Category Archives: Technology

The VA’s Latest Computer Problem

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Computerworld has an amazingly detailed description of the VA’s August IT breakdown.

On the morning of Aug. 31, the Friday before Labor Day weekend, the Region 1 data center was packed with people. According to Director Eric Raffin, members of the technical team were at the site with staffers from Hewlett-Packard Co.conducting a review of the center’s HP AlphaServer system running on Virtual Memory System and testing its performance.

About the same time, staffers in medical centers around Northern California starting their workday quickly discovered that they couldn’t log onto their patient systems, according to congressional testimony by Dr. Bryan D. Volpp, the associate chief of staff and clinical informatics at the VA’s Northern California Healthcare System. Starting at about 7:30 a.m., the primary patient applications, Vista and CPRS, had suddenly become unavailable.

What follows is a step-by-step analysis of how not to solve a systems problem.

CD-based lab testing

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Here’s an article in the New Scientist Tech Blog that talks about using a CD or DVD drive to perform some kinds of medical testing and chemical analysis.  The blog entry is pretty big on the “gee whiz” factor without getting into the technical details. 

My friend Ross, who works in the optical media industry, have been telling me about this for years.  But this is the first mention of it I’ve seen in the popular media.  I’ve always said I’d really, really like to see the actual device.

Well I don’t have to wait anymore.  It looks like it’s made it into the DIY hacker world.  An article on Hack A Day has schematics and a basic description.  Let the hacking begin!

Welcome to Corporate America…

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… where it is illegal for you to know this number: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0  (For the non-technical, that’s a hexidecimal number.  We programmers prefer that notation.  In decimal, it’s 13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,640.)

Why is this number special?  It’s the encryption key that controls the DRM (Digital Restriction Management) for every high definition (HD-DVD and BluRay) DVD sold to date.  If you are a very talented programmer, you can use that magic number to decrypt and back up your original DVDs.  A consortium of media companies claims they own it, and under the US Digital Millenium Copyright Act, they can censor anyone who publishes it.

Dual Displays

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I have dual video displays on my computers, both home and at work.  For people who constantly switch between two or more applications, it increases productivity by 9 to 50%.  Those aren’t my numbers; they come directly from Microsoft:

Give someone a second monitor, let them use it for while, and then try to take it away. It just isn’t going to happen. They’ll never go back to a mono display. Researchers in the Visualization and Interaction for Business and Entertainment group (VIBE), found that increasing a computer user’s display space made it easier for them to complete their tasks.

[…]

The research study required users to complete several different tasks, switch from one task to another, and remember data. None of the study participants had used multiple monitors before.

The first study revealed that the users’ productivity increased by 9 percent. Further studies showed even greater increases – at times up to 50 percent for tasks such as cutting and pasting. Mary Czerwinski, the VIBE research manager, is excited about her group’s discoveries, asking, “If you’re able to squeeze 10 percent more productivity out, do you know how much money that will save?”

My own observation is that for programming tasks, where the user has an IDE open in one window and the browser open in the other, 50% is a conservative estimate.

Webcams

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I first got interested in webcams back in the early days of the intartubes when I came across the original Africam.  It was simple: a 24-hour live view of a watering hole somewhere in Africa, updated every few minutes.  State of the art, circa 1998 or so.  I passed the link to a couple of people, they passed it to a couple more people, and so on until it died of bandwidth overload a couple of days later.  The original Africam is long gone, and the replacements are far inferior.

But time and progress march on.  Instead of searching for these cams or stumbling across them randomly, Opentopia aggregates hundreds of webcam feeds into one easy-to-use site.  Here are a few of my current favorites:

Note that while all the Opentopia cam pictures are SFW, various idiots think it’s amusing to add rude comments.  So if looking at bad words and/or stupid racist comments would get you into trouble at work, save this for home.

HDTV

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My tax refund showed up last weekend, so it’s time to spend some money.  Some of the cash is already allocated for a new hot water heater, which I’m going to need very soon.  Aside from that, though, I’m considering a high-def TV.  There is a bewildering array of choices, and darn few good sources of information.  Here’s a guide to what’s what in the HDTV world.  They explain the terms and don’t try to sell you anything, which is refreshingly unusual.

