Category Archives: Administration

Art Hewitt:

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I found out today that our planet  is  a little poorer, We lost Art Hewitt.

Art was a remarkable guy who lead a remarkable life.  As a young man he got shot down over Austria, and was a POW near Munich where he  endured cold and near starvation. He came home and married his sweetheart.

I met him about 45 years later as a new recruit for League City Volunteer Fire Department. He introduced to me the art and science  of pumping water on a fire truck.  Art was the ultimate teacher, patient and quick to praise when a point was grasped,  The first thing I learned about Art was that he appreciated and respected fine machinery. He had just repacked the leather seals in Granny, the engine ,  He had an old Harley Davidson that he had bought when he came home from the war, He had kept  it up and took out for a ride every Sunday. He had bought it when he got home from the Army and had kept it up ever since. Like Granny she was an absolute show piece.

Most of us will meet only a handful of people that we can truly look up to, Art is one of those people. He will be missed by those who were lucky enough to have known him.

The sound in the first 3.30 minutes of this You-tube video is pretty lousy,  but it does tell just a little bit about one of the best of the greatest generation.

A Bloggy Face Lift

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Updated the apearance of the blog a little, The header picture was taken at Galveston State Park, this last August. The Theme is an upgrade from Twenty Ten to Twenty Eleven.  Pretty much the default but it works.

I plan on more changes this year, like moving the blog to Host Gater, and combining the Wiki and the Blog so they share the site and host.

A Brilliant Idea

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I had the privilege working on a project a few years ago. It was an experiment for creating a drug delivery system for targeted cancer cures or MEPS. A lot of people poured their hearts and souls into, but so far not much has happened to forward the idea. Maybe there is hope:

Angela Zhang of Cupertino has an idea:

 … mix cancer medicine in a polymer that would attach to nanoparticles — nanoparticles that would then attach to cancer cells and show up on an MRI. so doctors could see exactly where the tumors are. Then she thought shat if you aimed an infrared light at the tumors to melt the polymer and release the medicine, thus killing the cancer cells while leaving healthy cells completely unharmed.

Angela is only 17 years old.   Angela, Please keep it up and pursue your idea.

 

The GoDaddy Boycott Busts, Sort of

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Thursday was the scheduled day for the boycott of Go Daddy over SOPA.  Go Daddy has gone from supporting SOPA to pulling support from SOPA  to claiming SOPA and PIPA is a bad idea.  I don’t know how sincere they are but it’s apparrent they were bleeding customers and their trust.

While GoDaddy had previously withdrawn its support for SOPA, until Thursday’s statement, the company had not voiced public disagreement towards the bill,which the House Judiciary Committee had been debating before adjourning for the holiday.

According to Yahoo, about 70,000 domains had already been switched before Thursday’s planned boycott. While these numbers aren’t extremely consequential to a company that hosts 50 million websites worldwide, these withdrawals along with high profile moves from Wikipedia, Cheezburger and image sharing site Imgur seem to have been enough to force GoDaddy’s hand.

Now, I don’t believe for a minute that Go Daddy is genuine in their recant of SOPA, their only regret is that their customer base found out that they have Hollywood’s interest over their customers.  The damage is done, they’ve helped craft the bill and supported it through the committee hearings it really doesn’t matter any more whether they support it or not.   Until we see proof that they will actually fight online censorship.

Go Daddy isn’t the only company that has supported SOPA and PIPA there is News Corp (Foxnews), CBS (C-Net), NBC and Disney. Just about all of the media, We don’t hear much about boycotting them.  Go Daddy struck our ire because we expected them to support their customers and the open internet.

I seriously considered pulling my domain.  I decided to wait. I have 2 domains, and am well paid up until for the next several months. If I were to bail on Go Daddy Thursday, they would still have my money, yet not have to provide any services. This would hardly be punishing them. On the other hand I can’t see renewing my services with them, Later on this summer I will move my sites to Host Gator. I will do so when I have used up my contract, and have the time to ensure that I can move this blog safely.

 

Go Daddy Bites the Hand that Feeds Them

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Passing SOPA would be a web owners worst nightmare. Godaddy’s support of it is a stand against its customers,  SOPA and its sister bill, PROTECT IP Act, in the Senate is a bad idea that promises to censor and restrict the web as we know it,  and threatens the very existance of websites like this that don’t have a staff of lawyers and editors to maintain compliance.   It is understandable that if not to be expected that Godaddy has pissed of its customers base.

There has been a tremendous backlash against GoDaddy.

Talk of a Go Daddy boycott began yesterday on community link-sharing site Reddit, and quickly grew to include several influential business leaders and media personalities. Among them were Y Combinator founderPaul Graham, Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh and celebrity/investor Ashton Kutcher. The company’s change-of-heart was announced today around the same time Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales Tweeted he would be transferring Wikipedia’s domains from Go Daddy in protest.

