Rabu, 30 Januari 2008

Voter Information Guide

This afternoon I check our mail and I see we've received a Voter Information Guide for Democrats and a Voter Information Guide for Independents, cool must have been put out by the SD Registrar of Voters for next weeks primaries. I wonder what the Republican and other party ones would look like? My curiosity begins to assuage quickly though and suspicion takes it's place as I start to take a closer look. At first glance they appear different, different patriotic graphics and wording on the front, but when you flip them over they are eerily similar...

Here's the front:

Here's the back:
Uh? They look almost exactly the same, and when we start to examine the content we can see a few oddities here. All of the proposition recommendations are the same: 91 - NO, 92 - YES, 93 - YES, 94-97 YES. Then we come to the presidential recommendation here:

They're hard to read since I took them with my phone's camera but the text is:
"For President. Vote for the Democrat of your choice in the Primary Election and then rally around the winner in November."
and
"For President. The Democratic Party invites Independent voters to help pick the Democratic canidate for President. Ask for a Democratic ballot when you vote."
Strange, why would a seemingly neutral agency such as the Voter Information Guide (as it says under the paid postage) take a Democratic slant, urging Independent (aka undecided) voters to vote for their candidates and props? So what's going on here? After a quick Google search I found the answer, mostly through another site who's noticed the same thing. These flyers are a sham, designed to look like official voter information endorsed by specific parties when in fact they are targeted to independent undecided voters to lean Democrat. Even though I'm a progressive, things like this really jade me about our political system. Elections should not be influenced by those who can afford to pay for these tricks. Digging further it appears these are created by a Political Consulting Company called Levine & Associates who are hired by various political action groups and candidates. While it's not clear who exactly funded these specific flyers, from looking at their client list it could be any number of groups endorsing propositions on the slate for next Tuesday.

This is one of the big things that gets me about politics, you hear it all the time, but when you actually see how shady it can get it really makes you wonder why we allow such nonsense. If you get one of these just toss it and pay it no attention, or better yet, put a Return to Sender on the front and drop it back in the mailbox and charge them twice for postage.

Selasa, 29 Januari 2008

Made in America

San Diego Union Tribune has a nice comic in veiled reference to buying "Made in America" goods and the tax rebate from last night's address (thanks Anthony)

source: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/features/breen/index.html

Senin, 28 Januari 2008

State of the Union 2008: Bush's Greatest Hits

My thoughts during the 2008 State of the Union address, or as what most pundits will refer to afterward as "Bush's greatest half-assed hits".

The Beginning
6:00 Countdown is over, and thankfully Keith is hanging on
Matthews seems to have a hard on for Condi
"When's the check coming, and when is the war ending." good Matthews quote.
6:05 "Madame Speaker", Oh I can't get enough of that with Cheney and Bush there, haha
6:07 Obama and Kennedy buddy buddy next to each other, awesome (most likely biggest news of the night)
6:09 Here we go....
6:10 "Rigorous debate" eh? Wonder if he'll endorse someone....

Taxes
6:12 "Trust people with their own money, and empower them" looks like he's going to bring up the stimulus package first, surprised he brought that up first. Seem to me it be better to end with it due to the other issues he'll most likey address.
6:14 "Please to say the IRS accepts both checks and money orders", oh George you crack me up
Hopefully next year we'll have a canidate who doesn't blame taxes for everything and actually man (or woman) up to the bigger picture
6:15 Wasting taxpayers money, with a project budget surplus in 2012? Why pass the buck to the next guy for all your reckless spending?
6:16 Nice shot at Dem controlled congress, threatening to veto anything that has earmarks and calling for "public" votes

Domestic Issues
6:17 Way to hop on the "hot" economic issue of housing. Maybe if citizen's made smarter real estate situations we wouldn't have to bother the feds with bailing them out.
6:18 Health care (cut to Hilary Clinton and Obama, neither don't look too happy). Consumer choice of health care my ass, look at the above real estate fiasco.
6:19 "All decisions about your medical care are made in the privacy of your Dr's Office, not in the hall of congress", how about you apply that to all person freedoms Georgie.
6:20 No Child Left Behind? Are you fucking serious? It's been what? Almost 7 years now?
6:21 Obama and Kennedy's expressions during this are priceless, just placid and calm.
6:22 Pell grants for private schools to save kids from public schools? But I thought No Child Left Behind was working....

Trade and Energy
6:23 "Made in the USA", there's a slogan I haven't heard since the 90s. Isn't it kinda expensive to make things here, why bother with a production economy when obviously we're almost all service oriented.
6:24 "Bring on the Democracy", cue Republicans standing up in the veiled reference to Iraq
6:25 "Clean energy technology" Switchgrass!!!!
Nuclear power, well at least he's said something worth listening to.
"Slow, stop, and eventually climate the growth of greenhouse gases", oh that's gotta piss off the global warming is a myth section. He's still using the "climate change" handle though, go figure.

