Ubuntu USB Wireless

Reason why I love the open source community #157:

Please leave really detailed comments on wiki pages like this one about which hardware actually works with your OS. See the comment for the FD7050, v4001.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HardwareSupportComponentsWirelessNetworkCardsBelkin#USB

After reading this page and related pages for other vendors, I stopped my local Target, and was pleasantly surprised to find the Belkin myEssentials line of components, but not the myEssentials USB wireless adapter which so many folks have said works fine with Ubuntu and is very cheap ($15-$25). But not to worry, the Belkin referenced above was on the shelf for $35, and it featured a barcode sticker with “ver. 4001″ on it. Bingo!

I plugged it in to my Ubuntu 7  machine, waited a few seconds, clicked the network manager on the launcher bar, and it had already found my network. I entered my password for WPA2-PSK (AES), held my breath, and voila, I can now move the Ubuntu machine to the basement for the kids

/dmc

Ubuntu Saves the Day (Again)

Vista crashed again on a friend’s misbehaving Thinkpad, resulting in the invitation to reinstall Windows at startup. Whereas this had happened several times recently and Windows was unable to repair the installation previously, resulting in the loss of all data, and whereas my friend had stayed up till 3AM working on MBA projects that would now be lost, said friend was in despair.

Enter Ubuntu. We booted off the LiveCD and attempted to mount the windows drive, which Ubuntu had automatically detected. The disk was flagged with an unclean shutdown, so it did not mount, but Ubuntu provided a helpful error message with the complete syntax of the mount command with “force” option to recognize the drive. With a little additional Linux knowledge and trial and error, we came up with

sudo mkdir /media/SW_Preload
sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda2 /media/SW_Preload -o force

Voila! There was the dead Windows drive, ready for transfer to USB flash or external hard drive.

Even if you don’t install Ubuntu, you should download a CD before you need it.

Related recommendations:

Backup 2 GB free at idrive.com. Easy and secure. Features continuous backup mode that will backup changes every 10 minutes.

Karen’s Power Tools Replicator is a free, lightweight utility for doing full or differential backups to an external hard drive. I set mine to run every hour.

/dmc

Graphing the Economy

I was poking around on the Federal Reserve’s very useful collection of data, and came across these interesting graphs:

This one I’m guessing is the total reserves of Fed member banks. I wonder where all the money in the stock market went?
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/WRESBAL?cid=123

This one is roughly equivalent to the money supply. Inflation? What inflation?
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/BASE?cid=124

Ooh. Ooh. Found another one. Total borrowings of banks from the Fed.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/fredgraph?chart_type=line&s[1][id]=TOTBORR&s[1][range]=5yrs
Liquidity problem? What liquidity problem?

Now, I’ve seen the line at the right of all these graphs somewhere before. Oh yes, electrical engineering, control systems theory. It’s an impulse function, the theoretical input to a feedback loop. Expect some economic oscillation ahead…

/dmc

whole lot of minus signs

Once upon a time, I subscribed to Business Week with about-to-expire FF miles. The best thing in it was the figures page, now available online for free:

http://www.businessweek.com/pdfs/2008/0842_figs.pdf

Minus signs everywhere, even the best-performing mutual funds in the last month earned negative returns. I’m sorry, but I think it’s funny that almost every number on the page is negative, even when it’s my money

I note that the S&P trailing P/E ratio is 19, hardly cheap by historical standards, and certainly not bear market standards. Forward P/E is supposedly 10, which I find really hard to believe, as that assumes company earnings almost doubling in the next year!

Curiously, trailing P/E was about the same a year ago, which means company earnings must have already fallen a lot in the last year since stocks are a lot lower today. This possibly helps explain why we see long valuation waves. At the top of a peak, earnings have already begun to decline, but the market’s momentum carries it to ever higher P/E ratios. At the bottom, the denominator (earnings) has already begun to recover, but market momentum is still negative, so you get P/Es in the single digits.

