Thoughts From The Sideline
Over at Corrente in comments Hipparchia provides her preparedness list. Because I ran into it, I added, don’t bring your grill inside for cooking and heat, because it is a source of carbon monoxide, just like a generator.
Angela Fritz has a State by state impact forecast for the storm, and Shaun Tanner has Latest State By State Information From Weather Underground Coverage. Both blog at Weather Underground.
The BBC reported that the replica HMS Bounty was abandoned amid Hurricane Sandy off the North Carolina coast. The Coast picked up 14 crew members and searched for the two others. They recovered the body of one of the missing, but the captain of the vessel is still missing.
The vessel started taking on water, and then lost power, which stopped the pumps.
I caught a bit of a news conference by NYC Mayor Bloomberg who is tired of people calling 911 about flooding that doesn’t involve a threat to lives, and about people driving around the city. There is extensive flooding in the city, and the number of passable roads is limited. The tunnels and bridges are closed until further notice, so there is no point in driving around.
This was another major weather event at the end of a month, which is bad news for poor people. They don’t have the money to leave, or to buy extra anything. Someone ran a story about the crowds at WalMart one minute after midnight on the first of the month. People are there so they can have something to eat before they go to bed, and the first thing in the morning. In many places that’s when the food stamp benefit card is updated for the month.
It is going to be a very long night in the Northeast.
23 comments
A note on the grill thing — a properly operating propane grill produces no more carbon monoxide than a properly operating propane or natural gas oven or stovetop in your kitchen. If the flame is blue, you’re fine. The stove is creating carbon dioxide and water vapor, but not significant amounts of carbon monoxide. Yes, I’ve tested this using a CO detector. It just isn’t a problem, with a properly operating propane grill (as vs. one in which the jet which controls the fuel-air mix is clogged or not properly sized).
What causes issues is if you try to bring a *charcoal* or *wood* grill inside. You’ll be dead pretty quickly in that case, because the parts of the fuel not directly exposed to air are deprived of oxygen molecules and thus when they burn they create CO rather than CO2.
In all circumstances where you are burning gaseous substances in your home, whether it is a standard natural gas / propane cook stove installed in your kitchen or a propane powered camping stove or grill, you should have a battery-operated CO detector. But that’s because of the possibility of a jet becoming clogged, not because they produce CO in normal operation (the whole point of the jet is to mix fuel and air to sufficient proportions that CO2, rather than CO, is generated).
One more thing — every year there are fires caused by leaky propane connectors. The Barker Ranch (where Charles Manson was captured) burned down a couple of years ago because a propane camping stove leaked at the connector where the propane bottle connected to it, and eventually flared up and caused an explosion. You should always test your connections with soapy water prior to applying flame, if there are bubbles then you should not use the stove. This, rather than CO, is the main reason why using a propane stove or grill indoors is risky.
Badtux, I’ve done it myself, but I’ve used and installed gas appliances for years and know how badly adjusted they are when they are shipped new, and how badly adjusted most of the gas grills in my area are. I prefer gas appliances, but I know how to adjust them and what to look for.
When you are dealing with most people, they don’t pay attention to the instructions, and don’t own the tools necessary to make the adjustments. When you have people who can’t figure out that running a gasoline engine in their living room is a bad idea, I don’t think you can expect them to adjust the air mixture until they have a pure blue flame.
You know, I’m probably the only person in town who checks to see if the tank is sealed on their grill. I keep warning people about it, especially if they store the grill in their garage, which also has a gas hot water heater [very common around here]. They don’t understand that propane is heavier than air and will eventually reach the flame in the water heater if the grill leaks. That is second only to unsealed gasoline containers as the cause for garage fires.
I do not store my stoves, lanterns, or grills hooked up to a propane container. That is ridiculously dangerous and risky, because while the propane canister itself is unlikely to leak, the ridiculously dinky apparatus between the propane canister and the burner can be caused to leak by as little as simply leaning a bicycle against it.
Yes, the majority of people are idiots. That’s why we should be encouraging them to run generators in their house and bring their BBQ grills in for cooking during the hurricane — the gene pool needs a good cleansing :twisted:.
– Badtux the Evil Penguin
Badtux, I doubt that one in ten people around here even bother to use the main shut off valve on their grill, depending solely on the burner shut-offs to stop the flow. They don’t even lash the tank down, much less remove it, when they move the grill. The real question isn’t why there are fires, but why there aren’t more. I think ‘dumb luck’ really answers that one.
