In professional Software Engineering circles we debate topics with real-world applications.
Sometimes, the debate must be aborted when a participant quotes one of the following so-called pundits. Most of them are academics or failed dot-com company founders.
The key point here is that "professional Software Engineers," referring to people who make a living actually accomplishing real work on real systems.

Here is the list of Godwin's Law violations.
Quoting them makes you forfeit your side of the debate:

Joel "On Software" Spolski
Daniel "I always wear black" Bernstein
Randal "I hacked into Intel and all I got was this felony conviction" Schwartz

This is the tool that enables the partnership between OLPC and WorldSpace Satellite radio so important.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/BookBeaming

[Written as a response to a LinkedIn.com question concerning the use Google and Adobe's online applications instead of Microsoft Office]

I dare suggest that the Writely and Tonic Systems applications that became Google Apps are very simple and rather slow when compared to OpenOffice.org or Microsoft Office.

The global accessibility is appealing if you are not able to use an internet file sharing service or a remote login program like LogMeIn.com but you lose a large number of important features using Google Apps and you sacrifice your personal, and more importantly, your business', privacy and security.

Finally, if you are concerned about privacy, you should know that Google's agreement reserves the right to anonymously search, index, and catalog your "private" files. This is the same thing that Google does with Gmail. While they currently only use this for targetted advertisements you should be aware that they are scanning, indexing, and cataloging all of your data.

Google exists to scan, index, and catalog the entire body of data in the world. If you like that idea, then you are contributing to it by using Google Apps.
If you want to preserve your personal and business security you should not use it.

More consumer products for computing and an update.

1) Logitech Marble mouse for daily use. Kensington Expert Mouse for continuous use.

2) SIIG MiniTouch Plus PS/2 keyboard with 5-year warranty appears to be out of production but there is plenty of stock on hand at all the major retailers that report stock levels.
This same keyboard is also sold as the generic BTC-5100C keyboard in either ivory or charcoal gray.
The recent SIIG production models actually have "BTC-5100C" in the model number, but only the SIIG model has a 5-year warranty. The BTC version is about $15 cheaper but is only warranted through the vendor.
Both brands of this fabulous sub-$40 keyboard easily trump all the $60+ Happy Hacking keyboards since they have the backspace and back-tick keys in the expected places for PC users, and the full-width caps lock key is suitable for use as your control key.
The most recent models have a clean, silent feel. Earlier SIIG models have squeaky, noisy feel, which can be remedied by a warranty replacement which supplies you with the most current SIIG-branded BTC model.

3) The Hawking H-U2PS2 PS/2 to USB converter is the only PS/2 converter that properly accounts for keybounce elimination, multiple key chording, and can keep up with touch-typists. It also has special support for all the key sequences required by Sun machines.

4) Dell's cheaper flat-panel monitors. Even though these are TN panels they are clear, bright, and don't have stuck pixels.

The Linux font rendering situation has changed yet again.
Here is the configuration story for 2008.
This works for Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, and CentOS releases.
Ubuntu has enabled these features except for the light LCD filter, so read on even if you're using Ubuntu.

Download the HEAD version in cvs at www.freetype.org or a recent snapshot.
There are some new algorithms that most of the font guides out there do not address.

By the end of 2007, Freetype includes two entirely new algorithms. The first algorithm is a color sub-pixel hinting algorithm. The second is the LCD filter. This means that there are now three algorithms that are configurable in Freetype that are probably not configured properly on your system.

All of these are set in the source code at build time in the file:
$TOP/freetype2/include/freetype/config/ftoption.h

1) Color-shaded sub-pixel rendering is normally disabled but you'll want to enable it even if you don't have an LCD monitor. This is the feature that is sometimes known as "ClearType" on Microsoft Windows and "Font smoothing - Best for LCDs" on MacOS.
Find the line that contains the string FT_CONFIG_OPTION_SUBPIXEL_RENDERING and change it to:
#define FT_CONFIG_OPTION_SUBPIXEL_RENDERING

2) The color-shaded sub-pixel rendering creates severe color "fringing" artifacts so there is another algorithm that cleans this up called the "LCD Filter." There are several settings to this filter but you'll want to use setting number two, the "light LCD filter." This setting is completely absent so you need to add it.
Right before the line that says "FT_END_HEADER" you add this line:
#define FT_FORCE_LIGHT_LCD_FILTER

