Concepts in the Paradox

Furious with the last time I had to ride on the 38, I decided to write an email complaint to Muni. I doubt it will be read, but my hope is that it’ll add to a complaint pile somewhere that will add more buses to the route.

The tipping point was last night after my late night workout. From Montgomery street, I boarded a mostly empty 38 bus. I got the infamous driver 556, who checks every pass, counts every coin, and makes sure everyone gets in the front. About Powell the bus got packed, but since I got in so early I was able to sit way in the back.

When my stop on Divisadero came around, I did my normal squeezing to rear door to make my escape. The green light didn’t come on, so I figured what ever magical Muni button hadn’t been pressed. It was then that the bus driver annouced, “You have to exit through the front door this stop.”

Why? I had to push through a bunch of very unhappy people all the way through the front. It isn’t like that stop at 10pm is very dangerous or busy.

The next day, I decided to walk one block up and take the 2 home. It is a little out of my way, but it was hardly packed. I climbed on to an electric bus where the driver was very cheery and greeted everyone on the bus. For the entire trip he made random jokes and tried to start random conversation.

“So, who here is from San Francisco?”

The few people on the bus looked confused, frightened, and weirded out, so I piped up.

“San Francisco!” I exclaimed.

A little surprised someone took the bait, he answered, “I hear it is nice this time of the year. You know where I was last week it was raining all the time. Do you know where that was?”

“Uhh.. Seattle?” I answered.

“San Francisco!”

He then looked at his watch and pointed to it.

“Welcome to the new Muni! We’re on time now!”

I couldn’t help myself from having a laughing attack where I sat. It was like an alternative Muni-land. He pulled up to a stop where an attractive young lady was obviously waiting for another bus. He then tried to coax her on to his line.

“So, where are you headed young lady? Oh, you don’t want to go there, I’m driving up to Leavenworth, you should get on!”

Later, he ran a red light, “I’m practicing stopping. You know where practice gets you? Carnage Hall!”

I don’t know if I’d want all my Muni drivers to be that conversive and flamboyant, but it made my day.

Coming up in December is LISA ‘05 in San Diego. I will be attending the tutorial sessions mainly (S4, M7,M12, T8, T12, F4). If anyone is attending or in the area, let me know and we can get coffee.

Immediately following LISA is FAST in San Franciso. I’ll be balancing work at the con at the same time, but if anyone is going to the NFSv4 internals talk, be sure to say hello.

In January is MacWorld in SF. I don’t work at a Mac shop, so I’ll be “sneaking” off with all the other closet Mac users to see what warez the vendors have.

February is CodeCon in SF, which isn’t exactly a work sancioned event either. Anyone who I’ve forgotten about having stay over at my place to go to this, please speak up. I don’t know if I have room for one more or not (if you are female, there is always room ;).

Finally, I’ve already started to plan for the notorious DefCon in the hot August Las Vegas heat, this time at a new hotel! $123/night, and the room is already paid and reserved. I know it is far in advance, but the rooms always get booked early, so why take chances?

In a pinch, I use my Treo 600 with Sprint PCS as a wireless modem on my Linux laptop:

First you’ll need the supplied USB cable that came with the Treo. Plug it into any USB port, and then dial:

##TEATHERED

This will put the phone into packet modem mode. Two devices will appear on your system: ttyUSB0 and ttyUSB1. The ttyUSB1 device will be your packet modem.

Next, configure ppp on the Linux laptop:

/etc/ppp/sprint.modem

TIMEOUT         5
ABORT           '\nBUSY\r'
ABORT           '\nERROR\r'
ABORT           '\nNO ANSWER\r'
ABORT           '\nNO CARRIER\r'
ABORT           '\nNO DIALTONE\r'
ABORT           '\nRINGING\r\n\rRINGING\r'
''              ~\r~AT
TIMEOUT         20
OK              ATD#777
TIMEOUT         22
CONNECT         ""

Also, edit /etc/ppp/peers/sprint

noauth
connect '/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/ppp/sprint.modem'
defaultroute
usepeerdns
/dev/ttyUSB1
115200
local
novj

Note that ttyUSB1 may not aways be the phone if you already have a device using ttyUSB1. I’ve had it come up as ttyUSB3 a few times, so check the output of the dmesg command to verify.

Now, make sure you don’t have any other network devices up, such as your wifi card or network card (ifconfig eth0 down), and type:

pppd call sprint

Check the output of /var/log/messages for a status:

tail -f /var/log/messages

Every once in a while the modem won’t respond by the time script times out. If this is the case, just try again. It usually works the second time.

Bugs

If you are using the USB cable, you should be aware that with the Treo 600 USB cable there is a overflow in the USB chip on the cable. After about 7 minutes the connection will die and you will need to redial or possibly put the phone back into tethered mode.

A work around is to get the serial cable for the Treo 600, which doesn’t have this chip problem. A more expensive option is to purchase a Treo 650, which fixes this problem with the USB cable.

This post is based on this old “Treo 600 modem how to“.

After a week of slacking off and not working out at all, I’ve kicked things back into gear and re-committed myself to my goals. A few changes though: Why do I take the bus to the gym? How does this make sense? Instead, I am going to walk to and from the gym, and do my elliptical training there. When I get home, I’ll do all my other exercises with the weights and ball.

