Toby's Log page 106

palm problems

in

I’ve had quite a bit of problems with my Palm Treo 650.

Some of the third party software seemed to have caused some major problems with the phone. I know for sure that some problems were caused by a third party application required to make the stylus work for the Treo (Treo’s seem to come with Graffiti hand writing recognition disabled). The phone kept having weird problems like freezing, going slowly, and the like, even while making calls.

The other problem seems to have been related to the battery. The battery seemed to have problems with holding a charge, so I figured it must have been old when I bought it, though I thought the seller said it was new. I took the power adapter with me in the car and used an inverter with that to power the phone so I could make calls while out. After doing that, my phone would go into a crazy epileptic mode where it would flash on and off the startup screen rapidly. Every once in a while I could get it to start up by plugging it in for a while, then unplugging it. It would start up and last for a little while, but eventually go back to epileptic mode. Eventually this became quite permanent.

After finally figuring out how, I did a full reset of the device, getting rid of the applications and what not. This did not help. I got a new battery, figuring the old one was shot and for some reason it needed a good battery to work at all. This worked slightly at first, but it started going back to epileptic mode again. So I figured, as a last try, that it might be a problem with the charger, that perhaps my inverter or something else ruined the charger. I bought a dock thing with a seperate battery charger. After much waiting with no phone through all these problems, the charger worked and the phone works just fine again, like it had when I first got it. The separate charger bay wasn’t necessary, as just the dock charging through the phone works, but it is nice with my additional purchased battery to have a backup in case I forget to charge up. Another $40 about for the two items, but I have a working phone again.

I’m very happy, as the cell phone is quite useful, especially since I have no long distance for my home phone; I was unable to make some calls for a while. It has been very useful for contacting cousin Paul and uncle Al while out of the house. It was also quite useful in contacting a friend Corinne about a mock news program my droogie Dwight is making for a video portfolio, as we needed to meet her at Kent State’s news room and needed a way to contact her to make sure she was able to make it (she was running late).

Objective File System

in

This is a modification of part of a previous post.

each file is stored in two databases: the normal hierchical db and an objective db. The hierarchical db is used for speed and for compatibility with current file systems. The objective db is used for metadata and other information less critical to basic file operations.

The objective db contains much of the metadata (non file operation related stuff). Each file type is an object type in the database, inheriting from the basic file object or one of its children. Each file type will have its own attributes as well as actions related to it. The actions may consist only of OS functions related to it, may also include application calls, and could even include user/other created scripts and functions related to the file type. The actions would provide the data from the file to the system or other function that is necessary for it to operate (functions and applications would all have a defined standard interface to them).

First Motorcycle run

in

Today I piloted a motorcycle for the first time. It was my cousin Paul’s. He started with a 250cc, then last year upgraded to a 600cc, both japanese sport bike types. He’s quite into it, with a lot of money invested, and plans to take the 600 to a track soon.

He’s been trying to get me to try it out for a while now, but I’ve had little confidence in my ability. Even the 250 seems too big and heavy for me to handle from looking at it and feeling it. But today, him and my Uncle Al set up everything for me to ride, so I figured I’d go ahead and give it a try. Paul explained the operation to me in just enough detail. I sat on it and tried the controls and shifting from neutral to first and back.

Then I went right in to trying to drive it. Kicked it into first, released the clutch, it stalled. Not enough gas. So I started up again and tried the same time. This time I gave it way too much gas. I shot forward with my feet still on the ground, kicking off the gravel to ensure balance (though I’m not sure it was necessary). I very quickly was at the end of the driveway, which was to be my first run. With engine braking and the front brakes I was able to easily come to a stop though. The brakes on that bike are very grabby, which I had trouble with many times, one somewhat painful to the groin region.