3) The Apple-style of handling of composite offsets can usually make text appear in the right places, but only on OpenType fonts. It only happens on non-OpenType fonts if you force Freetype to do so. This setting makes it happen:
#define TT_CONFIG_OPTION_COMPONENT_OFFSET_SCALED

4) The Freebyte bytecode interpreter can be enabled but I recommend you do not. Most of us know about this one already. You won't want it because latest Freetype release renders the fonts so cleanly and naturally using the color-shared sub-pixel algorithm. In addition, if you do use the bytecode interpreter instead of the auto-hinter, the Windows Vista fonts like Constantia turn into bold-weight fonts above approximately 10 point. Conversely, the Freetype auto-hinter always looks natural and renders normal light-weight fonts.
Still, some people, like those who don't use sub-pixel rendering, need this feature so here is the setting:
#define TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER

Okay, now build it:

sh autogen.sh; ./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

If you have built freetype using the bytecode interpreter setting you need to edit your /etc/fonts/conf.d or your ~/fonts.conf files and be prepared to tune things (or just turn the bytecode interpreter off). Otherwise everything will look great using the autohinter.
Then restart X Windows or reboot.

Now that the color-shaded sub-pixel rendering and light LCD filter are available the fonts are absolutely amazing. You really don't want the bytecode interpreter unless you have sub-pixel rendering turned off.

Enjoy.

VMware can be tuned for remote access and you can return resources that you will not use to the system so it runs more snappily.

Here's what I did to the free VMware Server. It takes most of the same options that the paid VMware Workstation and GSX do.

1) Use the vmxnet network driver instead of vlance/pcnet32/e1000.

2) Turn off the virtual network driver's ROM boot code. I'm not sure why it's there.

3) Restrict video RAM to the smallest possible value to accommodate the text console only.

4) Disable 3D acceleration.

5) Turn off devices not in use (even the ones you cannot turn off from the VMware Console GUI, like the SCSI device on an IDE host). Note the values 'device.present = "FALSE"'.

6) Adjust performance, scheduling, and memory handling.

7) Make the backing store use the host computer's RAM instead of a file on disk (this is in the global config.ini, not the vmx file).

There are two files pasted below.
First is is the vmx file that you might use for a CENTOS/RHEL system.
Second is the global VMware settings file which goes into "c:/Documents and Settings/All Users/Application Data/VMware/VMware Server/config.ini".

Make sure you shut down all VMware services in the Services control panel before you change these because the VMware Console might over-write your changes.

VMware Console will honor your changes for the most part.

---cut here CENTOS.vmx---
config.version = "8"
virtualHW.version = "4"
numvcpus = "1"

displayName = "CENTOS"
guestOS = "rhel4"

uuid.bios = "whatever yours is"
uuid.location = "whatever yours is"
workingDir = "."
extendedConfigFile = "CENTOS.vmxf"

autostart = "none"
autostop = "softpoweroff"

memsize = "296"
MemTrimRate = "0"
sched.mem.pshare.enable=FALSE
priority.grabbed = "normal"
priority.ungrabbed = "normal"

svga.vramSize="1536000"
svga.maxWidth=640
svga.maxHeight=480
mks.enable3d = "FALSE"

snapshot.disabled = "TRUE"
tools.syncTime = "FALSE"
toolScripts.afterPowerOn = "TRUE"
toolScripts.afterResume = "TRUE"
toolScripts.beforePowerOff = "TRUE"
toolScripts.beforeSuspend = "TRUE"

ethernet0.addressType = "generated"
ethernet0.connectionType = "custom"
ethernet0.downWhenAddrMismatch = "TRUE"
ethernet0.features=0
ethernet0.generatedAddress = "whatever yours is"
ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset = "0"
ethernet0.ignoreMACAddressConflict = "FALSE"
ethernet0.noForgedSrcAddr = "FALSE"
ethernet0.noPromisc = "FALSE"
ethernet0.present = "TRUE"
ethernet0.reassignMAConResume = "TRUE"
ethernet0.startConnected = "TRUE"
ethernet0.virtualDev = "vmxnet"
ethernet0.vnet = "VMnet8"

vlance.noOprom = "TRUE"
vmxnet.noOprom = "TRUE"

ide0:0.fileName = "CENTOS.vmdk"
ide0:0.mode = "independent-persistent"
ide0:0.present = "TRUE"
ide0:0.redo = ""
ide1:0.autodetect = "FALSE"
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-raw"
ide1:0.fileName = "G:"
ide1:0.present = "TRUE"
ide1:0.startConnected = "TRUE"

scsi0.present = "FALSE"
scsi0.virtualDev = "lsilogic"
scsi0:0.fileName = "CENTOS-SCSI.vmdk"
scsi0:0.mode = "independent-persistent"
scsi0:0.present = "FALSE"
scsi0:0.redo = ""

floppy0.present = "FALSE"
sound.present = "FALSE"
sound.autodetect = "TRUE"
sound.fileName = "-1"
usb.present = "FALSE"
usb.autoConnect.device0 = ""
vmmouse.present = "FALSE"

