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Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Mistborn starts with the familiar fantasy premise: the nobody destined for greatness, wielding strange power. Sanderson however, manages to introduce a unique world, history, and power. Early chapters suffer a bit from the he-said-she-said dialog disasters that ruined much of David Eddings works, but they don't persist, and the story seems to continually pick up pace, even after it seems like it should run out of steam. The last 100 pages were truly an excellent read, and the pages preceding them were an enjoyable time well spent preparing for the "flared" ending. While a trilogy, the first book stands well enough on its own, still leaving enough mystery to "riot" the reader into looking into the subsequent books.

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
If you're a geek, or know a geek, this book reads like our minds work while following the main character. Lots of tangents exploring the details optimal solutions to problems most folks couldn't care less about. Following a WWII marine adds some needed gritty relief from the geeky modern day chapters. The book is longer than it needed to be, but the tangents were also a lot of what I enjoyed about the book. My only complaint would be the rather corny ending.

I purchased a new phone system (AT&T CL82359) and was having trouble with the voicemail waiting indicator not showing up even though the dial-tone was flashing. I tried calling Vonage to speak to one of their "highly trained support specialists". I had a very difficult time understanding both their accents as well as their grammatical structure and inflections. The first person had no idea what I was talking about, the second level guy kept telling me I had to turn the answering machine on my phone on. I eventually got him to transfer me to "Advanced level tech support in New Jersey". I couldn't understand this person any better and she seemed to know less than level 2 support.

Turns out that after the level 2 guy had fiddled with some settings he neglected to actually leave a message, or he somehow cleared the message waiting. After I finally gave up with them after an hour I checked and the dial-tone was not longer flashing. I called myself, left a message, and before I had my finger off the hang-up button, the voicemail indicator on my handset came on and the light was blinking on the base unit. And yes, the "answering system" is still off!

Come on vonage! Your highest level technical support didn't even know what FSK was! I found myself educating them on how this stff works so they would know what to look for. The second level guy couldn't even understand the manual he downloaded for my phone - even after I showed him the page numbers to look at and even read one of them to him.

For those of you who don't know what FSK is, it's OK - you can do what I did and spend 10 seconds on google and become better versed on the technology than the "highly trained support specialists" at vonage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_Waiting_Indicator

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-shift_keying

Shopsmith says there are 3 things that cause a humming motor, all factory repair jobs. They forgot the fourth - pull the motor, take it apart, clean the contacts, blow the dust out, get back to building cabinets!

Many of you know I have been working extremely hard to make some quality contributions to the Linux kernel. This can be a tough environment to work it, but also very rewarding. For the last couple of months I've been working on a patch series to allow for the requeueing of Priority Inheritance aware futexes in order to make glibc pthread_condvars PI aware and avoid some of the problems with the current implementation. I recently sent out an early copy of the patch series to be reviewed by a few core people, not even labeling the mails with [PATCH] as is customary. Apparently that didn't stop someone from finding my new tongue-in-cheek error code for dealing with misbehaving user applications. I was cited on LWN's Quotes of the Week, along with Steven Rostedt, Linus Torvalds, and Andrew Morton. I was the only one, however, to earn a nickname for my efforts. Darren "graceful" Hart, thank you very much :-)

If you don't have an LWN account, I'll try and post a new link once it's publicly visible, but for now, the interesting code segment mentioned in the article follows:

+	/*
+	 * The pifutex has an owner, make sure it's us, if not complain
+	 * to userspace.
+	 * FIXME_LATER: handle this gracefully
+	 */
+	pid = curval & FUTEX_TID_MASK;
+	if (pid && pid != task_pid_vnr(current))
+		return -EMORON;

Jon Corbet has posted an article on LWN calling for ideas for topics for this year's Linux Plumbers Conference. Last year was a great success, and I looking forward to attending this year's conference. If you haven't seen it, hop over to LWN and post your thoughts on topics you'd like to see at the conference this year. Current topic suggestions include things like improved user-space I/O APIs, configuration storage, and security integration. I'm debating if I should add "making wireless not suck on Linux".... Add your own, help make LPC a success.

