Isotopes may cause cancer, but only in California.

I have had students of varying intellectual finesse in my tenure as an Information Technology instructor. We’re required to teach “bare-bones” skills, but I enjoy dropping other nuggets of current information to my classes as I find them in hopes of inspiring discussions about where technology is heading and how it will affect us. Well, I shared an article found on Engadget earlier this year about Quantum Networks being faster than light (http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/13/northwestern-university-researchers-route-photon-qubit-make-qua/) which started a rather spirited dialogue in a Computer Forensics class.  The rest of this story and resulting theory happens in three parts.

Act 1: Explaining (briefly) quantum physics for non-science majors

Einstein once explained that quantum physics is, “Spooky action at a distance.” Spooky, to be forward, will find new meaning later. The tragic Lolcat for this theory (belonging to the imagination of Erwyn Schrödinger) is a particular feline known for living in a box with radioactive isotopes, a hammer, and a flask of hydrocyanic acid.  Hey, it was 1935 and the science kits back then had all the fun stuff.  The cat and all of the (in the state of California) cancer causing materials work in the story as so: if the isotope should degrade (as it measurably will at some point depending on the quality of previously unmentioned sensors), the hammer shatters the flask thus releasing poisonous gas. Assuming the cat was not Ninja-turtled by the radiation, the purr thing would be rendered “living impaired,” by the vapors of kitty-unfriendly gas. The trick is that the box was sealed and no one could possibly know the current living conditions of Schrödinger’s Cat. So, the feline existed as both alive and dead simultaneously. This is referred to as being in two states concurrently. In the argument of science, the cat could continue to exist (or not) indefinitely until 1980, when PETA was  formed and would’ve surely ransacked the cat box, killing Schröddy accidentally; thus ending all hopes for thwarting Shredder as a ninja turtl…  …cat.

  Act 2: In which a Rabbit is completely unrelated to physics, but maybe voodoo

Original picture by Gwendal (http://www.flickr.com/people/gwendalcentrifugue/)

A story was shared in the same class (on a later date) by the only student to ever borrow every issue of Wired Magazine I keep available in the computer lab (I put them there for just such reasons). His story begins with a deceased rabbit. He found a dead bunny in his front yard (its demise was met by unknown means). He tells us that he then hung the bunny in a tree (I like to imagine that by, “hung,” he meant in a cage, but there’s no telling). He made a sign which read “Free Radit [sic, with the d being a backwards b].” His youthful hopes, I think, were just to creep out his neighbors. The plans of mischief ended up backfiring when the first highly-anticipated knock on his door was a woman who informed him that the hanging rabbit would welcome voodoo and black magic into his house if he chose to leave the carcass there. His practical joke was promptly removed and given a proper burial…    …with holy water…    …so that it wouldn’t become bunnicula, a zombunny, or something worse of course. This led to a few nights of unrest.

  Act 3: In which the rabbit joins Schröddy in the box and adds a third quantum option

Armed now with dark magicks; science fiction; science fact; and science theory, Mr. Babin proposed the following spooky actions. If a rabit [sic] were to be sealed in a box with radioactive isotopes, a hammer, and a flask of hydrocyanic acid then hung (sealed in said box) from a tree where a wiccan, witch or voodoo doctor lived in the same neighborhood (statistically, a 1 in 4 chance); then at any given moment the “harmless bunny” could be any state of alive, dead, or zombified by either the extended exposure of unlicensed radiactive materials (see what you get for taking the cool materials out of “My First Science Kit” toys) or dark thaumaturgy. Take your pick.  The rabit [sic] could also exist as combinations of alive/dead, alive/undead, dead/undead, or alive/dead/undead.

Conclusion
This effectively makes seven states to a Qubit allowing for multiple superpositions of quantum state and now blows open the world of quantum computing. Eat that Schrödinger’s Cat.

If you were not privy enough to have experienced the old text and language-based games before the First Person Shooters, MMORPGs, and real-time strategy games became all the rage; then you can now relive my youth by typing in vulgar commands to these adventure games. Any bona fide (self proclaimed) OG (Original Gamer) has to experience these games to really be on the cool (geek) kids’ side of the inside jokes.