Science
6:28 "Scientific Edge", another good point that apparently the entire congress agrees with.
Here comes the stem cells... "without the destruction of human life", one side up, other side down, wheeee
6:29 Cloning of human life? Seriously, almost no one supports this and those who do will most figure something out

Supreme Court
6:30 Boo hoo, up or down on nominees, when was the last nominee? Last summer? You figured out a way to get them in without
6:31 2nd time he mentioned "Faith Based (aka Christian)" groups, and is wanting "charitabe choice"? Yeah, like we don't know what that means
6:32 Whoa, he semi-mentioned Katrina... more so than he did last year

Social Programs and Immigration
6:32 Social Security, think of the chimblen!!!
6:33 Actually hitting the immigration properly, allowing legal ways for foreign workers to work in the US *gasp*!

Iraq
6:35 "Stirring moments in the history of liberty", ink-stained fingers, what was that? 3 years ago? Way to wax nostalgia
6:35 Oh here it comes....
6:36 Let the terrorist and 9/11 count begin!
6:37 Terrorist in Iraq! Oh noes! How did they get there?!
6:38 Afghanistan, "boys and girls are going to school", guess he missed out on the whole "women and children scared to go to school reports"
6:39 More troops to Afghanistan eh? Wow, did you finally figure out that's where Osama came from?
6:40 The surge is working!!! We changed course, we were never staying on it!
It's troop thanking time! Everyone up! If you don't stand you hate America!
6:41 "Grass roots surge", that is an awesome title
6:43 "Al Qaeda is on the run in Iraq and will be defeated"
6:48 Sectarian violence (cough, civil war, cough), I can never hear that enough, gotta love semantics
6:49 "A free Iraq with deny Al Qaeda a safe haven", I don't think it's working anymore, we know that Iraq and no links before you started your little war
6:50 "We will not rest until this enemy has been defeated", man, he's really milking this for his legacy isn't he?
6:52 Iran! They love freedom! But they're supporting terrorism and missiles! And uranium that could be used to "nucluear" weapons! Highly enriched uranium is ONLY used for weapons, it could never be used for anything else.... nope nothing... and by the way, comply with our climate change pack. Yellow cake!
6:52 Holy shit, he brought up the "tallest building in LA" terrorist plot? Um, wasn't that short of a sham?
6:54 "Tools to keep our people safe", like not only listening to the terrorists, but also our citizens. Don't pull this shit, FISA will not pass by this Friday, we prefer our privacy and freedom of your so called "security".
6:56 "We oppose genocide in Sudan" Good, I was worried there for a bit that we did.
6:58 Veteran funding, holy crap, Bob Dole is still alive? And a senator?!
6:59 "Hiring preferences for military spouses?" Isn't that sorta like affirmative action?
7:01 "So long as we continue to trust the people, and keep our liberty secure..." yeah, about FISA again?

What a waste of 53 minutes. I don't think he went over anything we haven't heard before and it seemed more like a summary of a shabby legacy. I think Olbermann sums it up best when he says "it seemed more like a list of half finished greatest hits than a state of the union.".

Only 357 more days....

Rabu, 23 Januari 2008

Debian Work Desktop


This is my new Debian Unstable work desktop running GNOME on a Dell Optiplex 755 Intel Core Duo Quad with 4Gb of memory.

Getting it up and running wasn't as smooth as I first expected. First, due to the strangeness of the on-board Intel non-analog DVI connector, I put the dual-head ATI Radeon I was using on my old desktop. Because I have one wide screen and one standard LCD setting the resolutions was tricky, and I finally gave up on the ATI flglx driver after I discovered it couldn't do 1600x1050. It also caused weird corruption in the lower right hand of the screen and major stability issues. moving to the open source ATI driver and a combination of Xrandr I was able to setup each monitor properly and get them working as a "Big Desktop". Originally the on-board gigabit ethernet didn't have support in the kernel, and I used a common 10/100 PCI card, the latest 2.6.24 kernel added the e1000e module which took care of that.

Performance wise it's a beast, at first it was sluggish due to the AHCI and NCQ enabled on the hard-disk, but disabling it in BIOS solved that problem. The quad-cores absolutely scream, and it's a huge improvement over the original Vista install. In order to run our more MS specific apps (IE, Outlook, SQL Manager, Cisco), I installed the free Vmware server and setup a Windows XP virtual machine with 2gigs or memory and 2 processors. Enabling remote desktop and then logging in via the terminal server client makes it seem like Outlook is it's own "app". Native Debian apps I'm using are are mostly GNOME centric: Iceweasel (aka Firefox), GNOME Terminal, Gedit, Rhythmbox, Pidgin, Picasa, and a variety of other GNU programs.

