Webs’ Random Ideas

A group at work here just got in a WiFi drill that sends data to a base unit over WiFi. Being an IT guy and having worked in networking I am always very very skeptical of such devices.

The 2.4 range is for the most part open and companies can make devices that broadcast how they want to, following FCC rules. But the FCC is under staffed and manned to adequately enforce everything that happens, so companies end up with devices that blast RF everywhere and take out wireless, in our case, LWAPP.

So we hooked up the base unit, got the wireless drill operating, and pulled out the spectrum analyzer to see what the drill was doing in our WiFi environment. The results? We found nothing. I was shocked and thought for a second the equipment might be malfunctioning or our spectrum software or device was somehow not working correctly.

Everything was operating as it should. So why didn’t we see it? This drill uses the a newer wifi protocol, zigbee: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigBee. Its a wireless mesh protocol that operates at 900 mhz in the US. All WiFi today in the US is either 2.4 or 5 ghz. So anything wireless at 900 mhz is a network admin’s wet dream.

The Zigbee protocol is interesting, but I will leave it to another post. We approved the device and I was pleasantly surprised.

My wife and I were driving home from being away for the weekend and halfway on the journey home, 2 hours in, the bad weather hit. Snow. At first it looked like it wouldn’t stick, but as we went further on (1 hour in) sure enough it did. And with the bad weather came the inevitable dumb asses. The people that somehow think the law of physics dont apply.

We had a car that passed us when things just turned from bad to worse going much faster than they should be and four seconds later they were in the ditch. This surprised me because I see cars passing in those situations all the times but I never actually see any go in the “ditch”.

Then we passed two more in the ditch. Then after that we saw another car that passed us ended up in the ditch and there was a cop down the road so everyone started slowing down. Well the car behind us had an idiot behind them and both were following too close and when everyone started slowing down those two got in a fender bender and both went into the ditch behind us. I started to feel bad but then remembered they were both following way too close.

Then we saw a couple more cars in the ditch after that, but no more happened in front of us. Until we got closer to home. Another car that passed us going too fast started to swerve and went off the road. This one was bad because it happened 30 feet or so in front of a bridge. So if the guy started losing control sooner or had more speed, it could of been bad.

Then the last one we saw was a small little cavalier that had passed us 25 minutes ago, this one was going especially fast. The driver ended up losing control, slammed into a barrier, left debris on the road, and came to a stop right in front of a 15 – 20 foot embankment, where the barrier ended. Another narrow miss.

The audacity people have to justify such stupidity is impressive. How much time did you lose after spinning out of control and getting stuck in a ditch?Was it more than the few minutes you gained by speeding? REEEAAAALLLLYYYY? You don’t say…

For an explanation of why its stupid to push the car in inclement weather, go read my friend George’s post on the topic.

If you pay close attention you can see what Stewart does. Bill gives Jon Stewart so many opportunities to attack the characters of the folks on Fox News. But he doesn’t, he sticks to the ideas and issues and argues those. Take the point where Bill brings up Glenn Beck and calls him an “Everyman”. Every Liberal in the world just rolled their eyes or rolled in their graves. But Stewart calmly stuck to the issues and focused on those. And I think it helped his cause.

Anyway, below should be the whole unedited interview. I highly recommend…

[Update]: Its fun to count the facepalms… LOL

The server guy is checking out projector screen motors today.

I’m watching a webcast right now of AirMagnet’s new product. Pretty impressive what it can do. Their best new feature? The specialized wireless card needed for their software is now USB. How long has USB been out and they are finally making use of it?

I give them a break because it was probably easier for them to just use PC Cardbus and PCMCIA, but geez. Get with the times.

For all my gripes though I would highly recommend their XT product for anyone working with Wireless day in and day out. That and I recommend to install the software on a mini. Much easier to walk around with a sub 1lb laptop for 5 hours than a 5 pounder.

good riddance!

I just got an email about my Google Apps Domain account from Google stating that HTML5 and java improvements from Google will phase out IE6 support. It took forever but finally it dies!!

Yes there are a ton of recipes out there, but I had a hard time finding one that had what I wanted for ingredients. And I don’t mind experimenting and making my own. Plus a lot of recipes I came across had no nutritional info, though some did. Which is something I care about as I’m trying to slim down and start working out more and such.

So I decided to start by looking at recipes that had ingredients that looked good and would seem to make a good tasting bar. Then pick and choose the items I wanted. My first attempt is based off the below link with some minor edits. I haven’t actually been able to try the recipe below yet but probably will in a few weeks. My plan is to keep updating the recipe till perfection.

Also the bars are little high in calories but I use them for meal replacement for breakfast. If you cut them into smaller pieces they can make for a tasty low cal snack. I will update the spreadsheet with some math.

Please let me know if you cannot view…

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ary4NsBeeKsRdDEySkVHLXZOWjhUbm9helJQMG5lNnc&hl=en

Another school in news for making the switch to Open Source, this time in New Zealand…

Albany Senior High School in the northern suburbs of Auckland has been running an entirely open source infrastructure since it opened in 2009. The 230-pupil school was set up to follow open learning principles, offering large “learning commons” areas where multiple classes interact rather than conventional classrooms and setting aside one day each week for pupils to work on self-driven research projects.

