What's cool? Happy birthday to my father!

When I was in my 20s, I worked on computer software to translate from one language to another. It was pretty fun stuff I thought, very hard to show you now how much fun it was as there's nothing left of it—and no pictures. Besides, it didn't really ever work.

But when my father was in his 20s, he was an electrical engineer and worked at the General Dynamics Corporation in San Diego with other engineers to build this rocket. This is a picture of it taking astronaut John Glenn, who passed away last year, into the first manned orbit by an American (1962).

I probably don't need to point out which is a cooler thing to have done in one's 20s.

Fire the Ubuntu staff!

Here's an idea: Why don't we just fire the entire Ubuntu staff? That way, they could go off to the Macintosh feeling guilt-free. It's a good home and a stable environment unlike the pig's breakfast they've made of Ubuntu Linux.

Or, we could be lenient. We could administer an oath to those who wish to remain:

"I hearby swear that I will do my best to disentangle Ubuntu from any notion of Unity, restore Gnome goodness, return Ubuntu to stability and resist with my very life, if necessary, any return to anything approximating Unity. I will restore to full working status and option all software that worked prior to Ubuntu Oneiric.

"I recognize that Ubuntu is a desktop platform used by many, but most especially, by software engineers whose delight is accomplishing productive work with the minimum of intrusion by experimental fantasies in unproven and cumbersome graphical user interfaces.

"I will furthermore return the window title bar controls to the right side leaving their relocation on the left side merely as an option and I will resist all further 'Macintosh wanna-be inspiration or temptation'.

"So swear I for myself and for all my descendants."

Otherwise, it's off to Mint for me.

A boy and his erector set

This week parts of my fifth erector set have been arriving. To the right here is a picture I found out there of my first set, which I dearly loved of everything Santa Claus ever brought me and with which I built all sorts of cool things. It was a pretty dangerous toy: if you put your finger into the gearing of the motor power take-off box, you'd get it seriously shredded.

You can't buy such a thing anymore, but the whole concept has been handily replaced by a different sort of erector set. I'm on my fourth, it's called parts for a computer.

Indeed, as soon as the last piece, the case, arrives next week, I'll assemble a new computer designed to replace my web server (eventually) and serve as a platform for me to cement my understanding of managing a professional data center using VMware vSphere to manage the virtual machines (VMs) I will create. Each VM is in fact a virtual computer host that behaves as if separate from its siblings. So, it's like one great big computer masquerading as several, separate ones. I'll also be using software called Chef to manage what ultimately populates any VM I create with software. It's more or less a tiny part of what I do at work.

For example, my brother has such a set-up in which he uses separate VMs to be 1) a PBX (telephone exchange system), 2) a network router, 3) and one or two other things at home.

My usage will be 1) my primary web server, 2) one or more applications running on Tomcat on separate VMs and 3) a set of MongoDB database replica nodes consumed by those applications.

Below, in conch-shell order beginning with the big, black power supply at top left: DVD drive, two 2Tb hard disks that will be put into a RAID 0 configuration (if VMware will support that), the motherboard, the CPU fan, the Intel i5-2500K quad core CPU clocked at a stock 3.3GHz, a scrap of metal to put over the connectors on the back plane, two 8Gb DIMM memory sticks, an orange SATA cable, two black SATA cables, a small package of screws and a utility knife (for opening packages or for my wrists if things don't go well—all depending).

Should be fun.

A new era begins...

I began putting a period to a blessed life pre-Unity today at work as I relegated my primary development host, running Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat, to second fiddle while I picked up and am now playing (identical HP hardware) on Precise Pangolin with Unity (12.04LTS).

I really do not like Unity as compared to Gnome. I develop software and I can't see how using Unity helps me do that better than using Gnome. Mostly, it gets in my way.

And chasing Unity off and restoring Gnome isn't fun and easy, nor was it altogether successful the time I tried it last November. I don't just want Gnome, mind you, I want it exactly how I've had it and I could not reach that point in the few hours I allotted to the experiment. I also don't want to have to hack every new OS I install, so before fleeing Ubuntu altogether, I'm going to see how badly my productivity is afflicted by Unity.

So here I am with about half my crucial development tools running on the newer operating system and the ones that don't still running under Maverick. Principally, I can't get Remmina to work and I need it to replace tsclient. I'm also struggling with Thunderbird in some ways. Today I finally got it set up to do my HP mail, but then it refused to do my personal mail.

The reason for this bothersome detour from productive life? Lucid Lynx LTS expires next April. Maverick already expired last April.