LOL Have to agree with the above! (I needed a laugh!) 😈
We’ve had a lot of fires here caused by faulty gas appliances such as BBQ’s because people leave them outside connected to the gas bottles for months unused until spring or summer rolls around and they simply turn them on just expecting everything to work as it should, and find that something has gone rotten in the meantime (usually a rubber/plastic washer, gasket or the hose), and get a very nasty surprise (which they may or may not survive). *shrug*
OT: Just when you thought M$ couldn’t take away any more rights… 😉
Micro$oft’s new terms raise privacy concerns, forbid class action suits
Thankfully, that is illegal here (and in most sane countries) which really PO’s M$! 😆
There is this one too regarding the new M$ Windows 8 Store:
Windows 8 Store Terms: We’ve many reasons to wipe your data
Nice, huh? (and sooo typical of the childish and draconian mind of Emperor Gates 3rd!) :lol;
“I own everything! You own nothing!! Nya nya nyaaaa…”
Just for a laugh! 😉 😆
PS. Apparently, in a survey over 53% of 50,000 Win 8 users that migrated from Win 7, said they much prefer Win 7! Big surprise. 😆
Ah yes, Windows 8. I’ve been evaluating it for quite some time and find it to be half-baked, especially in the way it uses all four corners and the edges of the screen as “hot” corners and “hot” edges, each of which does something different and sometimes do different things based on what application you’re in, all of which is ridiculously overcomplex because Gnome 3 has the same tablet functionality with only one hot corner and one hot button (which can be used interchangeably). The only good thing about Windows 8 is that it does close some of the security holes of Windows 7. Of course, given that Windows 7 had more holes than ten-year-old socks, that’s not saying much :lol:.
Regarding those legal terms, they’re pretty standard here in America, alas. One thing I will note is that Microsoft is no longer the Evil Empire that they once were. In fact, they’ve been rather open and cuddly these last few years. The Evil Empire title has been taken over by Apple, which apparently intends to sue all its competitors into oblivion rather than competing by out-innovating its competitors. It’s the American Way, I guess. 😈
Oh yes, one other nice thing about Windows 8 — it is *much* easier on laptop batteries than Windows 7, because it is “tickless” and does timer aggregation to keep the processor in low-power idle state for longer. But if you’re on a desktop or rarely use your laptop’s batteries, that probably isn’t a big deal.
The only thing more dangerous to life and limb around here is a gas-powered chainsaw. It is a good deal more effective at teaching harsh lessons about reality.
I assume that M$ will do whatever they feel will make them a buck with whatever information they can sucker you into providing, so I use the minimum number of their programs that I absolutely need, and don’t use any of their on-line resources. They include entirely too much meta-data with every file you create with M$ software, and there are good open-source alternatives for all of it.
The latest Apple-Samsung battles are not going to benefit anyone but their lawyers. They should fight it out with their development teams, not with lawyers. Jobs went Randian in his later years, and the results aren’t pretty.
I saw what happened to Apple first hand when I worked for them between 2004-2007. When I became a Svc Mgr, I was told in 2k6 that my *job* was to disallow as many warranty claims as possible and was told how to do this *legally* (though it was neither ethical nor moral) due to changes in the legal language of the product warranties, most especially on notebooks and iPods as there were far too many claims (which was hardly surprising since the ones being produced at that time were garbage. My tech’s had to actually *repair* Notebooks before they could even be sold! Of course, this was never mentioned to the Sales teams and definitely not to the suck… errr, consumers)! There were many revisions of the early MacBook and iPods during a year, with no mention to anyone, or change in (visible) ID’s. When I worked with Apple in the early 90’s, they were definitely a much more customer-centric company. Now they are just another *maximize profit* company. *shrug*
M$ had to release a general update for Win8 before the official launch. The specific problems addressed were:
* Increased power efficiency to extend battery life
* Performance improvements in Windows 8 applications and Start screen
* Improved audio and video playback in many scenarios
* Improved application and driver compatibility with Windows 8
MSDN are talking about a major update in 2013 code named ‘Blue’, and expected around mid-year. It may either be a full version update or a major revision (v9 or v8.1). Apparently, M$ are dropping the *Service Pack* convention. It was first reported by Mary Jo Foley @ ZDNet (I am told).