Next they moved the bike out onto the street. There were occasional cars going by, which they waved by. I then started off, this time much easier on the clutch. I still jerked forward a bit and had a bit of trouble getting my feet up properly, but much better. Once I was going, I was going. At that point it was a little scary just at the 15mph I was going. I just slowly went along for a bit, with cars passing by and Paul following. I eventually sped up somewhat, but stayed in first gear. We went down to the end of the road (the neck of a T) and turned around. My first turn. The turn itself wasn’t bad at all. I had trouble getting back out of neutral though for some reason. I kept kicking but couldn’t get it to shift. After seeing this a couple of times, I think I have to move the bike with my feet to move the gears in the transmission or something like that.

We went back up the road again. This time I went faster and shifted into second. The shift wasn’t smooth: I jerked forward for sure, and may not have depressed the clutch. But I was able to easily go faster. Those high RPMs on those bikes worry me somewhat. I was able to easily engine brake to slow down, shift down and make the turn back into their driveway.

Paul called a friend of his and was about to leave to see her, but then his Dad and himself convinced him to take me out for a longer run. We went back down the same road as before, me going in second gear and probably 30mph or so, then turned at the end. At that point I didn’t know how to do turn signals, but a look at the next turn showed me. I got up to maybe 40mph there. I was starting to feel more comfortable at the faster speeds.

We went to a new housing development with a road like a b that had no traffic and only a few houses. We went around the loop a number of times. I went slowly around the turns. At first I took them at like 15, then would speed up to maybe 30 on the straights. There were some rocks and some of those raised sewer things, like they hadn’t put in the final layer of asphalt for the road yet, that made for obstacles around the turns and lowered my comfort level. But I eventually made it up to 25 or 30 around the cleaner turns. Paul was of course able to take them much faster and was able to breeze right by me.

I had already gotten up into 3rd and 4th gear by the time we were heading home. I followed him and got up to maybe 50. I was worried about the turns (at intersections, the roads were straight), but it was fairly easy to slow down, much more so than on a bicycle. He left when we got to his house.

I had worn Paul’s older helmet, jacket, and gloves. Those definitely made me more comfortable with the speed and prospect of falling. The helmet was quite tough to get on and off though: he must have a smaller head. I wore the visor open the whole time, for talking purposes. I think I got a little bit of dirt on my face, but nothing that I noticed while riding.

The whole thing was really not as hard as I thought it would be. The controls are not too bad once I got used to them, though I still am quite jerky with both the clutch and the brake. Balance is not hard at all. Turns aren’t very hard either. I never really felt like I was going to fall over. I didn’t have to think about lean at all. I didn’t notice the counter-steer, which is apparently noticeable on these bikes, probably because I wasn’t going fast enough. It was somewhat unwieldy at stops, but nothing awful. It was a little scary going by some cars that seemed like they either didn’t really noticed me or were upset I was on their road.

I think with a few more days of that I’d be comfortable enough to ride it around on easy roads with light traffic no problem. It was fun. Maybe I’ll eventually get a motorbike, have some fun and save some gas.

snow storm

in

Last Saturday, my parents had to be dropped off at the airport at around 0500. I was the man to help them out. The weather had been warm the week before, and snow seemed like it had been mostly done for the year. But the news people kept saying Friday there’d be a big snow storm. It got pushed to Friday night, then to Saturday morning. But it came. Friday night it snowed a decent amount. But Saturday morning it just came down hard. Our drive to Cleveland was very slow and tough. The roads were not really plowed very well. At one point we had to turn around and take an alternative route because we couldn’t make it up a hill. My dad’s little Ford Focus didn’t seem to have the best traction. We took the turnpike. It wasn’t very well plowed, but we saw at least three plows on our side of the highway on our way. When we first got on, the fast lane was somewhat well plowed, and we took that until we came up to the plow that made it that way. We passed it by. We were going about 50 mph most of the way. Passing cars was a little scary, especially since some seemed to take up a good portion of the three available lanes very well. It took us quite some time to get to the airport, but we left with extra time in mind.