At home I'm going to be undertaking much the same journey if with less angst about how fast and well it works.

A good office sometimes...

...or sort of: it's all relative, n'est-ce pas ?

Not since Novell have I enjoyed a view like this one. Of course, there I had a hard-walled office all to myself whereas here I live in cubicle hell. Here you see I-15, the cities of American Fork and Pleasant Grove as well as Mount Timpanogos.

In the dark foreground is my visitor chair and a couch. As my manager shares this cube with me, we have our (small) team meetings here.

PBS Fund-raisers...

I see PBS has gone back into fund-raising mode again.

Is there anything in the universe more incongruous than a PBS fund-raising drive?

What's on PBS during fund-raisers? Shows that are never part of normal programming. Cheap, popular psychology by two-bit therapists. How-to-get-rich pitches by speakers whose fortunes come from writing books and giving pitches on how to get rich. Opinionated, anti-fat nazis who just want to tell you how you should eat food that no one else eats. Chefs that can't cook their way out of a paper bag that's been soaking in warm water for 24 hours.

Really? PBS fund-raisers drive die-hard PBS fans such as myself to discover "normal" television or turn away to put more time into books (where more of my time is deserved anyway). While I'm gone, save for maybe a few quarters tossed over my shoulder on the way, I'm not there contributing. In fact, most of the time I confess I don't contribute out of disgust with what they're doing.

In years past, I was lured into giving by the broadcast of a few great Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes portrayals, a marathon run of Fawlty Towers, the promise of a mug embellished with PBS Mystery, Masterpiece Theatre or The MacNeal-Lehrer Newshour.

Fund-raisers used to be a time where the local PBS station's personnel made a connection with the local populace. Now it's all robotic broadcasts done by paid, D-rank speakers and actors nobody knows.

There must be an audience for the utter rubbish PBS puts on now, but it clearly isn't the people who watch PBS. I can imagine that someone unaware, for PBS fund-raisers aren't publicized, discovers this programming, likes it, contributes his bit resolving to adopt PBS only to find a few days later that PBS doesn't continue to broadcast this sort of thing. Which means that the next time this person sees it, he simply keeps on surfing.

Randomly firing smoke detectors

This has been happening to me. I don't mean the beep every couple of minutes indicating the need for battery replacement, but the whole (linked) system going off. I did some research and found some interesting points that likely explain my problem.

How do smoke detectors work?

There is a source of beta particle radiation (yes, smoke detectors are weakly radioactive) that continually releases particles across a small space to be picked up by a detector. As soon as the stream of particles or even part of the stream is interrupted, the alarm goes off.

Systems that meet modern codes are interconnected both to 120v power and also linked by an additional electrical wire such that when once detector finds reason to go off, every detector in the system goes off in sympathy. This results in a whole house protection that is very effective.

Even though a modern smoke-detection system is wired to sector current and powered by it, each detector has a back-up battery much as radio alarm clocks and other devices for the "convenience" that this provides during power outages. The convenience of this in the case of a smoke detector is simply that if the power's off or out and your house begins to burn, one or more detectors will presumably sense it and sound the alarm.

What can set off smoke detectors?

1. Low battery.
2. Condensation.
3. Change in temperature, especially from warm to cold, probably because of condensation.
4. Cooking smoke or vapors.
5. Dust particles.
6. Tiny insects and arachnids.*

* This appears to have been my case because of the randomness of occurrence coupled with the random length, but short duration of the alarm. My guess is that the vibration of the alarm is annoying enough to chase the little beasties out of the hole in the detector sensor mechanism.

Is it possible to diagnose the exact cause?

If the alarm duration permits it, running around examining each detector will reveal, for most brands, that the offending detector is showing a red LED light instead of the usual, continual green one. This is the detector causing the rest to fire off.

When should I change smoke detector batteries?

Other than the obvious need to do this when the detector begins to complain by beeping every few minutes, many advise spending an hour each New Year's Day or the evening before your locale goes on or off Daylight Savings Time. Detector batteries usually last a good year making this a good policy.

I personally do not replace the batteries until I hear the detector beep. I find that my batteries are lasting several years.

Do smoke detectors go bad?

Yes. However, people frequently replace them unnecessarily with new ones after 1) a family member or acquaintance experiences a catastrophic fire, 2) unexplained failure creates mistrust. Still, better safe than sorry.

Why is the need to replace batteries only detected at night?

This probably lies in the realm of urban lore. No one seems to know why, but it is widely reported. Many also report that it drives them nuts while other inhabitants of the household seem to be able to sleep through the beeping.