.

Apparently global warming may not increase hurricane frequency.  I am not a climate scientist, so I don’t claim to be an expert, but I do have a pretty good grasp on science in general, and have a fair amount of knoweldge of complex systems, but most of the claims as to the effects of global warming have never passed the smell test.  We do know that CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, and we know atmospheric levels of it are rising.  We also know that computer models show more CO₂ in the atmosphere leads to warmer temperatures.  Are the computer models right?  Maybe.  But I’m skeptical that a complex system like climate can be predicted with even a modicum of certainty.

I work in the pharmaceutical industry, and we do a lot of complex systems modeling, particularly how ligands bond to proteins. In fact, what I do for a living is build and maintain supercomputer clusters so these types of calculations can be done.  There have been many good scientists who claim that certain methods of doing this kind of modeling are the greatest thing to come along since sliced bread.  People want to believe in what they are doing, even if it’s not really good science.  I’ve seen too many people collectively buy into a lot of these fads to believe that consensus is always good science.  It hasn’t been always in the pharmaceutical field.  I’m skeptical of any claim that climate science is also not collectively prone to the same errors.

I’m not saying global warming isn’t happening, or it isn’t something to be concerned about.  But I remain highly skeptical of people who claim to be able to model a complex system to such a degree as they can tell you global warming will lead to more droughts, rainfall, hurricanes, or mass extinctions.

Tam has a great article on how the Mac faithful haven’t been quite so happy since their product has gone main stream.  I have been a Mac user since 1992, so I’ve been working with this platform for a while.  Of course, the truly geeky among us know that we have not witnessed the Triumph of the Macintosh, but have in fact witnessed NeXT take its rightful place in the world of computing!  The original Macintosh died in 2001, and what everyone has been using since then is really a jazzed up version of NeXTStep that now runs on a very expensive and stylishly designed Intel PC.

Clayton asks an important evolutionary question:

I mentioned a couple of years ago the fossil evidence that life existed at least 3.4 billion years ago–and the presence of an oxygen atmosphere suggests photosynthesis was already at work (thus implying life) 3.8 billion years ago. I also mentioned that this creates an interesting problem for evolutionists–how in the heck did this happen so quickly?

The answer to this is quite easy.  We all know that Ronnie Barrett is a well known time traveler.  In order to secure a future market for his terror rifles, he merely traveled back in time and sneezed into the primordial ooze.

Life on earth is the most dasterdly and insidius gun blobber plot yet!

I’m keeping our organization at XP until forced to upgrade.  Looks like some users are pissed off enough to go for a class action.   In the mean time, via Instapundit, Apple couldn’t ask for better free marketing.

Tam thinks “Y’know, if only this vapid, content-free crap was more crisp and colorful, I’d totally watch it?”  I have been pondering dropping cable TV for a long time because I never watch it, and it’s horribly expensive.  There are only a few programs I watch, but I’m not sure I like them to the tune of 80 bucks a month.

From Tam:

This Google Analytics thing is the shizznit. It’s got more graphs than a Congressional subcommittee hearing and more buttons than a waiter at TGI Friday’s. I even know what some of them do.

I think pretty soon Google will know more about me than I do.

The big problem with using hydrogen for fuel is that it’s a gas. The combustibility of the gas is of little matter when it comes to using it as a transportation fuel. The problem is that in order to have enough of it to get anywhere, you have to liquefy it. There are two ways to do this, temperature and pressure.

The space shuttle uses liquid hydrogen as a fuel source, but stores it cryogenically, which is why the fuel tank has to be insulated with foam that likes to occassionaly fly off and damage the heat shielding. Cryogenic storage is expensive and impractical for use in earth bound transportation. It’s really impractical and too expensive for rockets too, but the alternatives kind of suck.

The other option is to pressurize the hydrogen to such a degree that it becomes a liquid at normal atmospheric temperatures. The first trade off in this kind of scheme is that it takes about 30% of the energy stored in the hydrogen to get it to a liquid state. The other major disadvantage to storing hydrogen in liquid state is that it has to be stored at about 10,000 psi, which is essentially bomb. And not just any bomb, a bomb that will spew cryogenic liquid everywhere.  There’s also the issue with the tank material needing to stand up to wide temperature fluctuations as you start to draw off hydrogen, thus cooling the liquid down to a cryogenic state.

The other solution is to store it as a gas a very high pressures. This still has the problem of creating a bomb. It’s not the combustibility of the gas that’s a problem, it’s the energy stored up as pressure.

I got tied up in this mess for more than two hours yesterday morning.  I saw the accident scene.  I have to say, the fact that there were only a few injuries from such a horrific looking scene is a testament to what automotive engineers have accomplished in terms of vehicle safety.   The cars on the road today are far safer than they’ve ever been, and a lot of people owe their lives to that.