The only reason Apple sue Samsung is not that they expect to win, but to delay Samsung’s entry into the market on a particular product. A 6 mth delay in product release allows Apple to make huge profits. Has nothing to do with any *legal battle*. It’s simply using ‘Law’ for sales/marketing purposes. Many other companies do it, Intel has used that tactic several times. *shrug*
I sometime think that it would be really nice if companies were required to actually provide the product they promised when they sold it to you, but that concept is ‘too socialist’ and ‘anti-business’ if the company is large enough to own government officials.
M$ discovered that if you change the version number you get to charge for fixing your software, as opposed to offering the fixes to current users. You also get to stall angry customers by telling them to upgrade, rather than dealing with their problem.
Now that you mention it, the use to block new products is obvious. IBM use to be able to accomplish the same thing just by announcing the possibility of a new product, and then stalling as they watched the newcomer die.
Bryan, M$ learned that strategy from Apple — for example, Mac OS Mountain Lion is basically just a service pack to Lion with only minor differences in the UI, mostly bug fixes and removal of a few arbitrary limitations (for example now Time Machine will properly back up to whatever backup drive happens to be plugged in, rather than doing nothing if the last backup drive it used is not available), but they charged $20 for the privilege of installing this service pack. What a bargain :twisted:.
On the “evil” scale, I have to say that Apple has overcome and passed Microsoft there. Microsoft’s business practices are still aggressive, but they’re not outright illegal and abusive the way they were during the Dweeb’s tenure as CEO. Their API’s are a mess, but at least they *have* an API and don’t just randomly change it and break your program (said as someone who spent two months fixing Linux kernel bugs in our product because Linus decided to arbitrarily change locking and the order of device teardown inside the kernel). And they’ve been downright good to the Linux community lately, they quit funding lawsuits against Linux and have been open with protocol and API info with Linux folks who are trying to interoperate with Windows desktops, plus they mandated that to be Windows Certified for Windows 8 on x86 hardware you had to be able to disable the Secure Boot feature so that Linux could be installed, *PLUS* allowed the Fedora Foundation and Free Software Foundation to purchase a Secure Boot certificate for installing Linux on ARM-based Windows 8 tablets, an accommodation towards the Linux community that Apple will do never and no how.
So yeah, evil. But less evil than they used to be, and less evil than Apple. If only their products weren’t so clunky… though I must admit that Office 2013 (which I’m running as a preview) is almost Apple-like, probably because it cribbed from Office 2011 (their Apple version of Office).
Bill and Steve were control freaks, and Linus has headed that way. It is really annoying to someone who is looking for tools, not a lifestyle. They all built on the work of others who weren’t as controlling and act as if they are creators. They refined things that others created, they didn’t create them.
The ‘magic of the market’ has put them in charge to annoy the rest of world.
looking for tools, not a lifestyle
amen.
Indeed, reminds me of Linux geeks who are irate that Gnome 3 doesn’t have all the neat bells and whistles to let them customize it the way they could customize Gnome 2. At which point I say, WTF? Most people do only one customization to their desktop: They change the background picture to be a picture of their kids or something. After that, they don’t customize anything about their desktop, because it’s a place to launch tools they need to do their job, it’s not a lifestyle. Geeks just do not understand actual real human beings. They don’t. You’d think that they have mothers and grandmothers who might give them a clue, but maybe all their moms and grandmas are like Dilbert’s mom? Baffling.
My mom uses the computer for two things: To send email to her far-flung clan, and to keep up with their Facebook pages. That’s it. So it goes.
There are a lot of people who would be happy and content with a thin client for e-mail and browsing; they just don’t use anything else. Something using a Raspberry PI board would be enough for them and cost a lot less than a regular box.
Aside: just had a feline- caused minor problem with the system and had to kill power to fix it. When I powered back up Firefox came back here and had saved the paragraph above, even though I hadn’t. That was a nice piece of user programming.
The majority of users need an appliance, not a computer.
Well, my Mom does use the computer to keep photos of her grandkids handy. So there’s that, which current appliance-type tablets and etc. currently don’t do well. Her first thought if handed an Android tablet would be, “how do I get my grandkids’ pictures into this thing?” The second thought would be, “how do you expect me to see this tiny little screen?” Not happenin’ ;).
My Mother’s television takes care of that chore. The pictures are sent on CDs, DVDs, or USB drives, and she can see them all. In her case it is the great grandchildren that occupy so much media.
LOL (Sorry, my PC I use for general internet stuff had a meltdown, almost literally. The CPU cooler fan decided to die on a 28C day a couple days ago. Typical.)
