Mac is NOT always easy

My laptop computer is a MacBook Pro (8,2 - early 2011 - high resolution display).
With a lot of effort I had managed to get it set up for triple boot: I goot choose to run Mac OS, Windows or Linux (Ubuntu at the time because that was the only one that had drivers for the chips in this model).

I was very happy with it for years. I would mostly use the Mac personality, but occasionally on field service visits I would need to use Windows in order to run the utility programs to talk to the radios that my company makes. Sometimes at the office I would use it to run the Windows-based programs to talk to our Panasonic telephone switch. And sometimes I would use the Linux to duplicate problems that some customers had with using the Linux version of our utility programs in Ubuntu (since most of our Linux systems at the office are Fedora Linux).

But one day I was seduced by Apple to update the operating system to their latest version, "Yosemite". It was after all a free upgrade, and some of the older versions of Apple's programs did not support all of the latest features. Unfortunately, the installation procedure for the Yosemite upgrade broke my triple-boot system, and it has taken me about 3 months to get back to a working system again.

First, I could not find the Snow Leopard install disk that came with the computer. No big problem, for $20, Apple would send me a Snow Leopard install DVD.

Only one problem: As soon as I tried to install Mac OS X from that DVD, it would stop with a simple white screen with a grey apple and issue a sequence of 3 beeps every 5 seconds. The online pages that mentioned such signals said that indicated a memory error. Except the memory test on my Linux DVD said my memory was good. So I concluded this must be a problem with the partition tables.

Partition tables are one of those "magic" things under the hood of the computer system. Most personal computers have a single hard drive, and all the space is available as one large warehouse to all the software on the machine. By dividing the drive into separate spaces called partitions, we can pretend that we have several smaller hard drives (called partitions) instead of one large one, and each of them can be organized in a different way (called formatting) which is important when you try to run different operating systems, because each OS wants its system disk formatted in it preferred style. Mac OS X uses a format called HFS, Windows needs to use NTFS and Linux prefers ext3fs although it can use others (but not NTFS or HFS). In order for the part of the system that loads the operating system to find out where on the disk to start loading from, there is a table of which partitions exist - generally called a "partition table". And now the fun begins: Different systems use different formats for the partition table. For many years, all personal computers with intel CPUs used a built-in bootloader called a BIOS, and there was a partition table defined for that. But then Intel came up with a new bootloader called EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface), and while it could use the BIOS partition table and pretend to be a BIOS so that Windows would still work, EFI had a different preferred partition table layout called GPT (General Partition Table). When Apple changed from Motorola CPUs to Intel CPUs, they decided to use EFI and GPT from the outset. It took several years before first Linux and the Intel updated their systems to be able to work with EFI and GPT, so in order to run all three on the same machine, you needed to create both a BIOS and a GPT partition table that described the same partitions. This turned out to be a very fragile setup. Any time an operating system update touched anything related to partition setup, it could render the system unable to boot. For this reason, both Apple and Microsoft (and most computer stores and "helpdesk consultants") refused to support any setup with multiple operating systems installed except for two very limited combinations of Mac OS and Windows, called "BootCamp" and "Parallels".

So I needed to get the Mac back to its factory settings. I took it down to the Apple store, and had them load Yosemite on it from the server in the store. Done in 20 minutes.

After I got it home, I successfully installed Windows on a second partition. Windows ran fine. I did notice that both Mac and Windows had slightly different variations on their setup of EFI - they had each allocated their own partition for the EFI support files. Which turned out to be a problem: After I was done with Windows, I discovered that the Mac side would no longer boot. And I could still not use the Snow leopard install disk to wipe the hard drive and get back to something that worked.

I went back to the Apple store. This time I had them install Snow Leopard.

After I got it home again, I reduced the Mac partition to a modest 100 GB and installed Fedora Linux in the unused part of the hard drive, letting Fedora figure out how to partition it. Again, Fedora ran fine, but when I went back to Mac, it would not boot.

I spent many hours trying to erase the mangled GPT so that the Snow Leopard disk would believe that the hard drive was blank, but it always refused to install.

Finally, someone suggested that I go to the independent Mac Superstore in town. Where the technician explained that not all Snow Leopard disks were created equal, and the one had bought from Apple was a few months older than my machine and was guaranteed not to work for that reason. He said he could load the operating system for me over the Internet, and then "clone" the system to a USB stick that I could then use to recover on my own as I probed my way through various setups until I found one that worked.

I am now in the middle of running Windows update after installing Windows 7 on the machine. I am anxiously waiting for 203 updates to be installed so I can try booting Mac and then Windows again.

I am hopeful!

The old Hewlett-Packard company has a new name .... again

When Bill Hewlett and David Packard started their company in a garage in Palo Alto in 1939, they were devoted to building precision measurement instruments at very competitive prices. Their first successful product was a precision audio oscillator, the HP200A, which was still being built in 1972.

In 1966, the company started building minicomputers for controlling lab equipment. These systems known as HP2100 and HP1000 were produced for 20 years. In 1968, they introduced a programmable calculator, the HP9100A, which as been called the first personal computer.

In 1984, HP started building inkjet and laser printers.

By 1999, the computers and the printerrs had grown to be the majority of the business, and the non-computer company (inclinding the original test and measurement division) was spun out in an 8 billion dollar IPO to become Agilent. (This was well before HP took over the failing Compaq, which had already taken over the failed Digital Equipment Corporation.)

Since then, Agilent has been growing its activities in life sciences research,  building MRI machines, genetic sequencing machines and buying Dako, a Danish cancer diagnostics company, while selling off units supporting semiconductor manufacturing. The original test and measurement unit still exists, but it is now a small group that again does not fit well with its parent company, so Agilent is splitting into two companies. The Agilent name goes with the life sciences, and the test and measurement unit will now be called Keysight Technologies.