Go Daddy initially shrugged off the protests, issuing a nonchalant response to let people know it hasn’t negatively impacted its business — which was the equivalent of shaking the hell out of a giant beehive and not expecting to get stung. Boycott participators responded by publishing step-by-step tutorials for transferring a bulk of domains to a new registrar, complete with recommendations to competitors.

Go Daddy’s response didn’t get to to the heart of it. They basically claimed that SOPA might be poorly written, although they support the basic idea behind it, they are withdrawing support. They didn’t offer to fight it it or withdraw support from the  Senate’s PROTECT IP ACT. It gets worse for Go Daddy.

Hosting and domain registrar company Go Daddy has lost more than 37,000 domains in the past two days due to the company’s wishy-washy stance on the Stop Online Piracy Act.

Talk of a Go Daddy boycott began yesterday on community link-sharing site Reddit, and quickly grew to include several influential business leaders and media personalities. Among them were Y Combinator founderPaul Graham, Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh and celebrity/investor Ashton Kutcher. The company’s change-of-heart was announced today around the same time Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales Tweeted he would be transferring Wikipedia’s domains from Go Daddy in protest.

Go Daddy initially shrugged off the protests, issuing a nonchalant response to let people know it hasn’t negatively impacted its business — which was the equivalent of shaking the hell out of a giant beehive and not expecting to get stung. Boycott participators responded by publishing step-by-step tutorials for transferring a bulk of domains to a new registrar, complete with recommendations to competitors.

37,000 in two days before Christmas, looks like the beginning of an avalanche of bailouts. Now I’m left with a dillema.  This blog and the domain is hosted by Go Daddy, I’m paid up ahead, and I’ve been pretty happy with their service.  Host Gater is a local Houston Company has a good reputation, and is opposed to Govenment and Hollywood censorship. Their statement opposing SOPA:

Imagine if you were able to genetically combine Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Darth Vader and Barbara Streisand into one horrifically terrifying being. Now imagine that being is actually a piece of proposed legislature — the terrifying creation in your midst would then be the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) which is currently being considered by the House.

SOPA, aka H.R. 3261 is a bill right now in the House sponsored by R-TX Lamar Smith. It’s not just any bill though, it’s a bill that would allow the USDOJ, RIAA, MPAA and anyone else who lobbies for the entertainment industry to effectively censor the internet to suit their needs.

So, I’ve got a lot to consider. moving the content and the domain is a scary thing,  a lot of work and some money. Perhaps if Go Daddy took a substantial stand to actually fight this thing my decision would be a little easier. A significant donation to someone like the Electronic Frontier Foundation perhaps?

Nightmare on the Interwebs

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Alexandra Petri isn’t the only one having nightmares:

Last night I had a horrifying dream that a group of well-intentioned middle-aged people who could not distinguish between a domain name and an IP address were trying to regulate the Internet. Then I woke up and the Judiciary Committee’s SOPA hearings were on.

It’s exactly as we feared. For every person who appears to have some grip on the issue, there were three or four yelling at him.

The experts testifying for SOPA and promising that SOPA won’t be disastrous to the internet, admit they don’t know anything about how it works.  The experts on the Web are the folks claiming an end to to the web as we know it.  Who do we believe Spielberg who makes Billions making movies, or the folks who actually built the internet?

There ought to be a law, I think, that in order to regulate something you have to have some understanding of it. And when people are saying things like, “This is just the rogue foreign Web sites” and “This only targets the bad actors” and “So you want universities to host illegal pirated versions of copyrighted content?,” it’s enough to make you claw out large fistfuls of your hair. No! No! Nobody is hosting anything. This bill would require service providers to cut off access to entire Web sites where users are deemed to be engaging in copyright infringement, not take down stolen content they posted themselves. That’s already against the law. But no one seemed to be able to express this.

When you have a signed letter from the engineers responsible for creating the Internet pointing out that this bill would jeopardize our cybersecurity, balkanize the Internet and create a climate of uncertainty that would stifle innovation, it seems odd to ignore it. As a general rule, when the people saying that this will have a horrible, chilling impact on something are the ones who created that thing in the first place, and the people who are saying, “Oh, no, it’ll be fine, it only targets the bad actors” are members of the Motion Picture Association of America, it seems obvious whose opinion you should heed.

The problem is the folks with the most influence at the capital aren’t the people with the most knowledge, but the folks willing to spend the moist money for their cause.

A Wiki Boycott

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Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. is publically considering shutting down Wikipedia in protest of SOPA.