All the great adventure game titles are represented: Zork I, Sorcerer, Wishbringer, Planetfall, and (drumroll please…) Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy! Part of the thrill in these games is trying to figure out what, exactly, you can type to make the scene change, use some item, check your inventory, pick up something, or just turn on the lights (Grues only lurk in the dark apparently). Before you dismiss these text-only games as drole, give one of them a shot, they’re strangely addictive. Oh, and break out a pencil and paper. You might need to make a chicken-scratch map or note an action.

All kinds of text-based adventure games from Infocom here:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~pot/infocom/

…side-note for you Douglas Adams fans who can’t deal without pretty pictures…
There exists a version hosted by BBC Radio 4 with scene pictures (by Rod Lord, Nolan Worthington, and others) which still requires text entry, but some clickety-click stuff is available. Side-side note: if someone knows if this online game has been ported to Android… let. me. know. Side-side-side note: yes, it works on Android through the web, but it’s rather clunky to navigate.

Here’s BBC’s version of Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Game by Infocom and Douglas Adams himself:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game_new.shtml

Side-side-side-last-side-I-swear note: try not to use the cheats and walk-throughs which you will undoubtedly find online, especially for the Hitchhiker’s Guide game. Some of the funniest parts of the game are the outcomes of your wrong moves and follies narrated by Douglas Adams’ swanky wit.

Four words that can instill terror and spontaneous mental conditions in at least 80% of men: The Mall at Christmas. I’ll spare you my hunter vs. gatherer theory again (I’ll link it layer), but I think there’s a deeper rabbit hole. Of course, the rabbit is gone and has made this funky furry vest possible. Shopping with Xiom normally doesn’t send me into a schizo-fit even when she drags me to polar corners of a clothes store 18 times to opine on A/B options.

If we were shopping for ourselves, then this is easy.

“I don’t like that, it makes you look like a serial killer.”
“Okay.”

That being said, the object of opinion probably gets bought anyway. When Xmas shopping, however, our opinions have to match regarding gifts for third parties. This gets more complicated than that time I had to explain how what I do has nearly no resemblance to the movie “Hackers.”  Today I must have won a mall-opinion gift card, we’ve been on a roll. I think I’ve run out of points just now and I’m running for a couch and the comfort of the internets to shop online…  …at the mall.

Sometimes, it changes from an office into “the computer” room. Sometimes, it may make the semantically demoralizing change from music room (or ambitiously, the studio) to hobby room. Workshops become storage, smoking rooms (ambitiously, “the study”) morph into writing rooms (although writing may still take place mainly in the kitchen), and masturbatoriums evolve into.
..   …well, that’s a sticky subject.

Ours is not that much different; although technically it never had a solid previous delineation, flopping back and forth between office and studio. Once Xiom could not possibly fit all of her toys (and she buries my Star Wars collection) anywhere else, they migrated in to the studio. Still, it was a studio. Her Blythe sewing eventually made it on to an unused desk. Ultimately, a monstrosity of a cabinet (“monstrosity” is only a reflection of its size) was moved in to accommodate the collectibles and that’s when the name of this room came into debate.

Couldn’t call it a hobby room, actual work is done here. Couldn’t call it a sewing room, half of her threadwork is still completed in the bedroom or kitchen (better lighting is sometimes quoted). Crafts room sounds like something found in a kindergarten. Neither office, studio, collectibles, “back,” music, demarc, pr0n, geek, Star Wars, or “Tiny People Village” room seem to fit its purpose now. Much debate ensued. A few more possibilities were vocalized, but I think I had the final say on the subject. Once the words were set free from my lips, there was a silence. It’s like that nickname you didn’t mean to give that girl in high school, but it just eerily fits and now you have to live with being the person who distilled the distinction through a subconscious moment of blurbage.  As much as I’ve tried to erase the audible creations of my tongue with Jedi mind control, things can never be unsaid.

“Why don’t we just call it Mr. Buttersniff.”