---cut here CENTOS.vmx---

--cut here config.ini---
datastore.name = "local"

datastore.localpath = "C:\Virtual Machines\"

security.host.ruissl = "FALSE"

prefvmx.useRecommendedLockedMemSize = "TRUE"
prefvmx.minVmMemPct = "100"
defaultVMPath = "C:\Virtual Machines"
priority.grabbed = "normal"
priority.ungrabbed = "normal"

mainMem.partialLazySave = "FALSE"
mainMem.partialLazyRestore = "FALSE"
mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE"

--cut here config.ini---

I have the problem with VMware guest hosts not working upon computer startup because of "VMware Registration Service" failing to start. It appears that the service is starting too soon in the computer's startup sequence. I have verified it to happen on Windows XP Home, Windows XP Professional, Windows 2000 Workstation, and Windows 2000 Server.

I am unsure which service I should make the "VMware Registration Service" depend on, so I didn't bother changing any of those settings in the Services MMC window.
Instead I wrote a tiny script that I put in my startup folder which solves the problem as long as the Administrator logs into the computer (which is not ideal for Windows 2000 Server, but for my needs is okay). If you want the script run unattended without logging in you might try to put it into HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Run but there it will probably also start too soon to work.

The script is very simple. Call it "vmwarestart.cmd" and place it somewhere in your PATH:
net start vmserverdWin32

The nice feature of the "net start" command is that if this service is already running it doesn't try run another copy.

This completely solves this annoying VMware Server 1.x problem on all my Windows XP Home, Windows XP Pro, Windows 2000 Workstation and Windows 2000 Server installations.

I'm disappointed that VMware/EMC doesn't believe that the problem exists.

I spent a week in Queens and parts of Brooklyn recently and noted the sudden proliferation of satellite dishes all over the place. I surmised that the backup transmitters put up after the September 11 attacks were not adequately serving these boroughs and the satellite broadcasting companies aggressively marketed to these areas. Even high-rise buildings have significant numbers of DiSH Network and somewhat fewer numbers of DirecTV dishes both on rooftops and hanging outside individual windows.

It turns out that the temporary transmitters, still in place five years later, are far from adequate for these lower boroughs.

The Empire State Building transmitter facilities are much less than adequate. The huge, ancient antenna that rings the observation platform was brought back to life but kept at a very low power, around 800 watts, to protect the tourists on the platform from radiation. The main antenna on the famous mast had always been intended for FM broadcasters (there were 18 using it before 9/11, and 22 using it afterwards). There are also several directional backup antennae which leave significant nulls, too, but they have to do what they can to get a signal out there. Throughout Manhattan there are backup antennas on much shorter buildings (Conde Nast, Viacom) but they are affected by significant multipath and interference from nearby buildings and other transmitters, to say nothing of their low power.

Outside the city the much higher-powered backup facilities on the historic Armstrong tower in northern Alpine, NJ cannot penetrate the buildings of Manhattan to reach the lower boroughs.

This leaves WCBS-2 the only good signal in Brooklyn/Queens with a high-powered omnidirectional antenna on Empire State Building.

The city's broadcasters formed the Metropolitan Television Alliance to seek a new communications tower to be built within 3.2 miles of the World Trade Center site. It would need to be 1,800 to 2,000 feet tall. The Freedom Tower is being configured to handle broadcasting needs but the broadcasters do not want to wait another 5 or more years when a communications tower can be built within months.

Naturally the site for the tower is being debated hotly among politicians. New Jersey has several optimal sites but that's politically undesirable. The mayor doesn't want a tower on Governor's Island, another optimal site. The airports need to be accomodated, too. The Meadowland sites in New Jersey, traditionally used by AM broadcasters, are optimal, too, but have the dual stigma of New Jersey location and any high tower's conflict with the flight plans of Newark "Liberty" Airport.

As side note is that DTV is practically nonexistent due to the destruction of most of the major broadcasters' DTV equipment at the World Trade Center.