Ditching Microsoft is highly unusual within the NZ education sector, as a long-standing contract with the national government means the software giant is paid for technology for the school even though none has been used. Microsoft’s dominance also means that most planning documents for education presume an Microsoft infrastructure.

The whole article is just a fascinating read! Not just about the school making the switch but MS’s dominance in the computer market and their ingenious marketing to get themselves so intertwined in school districts (which is smart on many levels for MS).

I also liked how the principle stated his server room in the school was built to common practice standards for schools of that size and enrollment, which was 4 racks. Each rack able to hold 48 servers or 24 2U servers. Yet the school only needed 4 servers to run the whole school on an open source system.

I’ve written about this before so it comes to little surprise to me to read about this again. What does surprise me though is how these stories still seem to be few and far between. I’m still confident the Open Source model will win out as free software that works great (in many ways better than the paid version, think archiving programs, Internet browsers, antivirus, or file transfer clients) is hard to pass up. Heck even my company is finally starting to adopt OSS.

Kindly send them the link below or read through that post for some talking points. If they still continue on then there is just no hope for them.

I think maybe part of the reason you’re so angry is you keep demanding that you get screwed and then, not surprisingly, you keep getting screwed

Hey you. You there in the Glenn Beck T-shirt headed off to the Tea Party Patriot rally.

Stop shouting for a moment, please, I want to explain to you why you’re so very angry.

You should be angry. You’re getting screwed.

I think you know that. But you don’t seem to know that it doesn’t have to be that way. You can stop it. You can stop it easily because the system that’s screwing you over can only keep screwing you over if you keep demanding that it do so.

So stop demanding that. Stop helping the system screw you over.

Look, you can go back to yelling at me in a minute, but just read this first.

It’s a very good quick read that tackles the issue I’m sure confuses many, why would anyone making less than $250,000 vote for republicans? Maybe that number is too high, but it just has never made sense to me. If you are part of the middle or lower class it makes no sense to hurt yourself by voting in politicians that set policies based around helping the rich.

I could go on an on with this one, but really I just recommend reading the article linked above.

I wasn’t sure where to file this but I guess weird stuff works…

So I have bad skin. Not that its ugly or anything but it dries out easily, I have psoriasis, and something with my scalp. A dermatologist told me my scalp wasn’t psoriasis, but wouldn’t tell me what it is. I haven’t visited that one since. I don’t think it’s dandruff cause anti-dandruff shampoos don’t help and I have tried them all. So my guess is psoriasis or seborrheic dermatitis.

I’ve lived with this my whole life. Nothing cures it and all I can do is keep it under control and wait for something that works. So I’ve tried some small things over the years to see if something helps and really nothing has helped much. I did notice that putting olive oil on my scalp seemed to help but things just come right back when I stop using it. And putting oil on your scalp gets cumbersome quickly.

So floating around the tubes I see an article about giving up shampoo. Interesting idea, especially if it works:

I haven’t used soap or shampoo anyplace on my body for six months, save hand washing in advance of food prep. That’s it. let me just report my observations and leave you to judge.

[...]

Later, and maybe TMI: My wife now mentions more than ever before that “you smell good.” OK, I had to post that only because some might worry on that score….

In that link the author highlights some main points or advantages he has witnessed. Which is kind of what peeked my interest. Not to mention all the comments of other people that have given up shampoo. I’ve grown highly skeptical over the years and I don’t just make assumptions about things. So I’m treating this as a loose experiment for myself to see what happens.

The idea is that shampoo doesn’t allow your body to regulate the oils released from the scalp to the hair. Which is why most people don’t go more then 3 days without shampoo and shower, hair gets too greasy. But when you don’t use shampoo your body has a chance to produce the oil and regulate the production. Which is why people that stop using shampoo reach a point where their hair gets less greasy and eventually the greasiness returns to normal levels that feel similar to shampoo days.

It sounds a little shaky yes, but I’m at the point where I’m willing to try. Like I said above my scalp sucks. My plan is to simply to shower like I normally do but not use shampoo at all. So what are my results?

I have been doing this for a week and a half going on 2 weeks now. So what are my results? The first 5 to 7 days were about as greasy as I’ve been in awhile, but I feel as though the grease is slowing down now. Maybe not, but my wife has yet to comment on the greasiness of the hair. Well she did last night but it had been 1 and a half days since I last showered and she said that it didn’t seem all that greasy to her.

Results:

So far my scalp has itched a lot less than usual which is good, but my scalp doesn’t feel a lot better. I still have flakes and they haven’t seemed to slow down a lot but I’m thinking that will take time. My hair feels a million times better. This is probably one of the best outcomes of no shampoo. After I showered with shampoo my hair would be frizzled to all hell. Now it feels great, more natural, and healthy. I have very few split ends and no more frizz. So even if it doesn’t completely cure the scalp and flakes I still have a lot of our positives for sure. And I’m not even to week two yet.

The other thing with this is it could all be placebo or a result of something else. I will have to see how my results progress to see if there is a real difference. Or I could do no shampoo for a few months and then go back to shampoo to see what happens. But I think if I have what appear to be positive results from my experience I will likely not go back to shampoo.

So there are some benefits so far, but nothing as what other people have witnessed. Which means one of two things, I need to wait longer and/or there may be nothing to this idea.