The proposed shutdown has nothing to do with technical problems or money issues, and everything to do with the Stop Online Piracy Act, an anti-piracy bill that has raised the ire of many major technology companies. This past weekend, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales posted a discussion on his Wikipedia user page suggesting that the English-language version of Wikipedia may temporarily go dark to protest the bill, which critics say gives movie studios and other copyright holders unprecedented power to shut down Web sites seen as infringing on their content.

SOPA endangers the very existence of Wikipedia,  and most any other site that relies on links or user input.  SOPA would criminalize links to sites that offer copyright violations, or other things that offend the sensibilities of the Hollywood crowd. On the surface this might sound reasonable bu the penalties kick in with out trial or court orders and site owners have little opportunity to defend themselves. Web owners and maintainers have a difficult time keeping their websites clean as it is. Most of us don’t want this crap on our sites and work hard and dilligently at keeping our sites clean, but it isn’t our job to protect the Hollywood moguls and their revenues.

SOPA is an attempt to shut down the internet, and restrict voices to only the Hollywood approved.  It is an attempt to shutdown search engines like Google or Bing. Google is very worried, and concerned that it will crimminalize every search engine.

An online piracy bill in the House would “criminalize linking and the fundamental structure of the Internet itself,” according to Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt.

Schmidt said the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) would punish Web firms, including search engines, that link to foreign websites dedicated to online piracy. He said implementing the bill as written would effectively break the Internet.

 

“By criminalizing links, what these bills do is they force you to take content off the Internet,” Schmidt said, calling it a form of censorship.

 

The search giant has been at the forefront of a tech industry backlash against the legislation from House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas).

“If Congress writes a bad law, we all suffer,” Schmidt said.

He compared the proposal to the Web censorship practiced by repressive foreign governments like China and doubled down on that comparison when speaking with reporters after his remarks at the Economic Club of Washington.

If Wikipedia shuts down in protest of the of SOPA I will pull the plug on my little Wiki , and if I can safely take my blog down for the duration I will take down this blog.  The Wiki is easy, I can literally just pull the plug.

I’m Back

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Its been a busy time for me, and blogging has ground down to a stop.  some of the things keeping me busy has been updating the blog,  Building a wiki, and spending some much needed time on vacation.  All of these things are bloggable. Along with the political races and The Occupy movement there is no shortage of something to blog about.

Thoughts on Google Plus

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Sometime at around the beginning of July, Google presented their new social network that they called Google+ .  to a limited group of Beta testers. They have controlled the growth of their new network by making the site by invitation only, and at times throttling the the rate that the invitees could join.  this is pretty much the same system that has been used since Google introduced Gmail.  While the Google plus is still by invite only, Invites are pretty easy to come by.  Anyone reading this can get one here. Existing users received 150 invites. At any rate Invites aren’t so scarce and Google doesn’t seem to be throttling back anymore. Continue reading →

Burning CDs

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Like most people I have a CD/DVD burner on my computer.  I also have a stack of CDRs. I don’t believe many of use  CDs much anymore. We buy our computers with most of the software need already installed, and almost any other software or software upgrades we need can be bought or downloaded on line.  One thing that we do use our CD/DVD readers for is watching and listen to store bought disks. Other wise the CD/DVD burner is heading down the same path as floppy disks.  CDs wont work on the newest tablets Chrome, or Netbooks. Although on they are still standard equipment on Desktops Laptops and even servers, One might wonder if we will start to see these no longer supplied as standard.

I spend as lot of time behind the wheel, often through areas that have poor radio coverage. I could always use an MP3 player, but its not something I normally use. Pluging my phone in and listening to Google Music on my Android would be a good solution if I was always in range of a good 3G/4G  signal.  Most cars still come with MP3 players,

I burn MP3 CDs.  You can hold a lot of music on a CD. It normally works out to about 1 meg a minute.   One can get about 10 hour plus. on a CD without hearing the same song twice.   2 or 3 CDs in the Dash or console is enough music to get me anywhere in the country with some pretty great music No thumb drives, no MP3 players and no Apple I-tunes required.

Miro has proven to big resource in gathering music that is scattered all lover a computer and other local machines on a network. Miro will gather and aggregate your music and video media,  its a good player as well.  It takes some getting used  and learning It Works for most systems

Google Music is a nice way to listen to music on a phone while in the the civilized world. Make sure you download Google Music Manager though.  This is the program that searches and syncs music from your computer to the clouds.

Pandora is pretty nice, but I’m finding myself using it less and less.  MP3 cds play on my BlueRay players also.

Linux “abcde” is a linux command line driven program that kicks butt ripping CDs, There are good free rippers for any O/S.

Please feel free to to comment on your music solutions. I am interested in with how you pack and take your music with you.