The Chemistry Set

I wish there was more stuff going up today.  I’m quite busy trying to convert my employer over to a nice, fast GigE network.  We are already in awe over the increased speed of loading simulation data.  We’re also discovering which cable drops in the building are marginal.  Not much I can do about those without spending a lot of money for people to snake cable, so my strategy is to throttle those back to 100Base-T and hope none of the people who really need 1000Base-T have bad drops *cross fingers*.

I also have to do purchasing today.   If there’s one aspect of my job I hate, it’s purchasing.  You’d think I’d like to shop for technological toys with someone else’s money, but that wears off pretty quickly.  After a while you just get tired of dealing with the vendors.  Even the ones who are easy to deal with.  Everyone always wants this or that.

I usually won’t argue with people over what they need to do their jobs.  Too many IT managers seem to take sadistic pleasure in denying folks basic things they need to do their jobs.  I don’t do that.  Whatever I can order for that person is pittance compared to what we’re spending on their salary.  If a trackball mouse increases productivity of a six figure salary earner 1% it pays for itself.

Sorry for the lack of posts.  I just got back from work.   I bricked one of the switches I’m installing trying to update the system image.  I had to restore a copy from the boot prom, which takes a long time with xmodem over a serial port.  Normally I’d leave that problem until the morning, except I had already installed the switch at great frustration and much swearing.

But once all this is done, we’ll have a gigabit network.  I know our scientists will appreciate the fast loading times of the rather large amount of simulation data our Linux cluster generates

A few people have requested that I simulcast the GBR. I think I can probably do this, since I plan to take my MacBook. It appears that Google Talk can handle AV if I use iChat. If anyone wants to give it a try, I’ve set up a GTalk UserID snowflakesinhell. The webcam is on, and we can give it a try.

Appearances can be deceiving. Google Talk can only do it with a special plug-in. I’m giving Skype a try. My ID there is SnowflakesInHell. Feel free to connect if you’d like to help me test out whether this will work for GBR.

UPDATE: Skype seems to work pretty well for one on one, but not so well for broadcasting.  Given that Kevin says wireless coverage at Circus Circus is spotty, I’ll keep looking, but will keep Skype in mind.

Any data center server move from one rack to another, while the server is alive, is a potentially hazardous undertaking.   It went something like this:

Me: OK, we have to be careful with this part.
Intern:  Right
Me: OK, ease it up a little more.  WAIT!  Something’s caught
Me: Oh crap!

Things are all fine now, but that was an unpleasant and unexpected emergency.   Moving servers live is always fun, but it’s definitely safer to take them down first, but on servers that are downtime sensitive, sometimes you have to try it the risky way.

Glenn Reynolds got Windows XP for his wife’s computer, instead of Vista.  I agree with this move wholeheartedly.  Professionally, I am a Systems Manager for a small pharmaceutical research company.  I run everything IT for it, including a fairly sizable Linux based compute farm.  I use MacOS, both at home and at work, in the form of a MacBook Pro I carry back and forth.  It works well for me, since most of our infrastructure is Linux based, which inter-operates well with MacOS.  But all the scientists’ desktop PCs, and a few of our servers, are Windows.   At this point, I have no plans to upgrade them to Vista.  Some of our scientific software isn’t even certified to work on it yet.  I know, at some point I will have to upgrade, because Microsoft will force it.  I am starting a few pilot users, non-scientists who don’t require the non-certified software, with Vista.  Their experiences will determine whether I upgrade anyone else.  I have evaluated Vista myself, and wanted to throw the machine it was running on out a window after 10 minutes.  I’m not too happy with Office 2007 either.

So I’m glad to see Glenn joining the ranks of people just saying “no” to Windows Vista.   Now, all we need to do is get him to say no to Windows Vista by getting a Mac :)

My friend and sometimes co-blogger Brad points me to this page, about a Wikipedia search engine, that finds out who’s editing.  It’s a really neat idea, and interesting to read through, but overall I don’t like what the consequences of it will be.   Chances are the people making these edits from various companies are in no way authorized by that company’s leadership to make those kinds of changes to the Wiki.   What this is going to do is cause companies to either block access to this valuable resource, or severely restrict internet usage, at the detriment to their employees ability to find information.

Corporate leaders tend to be very risk averse, think little of their employees, and hate bad publicity.  They will respond to this kind of bad publicity in predictable ways, and it’ll be all our loss.

I seem to have a faulty battery backup unit on my FiOS system that’s causing the outage.  When I came home the light was on at the junction box outside that indicated the power was out and battery was low.  I go check the AC line, and it’s feeding power to the BBU just fine.  Fortunately, unplugging the battery convinced it that it had a bad battery, but everything else was fine.  We’re back up for now.  Verizon will be out tomorrow to replace the faulty BBU.