Once I got everything up and running using the desktop has been a dream.
Using GNOME as a desktop manager works wonders, since I can place menu bars in any location with any number of apps that I'd like to use. Creating a "quick launch" section on the menus is also nice, since before I was using a multi-media keyboard to launch my common apps in an attempt to slim down the memory footprint of Windows. Other benefits are the copy/paste highlight/click functionality and sloppy window focus, which makes using multiple monitors more intuitive.

Overall I'm glad I spent the extra time getting Debian running on this new desktop, since it makes my workstation a lot more usable and I feel I can garner more out of this new machine that I would have with Vista.

Jumat, 18 Januari 2008

Thinkpad T42 and Debian

The other week my wonderful girlfriend came over with a "present". While I was expecting food or something another I was pleasantly surprised when she handed me a relatively unused IBM Thinkpad T42. I have sort of a fetish for laptops, and at last count have around 6. All are in some state or working order save my poor iBook G3 which has suffered one to many logic board failures to resurrect again. This one however was different, it's almost perfect. It has all of the features and non of the defects than the others have. Each always had one thing that would bother me: trackpad would go crazy, lid was too loose and kept falling back, or simply ran way to hot. So far this Thinkpad is not only the best Linux laptop I've had but the best one I've owned period. Here's the specs:
  • Intel Pentium-M 1.7Ghz with SpeedStep
  • 1GB DDR Memory
  • 80Gb Hard Drive
  • DVD/CD-RW Drive
  • 802.11 B/G WiFi
  • 1 Gigabit Ethernet
  • ATI Mobility 7500 on a 1024x768 LCD
Desktop:


In the week or so leading up to getting the thinkpad I had been configuring my Dell Inspiron 8500 with Debian GNU/Linux Sid and found to my delight that transplanting it's 80Gb hard drive worked beautifully. All I needed to do was change the xorg.conf drive from the nvidia one to the Xorg ATI one. After that I was in business and with a few tweaks I got many things working properly:
  • ATI 7500 Mobility: Yes, Direct Rendering enabled using ati driver in xorg.conf (listed below)
  • Intel Pro Wireless 2100 3B MiniPCI: yes, after firmware download
  • Intel 82540EP Gigabit Ethernet: yes, with e1000 module
  • Intel SpeedStep: Yes, using cpufreq the processor will scale from 1.7Ghz down to 700Mhz depending on power settings
  • Suspend and Hibernate: Yes, using acpid. video and network come up correctly
  • HDAPS (disk head parking): sort of, works after a kernel patch, but seemed to cause instability and it was a bit too sensitive, somethings making the system unusable while it was parked.
The best resource I found when setting everything up and learning about the capabilities of the hardware was the ThinkWiki site that has excellent Linux information on almost all Thinkpad models.

Overall this is a solid laptop, I guess you could say the lid is a bit flimsy, but it's metal hinges are leagues above what Dells have. The gigabit ethernet is a big plus too, since we have gigabit connections at work and I'm planning to update my home router too. With auto-dim on the display, speedstep, and the tickless kernel option in 2.6.24 it's power management is capabilities are great. Hopefully this lasts me for a while with the only replacement part being the hard drive, but future laptop purchases will be guaged against this superb piece of hardware.

Some Linux info:

lspci
micheal@ruth:~$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82855PM Processor to I/O Controller (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82855PM Processor to AGP Controller (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 01)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 01)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 01)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-M) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 01)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev 81)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801DBM (ICH4-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 01)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801DBM (ICH4-M) IDE Controller (rev 01)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) SMBus Controller (rev 01)
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 01)
00:1f.6 Modem: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 01)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500]
02:00.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI4520 PC card Cardbus Controller (rev 01)
02:00.1 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI4520 PC card Cardbus Controller (rev 01)
02:01.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82540EP Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Mobile) (rev 03)
02:02.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 3B Mini PCI Adapter (rev 04)
/proc/cpuinfo
micheal@ruth:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 13
model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.70GHz
stepping : 6
cpu MHz : 1400.000
cache size : 2048 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss tm pbe bts est tm2
bogomips : 2792.87
clflush size : 64
xorg.conf (touchpad is disabled here)
Section "Files"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Generic Keyboard"
Driver "kbd"
Option "CoreKeyboard"
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbModel" "pc104"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "ImPS/2"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0"
Option "VertScrollDelta" "0"
Option "MaxTapTime" "0"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "ATI Mobility 7500"
Driver "radeon"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
Option "RenderAccel" "true"
Option "backingstore" "true"
Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"
Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
Option "TripleBuffer" "True"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Generic Monitor"
Option "DPMS"
HorizSync 28-64
VertRefresh 43-60
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Device "ATI Mobility 7500"
Monitor "Generic Monitor"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Modes "1280x1024" "1024x768"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen "Default Screen"
InputDevice "Generic Keyboard"
InputDevice "Configured Mouse"
InputDevice "Synaptics Touchpad"
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "true"
EndSection
 
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