1337 gas

Yeah. 1337.

Oil tycoon bastards.

Thankfully, the iPod was itemized on our renters insurance, and the window was covered with a small car insurance deductible. All in all, it was only a few hours of hassle to get everything sorted out over the phone, have the window replaced and clean up the mess.

However, I have been considering the following question: What, exactly, would prompt a minor crime such as this in a “nice” area of town. Perhaps the area is not as nice as I think it is, but all indications show that the population is generally of the older variety with grown children. Of course, miscreants may swing in to the nice neighborhoods specifically to target people they assume have a higher income than themselves. That notwithstanding, it still takes a certain amount of balls to break into a car just to steal an iPod. I believe that this specific crime boils down to the current economic climate of the country, and, ultimately, the combined actions (or inactions) of our government that has widened the perceived disparity between classes and the overall state of despair.

Our country, with no uncertainty, is in an economic downturn. I’m no economist, but I believe it’s more psychology than economic factors that’s stopping the government and officials from uttering the word ‘recession.’ No matter what it is, it ain’t good. The country is in great monetary debt and many families are tortured by the threat of having banks foreclose on their loans. Though the current administration passed the Economic Stimulus Package, I think it will take a regime change (either Democratic or Republican) before our country is able to get out of this rut. Meanwhile, our “team” morale has been shattered, and people who were doing fine before this rut are now, driven out of some form of desperation, acting on primal impulses and initiating misdemeanor crimes in order to satiate their inner desire.

Granted, no amount of perceived psychological security will ever completely stop crimes of this nature; there are certain primal urges that some types of people are unable to contain. However, as the country recovers from this mess that we’re in, I’m sure crimes of this nature will decrease, and restore the peace back into a local suburb near you.

Spring has sprung,
the grasses riz.
I wonder where
da boidies is?

All da boids
is on da wing.
But dats absoid
because da wing
is on da boid.

As a kid, I’d read Garfield. Heck, I even watched the animated TV show. Looking back on it, my parents must have been spiking the punch or something to that effect.

You can reach a high degree of realism in Microsoft’s Flight Simulator line of products, but one area that has consistently been lacking in all flight simulation programs is accurate air traffic control (ATC). This, as you obviously may know, is a vital part of the global air transit community. Talking to an actual person on the other end of your COM radio rather than punching buttons provides another level of complexity and realism to the simulation experience.

Fortunately, you can achieve this by using online multiplayer networks such as VATSIM. Using this system you can use voice, obviously the preferred and more realistic method, or text to communicate with air traffic controllers watching the traffic in their virtual scopes. VATSIM aims to be as realistic as possible, so you must file flight plans, use DP (Departure) and STAR (Standard Terminal ARrival) plates, and get required clearances to guide you from point to point in your flight path. Through VATSIM you are afforded a rich and vibrant community of avid flight simmers devoted to achieving the highest realism while also being extremely helpful and patient.

For all the fun this provides me, it still is a time consuming process; flights on VATSIM must be flown in “real time” (rather than using the time acceleration capabilities of the simulator); a 5 hour flight from KSFO to KJFK really must take 5 hours in the simulator as well while you’re on VATSIM. Of course, when you’re offline you can use whatever time shifting you like, but I feel it highly diminishes the entire simulation experience.

Ultimately, there are two roles you can play on VATSIM: Pilot or ATC. If you’re into flight simulation, then you can fly on your own, or find a Virtual Airline that fits your requirements. (I am currently AFA4431 at American Flight Airways.) If you’d like to try the scopes, you can get in touch with a specific virtual air traffic control center and use their documentation and guidelines to train you.

If you’re interested, here are some links for more information:

• VATSIM
• VATUSA
• American Flight Airways (Virtual Airline)

On one of the forums that I visit, a user has the signature: “If you think Flight Simulation is a game, then get out of my airspace.”

Red, the name of Virgin America’s seat back system, is novel at first, but my excitement faded as the interface was laggy and the TV quality was quite low. Both my wife and I had issues receiving some live television stations, and other stations were pixelated and annoying to watch. Perhaps the difference in signal quality is that Virgin uses Dish Network and JetBlue is on DirecTV. Red also offers an array of on-demand videos (tv shows, music videos) to be streamed to your seat, as well as a wide array of music stations to listen to. You can order snacks, meals and drinks right from your screen, and, by using the included controller, you can chat with other people on the plane, or play some of the included games.

If we consider that the price to fly these two airlines is generally the same (give or take a bit), the seats in coach are just as cramped, and the flight times are exactly the same, I’d still take Virgin America over JetBlue only for the fact that it has power at every seat. This means that no matter what kind of entertainment they provide on board, as long as I can plug in my laptop I can watch any entertainment that I bring along. This past trip we watched a few episodes of Futurama and Good Night, and Good Luck. Once they were completed, I was still able to use my laptop to do some programming I wanted to get done.