I think I might need to get Verizon out here to troubleshoot some link problems with the copper portion of my FiOS connection that runs into the house.  It seems that I’m having difficulty keeping the network link to the fiber hub up.  This is the second time I’ve seen it cut out during the day with a dead link.   Both on hot days… hmm.

This temporary outage was brought to you by Faulty Ethernet Cable. We’re not happy with this sponsor, and won’t be inviting him back again. I’m guessing it was borderline, and my switching the cables out last night pushed it over the edge.

I put a new firewall/wireless router on my home network.   The default Verizon ActionTEC has flaky wireless, so I switched to a Netgear box.  The firewall features on the Netgear box aren’t quite as good, but it’ll do for now.  At some point, I might play with OpenWrt on a Linksys WRT.   Linksys WRTs by default kind of suck, because they like to time out TCP connections while you’re using them, and there’s no way to disable this “feature”, but if I can run a Linux based firewall/wireless router on one, I’d have total control, and it would do anything I wanted it to.

Visitors to the blog might have noticed a slight interruption in service for the ten seconds it took to switch over to the new system.  It’s easy when it’s just a simple home network.

I won’t say I’ll never get an iPhone, but when it comes to Apple, I’m not an early adopter.  Why?  Because they stick it to you on price if you adopt early.  Even if you’re a late adopter, they’ll charge you a pretty sizeable chunk of change.  Plus, I kind of like my phone to be, well, a phone.  I use my phone to make calls.  I’m not sure I really want my phone to have a camera, play video, or play MP3s.   When I want to play MP3s, I’ll use the iPod.  If I want to take a picture, I’ll whip out my Nikon digital camera.

Now, I know there are more than a few haters out there, but I think I at least have some company in the world of Apple.  I’m a computer professional by day, so I’ve used a lot of different types of laptops, and I can say that they pretty much all have their problems, Macs included.   I still wouldn’t really use anything else, because I can’t stand using Windows for 10 minutes before I want to use whatever machine its running on as target practice.

Linux, which I used for years as a desktop, makes a great server, and reasonably good workstation, but it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of user interface design, and tends to borrow the best and worst features of all the other systems out there.   I stopped using Linux on the desktop because every time I bought a new peripheral, I’d have to have to spend 20 minutes to figure out how to make it work with Linux.   Linux will actually work with most things these days, an they are getting pretty good at the plug and play thing for common devices, but when things don’t work, you better know what you’re doing.   On the Mac, things just work, and since I get paid to make things work by day, I don’t exactly feel like doing it when I come home at night.

I may not buy an iPhone, but I do think Apple makes genuinely good products overall.  It’s not just marketing hype.  Having to deal with Windows on a daily basis professionally, I wouldn’t even think of using it for my personal life.  I was long of the opinoin that NeXTStep was one of the best operating systems ever engineered, but had the misfortune of running on underpowered and overpriced hardware.  Apple hardware is still overpriced, but it’s worth it to me not to have to deal with the aggravation of Windows.  I can understand why someone may not feel it’s worth the price tag; even I wince at the price of Apple’s hardware, but you can have my MacBook when you pry it from my cold dead hands ;)

I’m thinking about changing my blog host setup.   Currently, I host the front end of the blog on my Linux workstation, and host the back end on my MythTV DVR system.   Since I’ve gotten the MacBook Pro, I’m finding I never use the Linux workstation anymore, so all it’s doing is consuming power hosting a blog front end.   I could get a single server to act both as my DVR and blog host, and anything else I might want it to do.  If I’m going to consolidate both machines, I’ll probably get a new case, and a few larger hard disks so I can make a RAID5 array, to guard against data loss in the event of drive failure.  I might as well make it a dual core box as well.  I’ve not noticed either machine having a hard time with blog traffic.  The only time I noticed it was in the middle of an Instalaunch.

The real question is whether I want to shell out 500 or so bucks when it’ll take a while to recover that in energy savings.

I’ve been spending my time at work migrating over to a new file server. The old Windows 2000 file server was getting rather long in the tooth. Microsoft wanted to charge more than two grand for a Windows 2003 Server and CALs for the whole company, so I said “Piss on that!” and decided to convert it to a Linux server using Samba. I plan to move all the company’s print functions over to Samba in the next few days. My ultimate goal is to have Windows only used as Active Directory domain controllers and for Exchange. I would ideally like to get rid of Exchange too, but I’m not selling management on the idea, and they seem to have no issue forking over 8 grand to Microsoft when I could for over 1.5 grand and get Zimbra to do the same job under Linux.

Of course, this new file server is just a stop gap. The big plan for the following year involves consolidating our Andrew File System under samba, and to move most of the simulation data (which is into the terabytes) to a new distributed cluster file system written by one of my coworkers.