March 2009

There were 51 posts published in March 2009 (this is page 2 of 6).

Fog

This morning’s commute was notable due to the thickest fog I’ve ever seen here. In spots I could see maybe a block ahead but not much farther. It reminded me of some other foggy drives I’ve made.

One night in the early 90s when driving sound to San Diego on I-5 from north of L.A., I drove into a sudden blanket of fog that essentially blinded me. When you’re driving 75 MPH on I-5 late on a Sunday night the last thing you want is to disappear into a fog bank.

Same thing happened in the fall of 1988 on a late night drive from the Boston Airport to Ft. Devens in western Mass on Route 2. I drove into fog so thick I had to move at basically a crawl, as there was nothing but woods around me and no lights to show me the way.

Good times, I tell ya.

Video of Chinese Navy – USNS Impeccable dustup

I was checking through some of my bookmarked websites when I came across some Youtube videos [NSFW: Contains salty sailor language] of the incident with the USNS Impeccable and elements of the Chinese Navy. Sure enough, it shows the Chinese ships harassing the Impeccable, even going so far as attempting to steal the towed-array sonar and blocking its way, causing an emergency all-stop to avoid a collision.

Pretty bold stuff. If they tried that on an armed ship they would’ve earned a shot across the bow (or worse).

After that dustup, the Navy sent an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer to accompany the Impeccable. The USS Chung-Hoon will take up station near the Impeccable and hopefully keep a war from breaking out before the two sides can hammer out an agreement on such activities.

Southwest Airlines tests in-flight WiFi

Sez here that Southwest is testing in-flight WiFi on some of its planes:

Southwest now has four aircraft up and running with Wi-Fi service—and so far, the testing is going really well. Southwest has operated the service on more than 500 flights and more than 9,000 Customers have logged on.

The four planes with WiFi installed have tail numbers N901WN, N902WN, N906WN, and N907WN.

Sunrise

Yesterday morning before work I walked the dog as usual. This was the first time I didn’t finish our walk in the dark. By the time we had returned to the house, the sky was bright enough that we could see without streetlights.

It’s definitely a welcome sign of spring!

Fun weekend

It’s been a fun 72 hours. I began it Friday afternoon with my GPS talk at Conn. Then I did some volunteer work at the Rhine.

Saturday morning the family and I puttered around the house. Around lunchtime, I brought the last of the donations I’d collected over to my neighbor, recruiting my neighbor for assistance. She seemed happy and settled in her new place.
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Another GPS talk

My recent list of commitments this week left out an important one: another GPS talk at Conn today! I met the class at 2:45, which was the time I was given. I got to the media center hearing “oh, there he is,” which made me suspect I was expected earlier.

I don’t know if there was a mix-up in time, the kids just had spring fever and I was keeping them from an extra recess, or I wasn’t as engaging speaker as before but I don’t think this talk went as well as the last. Not to say that it was bad, it just wasn’t as good as before.

I’m still very happy to have been invited and I will cherish my Conn guest speaker water bottle. It feels great to be in the classroom, if only for 45 minutes.

Bring back acoustics to the studio

I was poking around the Mailboat Records site this morning and enjoying the version of Margaritaville that Nadirah Shakoor sang in the [auto-playing!] Flash music of the site. It was recorded live and it sounds like it. The acoustics are very warm. You can hear the music bouncing off the walls.

It made me recognize that these acoustics are part of what I admire in the old Squirrel Nut Zippers’ Hot record. It was recorded in a house in New Orleans – and again, you can hear the musicians in the room. Same goes for this Jolly Boys songs I have. The stand-up bass sounds like it’s right inside your head. And the O Brother, Where Art Thou record wall full of this – it’s a great record.

Recording studios think they’re improving the sound when they dampen the acoustics so that all you hear is the source. But that’s not the way music is really played, or enjoyed. The lack of these acoustic details puts a barrier between the artist and the audience, saying “what you hear isn’t real – it’s plastic.” It’s the audio equivalent of the airbrushed pin-up: sure she’s cute but she’s not real.

I think artists and producers should make an effort to put more acoustics in their recordings. It’s only natural.

QEMU 0.10 out

I noticed today that two weeks ago a new release of QEMU came out: version 0.10.0. This the first new QEMU release in a year. Good to see that this free virtualization software is still alive, well, and better than ever.

Here’s the changelog for version 0.10.0:
version 0.10.0:

– TCG support (No longer requires GCC 3.x)
– Kernel Virtual Machine acceleration support
– BSD userspace emulation
– Bluetooth emulation and host passthrough support
– GDB XML register description support
– Intel e1000 emulation
– HPET emulation
– VirtIO paravirtual device support
– Marvell 88w8618 / MusicPal emulation
– Nokia N-series tablet emulation / OMAP2 processor emulation
– PCI hotplug support
– Live migration and new save/restore formats
– Curses display support
– qemu-nbd utility to mount supported block formats
– Altivec support in PPC emulation and new firmware (OpenBIOS)
– Multiple VNC clients are now supported
– TLS encryption is now supported in VNC
– MIPS Magnum R4000 machine (Hervé Poussineau)
– Braille support (Samuel Thibault)
– Freecom MusicPal system emulation (Jan Kiszka)
– OMAP242x and Nokia N800, N810 machines (Andrzej Zaborowski)
– EsounD audio driver (Frederick Reeve)
– Gravis Ultrasound GF1 sound card (Tibor “TS” Schütz)
– Many, many, bug fixes and new features