purg.atory

Today, in an effort to save money and eat better, I went to the store and bought the bits for sandwiches. Gourmet sandwiches that I would never be able to get my kids to touch, even if they happened to have a thirty-nine and a half foot pole handy.

Ingredients:

• Grandma’s multi-grain bread with visible seeds: $2.00
• Kroger brand crunchy peanut butter: $1.74 x 2
• Smucker’s strawberry jam: $3.59

It would have to be white bread, creamy peanut butter, and grape jam for the kids to even consider eating it.

Does anyone know of any free or open source CAD software? I am in a situation where I need to investigate the possibility of building an addition to my house, so we need to be able to draw up some plans. Visio would do the job, and I can use it at work, but it’s not free and I do not own a copy for any of my personal computers.

I’d prefer a Windows program, but I can deal with it being on Linux if that’s the only reasonable way to get the job done.

This is another post about my sleeping patterns, so if you don’t want to read about it, you can move on to the next thing in your reader now.

I’ve always had an internal alarm clock that lets me wake up right before the electronic version goes off. I’ve even on occasion been able to look at the clock just before going to sleep, think about when I wanted to wake up, and “set” my internal alarm clock for the next day.

The last few years this internal clock has been broken because of my sleep apnea. In the few instances it would wake me up, I was so tired that I’d go right back to sleep, waking up later and finding that the real alarm clock had been beeping for 20 minutes straight.

Since the CPAP came into my life, this nifty feature of my brain has been working again. I don’t know if I’ll still be able to calibrate it, but I’ll take what I can get.

Well, my night with the EPR setting on the CPAP transpired with a complete lack of success. I woke up several times during the night, with the mask giving me next to nothing in the way of pressure. I was still a little tired when I woke up.

Currently the machine is set for a minimum pressure of 5cm and a maximum pressure of 15. The EPR was set to reduce the pressure by 2, so it seems that 3cm is not enough to keep my airway open. I am hereby admitting that the doctor has more experience with these things than I do, and that EPR was probably left off for a good reason.

Down the road after I’ve really gotten used to the machine, I might experiment again with EPR, but set the minimum pressure to at least 7 so that the true minimum won’t go below what it is now.

From Smith’s Chinese:

• Now is the time to call loved ones at a distance. Share your news.

No doubt about it, the CPAP is making a difference. I feel so much better. If any of you out there in the blogosphere feel tired all the time and your bedmate tells you that you snore or stop breathing while you sleep, you should definitely talk to a doctor and have a sleep study.

This morning there was about two inches of snow on the sidewalks. In days past, I would have ignored it, not having the energy to shovel it. Very often our neighbors will happily run their snowblower up the block and do it for me, and if that doesn’t happen I can ask one of the kids to do it. Yes, I know this makes me a lazy putz, but today I put a small dent in making up for it by going out there and taking care of it myself. I did most of the driveway and the entire sidewalk, which on our corner lot is 100 feet in the front and 110 feet on the side.

One of the cool features on my CPAP machine was not enabled, but the medical supply place turned off access to the advanced features. I found out how to hack past the restrictions and this morning I turned on the Expiratory Pressure Relief feature, which drops the pressure when you exhale and resumes it when you inhale. It’s smart enough to revert to constant pressure if it detects that you’ve stopped breathing properly. I’m hopeful that this will make my experience with the machine even better.

Two of the three kids that I take to school in the morning called in sick, so I only had to take one. After that I went and voted, then stopped by Starbucks for my free cup of coffee.

I urge everyone to go and vote if they’ve registered, no matter which candidate or party they prefer, even if they live (as I do) in a state whose majority will probably swallow your vote and make it nearly meaningless. You never know what might happen.

Last night was my first night on the CPAP. It’s this model, including the humidifier option. I’ve got this mask to go with it.