History repeats itself: First as farce, then as tragedy. I think the customers will have a hard time finding the twice-renamed instruments in the future.

My Linux box had to be replaced ...

Over the week-end, the Linux server at my house shut down several times. It provides
- file service to
   - the desktops in the house (Windows desktop, Mac desktop, my travel laptop)
   - the Sonos music system
- email service for my private domain
- web server for my personal website including password-protected access to
      - the document storage
      - the music collection
      - 10 years of photo albums and some home videos
      - a Wiki note-taking server

This was quite annoying, since it was doing it at a time when I was trying to finish up my 2013 tax filings, and of course the program is on my (Windows) desktop but the files are mounted from Samba shares on the Linux box.

At first, I thought it was happening when I was doing certain file operations, so I attributed it to a bug in a recent update to the Samba file service, but then it occurred to me, that an ordinary system crash should lead to a reboot. So I thought maybe I had picked up some malware. The uptimes were getting shorter ... under an hour. So I went to look at /var/log/messages and learned that a motherboard temperature sensor was triggering a shutdown when it reached 139 degrees Celsius. My next thought was a failed fan in CPU or power supply, but after opening the case, I found all the fans in good working order. But a large chip with a 4cm x 4cm heat sink was hot enough to fry an egg. A google search for the motherboard's model name gave me a board layout picture which identified the hot chip as the SouthBridge (disk controller, mostly). So it was clear that I needed a new box.

The old box was a HP Pavillion, and the local Best Buy had a current HP Pavillion for just under $500, so I picked it up Monday afternoon and after dinner, I started scouting out how to get online again.

My first hope was that I could just remove the hard drive in the new computer and plug in the old drives and see if it booted. No such luck: No bootable files found. I swapped the drive connectors with no improvement.

Next thought was to boot from a Fedora Linux Live CD and look around. But it would not boot from the CD. I tried a lot of things to find a boot configuration menu, but without luck:
- The power-up screen offered no suggestions
- The Quick Start booklet had no useful information other than to suggest that if I started up windows, I would find a program that might give me more documentation or information about a telephone number for technical support.

I put the Windows drive back in, and did the "first boot and system setup" for Windows 8.1. I found the so-called documentation, which was useless. Finally, I called the 800-number for technical support. In India. After insisting on taking all my personal information before I could ask how to boot from a CD, he asked why I wanted to do that. "To install Linux instead of Windows", I explained. "Why would you want to do that?" I explained. He explained that running Linux on HP Consumer grade computers was not supported and would void the warranty. I explained that I am used to installing and managing Linux systems, but I needed to know how to boot from a CD. He did not know, but put me on hold while he "explored resources". After about 10 minutes he came back to tell me that he would transfer me to another support group that might know something about Linux. And after 30 seconds of switching noises, I landed on a recording that explained that "this office is now closed, please call back during business hours".

I called back to the 800 number. Went through the same script with a new person, who told me that I would get a boot device selection menu if I hot the "Fn" key. I had reused my old keyboard, which did not have an Fn key, but the keyboard that came with the new computer had one. I made the mistake of thanking the support rep; he hung up. I switched keyboard and rebooted a fair number of times while tapping the Fn key. No result at all.

I called back to the 800 number. Same script. Same promise of a referral "but I will stay with you to make sure you get connected". Still the call got lost after about 5 minutes in the hold queue after the alleged transfer.

Called back 4th time. By now, the wait before the first rep was 35 minutes. After going through the script, this rep saw that I had been through the mill 3 times, and sent me to the US-based professional workstation support group. When the rep there answered after about 5 minutes in the second hold queue, he was surprised that I had been transferred, because he was not supposed to touch consumer products and did not have any documentation for Pavillion desktops. He did know a lot about unix. He also had used the Pavillions and gave be some hints about boot escape keys:
- ESC is an EFI configuration menu called "Startup Menu"
- F2 is firmware based hardware diagnostics
- F9 is "Boot Menu", selecting a boot device for this boot only
- F10 is "BIOS setup Menu".
When I tried to boot from the CD, I got "Secure Boot Failure - Unsigned Content".
He thought I should be able to select a "Legacy Boot" option instead of the "Secure Boot" default configuration, but reminded me that he really was not trained on advanced configuration of Pavillion Systems. He then promised to find me a competent support rep in the consumer product group.

While I waited on hold again, I figured out how to switch to "Legacy Boot". At that point, the machine would no longer boot the Windows hard drive, but it booted the Linux CD, which allowed me to see the old drive that was still plugged in. So I exchanged the Windows drive for my old Linux system disk ... and the system booted to my old Fedora Linux desktop.

I had almost forgotten my Workstation support rep, but he came back and apologized for having been unable to find me help. He would file an escalation request and someone should call me back within a day or so. But he was pleased when I told him that once I had the basic information on where to find the menu, I had solved the problem myself. He was as disgusted as I was about the poor quality of the documentation and the support. He did suggest that if I would buy professional products instead of consumer products, I would get technical support from the United States instead of from India. And I pointed out that those products cost about twice as much for similar capabilities.

The irony is that a few years ago, I had a couple of HP laptops for which I needed technical support, and the support reps in India were EXCELLENT, well trained, polite, knowledgeable and patient. This was a great factor in my purchase of a HP desktop rather than a Dell or an ASUS (is that who took over Gateway/eMachines?) But I can no longer recommend these HP systems.