Since it costs more to purchase a good television antenna than a complete satellite system this means more business to the satellite broadcasters. Indeed I saw expensive television antennae on 50-foot masts on homes and buildings in Queens that nonetheless also had satellite dishes installed.

New York's television viewers, 30% of whom had no cable or satellite before September 11, 2001, are still waiting for things to return to normal five years later. This is sweet news to the satellite broadcasters in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.

Links/References:
http://www.fybush.com/wtc-recovery.html
http://www.njlibertytower.com/NewsArticles.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2002-10-17-tvtower_x.htm
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%22Metropolitan+Television+Alliance%22

I am writing a Java-based application with a Graphical User Interface (GUI). Everyone I had asked said there were no good, and certainly no worthwhile "free" GUI builders for Java.

NetBeans 5.0 has a GUI builder built-in.

I encourage anyone starting Java GUI development take a long look at NetBeans 5.0 and later. So far it has almost everything I think a GUI builder should. In addition the automatic code generation looks and feels like you wrote it yourself.

I'm still investigating Elipse--it does not appear to have a built-in GUI builder and I have to sift through a large list of plugins to get one working.

NetBeans is the one for me.

The FCC opened for bidding the new "Advanced Wireless Service," or AWS-1. This band is allocated in several sub-blocks in the 1710-1755 and 2110-2155 MHz ranges. Fans of Sonny Block and other Wireless Cable investment scam artists might remember that this used to be the band used by Wireless Cable.

The band sometimes known as Wireless Cable was officially known under many different names: Broadband Radio Service (BRS), Fixed Microwave Service, Educational Broadband Service, Instructional Television Fixed Service, and Multipoint Multichannel Distribution Service (MMDS). Wireless Cable, a victim of various boiler-room investment scams, was to be a primary user of this band. Most of these services never launched a commercial product. The band to this day is largely unused.

BRS had been intended to be used for digital multiplexing services using small roof-mounted parabolic antenna arrays in the 2.1 GHz band. At that time the use of digital multiplexing was a somewhat novel concept and, if launched, would have resulted in Wireless Cable services with over 100 channels. It never happened and Sonny Block, heard on WWOR-AM and other radio stations, fled the country was was extradited and eventually landed in a U.S. jail.

Now T-Mobile is a major bidder for the new AWS-1 band which will be used for digital broadband mobile services.

My wife bought a digital Canon XT Rebel camera recently and it did not like our equally new 2-gigabyte CompactFlash card. It keeps saying "format card" or something similar. I took the card to my PC's card reader and re-formatted it using FAT32 and it now completely works. I noticed this card has a switch to let you use two partitions of 1GB each in FAT16 but instead I re-formatted in FAT32 and it works in the camera just fine, thank you.

I think Sandisk must be getting lots of returns from Canon Rebel XT users.

Muzak is available unencrypted on satellite radio on a few birds: Echostar 7 and Nimiq 1/2 using circular polarity. I zip-tied a spare DirecTV LNBF onto my Winegard 76cm dish to tune these channels. Naturally the azimuth is off by about 6.5 degrees on my receiver due to the offset position of the circular LNBF. My 4-position DiSEqC switch is finally getting some use switching between LNBFs. Luckily my receiver allows me to address both USALS positioning and DiSEqC positioning satellites at the same time. It's a pain in the neck to adjust azimuth in USALS mode, which, for some reason, doesn't have "move east/west" or "nudge east/west" functionality.

Back to the music: The kind of music normally associated with Muzak is on the Environmental channel--these are acoustic versions of contemporary hits. This channel, though, is only one of about 30 channels on Echostar 7 alone, featuring a huge variety of music. The Foreground Music (FMONE) channel plays contemporary hits. Environmental and FMONE are the really old, traditional Muzak channels broadcast in mono on analog satellite and re-transmitted in mono on digital satellite. The other Muzak channels are mastered and broadcast in digital stereo.

A list of radio stations on satellite is here:
http://www.lyngsat.com/freeradio/United-States.html

A treatment of Muzak is here:
http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&fr=sfp&p=why+i+like+muzak&iscqry=why+i+like

After so many failures Echostar is finally doing the right thing. Not only are insurers not wanting to pay for the total failure of Echostar 4, Echostar has stopped buying insurance on their total fleet--most of which has a service-impacting failure of some kind. I'm not sure if they have insured the new Echostar 10 currently being tested at 138-degrees (I just found out that E*10 is out of range for me to scan, oh well).