They said their flight was still on when I dropped them off. I gave them my cell phone number just in case, but they didn’t call. My dad had driven there, and now I had to drive in this weather for the first time. It was definately tough in a non-stickshift car, but still manageable. On the highway, I managed 40 – 50 most of the way, but a few spots required slower speeds. At one point I hit a spot that must have not been plowed at all since the snow started. I lost all traction briefly, but the snow slowed me down very fast. I was able to get past that spot with no major problems. I was going to get on the turnpike to go back, but I sort of missed it: the onramp was a small trench dug out of a snow bank, and I was going too fast when I saw it. I took the regular roads. That was much slower. I was going maybe 25 – 30 there, plus had traffic lights. I was often stuck behind someone. Most of the vehicles out were snow plows doing driveways, and some of them seemed almost oblivious to the fact that other cars were out and about. At one point going up a hill, I really found myself quite unable to keep going. A snow plow was behind me, so I pulled to the side (sort of) to let him pass. It took some tire spinning to get that car going again, but I made it up the hill and continued on.

I made it home, with a few hours before work. I fell asleep for maybe an hour. Then an hour before work, Pyrka, our kitchen manager, called saying that work was closed. The whole day through, not just the morning. It was a 13 hour shift I was losing to the snow. I was definately happy, as I’ve been looking for less hours recently. With school and all I’ve not had much free time. But anyway, I had just woken up and it took a few minutes to sink in. I didn’t even pick up the phone, for some reason listening to the message like it had already been recorded. It was the first snow day I’d had in some time.

Unfortunately, I made very poor use of the snow day. I slept the most of the day away. I was told by friend Dwight that the Summit county police had forbade driving for the day. This was verified on the news. They said people weren’t being cited, but it was a warning not to drive unless absolutely necessary. I was stuck with the little food available at my parents house, where I was staying to watch the dogs. I had some canned soup and some hot pockets. I watched several movies and slept an inordinate amount of time. I started shoveling the snow, but didn’t get much done. I shoveled a lot the next morning before work, but couldn’t get done on time. I had to run to work. I finished shoveling afterwards. All in all it took me at least an hour and a half to shovel my car out of my parents driveway. It really tired me out as well. I can see why three people died from shoveling related to this storm.

I didn’t make good use of my snow day, but I did get to go sledding several days later, my only run of the year.

redo of plumbing fix

in

As I said in my last post, I recently had to cut out a section of pipe to fix a split, but the soldering job didn’t hold. I had been a little worried about the one joint, as I had heat it up a lot to get it to sweat, and the solder hadn’t gone in nicely enough for my liking. It was just a drip, so I had left it go, turning on the hot water section only when needed.

Sunday before last, when it was warm in the 50’s, I went back down to fix the leak again. I unsweated the whole two connection bits to make sure I could get them cleaned well. It’s unfortunately a pain to unsweat anything, as I can never get all the water out at the union I have. I have to push on the pipes to drain as much as possible, then pour a lot of heat into the first joint to melt it. Once I get the first joint open, I can then push the pipes to drain most of the water out, so subsequent unsweats are fairly easy. But that draining, followed by getting enough solder off to get things back together, is the biggest difficulty I have in plumbing.

I heated all the removed bits at a table and brushed off as much solder as I could. I got the two pipe ends under the house as good as I could. I sweat everything back together. The sweat at the same place as last time didn’t look that great, but I figured I’d give it a try. Unfortunately, this time water was spraying out of the joint. There was no way I could leave that while running anything.

I had to go through the whole rigamaroo of draining the water once again. I only unsweat the one joint this time, as I didn’t feel like doing everything all over again. Either in that unsweating process or in a previous one, I must have bent the pipe right as it went into the joint. It was kinda flattened, but not right at the end. I decided I might as well try it out as is, as I’d otherwise have to cut out that bit and cut another bit to replace the whole replacement bit I had made the other day. I really didn’t feel like doing that. I cleaned the two sides underneath the house there as best I could. I tried to go quickly in sweating to get the best joint possible, though I ended up reheating once to pour some more solder in. I just stuffed the flat side with solder, as much as I could get in there. Solder was dripping onto the ground.