(edit) Xiom’s experience of Mr. Buttersniff can be found here (complete with pictures).

http://myownprivatexanadu.blogspot.com/2011/04/collector-and-purveyor-of-childhood.html?showComment=1303247456249#c5097395290777670578

Yes, I’m still using Linux. I’ve stopped distro hopping on my notebook since Hardy Heron. I still install the latest 64 bit on a separate partition, but I keep going back to Hardy. I need that stability for work. I guess I’m only a few months from being absolutely forced to install something new as support is going out of Canonical’s official window. I might cry.

I have not been able to get Compiz to run as smooth in later versions as it does in Ubuntu 8.04 on my two-year-old Intel chipset. Yes, I actually use the effects in presentations. I use the desktop cube rotation to go between slides and demonstrations. Graphically, I find it easier for students to see this transition. I use the desktop zoom for focusing on the mostly sub-30 point font in examples. Exploding closed windows? Well, that’s just fun. Why, oh why, was burning windows removed from later Ubuntu releases?

Short of rambling again, all this to say that I’m going to give my Maximus-ness another go. I’m also cutting this short as I’m writing on my phone and I might need to actually make a good old traditional phone call at some point today.

Peace and penguins.

Today, I am testing the survey and form feature for a one-off Excel class I have to teach.  I would like feedback from the class participants and I found this while trying to upload materials for the class.

So….
Loading…
…but you’ll need to be invited.

Click here for the quick link to send an email to Louisiana congress about the Senate’s three-hundred percent pay raise.

I’m not joking The Louisiana Senate just passed SB672 which TRIPLES their annual pay. Think about the last time you got a raise. Three percent? Ten percent? No percent because times are hard and the company can’t afford it with the rising gas prices, rising bread prices (the lower production of wheat in favor of Ethanol producing corn drives prices up without the oil crisis), less revenue because of lower cost competition (due to the outsourcing of services to foreign countries or illegal workers), etc? We’re talking THREE HUNDRED PERCENT here people. The average Louisiana worker’s pay is $37,946. This is one time I wish I was average (I’m a teacher, what can I say). The average pay tripled is $113,838, and before you run to your trusty “Little Professor” calculator, the difference is $75,892. For 39 senators that’s right at 3 million dollars MORE a year total if they were an average Louisiana worker. The actual figures of what it would cost us tax paying citizens is estimated at over 5 million dollars annually.

The senate knows that we have a new and hopeful Governor in office with a lot of good ideas for the state, but he needs the help of the Senate to pass the bills in order to even get to his desk for approval. If Bobby Jindal does not approve this raise, the Senate could stall his proposals and therefore he will have to “play ball” the old Louisiana way. This is borderline extortion, or racketeering (remember what Edwin Edwards went to jail for). A quote from the Advocate:”Asked if he had been threatened by lawmakers, Jindal said he would not discuss private conversations with legislators.” In Louisiana, this more than likely means “yes”.

“I don’t want to give anybody any excuse for slowing down any of the important reform going through the legislature (that are) important to the people of Louisiana,” — Bobby Jindal

You’re sitting there reading this thinking, “Yeah, but what can I do?” I thought about that too, which brings me to this email. We can do what Bobby Jindal cannot for betterment of the state. I know you people send on much more mundane chain letters than this, but now it’s time to use chain lettering for good. I have provided a link which will automatically address EVERY Representative in the House and every Senator of Louisiana (the addresses are found at http://senate.legis.state.la.us/Senators/ByDistrict.asp and http://senate.legis.state.la.us/Senators/e-mail.asp if you wish to check). All you have to do is click on the link which will automatically compose an email to send them telling them that you do not want this passed. If you don’t like the text, feel free to change it, it’s your freedom of speech after all. Then, forward this to every person in your contact list and have them do the same. I’m going to step this up a bit: if you don’t have many people in your address book, then dig through your emails and find ten people who are tax paying Louisianians and send them this email requesting they do the same. If that doesn’t sound enticing enough, I can make it sound like a chain letter for you:

Send this to ten people or you will lose 5.34 million dollars!

Click here for the quick link to send an email to Louisiana congress about the Senate’s three-hundred percent pay raise.