Bringing Manufacturing Home to America

I came across a pointer to this article from the New York Times:
www.nytimes.com/2013/09/20/business/us-textile-factories-return.html?pagewanted=all

The story is that a fair amount of manufacturing that fled the United States between 2000 and 2009 is quietly coming back because it actually makes business sense to manufacture close to the customers. Low wages in Asia does not always translate to higher profit margins, for several reasons:
- the lower wage expense may be balanced by higher transportation costs
- merchandise subject to fashion's vagaries may be obsolete by the time the design gets sent to Asia and the goods get shipped back.
- the cheap manufacturing plants in Asia may not share your understanding of what "a quality product" is.

So even in Textiles, which was considered the premier example of a labor-intensive business that HAD to move off-shore, some jobs are coming back. But in returning, they have changed.
- there are fewer jobs now. Instead of 1000 workers in the plant, there may be 100, assisted by robots
- the jobs are not the same jobs: Rather than low-skilled mill workers (high school dropouts) they are machinists, mechanics and programmers that can maintain the robots.

Interesting reading!

Back at Blogspot

I have been away for a couple of years - there was a lot happening in my life. I may ease back in and we shall see what my new focus may be.
Since the last post here, I met a delightful woman and married her. So while I may have a fresh perspective on dating in retrospect, it remains to be seen if it is something I can share here.

Walking lightly on this earth ...

For several years my doctor has been nudging me to lose weight, and I have tried as best I could, but despite regular exercise, the weight has been inching upwards. At my annual physical exam this summer she repeated the usual lecture, and repeated the suggestion that I should look into the weight management program offered by a branch of the same multi-location medical service group that she works for. This time she actually put a brochure in my hand, which may have been what made me eventually sign up for an orientation session a couple of months later. Now I wish she had done that a couple of years ago, so I could have gotten started earlier.

They have several different program; I signed up for the most intensive, which they call the Decision-Free CORE Program. This is an excellent program, designed in multiple layers.

First, it is a medically supervised diet program. You eat nothing but the specially designed food they sell you, which include 5 different formulated protein shakes (Vanilla flavored whey protein, chocolate-flavored ditto, chicken soup flavored ditto, and soy based varieties of the first two) to be mixed with water. The soy based shakes turn into a pudding when prepared with half the normal amount of water. There is also a multigrain cereal package blended with dried cranberries, dried milk and whey protein that can be cooked in the microwave to create an oatmeal-like porridge for breakfast, and some miniature microwaveable dinner rations that allow for some semblance of eating a meal for lunch and dinner. The "standard" daily intake of 1 cereal, 3 shakes and 2 dinners adds up to around 1000 kcal per day, which means that if you weigh 100 kg (220 lbs) to begin with, you are 1500 kcal in deficit before you start exercising, so you are GUARANTEED to lose at least 3 pounds per week.

Second, it is packaged with the same kind of health education support group that you might find in programs such as Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig, but since this is operated by a medical clinic, the groups are led by certified health educators. The leader of my CORE class is a German behavioural psychologist who also free-lances as a life coach.

And finally, significantly overweight people like myself see a doctor in conjunction with the weekly class several times per month, and they draw blood samples for lab tests to make sure nobody's electrolyte balance gets too far out of alignment. (There is some concern about heart damage from potassium deficiency on an extreme diet like this.)

In the beginning I was worried that I would get really sick of the endless protein shakes, but one can add significant variety with non-caloric flavor additives. Tabasco pepper sauce on the oatmeal, for example. Or using aspartame-sweetened diet sodas instead of water in the shakes. There are 14 varieties of the packaged dinners, and ways to "doctor them up" with the chicken soup or by combining two in a single meal. One could also worry about being hungry all the time, but the program instructions are really simple on that point: If you are hungry, drink another shake or eat another packaged dinner. Yes, you will get more calories with more rations, but far less than if you "go out of the box" by giving in to a temptation to eat something that is outside the program. The one thing that we all crave - but can't find an approved solution for - is something crunchy. Regardless of former eating habits, we all wish we could eat vegetables, but that is NOT allowed in this program, until after we reach the goal weight and change to the maintenance program which will indeed  require us to eat a lot of vegetables every day.

After 7 weeks, I have lost close to 25 pounds (11.5 kg) and I hope to be able to ride the program all the way down to 70 lbs (32 kg) below my starting point. If all goes as planned, I should get there in 4 more months, in time for my daughter's wedding.

My growing art collection

Over the past year I have gradually started to think of myself as an art collector. I have a list of artists that I follow; I regularly go to visit the galleries where my favorite artists tend to exhibit; I love to go to opening nights and I struggle to go home without buying anything. To help me enjoy more and spend less, I have a focus for my collection: "I buy paintings of mountains I can see from my house, painted by living artists that I have met". Of course, I cheat on both accounts: Often I don't meet the artist until after I have bought the works. And some of the pictures I drool over are not actually of the peaks behind my house, just some that look similar.






But this one really is the cluster of mountains that I can see from the panorama window over my kitchen counter. It is titled "San Roque Canyon" and is painted by John Iwerks (grandson of Ub Iwerks of Disney animation fame - the artist who actually drew "Steamboat Willie, the first Micky Mouse movie). I spent the middle of Thanksgiving Day hiking up this canyon with my beagles on a leash, putting 15,000 steps on my pedometer.

I first saw a larger version of it at the Easton Gallery last spring. It was a show with about 30 paintings by each of John Iwerks and his wife Chris Chapman. The only problem was that it way way too big for my house, measuring about 40 by 50 inches (100 by 125 cm). So I wrote to ask John if he would be willing to make me a smaller version, which he graciously agreed to. This one is just 12 by 16 inches.