As someone who has had to try to mediate between Linus Torvalds and one of the top kernel and device driver developers, I can report that he has an ego that rivals Gates & Jobs (RIP). And I sometimes think he’s worse than both. It got so bad (over some serious security concerns my friend had about the kernel code), that my friend told Linus to drop dead and went to work for the BSD consortium as one of their 7 global Code Auditors. He eventually went on to work for Red Hat to develop and manage the security code for their kernel. trust me, Linus can definitely be a *control freak* m8! 😀
You know that Steve Jobs was the only guy to pull a fast one over Bill, not once, but at least 3 times! The first was in the 70’s (when he got the rights to BASIC for the Apple II for peanuts), the 2nd was in the late 80’s when he had to negotiate a new agreement for that BASIC, and screwed Bill again! gates actually is on record stating that 8that was the biggest mistake he ever made*! I bet Steve is still laughing in his grave. 😉 The third was in the late 90’s, when he caught M$ using code stolen from Quicktime (and other Apple code), and forced M$ to settle out of court and give the code to IE and guarantee to maintain IE, Office and other code for OS-X for a decade, pretty much for free! To save face, and show that *they were really good friends*, M$ bought $150M worth of non-voting Apple stock (which was peanuts as Apple was worth about $4B at that time). Turned out to be not such a bad thing for Gates though, he sold the stock when it was worth a lot more and made a decent profit. Still, Apple was the real winner as they were able to use some of the M$ code to develop their products, and M$ had to *STFU*! 😆
Jobs was always smarter than Gates, and he was way more creative… but I think he lost the plot when he was forced out and started Next, etc. He was a very changed man when he eventually returned. Sad really.
yes, there is a definite role for thin clients. I think android devices will evolve quickly to fill that niche. You do realize that Google will be even worse than it is now, and worse than M$, Apple and PayPal put together! Now there’s a horrifying thought!
Ahhh, well… 😉
When people start believing their press releases they are lost to humanity and join Badtux,s ‘lizard people’. After some success, some people believe that whatever they do is unquestionably ‘the best thing since sliced bread’ for no reason other than they did it.
It is very hard to talk to them when they miss the point that while the code is elegant and and the logic creative, it doesn’t solve the problem. When people are gathering groups and heating tar, they are not going to appreciate what a great thing the new code is, because it doesn’t do what they need done. I watched a lot of really neat start-ups circle the drain because they forgot they were supposed to be providing customers with solutions.
As soon as Google surrendered to the ‘corporate culture’ they were lost. Everything becomes subsumed to improving profit margins, and nothing else matters.
Kryten, Linus has always had an ego. I had some go-arounds with him back in the beginning, when I was a thirty-something industry veteran and he was a student still in school, over Linux’s lack of loadable device drivers. I pointed out that expecting my mother to compile kernels was an exercise in futility and that his notion that loadable device drivers would never be needed was silly because the hardware supported by Linux was expanding every day and there was no possible way to compile a kernel with all the drivers in it, you’d have a 500 megabyte kernel! (This back in the day when most desktop computers had 128 or 256 megabytes of RAM and a few very lucky duckies had 512 megabytes of RAM). I lost that argument and 1.2 didn’t have loadable device drivers. Red Hat hired Alan Cox and implemented loadable device drivers anyways for the 1.3/2.0 kernel, at which point it became Linus’s idea all along :twisted:.
And let’s not talk about some of the architectural decisions he made that are still annoying me today. I recently did some work at the block layer to work around locking bugs and bio delivery bugs (in prior Linux kernels you were always guaranteed to get an endio if you did a submit_bio, but on a device pull current kernels just throw the bios away rather than endio’ing them with an error, so I had to deal with that at a higher level by keeping track of my submitted bios and marking my submitted bios as invalid if I got a device pull then invalidating my RAID stripe — since I have no idea what actually got written — and return a write error to whatever filesystem called me). Thing is, this whole block API is a horrific hack to begin with, which was another argument I got into with Linus back in the day when I pointed out that if you were going to have kernel threads and queues anyhow you might as well make them a general purpose thing that was easy and transparent to use, like on Mach or the Amiga, but instead they’ve turned into this horrific mess that is all sorts of inscrutable macros and allocators and deallocators that have magic fields that do magic things that you as a block layer user don’t know about and can run into issues with when their underlying implementation changes especially when locking changes, and … well…. GRRRRR!!!!! I had that discussion with Linus back in I think 1995. I’m still working around Linus’s ego in 2012, 17 years later. SIIIIGH!