Talk about hucksterism in consumer electronics…. I stopped by my local Circuit City and Best Buy stores last night to look and ask some questions.  Talk about high-pressure sales.  Sheesh.  The Best Buy idiot did everything up to and including maligning my masculinity because I didn’t want to buy the piece of crap he was pushing.  The Circuit City guys (yes, plural; at one point I had SIX of them standing around me!) were basically clueless in terms of technical details and features.  One of them flat-out lied to me about the computer input specs, then told me in front of the floor manager that he didn’t. 

I also stopped by Target.  I bought my last TV from them.  They have a small selection if LCD HDTVs,  but all the floor models were showing a low-def off-the-air signal, snow and all, which makes it pretty tough to evaluate the picture quality.  And the department sales rep didn’t know nothin’ about nothin’, and couldn’t have cared less.  It was pretty obvious that he thought I was just some rich clueless yuppie and he didn’t give a rat’s ass what I wanted.

So, it looks like yet another thing I’ll be buying from Amazon.  I wonder if they sell hot water heaters?

New CDs

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I got a couple of new CDs this week.

Dixie Chicks – Taking the Long Way

I’m a Dixie Chicks fan from way back. I mean WAY back; back to their first incarnation as a festival band in Dallas, circa 1990 or so. This is the fourth studio CD from the current incarnation of the Chicks, and it expands on their complex pop-country style. Probably anyone who cares has heard the “Not Ready to Make Nice” track, which refers to the ongoing political controversy. (Which wouldn’t be a controversy anywhere but in the country music world…. somewhere along the way, the country music business in general and a few artists in particular– yes, Toady, err, Toby, I mean you– have lost track of what “free speech” means.) But I digress. Along the more interesting songwriting credits are pop rocker Sheryl Crow on “Favorite Year” and blues artist Keb’Mo’ on “I Hope.” Of particular note is “Lubbock or Leave It” a complex country-rock track that deserves to be a hit in its own right. For somebody who can see (that wouldn’t be me) this is a pretty nice sing-along album. All in all, I’d give it three and a half out of four stars. No DRM.

Bruce Springsteen – The Seeger Sessions

Oh, Bruce, Bruce, what have you done?!?

After nearly forty years in the music business, Springsteen has explored pretty much every musical genre. Most of it has been well done; much of it spectacular. The Seeger Sessions are no exception. It’s basically a selection of traditional American folk songs (despite the title, not all Pete Seeger songs) arranged by Springsteen & Co. Fair warning: fans of Springsteen’s rock style will hate it; much like “Tom Joad,” this sure ain’t that.

I originally heard this on one of the full-album Sirius stations, and knew I had to have a copy. Off to Amazon, and two days later I have it in my hand. But what showed up is a miserable piece of DRM-ridden crap that won’t play on my stereo. It isn’t recognized by my computer, either Windows or Linux. It won’t let me make a backup copy or rip it to MP3, as is my legal right. This is a deal-breaker. I listen to music mostly in my car, but as a matter of policy, I don’t keep my original CDs in my car. Not even for Bruce Springsteen.

This is in something called “Dualdisc” technology, which has a “DVD” on one side and an “audio CD” on the other side. (I put “CD” in quotes, because it isn’t a CD. There’s a lovely note inside the packaging that says “The audio side of this disc does not conform to CD specifications and therefore will not play on some CD and DVD players.” The Amazon web site mentions the Dualdisc technology, but not a word about the crippled DRM. The disc packaging itself only says it in four point type in yellow text on a brown background. I literally had to find a magnifying glass and a bright light to read it.)

So anyway, I gave it a listen on my DVD player (for some reason, the audio plays on my DVD player but the DVD side doesn’t. More DRM? Who cares?) Even with the crappy audio on my DVD player, I can tell this would be an impressive album if I could listen to it better.

Just for my own amusment, I set up my old $20 Walkman-CD with a cable to the line input on my computer’s sound card and recorded the whole thing into Audacity. A little cut ‘n’ paste, and guess what? It worked fine. So much for stupid anti-piracy schemes.

Alas, much as I might like the music, this one is going back to Amazon because of the DRM. (And yes, I deleted the analog copy.)

I’ll give this one star out of four possible. And that one is only for the pure irony of locking up the music of that old socialist Pete Seeger, behind stupid and useless restrictions that prevent music fans from listening to it, while doing nothing that actually prevents someone who really wants to steal this from doing so.

Bruce, you should be ashamed of yourself.