Reforming patents, promoting innovation

Found a link to this in a recent Lockergonme e-mail.

Google Public Policy Blog: Reforming patents, promoting innovation

Both ends of I-90 in one day

On my home from the airport last night I made a little detour around the Seattle Stadiums to drive the western most 1/4 mile of I-90. Earlier in the day, I had been driven around Boston's Logan airport, which put me at eastern terminus of the USA's longest Interstate Highway.

I guess this points out that I'm a true highway geek.

Liberty Quotes

I hate flying these days.

Liberty - Wikiquote:

• The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
  • Thomas Jefferson

• Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
  • Thomas Jefferson

• It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.
  • Thomas Jefferson
    

This last one was on the same Wikiquote page, and I thought it was cool, though not applicable to passing through an airport.

• It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties which make the defense of our nation worthwhile.
• Earl Warren

• Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.…The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip.
  • Ronald Reagan

Photos on Wikipedia

Looks like several of my longeing and vaulting photos have been used on Wikipedia in the longeing and vaulting articles. Who would have thought that one of my mentors, Tammy, and one of my longeing students, Holly, would get pictured as world class examples of longeing. And I don't know quite what to make of the fact that not only are two of my vaulters are shown as examples of vaulting, but I'm there too.

Fast bits

I like my fast pipes.

NASA Employees Fight Invasive Background Check

I don't find this too surprising, as I suspect that NASA is much more involved in the "Technical Measures" our country uses in international intelligence then most people realize.

Scientists sue NASA, Caltech over deep new background checks - International Herald Tribune:

It sounds like there was a blanket decision to basically require security clearances for all NASA employees and contractors.

The computer monitor I bought surplus from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center back in about 1998, has a little red plaque that states "CLASSIFIED USE AUTHORIZED". Given the proximity of GSFC and the NSA facilities at Fort Mead and the interruption of NASA TV coverage of shuttle missions during certain strategic international events, I suspect that there are some fiber optic cables linking the two carrying highly classified data. If NASA and NSA are sharing various communication and maybe even computing resources, I can see how such a blanket security decision might get made.

I predict that the government lawyers in the lawsuit will push to have the case dismissed on the grounds that defending against the complaint would require the disclosure of national security information.

Supporting TOR

Looks like Chris Prillo, the guy behind Lockergnome, is thinking about using TOR.

TOR or VPN? ~ Chris Pirillo:

IMHO, I think that supporting and using TOR is very worthwhile way to promote freedom not only on the Internet, but also in the off line world. In many parts of the world TOR allows users to access information that their government or ISP choose to censor. Take a few minutes and set up your own TOR server.

"information wants to be free" -- Stewart Brand

Re: old laptop & linux

Barry --

    There are a couple of flavors of Linux that will load and boot off a floppy and PCMCIA Ethernet cards are actually better supported then wireless cards.  So you should be able to boot of the floppy connect to the Internet via the Ethernet, then download and install just about any "distro" [distribution] you want to try.

    There might also be one or more "appliance" distros that could do something useful with your old computers. I'd start by looking at some of the rPath distros.  Perhaps you could mod the laptop case and turn it into a web connected picture frame?

    Linux actually does a decent job with more legacy hardware then you might think, especially if the HW was popular for small servers and/or with the geek crowd. For example Linux grew up on SCSI drives and have very good support for most SCSI devices built in.   Also if you're into tweeking drivers, with Linux you can always write or modify your own drivers. 

    I've got an old 486 file server in a beefy steel case sitting beside my desk waiting to have the new motherboard, processor , power supply, etc. installed. It's so old that it won't boot off the CD without a BIOS upgrade, otherwise it would already be running as my disk back-up server. 

    But like with an old jeep, even with Linux there is a point that the best thing to do with a system is take it to the recycler or post it on Craig's list.

TTFN
    Tom

Barry Briggs wrote:

Tom,

 

Did I mention this laptop does not have CD, ethernet or USB.  It has an PCMCIA (not cardbus)  I have an ethernet card that goes in the PCMCIA slot.  Normally I load things over the floppy or the ethernet port.  It does not have backup since the battery pack died a long time ago.