You may not get the 5.36 million dollars for forwarding this, but the spouse of a Fireman or a Police officer who has died protecting you might. 5.34 million dollars may put Railroad Crossing lights where they’re needed. 5.34 million dollars may help supply Louisiana school children with materials to be competitive in the employment market. Or, if you just want to give 5.34 million dollars away, then I will happily provide you with my Paypal information to give me 5.34 million dollars. I would really like a hybrid car, but I can’t afford one.

It’s only a couple of clicks y’all. At most it may require some copy and pasting from the address, subject and body into your web based email (Yahoo mail, Gmail, etc.), but it’ll take no more than five minutes. That’s at least $1,000,000 a minute worth of time.

Put your powers of chain mailing to good use.

Sincerely,
Thad

For reference about this information, check out the Advocate at http://www.2theadvocate.com

…also, feel free to comment below after you’ve sent you mail and forwarded this on.

Initial woes: no internet applications (other than Firefox 3 Beta), no office suite (at all),, no automount, no email or IM, no “Custom” radio button in Visual Effects…. oh, and we’re out of coffee.

I can understand the decision not to automount. The constant polling for automount devices makes Jackd jittery. I can understand if they decided to release Studio sans Visual effects, they’re more resource intensive than someone needing to do audio/video/graphics work should need, but this was a Compiz/Ubuntu problem. Compiz is actually installed, but I don’t think the manager was.  It took me a while to find out that it has its own icon in System->Preferences cleverly named “Advanced Desktop Effects Settings”. I was just used to finding it in the Visual Effects tab of “Appearance”. I’m happy again. I can do some light recording and wow onlookers at my eye-candy desktop (before anyone trolls this: I do like Enlightenment, but E-17 is too jumpy for my taste. I run E-16 on my production box)

Initial weirdness: wireless works, but there’s no activity light. The range seems to have improved considerably, but I’ll have to test it more over time. I can now access my wireless from my back patio… errrrr… I mean office (before I had to be halfway down the hall to my office in order to get signal). The package manager said that Network Manager was already the newest version, but it took a reboot before the panel icon would show up. I no longer have to type in my keyring password twelve times to get WPA authentication. After all this was said and done, I was excited again. When I got to work and booted up, I discovered the AP and was immediately on the network. I was soon wracked with despair and was going to sail my laptop into the pond when the internet stopped responding, then I discovered that my boss unplugged the uplink (yes, on purpose).

Less weirdness as this hasn’t changed from Gutsy: [Fn] + Volume keys and mute key works, but there is no nice on screen notification as there was in 7.10 (note: later, it has magickally reappeared I think maybe it had something to do with compiz… but I dunno). [Fn] + Brightness still does not work. Plugging the headphones in does not turn off the built in speakers (again, as it did in 7.10). There is a conf file fix for this which I’ll get to below. The mic works. Last time I had to manually build alsa and then edit a .conf file, but it worked perfect after that. I’ll track the steps.

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-generic

I had to do this in 7.10, Gutsy Gibbon which will work if you have that version, but is unneccessary as Hardy already has this alsa version built in (alsa-1.0.15). There’s already a bit too much betaware in 8.04 for my fancy and I’m even usually the “bleeding edge” kinda geek. Alsa version 1.0.16 is out. It has been out. I compiled it two months ago onto this very laptop. Why is Hardy shipping with 1.0.15?

So, I tried this:

cat /proc/asound/card0/codec#* | grep Codec

and get the string for the card model (in my case ALC262):

…then went to
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=3796486#post3796486
and matched it with one of the headings (in my case ALC262):

ALC262
fujitsu Fujitsu Laptop
hp-bpc HP xw4400/6400/8400/9400 laptops
hp-bpc-d7000 HP BPC D7000
benq Benq ED8
benq-t31 Benq T31
hippo Hippo (ATI) with jack detection, Sony UX-90s
hippo_1 Hippo (Benq) with jack detection
sony-assamd Sony ASSAMD
basic fixed pin assignment w/o SPDIF
auto auto-config reading BIOS (default)

the leading bold line on the list should be put into your modprobe configuration file by editing the respective file using gedit, nano, or vim. For the copy/pasters:

gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

or

gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.conf

There should only be one or the other, and if you’re using 8.04, then you’re going to want the prior with /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base. Last time around (this time as well), I had to add:

options snd-hda-intel model=sony-assamd

to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

…as a side note, I tried (unsuccessfully) adding:

options snd-hda-intel model=vaio

to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base. If you have some other model, then you may try this, but YMMV.