When I had my sleep study, I was clinically asleep in under a minute after lights out and showing apnea symptoms within 30 seconds after that. Last night, I’m pretty sure it took a lot longer for me to fall asleep initially. It’s an unusual feeling, breathing against air pressure. Not unpleasant, just not normal. I went to sleep on my back, something my wife hasn’t let me do in recent memory, because I invariably stop breathing right away.

I feel subjectively better today. Still yawning from time to time, but I don’t feel like I have to force my eyes open constantly like almost every day up to now. It’s not quite the night/day difference I’d been hoping for, but after one night it’s pretty amazing.

Wordpress has a beta of their upcoming version. I’ve created a complete copy of my blog on a different URL and upgraded the copy. If you’re astute enough to find my list of domains, it will tell you which of them contains the upgraded copy and you can go peek. Most of the changes are not visible to non-admins, though.

Modern computers present a quandary to the everyday person. They hear about advances in CPU and computer technology, yet their computers seem slower now than the ones they had five or ten years ago. It isn’t a perception problem, the average brand-new consumer computer DOES respond more slowly with a modern OS. It’s also true that the computer itself is light-years faster than its predecessors, something I will explore at the end of this post. So what’s the problem?

There are two main culprits for this. One is that the software we use asks more and more of the hardware. Microsoft and other primary software vendors add more and more capability all the time, but most often with a full new version like Vista. The same thing happens with everyday software like Office, instant messengers, photo processing software, and so on. Most of the development is done with rapid development environments that are abstracted from writing regular source code by one, two, or more layers. Each layer adds tons of potential functionality and makes development faster, but also adds large amounts of complexity and code. If they were written at a lower level, they’d be a lot smaller and probably run several times faster, but initial development would not be as rapid.

The other major culprit is a little feature introduced by Windows XP known as WinSxS, or Windows Side by Side. This is a repository of library software, primarily system DLLs. It’s a compatibility mechanism, solving the enormous problem known as DLL Hell that plagued older Windows versions. IN a nutshell, when you install just about anything, it makes a copy of system libraries that the program requires and puts them into a program specific subdirectory of the %SystemRoot%\WinSxS folder, where %SystemRoot% is normally C:\WINDOWS.

This does two things that cause problems. It chews up disk space when multiple versions of the same DLL file exist, and it chews up memory when different programs load different versions of the same DLL. There is some intelligence in this folder - for the most part, identical files that get copied in multiple times are actually references to the same file, not additional copies. It still chews up a ton of disk space, though. Although you can’t rely on the disk space reported by Explorer for the folder, if you go exploring it you’ll be amazed at how much is in there.

This nod to compatibility loses the performance benefits that led to the creation of dynamically loaded libaries in the first place. It can also lead to problems where a third-party program is still using an old version of a DLL even though you’ve installed a service pack or security update that should address a problem.

The WinSxS folder is the primary reason that you can get such incredible speed gains by reinstalling your computer from scratch (from a CD that’s had the latest service pack slipstreamed in) and applying all the updates before installing anything else. Unfortunately, I’m not aware of anything that’s got enough intelligence to prune this folder without the risk of screwing something up badly, so reinstalling remains the only sure-fire cure.

I’ve seen the advances in system architecture first-hand. One of the easiest and most dramatic demonstrations of the difference is in compression and text processing, both of which are heavily used by the package manager in Debian. My faster server runs an older version of debian, the slower one runs a newer version, so this is not an apples to apples comparison, but it’s pretty close. I ran these two commands on both servers:

rm -f /var/lib/apt/lists/*
time apt-get update

The older version of Debian downloads 11.1 MB of data and decompresses to 49.7 MB. The newer version is 13.7 MB and expands to 60.1 MB. This is a 23 percent increase in downloaded size and a almost 21 percent increase in the extracted size.

The slower server (400 MHz PII) downloaded, uncompressed, and combined its package information in 71 seconds, using 41 seconds of CPU time. The newer server (1.7GHz P4 Celeron) did its job (granted, with more than 20 percent less data) in 26 seconds, using 18 seconds of CPU time. A system at work running with a dual core 3.4Ghz CPU and the same software as my newer server took 8 seconds with 5 seconds of CPU time, with a lot of it visibly spent waiting to establish connections with the remote servers.