 

This is sounding more and more like a futile, time consuming job.  I have another big computer, but it is even older (P100) and has lots of strange hardware in it - SCSI CD, NEC 4 CD changer, backup tape drive (floppy) 720k 5 1/4 floppy, etc.  It was my web server running tiny until I ran out of disk space and bought a Fry's $300 wonder and moved to Apache.

 

Barry

 

On 8/22/07, Tom Sayles  wrote:

Barry --

   Laptops in particular tend to have more proprietary hardware and
software, so some of the custom designed devices might not work or be
fully supported.  If you have (or get) a wireless card with good open
source drivers for it, you should be able to set it up for lightweight
web browsing [don't expect to surf youtube] or maybe even as an
X-terminal.

   I've also heard of people having success using old laptops as web
server / internet gateway / firewall because they have a small footprint
and built-in back-up power.

   Assuming that the bios supports booting off a CD and that by modern
standards it's memory challenged, my first suggestion would be to try a
Puppy Linux or Damn Small Linux live CD on it.

   Another fun item might be to try the OLPC os on it.

TTFN
   Tom Sayles

Barry Briggs wrote:
> Tom,
>
> I have an old (12 years) Sharp laptop that currently has windows 95
> installed.  It would make a good candidate for linux.
>
> Questions:
http://bdbriggs.dyndns.org/DayTrips/USSHornetFlashlightTourAugust2007/index.html>
> Do you think there is any chance the old hardware would work with linux.
> If so, which version is my best bet?
>
> Any luck selling the old Jeep???
>
> Jon was just here and we took lots of pictures of the places we went:
>
> http://bdbriggs.dyndns.org/DayTrips/USSHornetFlashlightTourAugust2007/index.html
> http://bdbriggs.dyndns.org/DayTrips/RosicrucianEgyptianMuseum2007/index.html
> http://bdbriggs.dyndns.org/DayTrips/HistoricCarRacesLagunaSecaAugust2007/index.html
> http://bdbriggs.dyndns.org/DayTrips/CaliforniaRailroadMuseumAugust2007/index.html
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Barry

Fixing Deepest Sender

I was running into a problem with Deepest Sender not being able to post to my Blogger Blog. After much searching I found a post on community.livejournal.com that might help. (This post will be a test.)

deepestsender: Can't post to Blogger.com because of a date/time format error:The steps I followed were:

1. I downloaded a fresh copy of the modified the "deepest sender-0.8.0-firefox+sm.xpi" file from addons.mozilla.org.
2. Dug though the archives and made the replace "var iso8601 = this.date.toISO8601String(4);" with "var iso8601 = this.date.toISO8601String(5);" change to the "atom.js" per the community.livejournal.com posting.
3. Saved the file to my desktop and replaced the one in the archives. This also involved saving a copy of the deepestsender.jar file to my desktop to update the "deepest sender-0.8.0-firefox+sm.xpi" file.
4. I also updated the version number in both the install.rdf and install.js files to append my initials, aka 0.8.0-TJS.
5. I uninstalled deepest sender 0.8.0 and restarted firefox.
6. I dragged the updated deepest sender-0.8.0-firefox+sm.xpi file from my desktop to the firefox address bar, reinstalled and restarted firefox.
7. I deleted my blogger account from deepest sender and readded it with my blog's url as the posting url.

And it now seems to be working again!!!
My fixed xpi file is here.
Also it looks like the fix was made in the CVS source at MozDev.org, so it should be in the next official release.

Fixing F-Spot exporting to Flickr

I was having trouble after some Ubuntu update/upgrade earlier this year when I tried to export photos from F-Spot to my Flickr account. When the problem first cropped up my Google searches didn't turn up a solution. But now that I'm back from Nationals, I again looked into fixing the problem and found the following.

Re: Error while trying to auth flickr,:

It took a little more searching to figure out that the "/desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/" was a gnome key and that I needed to use the gconf-editor to up date the keys. But I was able to fix the problem.

Geek Jeep For Sale!

It's time to get rid of my white 1992 Jeep Cherokee.
it's posted on Craig's List.

I'd like to sell it really cheep [<$100] to someone local who wants various parts off it and has the space to store it and will let me come and pull a few parts off it now and then.