Sometimes I find something I like at a less prestigious venue. This one called "Little Red House" by Paul Edwards was hanging in a church where I attended a folk music concert,  and the pastor had invited his parishioners to bring in art for display. Paul Edwards is 93 years old, retired from a career as a Disney artist. I liked the masculine feeling despite it being a watercolor painting, and this looks very much like a compound I can see halfway up the mountain when I look out my window. It is 16 by 24 inches, and I had it reframed in a blonde natural wood frame with no matte to look moare at home with my other paintings.


Marcia Burtt is the most prestigious painter in my collection. This 18 by 20 inches piece is titled "Mountain Overlook #1". It was the beginning of my serious collecting. When I got it home, I thought it made the landscapes I had bought before look bad in comparison, so I gave them to my ex-wife who fortunately still likes them.


I have written about this painting "Peace, a quiet evening" by Karen Feddersen in an earlier post.
Each of the three panels is 20 by 20 inches (50 by 50 cm), It holds the place of honor in my living room, and I love it as much today as when I first saw it. Every night when I come home and turn the lights on, I draw a deep breath of admiration.

So what is next ?

                          
Last week-end I was gallery hopping with a friend who loves the Oak Group painters as much as I do. At the Sullivan Goss gallery we saw a couple of breathtaking pieces that fit neither of my rules, but still tempted me greatly. One was by Ray Strong, the other  by Angela Perko. Both of them scarily expensive (the Strong one especially) so I let them stay there, but I will probably go back and visit them again. I have also been very charmed by the recent work of another Oak Group member, Jeremy Harper. Jeremy has not painted "my mountains" but I think I might commission him to give it a try.

Watch this space!!

Thanksgiving - time to catch up with life

This blog has been languishing ... for almost a year. I have been too busy living to sit down and reflect on life. That is good and bad. Good that I have a life - bad that I do not take time to reflect.

The times when I might have sat down to reflect, events grabbed me:
- Each of my parents in turn got sick and died.
- My house needed some maintenance, and I temporarily had to move out and then move back in.
- Danish family members came to visit for several days.
- I went to Denmark on vacation and ran into more illness in the family.
- My hobbies heated up.

Fortunately, we have this thing called Thanksgiving, that occupies some of the same social space that the Easter holidays do in Europe: A 4-day weekend where office workers go home to celebrate their family. Since I now live alone, this gives me an opportunity to sit down and reflect for some hours, keyboard in hand. So I will be releasing a few posts on themes that I have wanted to write about for a while.

Buying Art is FUN!

Last week-end I took a tour of the new Cottage Hospital. It was very interesting - on two very different fronts.

First and foremost, it was interesting to see what the state of the art in hospital technology looks like. And I have no doubt that this is state of the art. The part that has been completed holds 204 beds, and the price tag is 900 million dollars. It had better be top of the line. This is not a poster child for health care cost containment!

But secondly, this hospital is the home of a magnificent art collection - about 1000 pieces. Most of these are prints of about 20x25 inches donated by 123 local artists selected after about 400 artists competed for the privilege of giving. About 45 major pieces comprise the "landmark collection" which was sponsored by local charitable foundations. One of these caught my eye:



This painting, titled "Peace", shows dusk falling over the city of Santa Barbara, with the coastal mountain range in the background. The 3 panels are about 7.5 feet tall, and the whole piece is 23 feet wide. But where it hangs, high in the entrance lobby, it does not look out of scale. The artist is Karen Fedderson, and I had never heard of her before, but I was intrigued, and looked her up on the web. She has painted lots of California landscapes, so I promised myself I would visit her gallery.

Today was the day I got the chance. Imagine my surprise to find in the gallery a smaller version of this piece (each panel is 20"x20" for a total width of just over 5 feet) that she had originally entered in the competition to win the commission. At a price I could (barely) afford. I need it to be re-framed to match my other paintings, so I won't get it for another week, but I am all giddy with excitement that I managed to buy this piece which I have no doubt will soon be famous in this town.

On Being Competitive in the World Market

One of the blogs on the Forbes magazine's website had an aticle a few days ago titled "Why Amazon Can't Make A Kindle in the USA" by Steve Denning.

Here is "the money quote":

How whole industries disappear

Take the story of Dell Computer [DELL] and its Taiwanese electronics manufacturer. The story is told in the brilliant book by Clayton Christensen, Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang, The Innovator’s Prescription :

ASUSTeK started out making the simple circuit boards within a Dell computer. Then ASUSTeK came to Dell with an interesting value proposition: “We’ve been doing a good job making these little boards. Why don’t you let us make the motherboard for you? Circuit manufacturing isn’t your core competence anyway and we could do it for 20% less.”

Dell accepted the proposal because from a perspective of making money, it made sense: Dell’s revenues were unaffected and its profits improved significantly. On successive occasions, ASUSTeK came back and took over the motherboard, the assembly of the computer, the management of the supply chain and the design of the computer. In each case Dell accepted the proposal because from a perspective of making money, it made sense: Dell’s revenues were unaffected and its profits improved significantly. However, the next time ASUSTeK came back, it wasn’t to talk to Dell. It was to talk to Best Buy and other retailers to tell them that they could offer them their own brand or any brand PC for 20% lower cost. As The Innovator’s Prescription concludes:

Bingo. One company gone, another has taken its place. There’s no stupidity in the story. The managers in both companies did exactly what business school professors and the best management consultants would tell them to do—improve profitability by focus on on those activities that are profitable and by getting out of activities that are less profitable.

I highly recommend reading the article (in 4 parts).

On words we use to label each others' values

A recent post on blog by a local parish minister (http://roydonkin.blogspot.com/2011/08/i-have-faith.html) suggests that true Christians must have faith that a better future is possible, and so they would be more likely to be liberals than conservatives. Unsurprisingly, the Republican readers of the blog were unhappy with this observation.