Geeks worldwide have been using IMAP mail servers to, among other things, allow them to have a consistent view of their email and their folders from various clients. Unfortunately, many useful IMAP features have had poor and spotty client support. The most notable for me has been server side tagging. There is the "!Important" flag... but come on... how much information can you really store with one flag? Is it something I need to do? Something I need to follow-up on? Something I just want to be sure I don't delete? Sure you can use Labels, but most clients store those in local databases so when you pull up your mail in the office (or at home) all of your hard work tagging those mails is now invisible to you! Enter Thunderbird 2.0 with support for IMAP Keywords in the form of tags. So long as you restrict yourself to the default 5 tags mentioned in the latest IMAP spec (or rfc, or whatever it is) these tags are stored on the server! No kidding! The trick is to rename the existing Tags from the default Thunderbird profile rather than delete those and create your own. If you do that, they become custom tags and don't get propagated, at least they didn't appear to for me. Once you rename your tags, your prefs.js file should look something like this:

user_pref("mailnews.tags.$label1.color", "#FF0000");
user_pref("mailnews.tags.$label1.tag", "Important");
user_pref("mailnews.tags.$label2.color", "#CC33CC");
user_pref("mailnews.tags.$label2.tag", "Follow-Up");
user_pref("mailnews.tags.$label3.color", "#CC9933");
user_pref("mailnews.tags.$label3.tag", "Someday");
user_pref("mailnews.tags.$label4.color", "#3333FF");
user_pref("mailnews.tags.$label4.tag", "To Do");
user_pref("mailnews.tags.$label5.color", "#6600CC");
user_pref("mailnews.tags.$label5.tag", "Waiting");

If instead you find entries that look like:

user_pref("mailnews.tags.someday.tag", "Someday");
user_pref("mailnews.tags.someday.color", "#3333FF");

Then you are using custom labels. I found myself in this boat, so I edited prefs.js and added all the $label[1-5] pairs and then did a manual search to retag all my existing mail with the new labels. At this point it's a good idea to copy your prefs.js to your other thunderbird installations so the client knows to look for those tags and render them in the same colors - lest you confuse yourself ;-)

Now... if only tbird would inline plain text attachments in replies....

References:

1. http://deflexion.com/2006/05/server-side-message-labels
2. http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/

Hey, I said "occasional rant", so I'm covered! After numerous calls to "support" I finally got Verizon to change us over to their Local TV plan (for only $12.99/mo). Since those channels are in clear QAM, my TV can tune them without the need of their really-poor-quality HD DVR (the list for that piece of crap is rant in and of itself). My HDHomeRun can also tune them, which means I welcomed back MythTV to our home for the best in homebrew HD PVR goodness (1.5 Terabytes of video storage anyone? Yeah!). After several days with the Verizon set-top box disconnected (to confirm everything worked) I took it to our local Verizon Plus store and dropped it off. The rep promised me that TV service would continue and I would just be saving the $15/mo they were charging me for their crappy box (on top of the standard service fees). I made sure I double checked with him that service would continue and got a confirmation number for when they screwed it up and I needed to call in. Well... by the time I got home they had disconnected my TV service. IDIOTS! MORONS! I'm surrounded by mindless MORONS!

After two hours on the phone this morning, their billing "specialist" informed me that they can't add TV service without a set-top box because their system won't let them. They eventually got it re-enabled and set me up with a standard def set-top box free for a year, normally 5.99/mo. My TV started working again while I was on the phone with them, and I'm now watching HD local channels, but funny - there is no set-top box in the house... and she couldn't tell me if they would be delivering it or not. So now I'm watching HD while having an SD set-top box on my account, but not in my house, that I will have to start suddenly paying for in 12 months time. IDIOTS. I figured I'm best off to let the year pass and hope they either come up with a process to handle the crazy people like me with consumer level HDTVs with QAM tuners... oh wait... that's pretty much everyone with an HDTV... MORONS. Ah well, in a year's time they will likely have pissed me off in enough other ways that I'll switch to another nameless-support-free-media-conglomerate for TV "service". IDIOTS. If only OTA DTV wasn't such an amazing PITA!

Okay nothing to exciting I'm just trying out a new blog site (that requires less maintenance on Darren's part). So check out Hart on my Sleeve and let me know what you think.

For those who are wondering what I look like here is a picture. Feeling the baby move and go in on the 16th for our ultrasound. Devon is still hoping for a sister so we'll see.