Here’s the scary part: even if earnings coming out of the recession are equivalent to today’s earnings, single-digit P/Es imply much lower prices ahead. Assuming anyone cares about fundamentals, that is, which I’m not sure they do

By the way, if you want to see what recedes in a recession, check out the Fed’s economic data at http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/. Most charts have the recessions clearly marked.

/dmc

Why the Fed Can’t Save Us Now

From http://www.lewrockwell.com/rozeff/rozeff220.html:

The Fed cannot create value. Causation runs from sound assets to sound credit. Causation does not run from credit creation to sound assets.

If you’ve never heard of Lew Rockwell or Austrian economics, now would be a good time to start studying.

/dmc

Quality doesn’t end with the sale

Want to know why Toyota is the #1 selling car in America? I know one reason why. I recently purchased my first foreign car, a 2004 Toyota Sienna, from a third party. After a few months, the driver door started squeaking and popping when opening and closing, and the rear liftgate was starting to hesitate a little on opening. How disappointing to one who had expected the famed Toyota quality!

But wait, there’s more. I took it to my local Toyota dealer, who informed me that Toyota had extended the warranty for this issue to 100k miles, and also informed me of an active recall involving the rear liftgate struts. These were the major things wrong with the car, and both were fixed at no charge, even though I’m the second owner of a car with 89k miles and didn’t buy from the dealership! Until now, I’ve never heard of a manufacturer extending the warranty retroactively for a particular issue! GM and Ford think that TV commercials inspire customer loyalty, but Toyota understands that quality and service inspire loyalty, and neither ends when the car rolls off the line.

Does your software have enduring quality?

/dmc

David’s Laws of Management

1. Love your people. Listen to your employees. Give them the tools & support they need to do their jobs. Clear roadblocks. Keep hope alive. Act as though the people closest to the work are the ones with the best ideas about how to improve it. Empower them to fix what’s broken.

2. Have a plan. This is one of the greatest ways you can serve your people. If you do nothing else, when employees ask “which of your #1 priorities do you want me to work on today?” you should be able to pick one. If you can’t, what do they need you for? No problems worth solving can be solved without focus.

This Blog Has Moved (Again)

Sorry folks, still figuring out the best way to make all this work. From henceforth, you can find me at http://learnjsf.com.

/dmc

MyFaces Security Presentation Now Available

My ApacheCon presentation, Securing MyFaces Applications Against the OWASP Top Ten, is now available at http://learnjsf.com in the Security section. Learnjsf.com will also be the new home for my JSF blog, JSF code, and more to come, so click the “Subscribe” link there to continue receiving the feed.

Thanks!

/dmc

Using Tomahawk Tree2 Component in a Portal

To run Tree2 with client-side expansion, you need JavaScript in the page <HEAD>. Normally, this gets added by the Tomahawk ExtensionsFilter. This doesn’t work in a portal, however, because servlet filters don’t run in a portal. There are some patches in MYFACES-434 (portlet filter) you may be able to use, but here’s an easier workaround. I’ve used this successfully with Tomahawk 1.1.3 in both Jetspeed2 and Liferay.

First, use Tree2 with server-side expansion so as not to require JavaScript. The ExtensionsFilter is therefore needed only to serve up the image resources needed by Tree2, and image requests are handled through the Faces Servlet, not the portal, so the ExtensionsFilter will run as normal for these requests. However, Tomahawk 1.1.3 checks to see if the ExtensionsFilter has been configured, which fails in the portal context. Fortunately, you can disable the check with a web.xml context param.

So to summarize, you can use Tree2 1.1.3 in a portal without any of the MYFACES-434 patches if

1. You use server-side toggle
2. You configure ExtensionsFilter as normal for the Faces Servlet
3. You disable the ExtensionsFilter configuration check as follows in web.xml:

    <context-param>
         <param-name>org.apache.myfaces.CHECK_EXTENSIONS_FILTER</param-name>
         <param-value>false</param-value>
     </context-param>

/dmc