This article from 2004 talks about Echostar's plans to stop owning and operating their own fleet of satellites:
http://www.space.com/spacenews/archive04/echostararch_040504.html

Today this plan is already in full-swing. Echostar 10 will be the last one to be owned and operated solely by Echostar.

DiSH1000 currently uses Echostar-owned satellites. Ironically the Echostar-owned bird at 129-degrees cannot be used in most of the eastern USA because its partially failed spot-beams are intended for use at 110-degrees.

SuperDiSH uses both Echostar-owned satellites and third-party Ku-band satellites. Depending on what you want, SuperDiSH 105 uses Ku-band 105-degrees (totally leased but not owned by Echostar), and SuperDiSH 121 uses Ku-band 121-degrees which is jointly-owned. Both use wholly-owned 110 and 119 birds.

On top of these uses of Ku-band FSS instead of DBS, all of the current DiSH Network receivers can use both bands. In addition there is a measure in front of the FCC to use DBS spaced at 4.5-degrees instead of the current 9-degree requirement. This can mean more diverse programming without the obscenely large SuperDiSH and DiSH 1000.

In other news, the new Nagravision2 encryption system used by DiSH Network has already been compromised and reprogrammed receivers already have auto-rolling keys. Evidently the same exploits used for the old Nagravision are being used to defeat Nagravision2. To implement the new encryption system DiSH Network apparently was required to swap customers' receivers at considerably expense. At the same time, I have had the same DirecTV receiver since 1998 and DirecTV replaced its encryption system at least twice already with no receiver swap needed. I'm puzzled by this.

I wrote this note to Bruce Schneier concerning a piece on personal security featured in his CRYPTO-GRAM newsletter of February 15, 2006:

Mr. Schneier,

Concerning your essay on security for personal devices, such as wiping Blackberry memory when it is lost, there is an interesting solution that I have not yet seen in the industry. Several online music services use digital rights management to allow users with active subscriptions to copy music tracks to a portable device. After a period of time, if the device is not synchronized with the users' computer and the online music service, the tracks are rendered inaccessible. Perhaps the same concept can be used to protect user data on Blackberries, laptops, and smart phones? If the user does not synchronize the device with the host computer the DRM manager on the device expires the key used to decrypt the users' data.

This could be the redeeming use of DRM technology to actually help consumers, not take money from them.

An installer wrote me that the SuperDiSH would be replaced by DiSH 1000. He didn't seem to know there is a SuperDiSH 105 and a SuperDish 121. His assertions are only partially true.

DiSH 1000 is a wider reflector that receives the DBS 12.7 GHz signal from 110, 119, and 129-degrees west longitude. The problem is that 129-degrees is a spot-beam DBS satellite and appears to be intended for local-into-local, but several parts of the US are not covered!! It does not even have a spot-beam that can be received in the Washington, DC area, so we will not be seeing "DiSH 1000" antennas anywhere near here. Whether this is due to yet another failure of an Echostar satellite is unknown to me but the installers' documentation even state explicitly that DiSH 1000 cannot be used in many areas including most of Florida, parts of Texas, and all of the Northeast! It sure looks like some of the spot-beam transponders have failed and we have yet another Echostar satellite fiasco.

SuperDiSH 105 will be phased out in favor of Dish 1000 for those markets who can receive the spot-beams for their local channels. On the bright side the DiSH 1000 looks is as elegant as the triple-LNB DirecTV Phase-3 dish. The 105-degree satellite, which currently carries local-into-local at the older Ku-band 11.7 GHz, is not owned by Echostar so its transponders are leased to Echostar. Echostar conceivably would not like to continue leasing space at the weak Ku-band on 105-degrees. SuperDiSH 121, another Ku-band 11.7 GHz bird, will probably remain as a solution for niche customers like me who require international channel packages. The 121-degree satellite is jointly owned by Echostar but I am puzzled as to why it is using Ku-band 11.7 GHz instead of the more powerful DBS technology at 12.7 GHz with its smaller dish requirement. The satellite also has a Ka-band payload for use by future HDTV services.

DiSH Network is a huge mess! But they have several dozen international channels, many times more than DirecTV, so I will continue to use it for international services.

Oh, and Echostar X was supposed to launch on Sunday (yesterday) and was postponed due to "an issue at the launch site."

Perhaps you are wondering why I spell it "DiSH" with a lowercase "i." This is because DiSH is an acronym that stands for "Digital Sky Highway," the original name for DiSH Network before it was launched as a consumer product.