Labels like "liberal" and "conservative" are dangerous because they are often misleading. We have diminished the information content of the words we use when talking about important issues to the point where they often seem useless.
Take a word like "liberal". In this country, it has come to be associated with whatever the policies of the Democratic party are at the moment. Or as a milder word for "socialist". But it used to mean "someone who is in favor of increased freedom" of any kind. In Europe, it currently is used about center-right parties, which are in favor of free trade and an easier regulatory environment for businesses. For that reason, I try to avoid it whenever possible, preferring to say "progressive" which is generally agreed to denote mildly socialist leanings. I would like to see liberal regain the original meaning, which would mean that is would be best applied to Libertarians.
In the same way, the word "conservative" has come to mean "against socialism", where it used to mean "someone who wants to preserve the old ways", which would include conservationists. In my eyes, the "TEA Party" is not "conserving old values", it is a radical right-wing movement.
Finally, I have seen so many different value systems described as "Christian values", that I do not know what that means. Certainly, the early Christians lived in a socialist commune (see Acts 2:41-47, Acts 4:32-35, Acts 5:1-10).

On what shape of tax increases work best

I had lunch today with a bunch of retired people; I'm pretty sure I was the youngest one there. Most of the group agreed that President Obama's (and Warren Buffett's) proposal to raise taxes on the wealthiest is a no-brainer. But one of the other men disagreed. He (like me) would pay higher taxes under the President's proposal, and (unlike me) he was not happy about it. "It is easy for you guys to say that someone else should pay higher taxes while you get a free ride; but I already pay a much higher rate of taxes on my income than you do." Essentially he was saying that he would only support a tax increase if the burden was shared. He seemed to think that it would be much fairer if we just rolled back the Bush tax cuts so everybody paid a bit more.

And this is my only problem with Buffett's proposal to raise taxes on incomes above $1M, and only those. I don't think it raises enough money to really make an impact on deficits or allow the infrastructure investments that we really need (and which could boost employment). And almost all of those who have to pay it, will resent it deeply, which leaves a very small constituency for passing it. In other words: The proposal is not a realistic legislative proposal, but ammunition for the election battle.

On government and deficits

Having watched the American political circus this summer, I am getting seriously angry. First and foremost I am angry at the "TEA party" Republicans who want President Obama to fail, even if it means taking down the country's economy and then pinning the blame on him. Secondly, I am angry with more moderate Republicans who let these rogues set the political agenda, even though I am sure they themselves know better. And finally, I am angry with the Democrats who seem to be completely unable to either stick to their beliefs and political traditions, and equally unable to expose the counterfactual claims of the right wing in what passes for political debate today.

When I was visiting with my family in Denmark this summer, my nephew - who works for a bank - asked me how our American politicians can be so crazy as to deliberately work towards a downgrading of the Treasury bonds. This will lead to an increase in interest rates and carrying costs on the national debt load. It is also likely to force many banks and trust funds to dump their holdings of T-bills because these institutions are subject to rules that require them to invest ONLY in AAA rated securities. (The only reason this has not happened yet, is that Moody's and Fitch have not yet revised their ratings, so the institutions can still bury their heads in the sand and say that 2 out of 3 agencies still rate the bonds as AAA.) For someone who claims to want to reduce the deficit to wreck the credit rating of their own government seemed unbelievably stupid to him. I could not disagree at all.

I happen to believe that deficit are bad in the long run, and we ought to work on paying down the national debt when we can. But in the middle of a recession is not the time to try. We should have taken advantage of the opportunity in 2001, when the massaging of the budget that the Clinton government had done seemed to be on the verge of producing a surplus ... in other words a reduction of the national debt load. But the Bush government insisted that we should do no such thing; we should cut taxes and reduce the government's income in order to ensure that the debt kept rising (albeit slowly). And shortly after passing the tax cut bill, they dramatically increased expenditures by the military ramp-up in response to 9/11.

The Bush tax cuts were always unsustainable, and even their proponents knew this perfectly well. The proof of that is in the way they were structured to be temporary. If the legislation had declared them to be permanent, the budget projections required under the congressional rules for budget legislation would have shown that they would lead to ever larger deficits, even under the optimistic budget projections that accompanied the draft legislation. By having a sunset clause, the deficit appeared to be rather large in the first year, but getting smaller and smaller each year, as the tail end (when the old tax rates would be reinstated) kept getting nearer; and in the long run it would be a wash (because in the long run, the cuts would have ended). This was all a giant fraud.

With the above in mind, I think these are some positions that I hold regarding the deficits as we see them today:

(1) Running a government budget deficit in good times as well as in bad times is irresponsible and essentially borrows from our children in order to live beyond our means today.

(2) Forcibly balancing the budget at a time of economic crisis by cutting government help to the poor and by cutting education funding is irresponsible, and takes money away from the weakest. A country (or a state) needs to save up during good times and disburse those savings (and may even borrow a bit further) to help the poorest when the economy is bad.

(3) To seriously reduce the national debt cannot be done by cutting expenses alone. We must increase tax revenues. Ideally, we should just let the Bush tax cuts on income and inheritance expire and reinstate the Clinton era tax rates. I am personally in an income bracket the would see a tax increase even under Obama's over-modest budget proposal, and I would welcome such an increased tax bill.

(4) Progressive taxation is a legitimate tool for reducing economic disparity by letting those with large incomes pay a larger portion of their income as taxes to support the common good. When an individual reports a personal income of 4 billion dollars in a single tax year, I see no problem with having him pay 50% income tax on the last 3 billion dollars earned (instead of 15% capital gains tax). Actually, I think the rate could be higher than that without seriously “damaging his will to work hard to create jobs”.

