My commute for work has recently doubled, thanks to an office move. I now spend over two hours per day driving to and from work. And I've been reminded of a small pet peeve: strobe lights on big vehicles.

Back when I was in high school, I was mystified and very annoyed when school bus manufacturers started installing very bright strobe lights on top of their buses. Here you have a vehicle that is eight feet wide, thirty-five feet long, ten feet high, has lights all over, and is painted BRIGHT YELLOW. Anybody who manages to run into a school bus probably doesn't deserve a driver's license in the first place. Do they honestly think that adding a strobe light is going to significantly increase its visibility? In the early morning hours, when other drivers' vision is adjusted to the darkness, the strobes aren't just bright, they're blinding.

Now, apparently, the trend has spread. I first noticed it on garbage trucks. Now, I can understand the need for flashing yellow lights on the back of a garbage truck. While they move around their routes, they stop and go a lot, which can create a legitimate risk for surrounding drivers. As I drive down the highway on the way to work at 70mph+, I see garbage trucks (also barreling along at 70mph) with their lights flashing away.

Similar, but even more annoying flashers have now appeared on run-of-the-mill semis. Why does a semi need a bright, flashing yellow light, when it already has six tail lights, plus all the other decorative lights?

I understand the desire to ward off rear-end accidents. However, I can count on one hand the number of rear-end accidents I have seen in my life that involve a semi. Why? Because truck drivers tend to give themselves a lot more following room, which means that they rarely make sudden stops. The people who are following too closely behind generally have enough warning to slow down in time.

I wonder as well whether such lights are creating more risk than they are averting, by creating a distraction for drivers. Sure, that flashing yellow light might slightly increase safety for the one person directly behind the semi. But what about the couple dozen other drivers who are three lanes over, and are only distracted and annoyed by it?

I just returned to the office after several months away, and I have a new neighbor in the next office over. In talking with him, I am beginning to understand the antipathy some hold towards Microsoft and their licensing schemes. My co-worker is older, and not particularly tech-adept. Consider the following:

1) My new neighbor recently had a motherboard die on him. Because it was an OEM computer (HP, I think), replacing the motherboard with the exact same would have been prohibitively expensive, and replacing the motherboard with something else would have required a new license. (I know you can sometimes talk MS's CSRs into letting you reactivate, but 'officially' it's not allowed)

2) I recently bought a copy of Windows XP Home Upgrade. I didn't buy it at a store. In fact, I bought it from someone else who had. This same person had intended to install it on their computer running Windows 2000. And they couldn't. Not because of any technical reason, but because of arbitrary limitations imposed by Microsoft. See, in order to upgrade, you have to have an existing installation of Win95/98/98se/ME, OR an install disk for Win95/98/98se/ME/2000. And they fell neatly into a corner case. And they couldn't return it, because Best Buy won't take back opened software (can't blame them, really).

3) The gazillion versions. Yeah, lots of other people have complained about it, too, I know. But you know what? It's even worse than you typically hear. Take a look at all of newegg's offerings for Windows Vista. There are twenty-seven. Not only do you have the Basic/Premium/Ultimate/Business versions, you have a choice between Retail and OEM versions, Upgrade and Full versions, 32- and 64-bit versions, and single- and 3-packs. And, as we see in #2, if you get the wrong one, you're screwed.

4) The price is ridiculous. Period. Windows, in and of itself, doesn't help me do things. It's the applications that count. Comparisons to a Linux install (cost vs. what you get) are apt here.

5) I work for a big, faceless corporation. Our IT people buy (or do they lease? I don't know) laptops from Dell. They pay for the license that comes with the laptop, then pay again through their site license. Yep, Microsoft is double-dipping. I bought my own hard drive and happily installed XP using that unused license (and dual-boot Ubuntu), in case I actually want to do something useful with the laptop, which is otherwise tightly locked down. Off the company network, naturally.

6) It's becoming pretty difficult to purchase a computer from any of the big OEMs without getting burdened with Vista. I get the feeling that the number of people who prefer Vista over XP is overwhelmingly small. Yet Microsoft leverage their market position to force a copy of Vista onto nearly all new computers. And if you want to switch back to XP, you get to pay Microsoft again.

Back in October of last year, I installed Ubuntu on my main computer at home. I did a few tweaks, and was quite satisfied with the results. Other than a few hiccups, mostly related to sharing a printer, everything went smoothly. I'm now a convert.