I was, of course, rather worried about this joint holding up. To my amazement, when I turned on the water, it held just fine. There appeared to be a little, very slow seepage, but that must’ve just been leftover water from before: I haven’t seen anything dripping since. I’ve checked underneath the house a number of times since then, especially when it had gotten in the teens temperature wise again (I put the space heater down there in advance to ensure no freeze-ups), but have seen no signs of drippage. Soon I’ll remove the insulation again to see if perhaps it is dripping so slow that it is just getting absorbed by the insulation, but I think I am in the clear.

Now, this is good incentive for me to get that floor better insulated this summer. I’m considering putting two heat tape lines on the inside-the-floor piping, just to make sure it doesn’t freeze. I’m hoping that heat on just a little bit will carry through the whole pipe system to make sure it doesn’t freeze up. I’m also hoping that the tape doesn’t get too hot in the pipe insulation under the floor and melt the insulation or even cause a fire.

Plumbing break

in

I had my first split pipe a little over a week ago. The pipes froze for maybe the fifth time this year, on what might have been the coldest day of the year. I had put a lightbulb under the house, but it was no match for that cold and wind. I had shut off the water and opened the valves during the cold. After it warmed up, I put my space heater below the house to unthaw the lines (I had done this once before with fast results). It unthawed them, but I found one hot water line spraying out water.

I shut off the hot water side. Something made me think I had a leak in a cold water line as well. I think my toilet, which has a long delay for its valve to open after flushing, must have opened and when I heard the loud water rushing, I thought I had another leak. So I shut off all my water at my filter, which is inside the house.

For over a week I got my water from the filter: I had removed the filter part and was getting water from the hole that went through it. I boiled water for baths, filled jugs to use for teeth brushing, dish washing, and cooking. The water looked kinda junky, so I got my drinking water from my parents house.

Then one night I came home to find water dripping from the filter. When I went to shut it off, it fell apart and water was pouring out. I shut off my water at the main valve and had absolutely no water for a while. Luckily, the filter was not especially damaged, and I was able to just put it all back together. Evidently, the filter part holds a plastic plate against the valve part, preventing it from being pushed out. So I need to keep the filter on there.

Then I went underneath to fix the break. It was maybe a 1 inch break in the hot water line going to my kitchen. After some time of looking and crawling under my house, I determined that there was in fact no break in the cold water lines. I could have had cold running water that whole time. Without too much trouble, other than getting rather cold, I was able to cut out the old broken bit and put in a new bit with a junction. It held water just fine and finally I had all my water running again. I took a shower that night in celebration.

A few days later (yesterday) it got rather cold again. I put my space heater underneath the house just to make sure nothing froze up again. Unfortunately, a leak has developed, probably just at one of the soldered joints. I was worried about the one that had been there before, with how much heat I used to do some of the new joints. I’ll have to take care of that when the weather gets better. For now, I’m just shutting the valve till I need hot water.

New roommate

in

Toby Manor will soon have a new employee. Dwight Henson, my roommate and bandmate for several years in the past, will be living here temporarily for a few months or so. He wants to stay to look for a job in his desired field (TV or film). He’s had no luck in the two years or whatever it’s been since he graduated, so who knows how long that’ll take.

The preparation for the move has been very rough for me. I’ve had to move all of the junk from my back bedroom to my living room to allow it to become his bedroom. I have a lot of junk, and it really fills up the living room. There is a narrow walkway between stacked boxes and piles of stuff. This of course took a while to do. I’m intending on having a large and long series of garage sales once the weather turns nice to get rid of a lot of this, and hopefully pare my stuff down to a much more minimal amount.

I’ve also had to clean up the bathroom, kitchen, and hallway, known as the communal areas. These have taken a good bit of time and are still not especially ready for their planned roles.