I Added the following @audio lines to /etc/security/limits.conf
@audio - rtprio 99
@audio - memlock 1024000
@audio - nice -19

# End of file

NOTE: USING THE MEMLOCK SETTING LISTED HERE WITH YOUR SYSTEM WILL LOCK UP TO 1GB of your RAM. I do not know what will happen if you attempt to lock the memory and you DO NOT have the memory available. I’ve got 2GB of RAM in my system which is plenty for the OS, desktop and the audio applications to run and still lock up that much RAM. You may want to adjust this number accordingly

@audio is for the group that your user account should belong to. I apparently belonged to the group, but there was no “audio” group…. weeeeeiiiiird. So, I added audio in System -> Administration -> Users and Groups then added my username to the group. The last parts of this conf settings means: Real time priority, maximum memory to lock, and default nice level. The lower the nice number is, the better, but -19 is as low as you can get with a nice setting.

Then I started getting
late driver wakeup: nframes to process = 1024.
late driver wakeup: nframes to process = 1024.
…over and over again. I figured out that this number is directly equal to double the “frames/period” setting.
This may have been happening before, but I’ve just turned on Verbose messaging. I swear this worked once, and only once. I was even playing my keyboard through Qsynth… Chop stix off of vkeyboard using the “z x c v b n m ,” and “.” keys. …regardless.

time to try compiling alsa from source:
install the kernel-headers and glibc-devel

sudo apt-get install build-essential libncurses-dev gettext linux-headers-`uname -r`

I downloaded the alsa-driver, alsa-lib and alsa-utils packages, then

sudo tar xjf alsa-driver*.bz2

sudo tar xjf alsa-lib*.tar.bz2

sudo tar xjf alsa-utils*.tar.bz2

I ran the following on each:

./configure

make

sudo make install

…and lastly reboot.

got the previous from:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HdaIntelSoundHowto

where it also says to:

sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev

…but this may not need to be done. My alsamixer and alsaconf already worked just fine. Now, I’ve got a really strange “problem”. When I run jackd on my Intel built-in card, I’m getting soft xruns for days and a lot of hard xruns with the same “late driver wakeup” errors filling up the message log as above (I guess computers are sleeping late like their owners), but Qsynth and my Maudio keyboard are not producing jittering or crunchy sounds. The output sounds actually normal. Of course, I haven’t put the system under stress yet, and I grew tired of troubleshooting the built in card so I grabbed my FastTrack USB box to try it. It works fantastic with no xruns yet. I apologize for any previous comments in the forums about throwing this at the next Mac user I see. I even have the latency down to 8ms running it at a sampling rate of 96000. I’m done with the audio for now.

Next issue: video. Miro works! Unless I’m using the desktop cube that is. then it looks like a crashed Windows computer without the words “Fatal Exception error at XXXXXXXX”. Just blue. Sound comes out, but it’s like I’m watching the Phantom Menace before any CG frames get added… blue. I hear Patrick Norton from Sysm, but the screen is like my jewels on my Junior Prom night…

…hopefully, you get the idea. The Totem Player works, MPlayer works, VLC media player works, PiTiVi even works (PiTiVi never worked for my Gutsy install)! Now I just have to go grab Cinelerra and Jahshaka to see if they’ll compile or break my system.

My webcams are still a no-go. I’ve got a glimmer of hope in the future purchase dept…. I see that the Cliquecam HUE comes with drivers for Linux kernels 2.6 and up. I just don’t think I can afford to shuck out 80 bucks for something that I can’t find a real review on. Everything I find about it is pre-release PR or people citing the PR, Engadget and GeekBrief rehashing the specs in a humorous or cute way. Has anyone in consumerland actually plugged one of these into a USB port yet? Side note: it does find the USB audio device on my Micro Innovations webcam, but no video driver. Video Skyping is out of the question for daddy nobucks still.

Burnt like the last forgotten hot dog on Labor Day. Oh well, more later…