(5) We need to seriously reduce defense expenditures. I think we would be entirely secure in the world if we spent no more that what Russia, China, India, and the EU countries combined are spending on defense. That would amount to a 50% reduction in defense spending. We also need to bring home our “imperial” armies from Afghanistan and Iraq. We have not achieved much more in either of those two wars than we did in Vietnam. The impulse to “make the world better” by forcing better governments on those countries is a good and moral impulse, but by now we should have learned that this is an impossible goal.

(6) We need to reform health care and health insurance in the USA. We have a good model for how to do that: We should implement the Canadian model. “Medicare for all”. Like in Canada, we should decentralize the implementation to the states. Everybody knows that this is the only way we can cover everybody, save money and improve care. The only argument against it is that it would put the health insurance companies out of business, and their investors don't like that idea.

But as obviously necessary as these actions seem to me, I have little confidence that even the Democrats in congress will fight to see these things implemented. And as a (non-voting) resident alien, I have no direct influence on US politics.

Things I Believe

[This is a work item from a writing workshop I am participating in.]

Like everybody else's, my intuition is guided by my beliefs and values. I have done a lot of work over the years on clarifying my values, but beliefs are a lot harder to get my hands around. By beliefs, I mean things that I “know” but have not recently examined how I have come to “know” them. As Mark Twain said: said “It ain't the things you don't know that will get you in trouble. It's the things you KNOW for sure that just ain't so!”
* I believe that a society where the disparity between rich and poor is small, will be a happier and more stable society.
* I believe that we have a responsibility towards each other in our community, in our country and in the world.
* I believe that love is better than intense competition.
* I believe that a little competition makes us stretch and do a little better.
* I believe that what goes around, comes around.
* I believe that the smart and the rich can take care of themselves, and the weak and the poor need us to look out for them a bit.
* I believe that Americans once walked on the moon, and getting there was worth it.
* I believe that men – I can't speak for women – were not made to be alone, and it is not good for us.
* I believe that women are a man's best friends. (My experience with dogs has not been nearly so good.)
* I believe that America has a unique blessed position in the world – and therefore also has a unique responsibility.
* I believe that one reason for those blessings is that despite its often apparent tendency to insularity, this is a country built by immigrants, where every family has a deeply rooted connection to somewhere else in the world.

Car Shopping - The Result

For the record: I did buy the Prius, and I am very happy with it. It is full of geeky features provided by the alleged 14 on-board computers. Some of them - like the electronic stability control - are invisible, while lots of others are visible in the multiple cockpit displays on the dashboard and on the entertainment/navigation screen. To help me make sense of it all, a 400-page general user manual and another 300-page addendum for the entertainment/navigation system sit unread in the second glove compartment.

My MPG average is still climbing with each tank of gas: On the last one I ended up with 46.2 MPG, on the current one I'm bubbling in the range from 46.5 to 47.0; for a long time it drifted down to 45 when I drove on the freeway to and from work, but I am getting better at using the "hybrid system indicator" display to smoothe out the power draw.

And after 11 years in the convertible, I love the cargo capacity of the hatchback, which also gives the dogs a proper place to ride without muddying up the passenger area.

Car Shopping

"If your car is going to have an accident, the best situation is if it happens when you are not in it!" And that is just what happened to me yesterday. I have been doing some work on my house recently, and came home on my lunch break to see if the floor guy (who is patching in a new oak board to replace one that rotted out due to water damage from a leaking bathroom wall) had been there in the morning, so I could release the beagles from where I keep them confined when workmen are there. Since the front door was unlocked, I parked curbside in front of the house.

The contractor had not yet been there. I was warming some food in the microwave when I heard a very loud impact noise from the street. A full-size pickup truck had come over the curving hill above the house and slammed into the rear corner of my car, doing considerable damage to both vehicles. The sad part was that I knew the guy: He is my maintenance gardener. After we exchanged insurance identification, I replaced the cut-up left rear tire with the doughnut spare wheel and took the car to the body shop most favored by all the insurance companies. The impromptu comments led me to conclude that I am going to need a new car.

So this morning I went to look at the three most likely replacements for my 11 year old Mustang convertible:
- a Smart FourTwo Passion Cabriolet (the smallest convertible I know of)
- a Prius (I have wanted an excuse to test drive one for the last 5 years)
- a Volvo C70

Very different wheels, for sure, but each resonates with different desires.

I decided that the Smart is an overpriced Golf Cart. While it is totally adequate for my daily commute 8 miles each way, I would probably not want to drive it to Los Angeles (2 1/2 hours) or San Francisco (5 hours), but would need a rental for that. The salesman pointed out that the Hyundai Elantra gets the same miles per gallon as the Smart. (By some coincidence, the two marques are in the same dealership.) He did not actually have any Elantras in stock, but wanted me to come back when he gets some in 9 days.

I liked the Prius exactly as much as I thought I would. The salesman thought he could get one with exactly the features I wanted (white, trim level 4, and with a moonroof) but warned me that supply may soon become very tight due to the recent events in Japan.

And I loved the Volvo. To my surprise, they had 3 in stock (one each red, black, white), although the only color I liked was the white, which happened to be less expensive, being a left-over 2010 model. It drinks 50% more gas, and costs 25% more than the Prius, but it is very lovely. Having driven a convertible for a few years, I can appreciate how much nicer this one is: Better seats, folding hardtop instead of nylon hide (less noise), etc etc. The Mustang is cheap, the Volvo is nice. If I was ordering one from the catalog, I would take the stick instead of the automatic, and I would take the wood panel inlays. But a catalog order has to come all the way from Sweden, so I'd have to wait 6 weeks ... and probably have to pay the sticker price.