And of course, as is a tradition here at Toby Manor, I’ve had plumbing problems. I went more than a week without water because a pipe burst after freezing for maybe the 5th time this year. That plumbing is a pain and takes some time, since it is outside and underneath my house.

I’ve got lots of schoolwork to do as well. It seems quite overwhelming. I’m feeling enticed toward dropping a class or something.

Anyway, I’m worried that the new employee will want me to do all sorts of work to get the house up to his germophobic and more normal person standards. I won’t be able to do much at least till school is out. We will no doubt get into arguments about how to run things. Living with two people should theoretically be less work than one, but I fear the opposite will be the case.

There are bright notes of the move, though. This will provide me with some much needed social interaction, even if just with Dwight and his girlfriend. It could be cool playing cards and the like. The costs of living here will hopefully go down a good bit. I’m expecting utility usage to go up noticeably, but it shouldn’t overtake the savings of splitting the costs in half. And this whole thing will hopefully motivate me more to do things to get out of this rut I have dug myself into. It’s getting harder and harder to stay in this rut.

the opennest market

in

In democracy, each person gets one vote equal to every other. The votes are basically free, but some rules must be set up to ensure this. The free or open market is somewhat considered to be democracy of commerce. To take this to the extreme:

There would be a number of businesses equal to the number of citizens, each business owned and run by exactly one citizen. There would be no employees. All needs of the business that could not be completed by the owner would be outsourced to other businesses, surely creating the need for a lot of very specialized businesses. Government oversight would be needed to ensure that no mergers or pseudo mergers occur. Every business runs on its own, with no collusion, and any interactions with other businesses must be proper business transactions with dollars exchanged for goods or services and the best value chosen from multiple candidates. Each business would be required to turn, or attempt to turn, a profit, and that profit would be the sole income of the owner. Oversight would also ensure that there were a number of a given type of businesses in a given geographical region.

All of this should create somewhere near the largest amount of competition possible, and really test competition’s ability to create low costs, innovation, and good quality.

This system would certainly have many problems, especially in enforcement, but can serve for analysis of the openness of markets and the rules affecting them.

An interesting modification of this system would be to force all of this at the initialization of the system, but then remove all oversight. This would somewhat mirror the entire human history relating to economic issues, except that it would certainly go very fast. Mergers would happen all over until large companies would be formed.

WordPress and SVN

in

I’ve been thinking about it for a while, but I finally decided to use subversion to update my wordpress instead of the download, copy over to server, copy in all old files method. Details on using SVN with wordpress can be found on WordPress.org.

Since it was my first time, I had to do an initial install so that all the subversion tracking data would be there. The command for installation, which would be used for a new install, was just a simple one line thing with the url of the install and a few flags. Then I had to copy over my htaccess, wp-config, and wp-content, all simple and easy.

Because this brought me up to date, I was unable to try the update type commands. But it seems extremely easy, just a one line command again, plus the web based upgrade script.

This should make my upgrading much faster and easier, and so lessen the delay between upgrades.

[Update 09/01/10]The steps, which I should have included before:
$ cd blogpath
# for trunk versions you can simply update
$ svn up
# OR for full point revisions, you must use the switch command to change versions
$ svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.7/ .
[browser]updgrade.php

[/update]

[Update 2/13]I’ve now done an update via subversion. It was in fact extremely easy, just one simple command line command followed by the upgrade.php script. Everything works fine, no copying and moving files and what not, although a backup is a good idea.[/update]

Force multiple candidates

in

Each party must field in final election a number of candidates based on the percentage of support the party recieved in the previous election for that race. It could be that a candidate must be fielded for each 105 of support. This would be a minimum. Larger elections that can field more candidates, such as presidential elections, would have a higher number of required candidates than smaller ones, such as local elections in small towns, which may be able to field only one per party or not even have party affiliations.

This would give a wider range of choices in the final election. It would also force the big two to divide their forces, giving independent candidates a better chance while keeping the same elections style.