I had a 2005 Honda Accord Hybrid, but after 7.5 years, the main battery died. Luckily for me, the $3500 replacement was covered by an 8-year warranty. However Honda advised me to get a new car because I drive less than 5000 miles a year, and that is not enough to keep the new battery healthy.

I have installed Windows 8 Enterprise in a Parallels 8 virtual machine (VM) on my Mac Pro. I give each VM 4 CPUs and 4 GB of memory. I still have my Windows 7 VM configured with the same resources. The good news is that Windows 8 is noticeably faster, both in booting and running. The Windows 8 Windows Experience score I get is 6.9 vs. 5.9 for Windows 7.

The bad news is that the now user interface might be great for a tablet, but it sucks for a desktop machine with a 30" monitor. Without the Start Menu, which has folders, everything is a total jumble:

I have been a fan of the Micro 4/3 format for years now, having bought a Panasonic GH-1 camera and four extra lenses (multiply focal length by 2 for 35mm equivalent):

• The incredible Panasonic Lumix 7-14mm f4 Ultawide
• The Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f2.8 macro lens
• The diminuitive and very fast Lumix 20mm f 1.7
• The 45-200mm f4.5-5.6  Lumix telephoto lens
• The all-round prime lens for the GH-1, the Lumix 14-140mm f4-5.8 

I was able to take pretty decent still pictures and movies with the GH-1, but it had several shortcomings:

I have just returned from what was supposed to be an idyllic 12 days on the Rogue River in Southern Oregon. But United Airlines ruined a lot of it for me.

Day One

Yesterday, on May24, as promised by Sprint (after a customs delay) I received my new HTC EVO 4g LTE. I love the phone. It has every whistle and bell that I can imagine.

Here are some of my observations in no particular order:

In a previous blog post, I pointed out that every user has a responsibility to keep their computer malware free. Alas, it takes time and effort to do this!

I should note that I have many computers:

I have three Netgear Routers: WNDR3700, WNDR4000, and WNDR4500.

On the SAME wired network, the 3700 works great. But both the 4000 and 4500 exhibit the same symptom. They periodically drop WAN connections for a minute (almost exactly), then allow them for 5-20 seconds, drop them for another minute, etc. In the plots below, red in the time graphs means that traceroutes and pings are not getting returned by the affected hops along the path (top part of the plots).

Air traffic controllers must solve a four-dimensional (space + time) problem in their head using only the conventional two-dimensional radar display. This works when things are normal, but when for example, a thunder storm closes part of the airspace, the usual solutions do not work, and traffic must be slowed.

One of the biggest worries faced by a computer system administrator is that users are really imposters. As an administrator of a small computer cluster used by scientists, this is the number one issue. How do you detect whether a logged-on user is legitimate? Do you want North Koreans running bomb codes on your supercomputer? Could you tell if they were?