It is lovely to have a week to mull over this decision, and reflect on what "statement" each makes. I mentioned to one female friend that I had looked at a Volvo convertible, and she instantly wanted to know how many miles it gets per gallon, and how I could possibly find anything below 30 mpg to be acceptable. It is a fact that the parking lot at my church is about 30% Prius already.

GPS in Aviation

My old friend G.G. who is a recreational pilot in Northern California offered me this supplement to the mailing list version of my previous post:

"It might be unclear to your readers that the WAAS correction, while created from stationary receivers on the ground, is in fact (IIRC) broadcast by a subset of the GPS satellite constellation. Satellite failures can create areas where WAAS isn't available until the constellation is either adjusted or a new satellite is deployed.

I've an IFR certified WAAS GPS navigator for flight, and the accuracy seems generally within centimeters. Awesome performance. The WAAS navigators are also required to have a 5Hz update rate, which allows them to synthesize glideslopes, allowing ILS-like approaches for most airports.

The only problem for aircraft is that Jeppesen is the monopoly provider of GPS databases of enroute and arrival/departure procedures, which now cost ~$450 a year, vs. Free to use the old terrestrial navaids. And Garmin, who couldn't quite get their GPS designs to operate to WAAS standards, were allowed to buy their only competition, UPS Aviation Technologies, to get their hands on a WAAS solution. They stopped development of the UPSAT offering, the CNX80, relabeled it the GNS 480 but never delivered all of the advertised features, used the now Garmin AT office to port the good stuff over to look like the Garmin GNS 430/530 operations, and then quietly announced they were immediately dropping the 480.

BTW there is a free public aviation navigation database, but Garmin is making good money in partnership with Jeppesen and refuses to make the public database available. Not an open format, needs compilation to be usable.

GPS is wonderful and seductive. It is no surprise that general aviation pilots like it a lot and that it has gained a lot of use far faster and wider than the safety community is comfortable with. Many legislators have been clamoring for replacing the aging instrument landing systems used by civil aviation with GPS based systems that could integrate tighter with on-board systems on modern airliners. But there is a big worry about reliability, especially the fact that a small jamming transmitter can very effectively disable GPS within its surrounding area. That sounds far-fetched, but is actually a very real risk.

The trucking industry has embraced GPS for fleet monitoring systems. A GPS receiver with a cell phone modem allows a trucking company to keep track of where its vehicles are moving. This is good for keeping customers informed about whether the load is moving on schedule, but it also allows a degree of supervision over the drivers that bugs many of them out of their skin. They like to think that when they are on a week-long cross-country trek with a load, they are lone warriors on the high range, masters of their own day-to-day life. But the GPS tracking device lets the company know exactly where they have been, and where and when they have been stopping. If they schedule an evening meal break in the parking lot of Gilley's dance hall on Saturday night, it is likely to result in some trouble. Much better for the driver if the device is somewhat unreliable, and fortunately, that can be arranged. Ads in the back of truckers' magazines offer a $30 device that plugs into the vehicle's cigarette lighter socket and transmits pure noise on the GPS radio frequencies. That will disable the GPS devices on the truck, and often all the other GPS devices in a half-mile radius around it. This turned out to be the cause of a lot of malfunctions in an experimental GPS instrument landing system that was being tested at Baltimnore-Washington International airport a couple of years ago.

What is GPS and how does it work

GPS (Global Positioning System) was invented as a precision guidance system for ICBMs (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles). Before GPS, missiles were steered by inertial navigation systems (spinning gyroscopes). That would get them to the right city, but not necessarily anywhere near the right block within that city. With GPS, you could get to within about 10 meters of the target that was marked out on the map. That meant that you could take out an army barracks or an airforce hangar building instead of the whole city. This in turn meant you might fight a war without killing several million civilians. That was a great improvement.

Of course, we wanted to give this technical advantage to our own missiles without giving our enemy's missiles a free ride on the system. So the technology was classified, and the receiver modules that were sold to the public for civilian use were crippled in 2 different ways:
1) They were blocked from providing any position data at all at altitudes above 10,000 feet (3,000 meter)
2) The readout precision was "smudged" so that it had a random variation of about 50 meters. To get a "good" position, you had to average over a 24-hour period.

The better signal was encrypted so that only military receivers could get it in "normal" times, and the civilian signal could be completely disabled (globally or in a specific international region) when the military commanded it to be.

This all changed in the early 1990'es, when the civilian signal was allowed to get the full precision during the first Gulf war, so that the US Army could give a cheap civilian receiver to every vehicle in the US Army. Where a US Army dropped into a foreign desert used to be severely handicapped by the unfamiliar terrain, they now had better map data than the Iraqi army and could easily outmaneuver Saddam's army. A couple of years later, Bill Clinton quietly made the improvement permanent, and we have all seen the benefits of that.

Having learned about the GPS system before it was ever launched, the Soviet military quickly decided that they needed a system like that, too. Their clone was called GLONASS but like everything else produced by that system it did not work nearly as well as their literature indicated that it did. In fact, they had trouble keeping the satellites operating for more than a year at a time, so the system never achieved worldwide full service. They are now finally scheduled to reach full service this year.

Since then, both China (Compass) and Europe (Galileo) have designed similar systems and started to launch satellites. It will be a few years still before all 4 systems are each capable of independent world wide service. But the commercial builders of GPS receivers are building devices that will make use of any additional satellites they can see. At least one company, JAVAD (headquartered in Moscow, but chaired by an Indian), has promised that their newest series of high-precision receivers will be able to compute a fix from four arbitrary satellites, even one from each of the four constellations. That is VERY impressive.