If you're only interested in specific parts please leave a comment here, and your include contact information.

Vaulting in Denver

The trip from Washington was uneventful. All are well following practices in Ft. Lupton on Sunday. We will move the horses, starting this afternoon with Storm and Joey, over to the National Western complex. Tuesday and Wednesday morning are practice and setup days. The "Para-Nationals" in on Wednesday with competition starting on Thursday and running through Sunday.

Re: Tom, Can I get your assistance?

Kody --

Please let me apologize for my less then "couth" response.

Part of bing an effective coach (especially to teenagers) is knowing exactly what to say that will quickly and efficiently achieve the desired performance goal(s). In this case my goals were:

1. Break the attention barrier.
   Due to the detailed contact information I deduced that you probably were a real human and not just a spambot. I needed a way to standout from other "sorry not interested" replies.
   
2. Make a strong memorable impression.
   At a physiological level, strong emotions build the strongest neurological connections in the brain's memory centers. A good coach knows when and how to exploit this fact.
   
3. Again try to point out that the information you're working with has serious quality issues.
   Both your 07/16/2007 08:41 AM and your 07/25/2007 07:24 AM e-mails have data quality issues that give a first impression that you don't know what's going on. The employer information in the first one was more then ten years out of date. The data in the second one is just plain false. Thirdly the tools you're using really should have brought to your attention that you already contacted my tsayles {-at-} Soot-n-smoke.com address and got a "sorry not interested" reply.
   

Because you wrote a personal reply I can assume that I successfully achieved goal 1.

Your reference to my "vaulters" indicates that you probably followed the link in my July 16th reply, most likely because your somewhat upset and wanted to know just who you were dealing with. This indicates that I likely achieved goal 2. And now when my name shows up in your data, you will hopefully remember it and act on it accordingly.

At this time I have no way direct or indirect way of knowing if I achieved goal 3. (Some lessons are only achieved through repetition.) If I did/do get this point across and you act on the information, it will probably improve your success rate. This would then have been a positive response to the request for "assistance" in subject line your form letter e-mail. You're welcome.

BTW, I'm posting this conversation on my blog.

Sincerely,

Tom Sayles


Moore, Kody wrote:

Tom,

I apologize for the mistake as I would not waste my time with someone that is not interested or as uncouth as yourself. I hope your vaulters see more patience and understanding from you when they make meaningless mistakes. Rest assured that nobody from our firm will waste their time on you!

Best regards,

Kody Moore

Associate - Civil Engineering

MBA Management, Inc

14900 Conference Center Drive, Ste 300

Chantilly, VA 20151

703 273 0028 x 223 office

701 371 3909 mobile

kmoore@mbamgmt.com

www.mbamgmt.com

The information contained in this electronic message is intended only for the use of the individual or entity to which it is addressed and may contain information that is privileged, confidential and exempt from disclosure under applicable law.

If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are informed that any dissemination, copying or disclosure of the material contained herein, in whole or in part, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this transmission in error, please notify MBA and purge this message.

---

From: Tom Sayles [mailto:tsayles@Soot-n-smoke.com]
Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2007 11:35 PM
To: Moore, Kody
Subject: Re: Tom, Can I get your assistance?

Kody --
Get your face out of your !$$ [crude reference to hind end body part replaced] and pay attention to what your doing. You information is incorrect as I have never worked for MDSHA and I replied, nicely, to your inquiry last week. See my e-mail timestamped at 07/16/2007 05:02 PM PDT.

If you contact me again about these same positions, I will inform your supervisor and track down the firm that you are recruiting for and report the contact as harassment.

Disrespectfully,

Tom Sayles


Moore, Kody wrote:

Tom,

I am a recruiter in the land development and transportation industries, and my understanding is that you are a Project Engineer with the MDSHA. I represent many clients but am presently involved with a full service engineering company in the Baltimore area, that is looking to expand its transportation department with a team of three individuals. They include a PM with a transportation planning or design background, a highway engineer, and a traffic engineer. This firm has been in the business for over 50 years, operate our of 4 offices(2 in Maryland and 2 in Virginia), and employ around 200 individuals. The reason they are expanding is that they have multiple large projects(MD DOT, DC DOT, and MD State Hwy Admin) that need to be staffed. These are full-time positions with a company that last year was ranked in the top 25 engineering firms in the DC Metro area, recognized to be in the "Top 15 Mid-Size Engineering Firms to work for in the Nation" by CE News in 2006.

