Category: Uncategorized

light in the tunnel

Mid-summer, when the economy was sitting in the doldrums, there was a tempest in a teapot regarding the economic stimulus. One side argued that a second stimulus was called for. The other had buyers remorse, wishing we hadn’t done the first one. I argued that we had done enough and the only missing ingredient was time.

Some time has passed, and things are looking up. It appears that Bush and Paulson’s $700 billion TARP program may actually turn a profit. And it’s not just TARP; the Fannie-Freddie rescue could turn a profit too. The good news doesn’t end there.

A friend recently asked, “Is it just me, or are other people also seeing a lot more job offers lately?” Apparently it’s not just our industry that’s perking up: “A monthly gauge of U.S. online labor demand soared in August at its fastest pace in four years, indicating steadier footing for nationwide labor demand…”

A recovery in the job market typically trails a recession by 18 months. And there’s still plenty of hurt left in the housing market, but it sure seems like the worst of it is behind us.

End of life counseling

Last year my step-father-in-law Bill died of Leukemia. Months later, Mitzi, his wife and my mother-in-law, died of colon cancer. What I think many people don’t know is that when medical personal arrive at a home, they have a legal  obligation to administer medical care. In these cases, that likely means attempting to resuscitate them. They both had terminal illnesses. Any further care would simply prolong their suffering.

After his remission period ended, Bill was ready to go. Being a doctor, he knew how his last days would play out. We discussed the matter and if he could have done so without legal consequences to his survivors, he would have opted to expedite the process. And while Mitzi wanted badly to live another 10 years, she did not want to spend her last 3 months literally starving to death. Protracting the process any longer than nature took would be nothing short of cruelty.

The last thing either would have wanted after their death was a squad of paramedics trying to resuscitate them (unwanted and unnecessary care), hauling them off to the hospital in an ambulance (more unnecessary care), and then storing them in the hospital morgue (more unnecessary care) awaiting their last wishes. To avoid that, Continue reading “End of life counseling”

My favorite iPhone/iTouch Apps

Grocery IQ ($0.99) – shopping lists

– organizes by store & aisle, includes a large DB of items, and you can email the list to your SO if they’re going to be stopping by the store. My only wish for this app is that it would sync shopping lists between phones.

The Weather Channel (free) – An excellent weather app, with hourly, 36 hour, and 10 day forecasts, doppler radar, etc.

AIM ($2.99) – Instant Messages with push

– Instead of IMs being sent via SMS to my phone while I’m ‘mobile’, they are sent via push (which is completely free).  If you want a multi-protocol client, have a look at beejive ($9.95). I prefer being ‘offline’ from my other IM accounts (jabber, MSN, facebook, etc) when I’m away from my computer.

Facebook (free)

– if you use facebook, this app is a must have. Upload photos and status updates from your phone. This app provides a second reason to have your phone in your hands while sitting with Uncle John. The first being, keeping your phone as far from the bowl as possible. 😉

Remote (free) – remote control for iTunes and Apple TV.

PasswordWallet – sync your PW  between your mac and iPhone. I find this app is essential since I use one time passwords everywhere. I wouldn’t be able to use many iPhone apps without this one.

WordPress (free) – write blog posts and upload photos.

Amazon.com (free) – Use it to check prices while at the store. Place orders. Buy stuff. Because it’s an app, it loads pages and performs searches faster than using amazon.com in Safari. It’s fast enough that it’s actually useful while you’re at the store. Or just buying something that you remembered while lying in bed.

E*Trade Mobile Pro (free) – useful app if you have an E*Trade account.

Skype (free) – Place skype calls via WiFi.

Motion-X ($3) – a full featured GPS application.

– Uses the iPhone build-in GPS and compass for navigation. Caches map data, which is extremely useful. I’ve taken tracks while out fishing and also used it while geocaching. Just make sure to have a spare battery pack available.

Lose It (free) –  weight loss app

– set some weight goals (mine is lose 1 lb per week). Each day, enter the food you eat and any exercise you do. Step onto the scales and record your weight. Makes calorie counting fast and fun.

TextFree ($6) – free unlimited SMS messages on iPhone and iPod Touch

Trapster (free) – Get alerts sent to your phone as you approach speed traps, red light cameras, and live police patrols.

iDisk (free) – Access to your .mac iDisk. Another handy way to get files to/from your iPhone.

Air Sharing ($5) – Launch this app and you can mount your iPhone on your Mac or PC as a remote disk (webdav). Drag and drop files to it.

Wikipanion (free) – Wikipedia interface. Faster than using Safari.

HPA, Host Protected Area

I’m a big fan of technology that helps users. HPA could be one of those “helpful” technologies. HPA is a “feature” of some motherboards whereby they steal hard disk space (typically the last few megs of your disk) and use it for backing up the system BIOS, a recovery partition, etc.

I just purchased a GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P motherboard, RAM, and CPU to drop into my file server. Today I assembled the trio, stripped my old mobo out and dropped this new one in.

The machine booted up but there was a little problem. Two of my disks (members of a ZFS mirror) were corrupted!?  That effectively destroyed one of my filesystems, which made me very unhappy.

A few Google searches later and I learned all about HPA. This nasty little surprise was tucked away in Advanced BIOS Features -> Dual BIOS Recover Source = HPA (page 49,51 in the manual). My version of BIOS doesn’t have this option, but I found accounts online of older versions that do. It seems that changing that setting didn’t actually work (ie, disable HPA), so Gigabyte removed the feature. They have left me no way of disabling this destructive feature.

After hours of fiddling, I have worked around it by:  a) moving the disks off the first two SATA connectors b) rebooting onto the HDD GURU Magic Boot ISO, c) removing the HPA partition from both disks, d) rebooting into FreeBSD. Finally, my ZFS mirror was back with one disk, because the motherboard had helpfully restored the HPA on the first disk.

If you’re using this mobo and migrating disks to it, I’d suggest installing a sacrificial disk on the first SATA controller. That will appease the HPA demon and let you successfully migrate your RAID volumes to it. I’m stuck moving the data off the disk I recovered. Then I’ll recreate the array on the disks with the HPA partition and all will be well.