But a few weeks ago, I ordered myself some parts for a new build. My intention was to similarly install Ubuntu, get the right drivers set up, and off we go. Unfortunately, it didn't work. Here is what I ordered:

• Athlon 64 X2 3600 (yes, it's already overclocked)
• Biostar TForce 7025 uATX mobo
• 2GB some generic PC2-6400 RAM
• Radeon HD3850
• 300GB SATA (either WD or Maxtor, don't remember :eek:)

So nothing unusual. Since I had heard that the new Catalyst 7.12 drivers supported the Radeon 3xxx series under Linux, I thought I was set. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get the drivers to work. Trust me, I tried a lot of things. And I know that plenty of other people have had success doing it. Just not me.

So I bought a copy of XP Home Upgrade from someone who had a Win2k installation and realized only too late that you need either an installation of Win98 or Win98se or Win95 or WinME OR an official CD for one of the above or Win2k. They fell into a corner case--Win2k was installed, but they didn't have the CD. They couldn't install it because of an arbitrary restriction, and they couldn't return the (now-open) box. Even before I started installing XP, I started understanding a bit better the aversion some have for commercial software.

That feeling continued through the next while of setting up and installing things. True, all the drivers and utilities for my hardware were relatively up-to-date and polished. But it seemed to me like many of the things Windows does or wants to do are not for my benefit. Activation, for example. And setting up Windows Media Player and telling it NOT to send any information. And Windows Genuine Advantage, for the naming of which all of MS management ought to be drawn and quartered.

Granted, for the normal user, these things aren't any sort of big deal. I understand that Microsoft want to reduce piracy, and I have no issue with that. Even setting aside the "punish the customers, let the pirates go free" situation that results from WGA, DRM, and similar efforts, I still have issues with Microsoft poking around my hard drive. The necessity of installing anti-virus software is also annoying. Normally, I'd create a limited user account and use that, but so many applications require an administrator account that it's impractical. I miss sudo. I miss being able to update everything on my system at once, without having to download executables and run them individually. I miss compiz (I had problems paying half price for XP--you think I'm gonna spend money for Vista's eye candy?!). I don't have any alternative at the moment, though, so until there is a reliable and easy way to get my video card working under Linux, I'll be using XP. I don't hate it. In fact, I know how to work with XP better than I do with Ubuntu. It's just....less comfortable.

Here's hoping Hardy Heron brings me luck. Three months to go...

Gadget: Digital picture frames
Feature: Dimensions that reflect the reality of photography

At some time in the near future, I would like to buy my wife a digital picture frame. I started looking around, and found, to my utter consternation, that a vast majority of the under-$100 picture frames are widescreen. Yes, nearly all of them sport a screen with a resolution of 480x234. How many people actually take pictures with that sort of aspect ratio? I'd venture to say practically none. Nearly every digital camera defaults to taking photographs with a 3:2 aspect ratio. Widescreen LCDs are great for movies, yes, and some of these frames can do that. But for their primary purpose, i.e. displaying photographs, they are singularly unfit.

Let's take that 480x234 panel as an example. In the ideal case, we would have a photograph 1) displayed in its entirety (no cropping), 2) fill the whole screen, and 3) maintain its aspect ratio. With these devices, however, you get to choose two.

What were they thinking when they designed these?

At some undefined point in the future, my wife and I want to build our dream home. We have lots of ideas and opinions on what we want. The purpose of this Journal entry is to serve as a temporary repository for ideas, wishes, requirements, and fantasies for our dream house, and to collect ideas from anyone willing to share. Here is the list so far:

Rooms we want:

• Kitchen
• Dining area (my wife wants a formal dining room, although I think it's a waste)
• Living room (this plus the family room plus the play room = 3 living spaces? too many, methinks)
• Family room
• Master +3 bedrooms + guest suite
• 3.5 baths minimum (4.5 if guest suite is on first floor and all other bedrooms are on the 2nd)
• Den/study/library
• Play room/theater/game room (maybe the "family room" can take the place of the formal living room, and this will be the informal room)
• Workshop for me (either separate room or space in garage)

Things to avoid:

• Two-story rooms
• Wasted space
• Rooms that are too big, especially
  • Family/Great room
  • Master bedroom
• Extra rooms that add little usability
  • sunroom
  • big central foyer
• Tile in the kitchen and eating areas (I installed it earlier this year and it practically pulls food onto itself!

