Year: 2003

I bought a set of FRS radios (they used to be called walkie talkies) yesterday.  I ended up buying BellSouth Communicator 2260’s, which has 14 channels of FRS as well as 8 GMRS channels.  The catch is that the FCC requires you to obtain a license in order to transmit in GMRS.

Why do I know this?  Mostly because I read the little tiny writing on the back of the box, and also checked out the documentation that came with the units.  I can assure you that the casual user probably would have done neither, choosing instead to rip the packaging open and start transmitting on all 22 channels.  Which is illegal.

I will admit that BellSouth probably does the bare minimum required to inform users that they need a license in order to transmit on channels 15 to 22.  It was on the back of the packaging (somewhere near the bar code I think) and in at least 3 places in the paper documentation.  I really think that something more visible should be required.  A sticker on the back of the unit that you have to remove in order to put batteries in.

Here’s another ugly thing: FCC Form 605 is 27 pages long including instructions.  Any bets on the percentage of people that own this GMRS device and operate on GMRS frequencies that bothered filling out Form 605?  Did I mention that each license will cost you a $14.50 filing charge?  Allow me to ask again what percentage of GMRS users will have taken this step.  The probable number of users who are using handsets legally are beginning to approach zero.

I used the radios yesterday, but told my friends to make sure that we stayed within channels 1-14.  I will probably end up sending in the paperwork for a GMRS license, more out of priciple than anything else.

Running into this makes me wonder how many products there are out there that similarly require you to obtain a license, but assume that you will operate without one.

OSNews has a great interview with Miguel de Icaza:

Miguel de Icaza of Ximian tells all about Mono, .NET and dotGNU, Gnome and its relationship to KDE, and much more.

Slashdot dupes stories even on April Fools Day.

Matthew Langham:

And it’ll bulge your pocket for sure.

Brace yourselves.

So far I’m amused most by the announcement: Microsoft Acquires TheServerSide.com.

Via Slashdot, go grab Red Hat 9 via BitTorrent right now.

All the cool geeks are doing it.

I ordered some memory from Crucial on Friday evening.  With free 2day FedEx, I was expecting the order to be sent out on Monday and arrive Wednesday.  For kicks, I checked up on the order this afternoon.  It turns out that it shipped from Boise, Idaho at 4pm on a Saturday, is currently in Dulles, Virginia, and should be on my doorstep at some point tomorrow.

Thank you, Crucial.

Brian Graf:

There is no feeling quite like installing a new OS and having Windows Update report ZERO Critical Updates and/or Service Packs. Any bets on how long this lasts?

It will become part of your daily routine at some point.  🙂

OpenBSD Journal notes that David Wheeler will be giving a talk about writing secure programs on April 3 from 6:30-7:30 at UMBC.  Full details are here.

Brad Wilson:

I can’t imagine wanting to go back to the old way… and I wonder when my program is going to get TiVo-style smarts and say “If you like Don, Sam, Joshua, and Ingo, then you’ll love Sam Gentile and Craig Andera!”.

I spent most of the weekend offline.  Here are a bunch of things that I have been keeping tabs on but haven’t had a chance to look into:

• Cool freshmeat releases
• Highlight (source hilighter) 2.0b-6.  I’ve been happy with GNU Source-Hiligher, though it doesn’t support PHP4 because of non-GPLness issues.
• phpCodeViewer 0.3 “is a highly-customizable, general purpose file viewer tool for the Web. It produces directory listings similar to apache’s, and lets you click on (source code) files inside those directories to view them online with line numbering and syntax highlighting.”
• Sam Ruby tracks XHTML in RSS, which I think is A Good Thing.
• Slashdot notes that IPv6 subnets based on 6bone are going to go away eventually.  This sucks for Freenet6 and others.
• [H]ard|OCP pointed to a water cooled Traxxas RC truck today.  Way cool.  I ran electric 1:10 RC for awhile a few years ago.  I had a Opel Calibra V6DTM (Tamiya TA-02 body), a Mini Cooper on a Mini Tamiya body, and an F1.  I miss those days.
• After reading ChrisAn‘s entry about BlogX rev 20, I realized that I probably wouldn’t be able to work at Microsoft.  Can you imagine people referring to me as MattCroy?  Didn’t think so.
• Erik pointed to OpenZaurus.  Coool.