And the funny thing was that Linus’s argument in 1995 was *performance*. Well, the only way to make this bogus block layer thingy work in today’s multi-threaded multi-core CPU environment is via spinlocks all over the friggin’ place every time you touch something other than a local variable. Do you know what spinlocks do to performance? Hint: SUCKITUDE! We are no way no how taking advantage of all the CPU power available because the spinlocks are sucking us dry doing nothing but spinning! AGH!
So anyhow, so goes the lament of the unknown Linux kernel programmer :). (Okay, so I do have my name in one module, but all my kernel work other than that has been for commercial companies where I only have to deal with the results of Linus’s ego rather than with Linus himself 😉 ).
Yup!
My m8, PD, now works at Operational Dynamics and has a blog you might be interested in. 🙂
Operational Dynamics / Blogs / Paul Drain
There’s a lot there, on several topics (including WP annoyances, some you might find useful Bryan) 😉
I’ve known PD since about ’98, and he’s a really amazing young man. 🙂
Some of his patched 2.4 kernels (circa 2002) are still on Packet Storm:
Files from Paul Drain
PD was also a developer for several projects such as as Firestarter (with Tomas Junnonen).
Firestarter – Contacting the authors
Actually badtux, I’d be surprised if you haven’t come across him somewhere in linux World! 😉 😀
We created a security company together in ’98, but for various reasons (mainly health) I had to resign in 2002. We used to go spend our afternoons in our favorite cafe with a stack of napkins (I kid you not! It started one day when an idea struck and we knew we *HAD* to get it down or lose it forever! So We started scribbling madly on napkins (the only paper we had), and yelled for more when we ran out!) and pens, and work on our dream project. The Owner and staff of the Cafe thought it was funy and worderful, and they kinda adopted us and we became a *feature* ! People actually came to see us work (several from the nearby Melb. Uni.) We didn’t mind, and we enjoyed endless free (fantastic) coffee and treats! 😆 When PD and I were working on a problem, not even the *end of the World* could interrupt us. Our #1 Waitress (who was far from dumb, and was the owners daughter) would some times listen to us working on a problem in amazement. She said to us one day (paraphrasing) “You two must be twins! You know you finish each others sentences, and sometimes you just know what the other is thinking! It’s freaky.” We could do more work in one afternoon together than we could do in a week alone. We had an amazing synergy that I miss.
Yeah… good times! *sigh*
Oh, I should add, from the *horses* mouth… 😉
“For anyone that doesn’t know, I am mainly interested / involved in Free & Open Software hackery, hitting hardware with hammers and have a passion for gambling, snowboarding and other foolhardy exploits with my own health.”
And BTW, he has Cerebral Palsy and other serious ailments, and like me, has been told be assorted *Medical Practitioners* (I have yet to meet a *Medical Expert*) that he would be dead before since he was born. So, we have that in common at least! 😉 😆
We even discovered that as well as working well together on IT problems, we work well together at the blackjack table! We went to Crown Casino once, and after an hour had at least 3 dealers and a couple Security guy’s giving us the *evil eye* trying to figure out how we were cheating, ’cause we must have been! 😆 (We weren’t BTW), PD played and I’d suggest now and then when to stay or hit. Don’t ask me, I have no idea how it worked! (There was a bit more involved, PD and I were having a lot of fun with it to the dismay of the dealers, who were changed often, to no avail!) 😉 *shrug*
heh.
Just checked out his blog that you forwarded. Heh. Yeah, we seem to do a lot of the same things. Except that I finally abandoned Ubuntu and went to Fedora, if I was going to dump Unity and install Gnome Shell on top of it I might as well just go to a distribution that ships with Gnome Shell in the first place. (Plus I do virtualization with KVM and am experimenting with BTRFS, and in both cases Fedora gets those things first).
Interesting that you mentioned kernel security. One of the first rules of kernel security is that every parameter passed into the kernel should be checked for validity before being passed further into the kernel. It’s called “defense in depth” — you should never be able to trigger a crash by passing garbage into a kernel call. Sure, deeper layers of the kernel should also handle the situation, but in production kernels with 3rd party drivers installed you can’t guarantee that, thus that first line of defense. Guess what Linus stripped out of recent kernels in pursuit of the goal of “improving performance”? Yep. 🙄