If you know anyone that would be interested in an opportunity like the ones mentioned, could you please pass along the information. I would be happy to go into greater detail about the position. As always all conversations I have are completely confidential, and I appreciate any and all help you can provide.

Best regards,

Kody Moore

Associate - Civil Engineering

MBA Management, Inc

14900 Conference Center Drive, Ste 300

Chantilly, VA 20151

703 273 0028 x 223 office

701 371 3909 mobile

kmoore@mbamgmt.com

www.mbamgmt.com

The information contained in this electronic message is intended only for the use of the individual or entity to which it is addressed and may contain information that is privileged, confidential and exempt from disclosure under applicable law.

If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are informed that any dissemination, copying or disclosure of the material contained herein, in whole or in part, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this transmission in error, please notify MBA and purge this message.

---

Kody --

Your information is only 10.5 years out of date, as I haven't worked in Civil Engineering or for VDOT since December 1996. Current resume is here.

While I am somewhat interested in getting back into Traffic Engineering, I am not interested in relocating back to the Baltimore / Washington DC area. I'd only be interested in opportunities in the Seattle area, preferably on the eastside in cities such as: Woodinville, Bothell, Kirkland, Bellevue, Redmond, Sammamish, Issaquah, Snoqualmie, etc.

TTFN
Tom Sayles


Moore, Kody wrote:

Thomas,

I am a recruiter in the land development and transportation industries, and my understanding is that you are a Traffic Engineer with the VDOT. I represent many clients but am presently involved with a full service engineering company in the Baltimore area, that is looking to expand its transportation department with a team of three individuals. They include a PM with a transportation planning or design background, a highway engineer, and a traffic engineer. This firm has been in the business for over 50 years, operate our of 4 offices(2 in Maryland and 2 in Virginia), and employ around 200 individuals. The reason they are expanding is that they have multiple large projects(MD DOT, DC DOT, and MD State Hwy Admin) that need to be staffed. These are full-time positions with a company that last year was ranked in the top 25 engineering firms in the DC Metro area, recognized to be in the "Top 15 Mid-Size Engineering Firms to work for in the Nation" by CE News in 2006.

Another is a 13 year old firm that is already in the top ten engineering firms in the Metro DC area. The President of the company is a former president of Greenhorne and O'mara who grew the firm from 150-200 employees to over 1800 employees. They are a growing firm and looking to bring in the right team of individuals to ensure it continues to grow. They are the General Engineering Consultants for Spotsylvania county, are the on-call engineers for Fairfax County, involved with the Dulles Rail Extension, and are the prime Contractor for the work on VDOT 495/395 hot lanes. The firm is fully networked and all employees have their own workstations. They are looking for Professional Engineers that are looking to work with side by side with the main principles in the firm on these and many other projects. These individuals have to be willing to put in the time and effort to keep this firm growing and become the premiere firm in the area.

If you know anyone that would be interested in an opportunity like the ones mentioned, could you please pass along the information. I would be happy to go into greater detail about the position. As always all conversations I have are completely confidential, and I appreciate any and all help you can provide.

Best regards,

Kody Moore

Associate - Civil Engineering

MBA Management, Inc

14900 Conference Center Drive, Ste 300

Chantilly, VA 20151

703 273 0028 x 223 office

701 371 3909 mobile

kmoore@mbamgmt.com

www.mbamgmt.com

The information contained in this electronic message is intended only for the use of the individual or entity to which it is addressed and may contain information that is privileged, confidential and exempt from disclosure under applicable law.

If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are informed that any dissemination, copying or disclosure of the material contained herein, in whole or in part, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this transmission in error, please notify MBA and purge this message.

Note: I made some minor edits to this e-mail when I posted on this blog, first to eliminate a crude body part reference and second to obfuscate my e-mail address in an effort to cut down on th spam I have to wade through each day.