The Virgin America crew was friendly, the plane was clean, and it was about as enjoyable as a coach class flight across the country could be. With any luck the airline will be around for a long time and will expand its array of electronics and connectivity enabling it to be on the bleeding edge of technology at 35000 feet.

My experience with Eclipse began in college while taking advanced programming courses in Java. It was an amazing product back then, and has only grown better since. However, the marriage of Zend Studio to Eclipse has proven to be a bit of a disappointment. Perhaps it is because I’m too used to the way that Studio 5.5 works and need to shift my IDE paradigm back to Eclipse. Maybe it’s the difference in how the system is configured by the preferences. Either way, it will take a bit of time to get used to and that’s just not something that I can afford at my job right now. Using Studio for Eclipse will have to be a weekend project to slowly ween myself off of 5.5 and learn how to manipulate Eclipse to assist, rather than hinder, my development.

One of the major pieces of integration that I’m interested in the new version of Studio is how well it handles remote files. My current development process requires that I use ssh/sftp to open and save files to a remote file system. In Zend Studio Neon (their beta version of the Eclipse integration, as well as in Eclipse in general), remote filesystem access was still a bit lacking and buggy. At first glance, it seems as if they have figured this out in Studio for Eclipse. However, I’m running into issues building the workspace through the remote filesystem. It’s slow and bogs down the Java process so I can’t develop while it’s building. I tried, heaven help me, to stop the build process, which locked up Studio, and now I can’t seem to open Zend Studio for Eclipse at all.

As for right now, I’m going to uninstall it and try re-installing over the weekend and playing around a bit more. They may call it Studio 6.0.0 — however, I think I need to treat this as a 1.0 release. Overall, I don’t think this release will be stable enough for me to use until a few more rounds of bug fixes, but I certainly like the direction that the platform is heading.

• Synergy - (Cross Platform) This is quite possibly the most useful tool that I have found. It simply shares the keyboard and mouse on a system that you designate a server to any number of client systems. This is not a KVM, as each system requires its own monitor system. However, with Synergy and a fairly simple configuration, your mouse will flow from one system to another as if you’re using a single computer. In addition, the clipboard is shared between systems. Setup can be a bit tricky on non-windows machines, but binaries are available for Windows, OS X and Linux.
• UltraMon - (Windows) Ok, so you’ve got two monitors, and finally have the screen real estate to have many windows open in an order that you can create a comfortable work flow. Yet, all of your windows are stuffed onto your main screen task bar. Enter UltraMon. With this handy utility you can expand your task bar across multiple screens; tasks that are on screen 1 are on screen 1’s task bar, tasks on screen 2 on screen 2’s task bar. Aside from these great features, it also has other useful multiple monitor utilities. This is quite a great piece of software, and I highly recommend purchase of this product.
• Foxmarks - (Firefox Plugin, cross platform) Within the course of a day, I can use up to 4 distinct copies of Firefox. Two on my laptop (OS X and Windows XP in a virtual machine), my office desktop (OS X) and my home desktop (Windows XP). FoxMarks helps to bridge that gap by providing a easy and transparent way to sync bookmarks between copies of Firefox.
• LineIn (OS X) As documented by my post here on the trials and tribulations of moving sound between computers, LineIn is a great (and free) utility to enable line in monitoring on a Mac. Aside from the freebies on the same page as LineIn, Rogue Amoeba also provides other OS X based audio software to check out.

These tools help make my daily interaction with computers a bit easier, and I hope they’ll help other as well! If you know of other tools in the same vein, feel free to leave a comment or contact me.

Read on, here!

When we consider the evolution of podcasting from someone recording a few moments of audio for download to the full blown audio netcasts and video podcasts, it doesn’t surprise me at all that podcasting, especially in the tech-heavy Bay Area, has taken this route. It is as if podcasting has evolved in the same way the internet is used: Podcast 1.0 was a single-user system, while the current Podcast 2.0 is a more social, interactive environment that provides more information, reaches a larger audience, and, most importantly, is an open forum for discussion.

I am reminded of a time when the now-defunct Play, Inc. set up a network of online interactive shows using their Trinity broadcasting system in a box. The premise was to have live streaming shows that included audience participation (through some sort of instant messaging utility). Alex Bennett, a prominent Bay Area radio personality, signed on to this format and had a good run with it until, unfortunately, Play, Inc. closed its doors. The format of the Play TV network perhaps was a bit ahead of its time, but it demonstrated the social nature of broadcasting over the internet and how Netcasting should move into the global conversation.

I think we should be thankful that the podcasters in the Bay Area have created such an open community that shares ideas, stimulates discussion and genuinely provides entertaining content that I can shove onto my iPod.