EDIT: The second paragraph of this post never got finished. I think I got my original intent in there now.

As mentioned previously, I had a sleep study. The results, which took two weeks to come in, showed that I have moderately severe sleep apnea. The doctor wanted to do a second sleep study and evaluate what air pressure is required. The alternative is an auto-titrating CPAP machine, which figures out the right air pressure automatically.

The sleep study is very expensive, so I wanted to find out what it would cost after insurance. After looking at the costs and the bank account, I decided to just go with the machine and skip the second study.

In the few days between getting the results and making the decision, the sleep doctor left the country, and would not be back for two weeks. I couldn’t get the ball rolling because he had not written a CPAP prescription before he left. He arrived back in town on Monday of this week, and finally got the prescription written yesterday.

Today the home medical supplier called me and we set up an appointment. On Monday morning at 10:00 AM, I will pick up an auto-titrating CPAP machine. In theory, it’ll be the best night of sleep I’ve had in several years. It’s oddly appropriate that I may finally be fully awake on election day.

Today there was a lively discussion in the daily chatroom. It started with election issues because I linked Tim O’Reilly’s blog post about why he supports Barack Obama. Someone mentioned the death penalty and the discussion REALLY took off. Here’s my take on the death penalty.

In the Old West, they had public hangings. In biblical times, they had public stoning. In many places, but the deep South in particular, there were lynch mobs. These events were visceral messages to others about what society will not tolerate. If you’ve got that image in your head, you’re less likely to break the law, be it an actual legal document or society’s unwritten rules. Today’s death penalty is not public, so it has very little power as a deterrent.

The other purpose that the death penalty serves is to eliminate individuals who commit unspeakable crimes and demonstrate that they will continue to do so. The example that comes most readily to mind for this is Ted Bundy. The system accomplishes this, but at an enormous financial cost. A death row inmate gets many years and many chances for appeal before they are actually executed, all at taxpayer expense. Unless they live for a REALLY long time, currently it costs less to keep a prisoner for their entire life in regular maximum security prison than it does to execute them.

If we greatly reduce the number of appeals and the amount of time given to a death row inmate, then it would be economically viable. Innocent people do end up on death row occasionally, but the likelihood is low. There should be no reason to let them have so many chances to prove their innocence. If someone is executed and later exonerated, then there is a reason to spend all that public money that would have gone to appeals - as restitution for their family. I’m sure it’ll cost much less than paying it for all of them regardless of actual guilt. Our legal system is based on the principle that true guilt or innocence is impossible to determine, that we have to accept the less perfect opinion of a jury.

The other idea I’ve got for the death penalty is to bring back public executions. Invite the public to watch all executions in large numbers. I’m inclined to say that it should be free, but if you sold tickets, it’s a public revenue opportunity. Either way I think it should be untelevised and personal recording devices banned.

If we as a society are unwilling to implement one or both of these ideas, then the death penalty serves no real purpose and we should eliminate it. If we can’t quickly or publicly eliminate the serial killers, then we should just keep them locked up.

I invite comments. I do not plan to edit or delete them unless they include personal attacks.

Any modern UNIX or UNIX-like OS can do internet mail out of the box. Just give it a domain while setting up the mail software, set up an MX record in the DNS for that domain, and you’re well on your way to sending and receiving mail.

Normally with the basic setup just mentioned, incoming mail gets delivered to standard UNIX accounts. At the most basic level, mail will not be delivered to joe@example.com unless you add a user to the server with the username joe. You can also set up aliases, so that email to joseph@example.com also gets delivered to the user joe. Typically you get many pre-defined aliases that deliver email like postmaster, hostmaster, root, and a bunch of the other system accounts to the first user created during OS installation. More complicated aliases are possible, allowing you to deliver email to a completely different domain, or to send the email to a program for serious application processing.