Other features:

• Must be extremely energy-efficient, especially with respect to climate controls.
  • Double or triple-paned windows
  • More than the normal amount of insulation
  • Skylights where practical
  • designed to let light but not heat in
• Double oven
• Breakfast bar
• If adjacent dining and living rooms, ability to segregate or join the two in a way that's not obvious (really big pocket door? pocket *wall* like in that one episode of Monster House (the gangster house)?)
• Ideally All bedrooms upstairs except for guest suite
• Kitchen close to garage
• 3-car garage
• bathtubs in every full bathroom (no bathrooms with just showers)
• garage doors not visible from front
• Big pantry immediately accessible from the kitchen
• Mudroom area by garage
• Kitchen close to dining room

Other ideas:

• Desk/mini office in the kitchen for mom
• Outlets placed for Christmas lights (D.U.H.)
• Some place for the kids to do homework (possibly a table that folds up against the wall in an existing room when not in use?)

In a way, this is a bit similar to the Dilber Ultimate House, but what I'm looking for is a subset of what Scott Adams was looking for. At this point, I'm thinking on the level of "what rooms do I want, and where do I want them?" rather than "we should put hooks by the garage door to hang keys on!"

Please feel free to post any ideas or suggestions you have. This could be things you would like in your own house, things you have done that you really like (or that didn't turn out as well as you thought), things you wish you had done or are glad you didn't do, etc. I'll include them in the lists above and, of course, credit the contributor.

Over the last few months, I've done a fair amount of travel for my job. This has led me to ask this question:

Why, oh why, are airplane windows so small?

You see, as I sat on a flight from Paris down to my destination in Africa, I noticed that from our altitude, the view of the stars was absolutely breathtaking. I blocked as much cabin light as I could with my pillow, shaded my eyes, and wondered at how well I could see so clearly. Except I couldn't see much. Because of the thickness of the window (triple-paned), and its small size, my view was severely restricted. And I had to twist around to a rather uncomfortable position in my seat in order to get a decent view.

In fact, it would seem that airplane windows are sized and positioned as to be as useless as possible. Sure, if you happen to be flying at sunset and the plane happens to be pointed in the right direction and you have a window seat on the correct side of the plane, you'll get a good view. But you can see sunsets from the ground. What do people want to look at when they're up in an airplane? The ground, of course. Or, as in my case, if they notice the brilliant sky above, they'll want to look at the stars. But you can't get a decent view of either without smashing your face up against the glass, and even then, your view gets distorted by the three panes separating you from the outside.

You would think that after some fifty-plus years of jet airline design and construction, airplane manufacturers would have noticed that their windows are inadequate for any practical purpose. But no, windows are only slightly larger in the upcoming Dreamliner as they were in the DC-3.

C'mon, Boeing. You've made planes attractive for the airlines by making them more efficient. Now make them more attractive to passengers by improving the view.

While you're at it, those seats could use some work, too.

As I sat on an early-morning flight this morning, I started thinking about the difficulties Microsoft is facing in encouraging adoption of Vista. I thought about all the big complaints I have read, and then it hit me:

Why don't Microsoft follow Apple's lead and build the next version of Windows on a BSD foundation?

Now, I've only toyed with Vista a little bit while browsing through the local Fry's and fiddling with friends' computers, I've gotten a fair impression of what it's like from a User's perspective. And it seems to me that for billions of dollars worth of investment, there's not much from a user's POV that drives sales. Sure, it might be a little more secure under the hood, and the driver model is new, but neither of those affects (or should affect) the user experience. Yeah, there's some eye candy, but certainly nothing to justify the amount of development. And now we have a whole mountain of relatively new code in which to find bugs and security vulnerabilities.

Now let's do a bit of speculation. What if Microsoft had built Vista on a BSD core? Well, on the good side, they would start off with mature, complete, pretty-darn-secure code, which would save them an enormous amount of time and money. It would also have improved compatibility and interoperability with the rest of the world, although the cynic in me would say that this would act as a reason for Microsoft not to do it. Also on the minus side side we have application incompatibility. Microsoft, however, is a Grand High Master at handling this problem. In addition, most programs (setting aside games for now) work pretty well in Wine. Microsoft could even create an API analogous to Apple's Carbon to allow developers to easily write code for the old and new versions of Windows.