I tried that tonight, and it worked out rather well. I looked for the 38 just in case, but all I saw were the “garage” and “not in service” busses from the line starting to go into night-mode. I walked it, though bit of a power walk, and I beat the bus. I didn’t even see it when I reached Van Ness. Geary and Divisadero to Sutter and Van Ness isn’t so bad of a walk with good music on the iPod!

I think I may do part of my work out during my lunch break next week. It is only 20 minutes on the elliptical trainer, and might be a good way to get my heart rate up 5 times a week instead of 3.

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I’m seriously considering going to Front 242 @ DNA on Nov. 6. That is, serious enough to go by myself if I can’t find anyone else to go with me. The problem is, as far as I know, no one in my circle of friends listens to it.

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I tried to put OpenBSD on my Toshiba Portege 3500 tablet PC over the past few days. At first I tried Ubuntu’s Breezy Badger, but something went horribly awry and I ended up with an unbootable machine. I threw my hands up in the air and downloaded the Openbsd snapshot. The poor little laptop doesn’t have a CD or floppy drive, so I had to netboot. x86 netboot really sucks. I could go on forever about how awful it is, but I’ll just say I had to try a little too hard for it to take.

Somewhere in the process of editing the disklabel, blew away my Windows XP partition. I threw my hands up in the air again and decided that maybe I just didn’t need Windows anymore and OpenBSD will be my bread and butter. Mmm… perhaps with some jam too.

It is happily building Firefox as we blog. Now to get to get my Treo 600 to work as a modem with it…

On the way home from work I stopped by CompUSA to get a carry case for my Powerbook. It was then that she caught my eye. So small. So petite. So cute.

And ultra portable. Everything that I wanted in a sub-notebook:
The Toshiba Libretto U105.

753 Centrino/512MB/60GB/7.2″ TFT/Card reader/Finger reader/DVD dock/5 hour battery

I tapped her little keys, adjusted her little display, and checked out her stats. Will she run OpenBSD? Linux? I must find out everything about her!

It is either that, or my other, much less expensive obsession, a Zaurus running Openbsd.

*sigh* Do I need more computer equipment? Is that even a question I should be asking myself?

Thanks to Google, I’ll finally be able to get wireless anywhere in the city. Most importantly, that I means I can use my laptop on Muni and possibly BART. If there was one idea that was past it’s time, it was to put freaking wireless on the train.

Unless, wireless + BART = Terrorism?

“We had to shut off the wireless and lock the underground bathrooms do to a ‘heightened security alert.’”

Another thought I had was if there is wifi all over the city, wouldn’t triangulation be possible? An iPaq with a wireless card stashed in each bus would make it possible to track when busses would arrive and where they are. Muni already has a similar system to this, but it is only on a few lines for some strange reason. You can look at it over on Nextbus.

I was able to get into the Serenity pre-screen at the AMC Van Ness, only a short Muni ride away from me, thanks to a link from Edgan Llama. That means I’ll get to see the flim twice: Once in advance and once late on Thursday at midnight with Sam Llama & Co.

Here is a Synopsys of the movie:

Joss Whedon, the Oscar(R) – and Emmy – nominated writer/director
responsible for the worldwide television phenomena of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE,
ANGEL and FIREFLY, now applies his trademark compassion and wit to a small
band of galactic outcasts 500 years in the future in his feature film
directorial debut, Serenity. The film centers around Captain Malcolm
Reynolds, a hardened veteran (on the losing side) of a galactic civil war,
who now ekes out a living pulling off small crimes and transport-for-hire
aboard his ship, Serenity. He leads a small, eclectic crew who are the
closest thing he has left to family -squabbling, insubordinate and
undyingly loyal.

I really hate email. It is a system that is broken, misused, and abused, and designed that way. For a long time I used Evolution, but when I switched to Mac from Linux I started to use Mail.App. What an abortion: No fixed line width, crazy variable fonts, no built-in pgp support, and worse yet, a junk mail filter that would mark mail as junk even if it was legit!

So I threw in the towel and went back to my old standby[0]: mutt. It is ugly, it is text based, it doesn’t view html mails, it doesn’t have auto-mail filters. It just does one thing and does it well: mail.

Throw in a mail fetching program, fetchmail, a filter program, procmail, and all I ever need is there. Need a pgp plugin? Mutt supports it out of the box. Address book? That’s what .muttrc is for. And to top it all off, since this is a program that runs in a terminal or console, I can use screen to check my mail from anywhere, including my cell phone! And since I don’t keep old mail on the pop3 server, I can check it using the Treo’s Mail app for offline reading on Bart.

In short: mutt is ugly, but it makes email bearable.

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[0]This was for work email. I still use pine for personal mail, but that may change soon.

Every year in August, nerds from the UNR CS department decend on Sand Harbor at Lake Tahoe for the annual Nerdapolooza event.

More photos can be found on http://nerdapalooza.pi.cx/2005

Work let me out a little early so I could make a trip to LinuxWorld and visit with some of the vendors. I made a beeline for the Broadcom booth to ask them why there was no source code or specs available for the community, and got the answer “wrong department, but we can take your information…”. I wonder how many times they got asked that question? I also went to the VMware booth and had a lot chat with one of the drones working the booth. He was quite knowledgeable, and told me VMware’s plans with their API, OpenGL, and DirectX support, along with how they are going to take advantage of Intel’s upcoming Vanderpool technology. The drone dissed Xen, but what should I expect from a commercial software company?

At least they gave me a free copy of their software for visiting their booth!