I’ll be plugging in again later tonight.

It’s been snowing off and on in the DC Metro area today.

Welcome, Spring!

Steve Makofsky:

Just as an FYI, Furrygoat.com has been running on betas of Windows 2003 Server for months, and it’s been working flawlessly. Only downtime has been to install new drops, etc.

Very cool.  I must say that I was pleasantly suprised with the stability of the betas and RC’s of Windows 2003 Server.  The only reasons that I ever had to reboot were to swap out hardware or upgrade versions.

No BSOD’s, no crashes, no weirdness.  I wasn’t stressing the system much, but I’m glad to see that it holds up well to production use.

Marius Andreiana at freshmeat:

The plethora of Free Software applications available today, none working perfectly, is a problem which stands in the way of major adoption of Linux on the desktop. In order to conquer the desktop, we have to stand united.

It’s an interesting editorial that I can’t say that I agree with 100%, but it does raise some good points.  There are a hell of a lot of different free software programs/packages that do almost exactly the same thing in completely different ways.

From the article:

Choice is good, but it’s frustrating when none of the alternatives works properly.

The references from the article are also worth checking out:

• Mob Software: The Erotic Life of Code
• Things You Should Never Do
• The New Methodology
• Agile modeling
• Managing Projects the Open Source Way
• A Conversation with Martin Fowler

After doing some text messaging and IMing on a T9-enabled phone, I can’t go back to my old phone.  Here’s why.  If I were to type This is an example on a T9-enabled phone, I would type:

8447 47 26 3926753

For a non-T9-enabled phone, like my SCP-6200:

844(space or wait)4447777 4447777 266 339926755533

Granted, every once in awhile I have to cycle through a word combination to get to the word that I’m actually looking for with T9, but 97% of the time, it’s right on.

This is a no brainer.

CNet reports that Sun is dropping its own version of Linux in favor of forming alliances with Linux distributors.

When they put Sun Linux on their workstations for LinuxWorld, they didn’t even bother to replace the red hat at the bottom left of the screen, so it was fairly obvious what Sun Linux was.

“We will not be supporting the customized version of Sun Linux. We’ll be moving to standardized distributions of Linux,” said John Loiacono, vice president of Sun’s operating platforms group, in a meeting with reporters here. The change will take place as soon as possible, he said–“way before the end of the year.”

I’m also not suprised that Red Hat isn’t really excited about the whole Sun Linux thing in general:

Red Hat declined to comment for this story. However, in February, the company indicated Sun won’t have an easy time forming an alliance. “We don’t see why we should get any cozier with them,” said Mark De Visser, Red Hat’s vice president of marketing.

Congrats to Ingo, now a DMer.

Charles Miller on why testing private methods is a bad thing:

I don’t test private methods. Being able to quickly create, move around, and change the functionality of private methods is vital to remaining agile while developing.

For the last few days, The Washington Post has been printing the Business section in black and white.  I’m not sure if this is to save money on ink for the new War in Iraq section or if it’s a commentary on the state of business in Washington.  In any case, it’s eerie.

The Washington Post held out with black and white longer than The Washington Times.  They started with a color front page, then color seeped through the rest of the paper.

Now we’ve got a Business section in black and white.

OpenBSD Journal:

A recent OReilly Network article gives an example of how to use NFS for networked backups. It includes a couple of example scripts you can use to build small backup commands. Backups are lifesavers, and I’ve found it worth the brief time of setup and testing to make regular backups.

This method, NFS, is essentially what I do when I have an NFS server available in my environment. While I use rsync with ssh when I don’t have an NFS server around, when I do have one I use rsync and NFS. My basic backup command mounts the NFS volume to the right place and executes my rsync command to copy the information I need to the server, and then unmounts the NFS system. It’s a simple setup, but it’s saved me hours of rebuilding. Check out the article for some ideas.