What about hardware? Well, considering the paucity of drivers at Vista's release, and considering the fact that most common hardware actually work out of the box under Linux, I don't think this one is as large an issue as it initially appears, even if much of the code is written by independent developers.

Now, of course there are other "soft" issues that would follow such a transition. First of all, there's a whole ecosystem of developers who know how to code for Windows but not for anything else. This includes pretty much all of Microsoft. Consider this, though: there were six years between the release of XP and Vista. How long do you think an experienced Windows programmer would take to become competent at writing code for a BSD-based OS? Would a year of full-time training and practice be enough? Two years? And if the remaining four (or five) years were spent on writing the new version of Windows, would it be enough?

One could certainly write a book on this subject, and I've only scratched the surface, but there's one point I'd like to put forth. What about this: write the next version of Windows on a BSD core, and run every single old application in an emulator, or on a compatibility layer, or something similar. It may seem drastic, but here's my thought: breaking backwards compatibility can be a good thing. I've heard stories upon stories of patches, quirks in windows, extra execution paths, and special application-detecting code that have made their way into the windows codebase in order to ,a href="http://dansdata.com/gz070.htm">make a specific, single application run right. Break the yoke of backwards-compatibility and make it all run in its own space, and let Windows be an OS and window manager.

Before I get off rambling, I'll end it here. Comments?

The second number is 20

Gadget Feature: Fiber-optic link for displays.

I recently read an article where the author was given a demonstration of various HDMI cables and their ability to carry High-Definition content over longer distances. For a standard 6-ft cable, there was no difference in data transmission between the cheapest off-the-internet cable and the ludicrously expensive top-of-the-line brand name cable. However, when they tested 10-meter cables, there was a significant difference between the cables. The expensive cables were able to carry higher-resolution images farther than the cheap ones.

So here's my idea: why don't we use a fiber connection for our displays? I'm not particularly familiar with the encoding HDMI/DVI uses, but in terms of raw data, 1920x1080 x 60 frames per second * 24 bits/pixel comes out to around 3Gbps. That's a lot of data. It's a perfect application, in my opinion, for fiber. It's immune to electrical noise, so you don't have to worry about running it parallel to power lines in your house. It only takes one fiber, and requires no extra sleeving, so you have one small, light cable to attach. It can go considerable distances, provided it's a decent fiber, so you can put your projector, your receiver, your cable box, and your HTPC wherever you want. And it's getting quite cheap.

The home thater seems like a perfect situation to use fiber, but there's no reason it wouldn't work for desktop PCs, conference rooms, or any of a number of other applications as well. But nobody seems to be using it. Is there something I'm missing?

As I sit here, typing on my work laptop, my left wrist is practically getting burnt by the heat put off by the hard drive. The hard drive on my 700m at home gives me the same toasty feeling. For that reason, and because of the sheer geeky coolness of it, I want a Solid State Drive.

The performance advantages of SSDs have been stated many times: lower power consumption, very fast "seek" times, high data rates, shock tolerance. Several companies, including Samsung, PQI, SanDisk, A-data, and SimpleTech, have announced upcoming SSD products.

The only problem? They're expensive. As in a $600 premium on a notebook with a 32GB SSD instead of a spinning-disk hard drive, as of now (early June 2007). SanDisk say that the premium should drop to about $250 by Q2 2008, but for those of us who are too frugal, or too impatient, or both, there is an alternative: DIY.

It's actually quite simple. You'll need a few things:

• A dual-card CF-to-IDE adapter. $26 + shipping
• Two 16GB Compact Flash cards. $150 each + shipping (cheaper may exist--this was the only one on newegg ATM)
• About 5 minutes of spare time, plus however long it takes to format and install your OS of choice.

Step 1: Insert the cards into the adapter
Step 2: Swap the adapter into the laptop
Step 3: Format the drive and install your OS of choice. Make sure you limit (or turn off) your swap file.

There are a couple things that I've noticed:

• The adapter listed will only fill about half the space of the original drive, so in theory, four CF cards would fit just fine. I haven't been able to find any four-card CF-to-IDE adapters, though. Do any exist?
• If your laptop has a slide-in hard drive (as opposed to the type illustrated on the page for the adapter), you'll have to attach something to the adapter so you can actually push it all the way in.
• For what it's worth, this should also reduce the weight of your notebook by some few ounces. This always seems to be a big selling point for notebook manufacturers.