Monthly Archives: January 2008

Desk Cleaning for the OCD

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I tend to border on obsessive-compulsive. I wax the wheels on my car. I’m still not happy with the enormous performance gains I’ve gotten by tuning my WordPress setup to move from 4 to 400 (dynamic) pages per second.

So it stands to reason that how I clean my desk is… unique. The problem is that the desk is synthetic wood, so there exist a total of zero cleaning products that work on it. Using something like Windex cleans it but leaves it looking even more dull. And don’t even think about using a wood cleaner. I used Pledge once. It looked great, but it remained slippery for about a week. The Pledge is apparently supposed to sink into the wood. This is somewhat difficult when the desk isn’t made of wood, so you instead get an incredibly slick, oily desk.

I think I finally found the key, though: car wax. You clean with one of the many cleaners just to get junk off of it–I used Simple Green, but Windex would work just as well. And then you pour liquid car wax on and apply it with a cloth as if you were applying it to your car. Wait a while for it to dry, and wipe the white hazy stuff off. The result is a high sheen. It didn’t do as well as I’d like with filling in the scratches, but it looks much better overall.

I admit it: I’m a total dork. I just waxed my desk. But… It works.

Right Down through the Wire

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It’s time! I’m going to go grab some lunch, but then I’m going out to cast my vote, run a couple errands, and then spend the rest of the day on Get Out The Vote activities. When the polls close at 8, I’ll breath a sigh of relief that I can sit down, but I think my nerves will be shot, too, as I go somewhere with my fellow supporters to watch the results come in.

New Hampshire residents, don’t forget to vote!

Bad Bone Weights

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I decided the other day that I ought to try to start my own TeamFortress 2 server. (Actually, I tried long ago, but hoped the problem had been fixed. But it hasn’t.) I want to share the cause of the problem in the hopes of helping others, since Google usually picks these things up.

You spend forever downloading the Half-Life Dedicated Server (HLDS), and excitedly fire it up. It runs through some stuff and seems to be working, but then you get a whole bunch of bizarre errors scrolling by:

Bad data found in model "dispenser_toolbox.dmx" (bad bone weights)
Bad data found in model "dispenser_gib1.smd" (bad bone weights)
Bad data found in model "dispenser_gib2.smd" (bad bone weights)
Bad data found in model "dispenser_gib3.smd" (bad bone weights)
Bad data found in model "dispenser_gib4.smd" (bad bone weights)
Bad data found in model "dispenser_gib5.smd" (bad bone weights)

What’s been surmised is that it’s because your processor doesn’t support SSE2. Bah! There’s no fix, either, other than pleading with Steam to write a version that doesn’t require SSE2, or upgrading your CPU.

It’s clearly time to build a new server and colocate it. 😉

Fundraising

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For whatever reason, we’ve been getting a lot of calls asking us to donate money to various causes all of a sudden. My mom did some research and unearthed some interesting information. Most of the calls come from “paid fundraising” companies. They take a percentage of what you donate–usually around 40%, it seems. We had the same person call us today on behalf of two separate charities. Both from the same company.

Should you find yourself in the same position, don’t fall for the irritating, “Can the {starving children, disabled veterans, cute kittens, abused children} count on you for support?” line. Respond by asking where they’re calling from, if it’s a paid fundraiser, and how much they get. If you’re feeling charitable when they call, thank them, and tell them you’ll make a donation directly to the charity.

You could make an argument that it’s simple economics, and that there’s even “good” being done–most charities don’t cold-call people, so they may be bringing in incremental donations. But, in my mind, it’s extremely sleazy to not fully disclose your own fiduciary interests when taking donations.

Datacenter Fiend

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No matter what I do, I keep finding myself thinking about webhosting.

Netcraft does a monthly survey of hosts with the top uptime, and mentioned that DataPipe is usually on top. I’ve found that, at least for what I do, any “real” data center has just about 100% uptime. I have never not been able to reach my server. You’re either with a notoriously bad host (for example, when Web Host “Plus” bought out Dinix, they took the servers offline for a few days with no notice… that’s noticeable downtime), or you’re with a reputable host where downtime just doesn’t really happen.

So 0.00% downtime, as opposed to 0.01%, isn’t a huge deal for me. (That doesn’t mean it’s not impressive.) But what impressed me about DataPipe is that I clicked their link and their webpage just appeared. No loading in the slightest. I browsed their site, and there was never any waiting. I might as well have had the page cached on my computer, except I know it’s not cached anywhere.

Their data center is in New Jersey, but they clearly have excellent peering. I’m getting 20ms pings. They don’t (directly, at least) offer dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, or shared hosting.

One of my big concerns is that I wonder about long-term viability. The market’s full of hosts. A lot of them are “kiddie hosts,” inexperienced people just reselling space often with poor quality. That’s room for competition. But the problem is that there are hosts selling the moon: 200 GB of disk space and 3 terabytes of bandwidth for $5 a month? That’s ludicrous: that’s more than I get with my dedicated server! They can get away with it because no one uses that much, but it concerns more “honest” hosts–you’d have to charge ten times as much if everyone actually used it! But for hosts that offer, say, 1GB of space and 10 GB of transfer–a ‘realistic’ amount–they’re left vulnerable to people thinking they’re getting a better deal.

I realized the other day that, while a lot of people offer VPS (virtual private server: several people share a server, but software ‘partitions’ give each of them their own server software-wise, with root access and separation from other users), I’m really not aware of any good ones. It’s also hard to find any that offer significant amounts of disk space, or any that are particularly cheap.