If you’ve only got one or two domains and your needs are not very complicated, that’s all you’ll probably ever need. The difficulty with this arrangement appears when you start adding domains, particularly if the domains belong to different people and those people want to have the same prefix on their addresses - like sales@example.com and sales@frodo.com. You can tackle the problem by setting up aliases and creating UNIX users like frodo-sales, frodo-marketing, example-sales, example-marketing, and so on, but this becomes extremely cumbersome for the system administrator, the individual domain administrators, and end users. It also requires every user to have a UNIX account, opening up a potentially large attack surface for people with malicious intent.

For many years I have been running all my domain services on my own server, which has spent most if its life in my basement. The software suite that handles this for me has evolved over those years. At the heart of this are two major programs. One is called postfix, which is an MTA, or mail transport agent. This program sends and receives email using the SMTP protocol, speaking to other MTAs around the Internet. The other is dovecot, which is an IMAP and POP3 server. A mail client like Thunderbird uses IMAP or POP3 to log in and retrieve mail for reading, and uses SMTP to send mail.

Both of these major programs talk to a MySQL database back-end that stores the actual user email addresses, passwords, and preferences. A variety of other software provides ancillary services like spam and virus detection, webmail, etc. What I am running now is a more capable system than what I had built when I was actually running an ISP several years ago, and many times easier to maintain.

There is one real problem I face, and that’s a lack of documentation. I have never written down the steps taken and configuration changes required to get a fully functional server. I aim to change that, and will maintain it on this static blog page. This will make it much easier to recreate the work, as I’ve had to do a few times in a professional capacity.

EDIT: The blog software is not well-suited to documenting commands and config files, so I have moved the documentation to my wiki.

Tomorrow night I am undergoing a sleep study at the Sleep~Wake Center run by the U of U hospital, which happens to be in the same building where I work. For my new patient appointment, I walked two doors down from my office. The total distance was about par with the 50 yard dash from elementary school.

I’ve got sleep apnea, and the level of tiredness in my daily life has reached the point where I must do something about it. This sleep study will be a new experience for me, but I know two people who have done it before. One of those people is my wife, who tells me that when I end up on my back I stop breathing momentarily.

I’m ambivalent about what’s going to happen. It’s an overdue and necessary step on the way to improving my life, but it promises to be a very uncomfortable night. They’re going to take a bunch of time hooking up and removing all sorts of monitoring equipment to my body. I’ve been told that the adhesives they use for the various equipment are pretty nasty, especially the “toothpaste” they put in your hair for the EEG. Hopefully it will be interesting enough to write about. Wish me luck!

I have some interest in picking up a commuturd. For those not familiar with this term, a definition: a cheap car that gets used almost strictly for going to and from work. My commute is about 24 miles each way.

I have a few strict requirements:

• A manual transmission
• Air conditioning
• The ability to get at least 40 MPG without serious hypermiling.
• A price tag as far under $1000 as possible, under $500 if it can be accomplished.
• Mechanical systems in decent repair

Naturally there are some things that would be nice, but are not required:

• Cruise control
• Four doors
• A workable radio and CD player

The goal here is to have a car that will last long enough (2-3 years) without major repair costs that when it finally dies, I can look for a car just like it and start over. If I’ve got to get a loan and put full insurance coverage on it, then it’s not worth doing. I’ve also got kids that will be driving relatively soon, and if they can keep up with it, they’ll need a car.

My ‘91 Camry was averaging about 25 MPG before I started hypermiling, now I can occasionally get a little higher than 30MPG. That car will be a great thing for my wife to drive for ferrying kids around most of the time. It would be better than the huge van she uses now, which gets about 10-12 MPG. We will still need the van, but if we can drive it a lot less, we’ll save money.

I’ve been told that the Honda Civics from the early to mid 1990s might meet my requirements. I’d like to know if anyone out there knows of any other models that would qualify, or even better would be knowledge of specific cars I can look at.