I love the linux command line

I recently had an external hard drive die. It had been kind of flaky since I fell down the stairs at x-mass and dropped it about 6 ft. Since I knew it wasn't working well, I was using mostly as yet another location for backing up data (like from my parent's home network). So when I finally gave up on it this week, I had lost any data.

In planning for the replacement, I was trying to remember the hardware in the Ubuntu server, PopsHP, I have setup for my parents in their condo. A quick search of Google showed me the lshw command. It was already installed on PopsHP and when I ran it (via an ssh connection), it suggested that "you should run this program as super-user". Which I did and piped the resulting text to a file. Next I ran a little script I have that uses rsync to transfer files to a subdirectory in my home folder on my main desktop machine. So in under five minutes I had a complete and detailed listing of the hardware in PopsHP, on my local machine.

Then as a bonus, as I was typing up this blog post, I discovered that lshw will format its output as HTML. So in under a minute, I reran the entire process adding in the HTML command line switch.

What can I say except that I love linux.

Printing catastrophe

This printing catastrophe video was sent to me by one of the vaulters. I was able to quickly find it on YouTube.

Back on the road again.

Turns out the problem with the Jeep Noir was just the crankshaft position sensor, even though the mechanic kept calling it the cam sensor. (And yes sensors occasionally fail on older jeeps.) If It's the sort of think I could have fixed myself but would have had a hard time diagnosing on my own. I probably could have even pulled the sensor off the Geek Jeep, though that would have left it immobilized and thus harder to sell.

Chocolate Blog

I saw this linked to from my friend Gretta's blog and thought some of you might like it.

http://cacaolab.wordpress.com/

Is this what's wrong with Jeep Noir?

Cam-Crank Sensor Relationships:

My mechanic was too booked up to get a look at the Jeep Noir today, but he said that it sounded like the cam sensor.

More Jeep trouble?!?!

Aaack!

After tune-up on 7/13 at Model Garage in Fall City, I drove the Jeep Noir two miles to Patterson Creek Farm, where it was parked for several hours. Friday evening I drove from Patterson Creek Farm 20 miles to home in Kingsgate area of Woodinville, where it was parked overnight.

Saturday morning I drove the Jeep Noir from Kingsgate the 20 miles back to Patterson Creek Farm for regular vaulting practice. About midday I drove from Patterson Creek Farm toward Issaquah. On Issaquah – Fall City Rd approaching Klahanie Dr. (4.5 miles form Patterson Creek Farm) the Jeep Noir stalled while decelerating down hill and would not restart.

At the time of the stall Radio and A/C with fan on high were running and vehicle was coasting (clutch depressed) and breaking to stop behind traffic at signal.

On the side of the road, I then checked various superficial possible causes:

• checked for loose coil & spark plug wires,

• confirmed fuel under pressure at fuel bar test port,

• visually inspected various ignition related fuses,

• rotated positive battery terminal to avoid possible grounding on battery bracket

After each of these the engine would crank but would not start. Sounded like lack of spark or possibly lack of fuel. [Did not check exhaust pipe for fuel smell, and tank is 2/3 full.]

During repeated cranking and 45+ minutes of flashing hazard lights, voltage indicated at instrument panel gradually dropped from ~12v down to ~9-10v, at which point the starter motor would no longer engage / rotate engine.

So I ended up having the Jeep Noir toed back to Model Garage in Fall City, where I'm hoping they will be able to quickly fix the problem, especially if it ends up being one that they caused.

Bucking Hay

While the Jeep Noir was getting a tune-up today, I pent several hours "bucking hay", i.e. helping to bring it in from the field. Hutch and I hauled in about 150 of the estimated 600 bails that the neighbors cut and bailed this week. It was a hot sweaty and strenuous job that doesn't pay much, but it needed to be done and was a big help for the barn. The neighbor's hay is good quality at a good price.

Before bucking hay, we had a short vaulting practice for our Nationals bound vaulter and did a little bit of a vaulting demo for the Natural Horsemanship camp that has been taking place at our barn this week. Several of the campers were very interested and I hope that we will get another vaulter or two.