Most of us have used a GPS receiver, but few have any idea how they work. Most people seem to think that the receiver transmit a signal that is picked up my the satellites. That is exactly backwards. While there are minor differences between the systems, they are essentially similar, and the following description is more or less true for all of them, although the one I know best is the American GPS system.

The full GPS constellation is 24 satellites (plus a few spares) in medium high orbits at different inclinations betweenn equatorial orbits and polar orbits, designed so that most points on earth will have between 8 and 12 satellites above the horizon at all times. For a given service (such as the civilan "public" signal) all satellites in the constellation transmit on THE SAME frequency, using a direct-sequence spread spectrum signal with a long spreading code - a different code for each satellite. Similar to CDMA mobile telephone encoding, this allows a receiver that knows the proper code for a specific sender to extract that one signal out of the resulting mess. And a receiver can have a single front end (tuned to the shared radio frequency) for all the satellites and apply a separate back end loaded with a separate code for each channel that it needs to decode. Each of the satellites then transmits a complex data stream at a low data bit rate which contains a description of the orbit for each of the satellites as well as a very precise time signal - in the nanosecond range of precision. All of these data streams are precisely synchronized to an absolute time reference. Each satellite actually contains an atomic clock (and two spares!)

When decoding these data streams, the hand held receivers can triangulate to find their position. Since they know the precise position of each satellite (from knowing the orbit of each and the precise current time) and they can measure the relative delay between the multiple satellites that they can receive, they can compute their own position in 3 dimensions from 4 satellite data streams. With more satellites, they can improve on the solution by solving for multiple different combinations of 4 and then averaging.

Even with the best equipment and without the deliberate introduction of errors, this tends to only get to about 10 feet (3 meters) of precision for a variety of reasons. One of these is atmospheric disturbances, especially in the ionosphere, which can affect areas up to a few hundred kilometers at a time. But the error induced by this effect (and several others) tends to be similar for all receivers within a particular geographic area. This means that you can install a stationary receiver, learn its exact location by averaging over several weeks of time, and then compute its error vector by comparing its reading with the known location in real-time. You can then broadcast this correction factor to other receivers on the neighborhood, for example using a local ethernet network or a cellphone network. (Some geostationary satellites broadcast such a corrective data stream in a way that lets some hand-held receivers apply the correction in real time. This is called the WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation Service). While it is not as precise as a local differential reading, it may still get you from 20 feet to 5 feet. A local differential correction obtained from a station a mile or so away may get you in the centimeter range.

Are you impressed yet? I sure am, and I work with wireless engineering every day.

Another article soon will talk about novel applications for GPS and other GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite Systems).

Do we learn anything from listening to the news ?

My local NPR (National Public Radio) affiliate (KCLU) runs an hour of BBC World Service from 8 PM to 9 PM every evening. That works out to be the 3AM hour in London, which is probably a sleepy time there, but would be morning drive time around the Persian Gulf.
Tonight, on my way home after a business dinner, I heard the news anchorman say: "To give you an idea of the magnitude of Ireland's financial problems, let me share this number: The total bank debt of Ireland is equal to one and a half time the value of Ireland's entire economy."

The more I thought about this, the less I understood. What did he say ?

The easiest part of this is "the value of Ireland's economy". He is almost certainly talking about the annual gross domestic product figure for Ireland. Although "value" to me would more closely be associated with "worth" (assets) we are so used to comparing everything to the annual GDP that one needs a good reason to choose any other yardstick, so as long as he is not clearly describing a different yardstick that is probably what he meant; he just wanted a more colloquial phrase for it.

But what is "the total bank debt"? I can think of several possibilities:

a) The total debt owed to the banks in Ireland.
As far as the banks in Ireland are concerned, that would be an asset.
If this includes the total amount of mortgage debt owed on all the
"real estate" in Ireland, that does not seem excessive.
b) The total debt owed *BY* the banks of Ireland.
Without comparing it to the assets of Ireland, we don't know if the banks
are in good shape or in bad shape.
c) The *net* debt owed by the banks of Ireland.
This sort of implies that the banks are all grossly insolvent. Indeed,
if the sum of the negative balance sheet of all the banks is equal to
the annual GDP, then the banking system is in very bad shape.
That matches the headline. But is is even conceivable that the banks
would be allowed to continue doing business (by the local banking
regulators as well as by the foreign banks that they do business with)
if they were that grossly insolvent ? I sure would not want to leave any
transaction unsettled overnight with a bank that deep in the hole.

I would not be surprised at hearing this kind of garbage on an American commercial radio station, but I used to think that the BBC was better than this.

GPS, Personal Navigation Devices etc

By now, most people are familiar with the abbreviation GPS - Global Positioning System - and most people seem to associate it with at device with a small display screen that tells you where to drive your car to. Most people I know thinks that this is new and growing and must be a great business to get into.

Those people would be surprised to learn that the business of selling Personal Navigation Devices is already in decline: European sales declined by 18.6% in the 4th quarter of 2010 (presumably compared to the year before).

http://news.thewherebusiness.com/report/6364

The thing is that enough people can use Google Maps on their internet enabled cellphones so they don't need to buy a special navigation device.

I have an old GPS receiver without a map display, that I bought before internet cellphones were available; I have used it for a bit of geocaching, and hooked it up to a laptop with a map application loaded from a CD-ROM. But these days, I just use the Maps on my iPhone. I still think the navigation system in my daughter's car is cool, and I will almost certainly get one when I need a new car. The car devices speak, while my iPhone Maps require reading, thus distracting me when I am driving.

Meanwhile, the positioning provided by these device is getting remarkably accurate. That will be the subject of another post in the near future.