I have not had a substantial post in quite a while. If any of you are on the edge of your seat waiting for such drivel as I might produce, I do apologize for not delivering. It’s not that nothing’s been happening, it’s just that what’s been happening has either been not terribly exciting or doesn’t belong in a public forum.

I’m writing this post using Google Chrome. Chrome is a very compelling product. If you haven’t already, I would recommend reading their rather long comic book describing the product and the ideas behind it.

I’m particularly impressed by the notion of a separate process for every tab. In a typical scenario this means that it will use more memory than Firefox, but the gain in overall stability is impressive. People running memory-starved systems are already used to things running slowly. They’re likely to be impressed by the ability to find and close the tabs that are hogging their precious RAM without losing the one that contains the blog or forum post they’ve been working on for the past three hours.

Robert X. Cringely, who creates TV content for PBS, wrote a blog post about why Google is entering the so-called “browser wars.”

Like Mr. Cringely and his friend David mentioned in the post, I believe that in the end, Google doesn’t really care whether people use Chrome. It’s much more likely that they are showing the dominant players what they believe is the right way to do things and hoping that their ideas get copied and improved for the benefit of everyone. Although I think the next version of Firefox (3.1) is pretty well set in stone as far as features, the version beyond that is likely to start incorporating these new ideas. That is very exciting.

Fortune from the usual - Master Fung at Smith’s:

• Why not go out on a limb? Isn’t that where the fruit is?

“In order to check for updates, you must install an update for Windows Update.” I should have gotten a screenshot.

That man really needs to shut up.

I set up the boat today so I could get pictures. I’ve got five shots that I felt were worth sharing. The first is a wide-angle shot showing the boat next to our van. The van is Chevy’s 15 passenger beast, about 20 feet long. The boat’s specs say it is 11 feet long.

The second picture looks at the boat from the bow end. If you blow the picture up to full size, you can fuzzily see the batteries under the transom seat.

The third picture is a view of the interior of the boat from the side, looking towards the bow. The tripod chair was something I picked up this afternoon for $9 at Sportsman’s warehouse. It looks promising, we’ll see how well it works when the boat is actually out on the water. I have my eye on a thing or three from Cabelas, we might pick up a set early next week.

The fourth picture is the motor. Although I wish that either it were a 12V motor or that I had a single 24V battery, it’s worked out very well. You can see part of the transom seat and the transom motor mount itself in this picture.

The last picture shows my anchor, its chain and rope, and the chair bag I am using for rope storage and delivery.

Kathy has told me that she will shorten the bag for me - the rope only takes up about a third of the space inside it, so the bag could be cut in half and still work perfectly. In the long-term, I believe I need a single larger bag that can hold both the anchor and the whole rode. I’d like to put a large grommet in the bottom, which would serve two purposes. One purpose is drainage, so the bag can let water out easily. The other is to let a short section of rope hang out which would be tied to the boat. That would ensure that I never lose my anchor on the bottom of the lake due to carelessness, but not interfere when rope is deployed or stored.

I just got my property valuation and tax notice for the house. What I found therein amounts to a mixed bag of good and bad news.

My land value went up somewhere in the vague neighborhood of 33.3333333333333333333333333333333333 percent. The value of the house itself went down by about 26 percent. This makes for a loss in value of the whole package of about 11.3 percent. Those of you who can still remember beginning algebra now have a story problem - what percentages do the land and the building comprise of the total? Please show your work!

The good news is that the property tax burden for this year is now lighter by nearly $400. The bad news is that my house value has dropped by quite a lot. There is a good side even to the bad news, though. It simply means that recently inflated property values are coming back in line with reality. I hope that the housing bubble is completely burst and things will now level off.

Perusing the taxing entities is interesting. More than half of my taxes go to the Jordan School District. The next biggest chunks go to the county and to the city. Much smaller chunks pay for the county library system, water infrastructure, mosquito abatement, a multi-county assessment, and a county assessment.