Polls

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There was a whole round of new polls yesterday. Notice anything different? Polls are notoriously inaccurate, but Obama, just a week ago 10 points behind Hillary, is suddenly on top. As is pointed out on the site, we can’t rely too heavily on polls. But if a candidate is trailing pretty far in the polls and, in a week’s time, ends up as the front-runner, it’s a promising sign.

As an aside, they don’t show Richardson in the polls, but I’d be very interested to see how he’s done in the past week. He did great in last night’s debate: if I was an undecided I may well have latched onto him.

More on Campaigns

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The work you do as a volunteer for a campaign, quite frankly, sucks. You call hundreds of people, most of whom hang up as soon as they learn why you’re calling. You hear the same stuff over and over. Those that are more involved than I am rarely sleep. It’s just horrible work. I treasure every minute of it.

We’ve been working out of the basement of a wonderful local family, as the official regional campaign headquarters got too crowded and too hectic. All the national people have apparently come in (for obvious reasons), leaving little room for volunteers. With heaps of papers strewn across the table in someone’s basement, one of the organizers asked me, “Is this grassroots or what?” as I walked in.

You meet a lot of people. I mean that in multiple ways. Today I met Deval Patrick (MA governor) in person and he talked to my mom and I for a moment, seeming to genuinely care. I’ve met so many volunteers for the Obama campaign, and they’re all over the place. At dinner last night we sat with a guy and his two young children, and with several adults. Several of the volunteers I work with are younger than I am, many still in high school. And today we worked side-by-side with a woman in her 60s. This is exciting.

And you somehow get access to The Grapevine. We were talking today about how Romney pays his volunteers. This doesn’t make a ton of sense to me: I’m doing my work for Obama because I feel so strongly that he’s the right man for the job. My point isn’t that he saves costs by having volunteers who are, well, volunteers. My point is that since I’m not being paid a dime for my work, there’s no incentive to do it but for the obvious one: to elect him. Some of my new partners have apparently come across a few Romney “employees” who don’t even support him. They do their work, but at the end of the day on Tuesday, their vote won’t be cast for Romney.

Not many people pick up when I call. I’m either calling from a phone whose caller ID shows a candidate’s name, or I’m calling from my own phone, in which case I block caller ID data out of paranoia. (I don’t need some nut who’s had one too many calls coming after me.) And I really don’t blame them–I don’t pick up the phone unless I know who’s calling, either. But the one thing that excites me is that the people who pick up aren’t stupid by any means. You can’t just read some stats to them and swing their vote. They’ve either made up their mind and can articulate exactly why, or they’re undecided and ask tough questions.

This is what politics needs to be about. In New Hampshire, politicians can’t get away with reading us a prepared speech about what they want to talk about. We control the conversation, and we talk about the things that affect us. And the candidates who won’t do that don’t make it out of our state with ratings intact.

Busted

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What’s remarkable about this election is that it seems that a lot of people are booing attack ads. It seems like I’m far from the only one that much prefers candidates to talk on how they can work together, not to take perpetual jabs at each other. Not only does it not move us forward, but it’s frankly irritating.

In tonight’s debate, Hillary seemed to be in attack overdrive mode. After one particularly pointed remark, John Edwards made a comment about how, before she finished third in Iowa, she didn’t seem to be so focused on the negative politics. Bravo, John.

Anyone who read my (admittedly lengthy and sometimes meandering) commentary on the 100 Club dinner last night–or anyone who went there–remembers one thing that seemed odd: Hillary fans were assigned to tables right by the stage, and right in front of the cameras. The Obama tables were cast into a corner, perpendicular to all the cameras, at a distance. I was somewhat peeved by this, but didn’t think too much of it.

I can’t believe I’m linking to Fox, but it turns out that a Fox reporter picked up on this, with surprisingly good insight. (For brevity, feel free to scroll about a third of the way down and start with the sentence beginning, “Never was that on display more clearly than at the 100 Club Dinner here Friday night.”)

I think I speak for almost everyone, not just fellow Obama supporters, when I say that this type of sneaky campaigning isn’t welcome here. When the Republicans tried phone-jamming our get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts years ago, we sent them to jail. We don’t like people who play dirty in New Hampshire, and any politician who thinks they can come into our state and pull the wool over our eyes is in for a surprise. Except it’s really no surprise, but rather, common sense: we like an honest, clean fight in which the best candidate wins, and the voters will speak on Tuesday.

Thinking

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My mind works in strange ways sometimes. Read and think about each of the following statements:

  • I was cooking a pizza in the oven at 250 degrees, but I was in a big hurry, so I doubled the temperature to 500 degrees.
  • I miss the summer days when it was 80 degrees, and, over night, the temperature would be halved to 40 degrees.
  • It was ten degrees the other morning, and tripled to thirty by noon.
  • It was 0.1 the morning before that, and had risen three-hundred times to 30 degrees by noon.
  • It was -1 before I woke up that morning, so it was -30 times as warm by noon.

To me, it makes progressively less and less sense. But I’m trying to think of why. It’s clearly asymptotic at 0 degrees: if it’s exactly 0 degrees and grows to 0.1 degrees, it’s “infinitely warmer.” Of course, most people wouldn’t notice the tenth of a degree increase, and my concept of “infinitely warmer” is something significantly warmer than 0.1. And it doesn’t make any sense when you go into negatives. I think another part of the problem is that “zero” degrees doesn’t mean “zero warmth,” since it doesn’t make sense to have a negative amount of warmth. (Assuming that “no warmth” isn’t neutral, but is absolute zero.) Of course, Fahrenheit and Celsius don’t even grow at the same rate, compounding things further.