Occasionally Pondered

Rawhide!

2011-11-02T03:02:00.000-07:00

This blog is movin', new blog is at http://blog.computerjew.com/

(Update: Changed to a more friendly "subdomain" domain, the old address will still get you there.)

Baruch Dyan HaEmes

2011-09-19T16:55:00.000-07:00

My grandmother, Goldie Levine (Golda bas Avram A"H) just passed away. Baruch Dyan HaEmes. She was like a third parent to me. When I was in the hospital, she constantly asked about my well being, and when I failed out of college, she told my parents that they must give me a second chance and convinced them to do so. (I failed again, but it wasn't at all her fault.) Also, when I was a child, I spent a few summers with her in South Carolina, where she passed away at the age of 92 just a few days short of her husband's (A"H) yahrtzeit.

Sarah Palin - goes against big corporate America?!

2011-09-15T16:50:00.000-07:00

News Flash: Sarah Palin says something intellegent for a change.

Who's fault was the near default? Or, the Gambling House's advantage.

2011-08-10T18:10:00.000-07:00

This is how I see it, it was both Obama's and the House's fault, but primarily Obama's. It was not because of his having bad policies in the matter, but in his having very poor negotiation skills.

Obama held the debt ceiling limit negotiations to some extent for no reason, because he gave in almost completely to Boehner anyway. If he was going to do that, he shouldn't have contributed to making the crisis happen and should have gave in to Boehner at the beginning before it reached a crisis point, as the Speaker had offered him a similar deal to what we wound up with, minus some tea party stuff, earlier anyway - and he could have taken it with weeks to go.

Of course, the House could have given in to the President's demands, and likewise not delayed the debt ceiling limit, but why should they, when he was going to give in anyway?

Hindsight is 20-20, but if Obama wasn't, unlike Clinton with his government shutdown, actually willing to call the House's bluff, he shouldn't have gone to the gambling House in the first place. He should have instead chosen to surrender - on much better terms, at an earlier stage of the process.

Instead he held out for a "balanced package" that would never materialize for him and the Senate Democrat's slim majority he had behind it, which ended up causing the essentially wasted brinksmanship on the part of Obama, and the "gambling" House (gambling that Obama wouldn't, unlike Clinton, call their bluff) that led to the markets getting nervous.

It was the House's fault too, for also playing (successfully) at brinksmanship, but Obama chose to play politics when he didn't have a winning hand, he had the opportunity to do otherwise. Again, Boehnor and McConnell essentially got the same thing they offered earlier, plus even more concessions then they'd asked for, because the closer it got to the brink, the more sway the tea party got.

It would have been better for Obama, and even for the Democrats though perhaps politically they wouldn't have liked him giving in earlier, if he hadn't insisted on "not taking yes for an answer", as Boehnor somewhat cynically and inaccurately but on the whole correctly put it. (He ended up taking Boehnor's "yes" offer in the end anyway.)

He should have not tried to do the balanced approach thing - arguing over what, about 80 billion dollars annually (what 800 billion in cuts over a 10 year period means, not counting the smaller portion which is up to a committee that regardless of its composition will come up with smoke and mirrors for the remainder) - which is chump change on the Federal trillion-dollar annual level (that's thousands of billions, to put it in perspective, or tens of thousands of billions over a ten year period), but instead jeopardizing the faith people had in that trillion-dollar spending over whether there should be 10%, in the House plan that passed, or only slightly more of the budget, in Obama's failed proposals that included the admittedly balanced but unpassable taxation, cut over a ten year period! He, and the House, were playing high stakes poker for what in reality was low-stakes budget cuts.

Essentially, if you don't have a spine, and Obama didn't, you shouldn't play games with people who apparently did. Instead you should do what you did at the end, at the very start, quietly before the papers had gotten too excited, and saved everyone a lot of grief.

Of course, hindsight is 20-20. ;-)

Sony Security: Victim and Perpetrator.

2011-08-07T17:31:00.000-07:00

I just got a message saying "A child of yours has created an account for Clone Wars". Apparently someone harvested my email address and is doing who knows what on a multiplayer game MMORPG game for children. (A lot of this sort of thing is scam artists and gold sellers on an MMORPG.)

I called up Sony, concerned that someone might be using my email as their identity to do illegal/immoral acts on it, or even something like a child predator who I could get in trouble for, and they at first told me "don't worry, someone probably misspelled their email address (even though their "handle" looked suspiciously random, lots of numbers) . After some firmness on the phone with them, they said they'd cancel the account, and even sent me an email message confirming that the account was canceled.

Today, several days later, after being informed the account was closed by them, I just got another message from that game, saying "your child has selected the nickname "Anakain Lightsayber" Apparently Sony Online, so recently the victim of a security break-in, doesn't mind if their free2play MMO game for children is used by scammers / child predators / whatever using other people's email addresses. I wish I had a lawyer on-call so I could make it stop. I always suspected that all many MMO game companies cared about were subscriptions, and that's why gold sellers, botting, and scammers thrived on all but a few of them, This confirms that. Unfortunately, this means that Sony Online is being a party to identity theft, and other criminal activity perpetrated against children as well, instead of just a victim of it as the well-publicized break-in of Sony's lax security demonstrated recently.

HTC HD2 Mango Beta 1

2011-07-10T14:48:00.000-07:00

I installed a more recent version of this, and didn't choose the white wallpaper, but anyway... I figured this video was a lot more interesting than looking at my phone display a bunch of rectangles in a photo, and a lot less trouble than pulling out my own video camera. ;-)

Sardonic Salad: Anger Management

2011-07-10T14:25:00.000-07:00

Sardonic Salad: Anger Management

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Vi...

2011-07-01T02:16:00.000-07:00

I'm in!

2011-07-01T01:38:00.001-07:00

I just got accepted to Google+, in spite of my first reaction (Google has jumped the shark) I hope they eat Facebook's lunch, it's much more privacy friendly and absent a lot of Facebook annoyances.)

The Rabbi and the Paratroopers

2011-06-13T15:59:00.000-07:00

The Lubavitcher Rebbe On Faith, Part 1

2011-06-13T15:56:00.000-07:00

iCloud and Google Music Beta

2011-06-07T02:25:00.000-07:00

Music re-downloaded via iCloud to your iTunes library doesn't get detected by Google Music beta as it should and uploaded automatically, you have to go to the advanced menu and upload it manually. Coincidence?

No, its not really a HD7. :)

2011-05-18T10:07:00.001-07:00

WP7 NoDo

2011-05-18T10:07:00.000-07:00

Voila!

2011-05-18T10:01:00.000-07:00

Mod USB install from Linux

2011-05-18T10:00:00.000-07:00

"We Hacked it :)"

2011-05-18T09:57:00.000-07:00

Triple boot on PC

2011-05-18T09:54:00.000-07:00

Windows Phone 7 NoDo ROM on the HTC HD2 Walkthrough

2011-05-16T16:17:00.000-07:00

A new hack for the HD2! You know what this means, I'm probably going to try it out. (Although I love Android and will probably switch back, I'm running unofficial CyanogenMod7 nightlies (Gingerbread) now.)

New Ubuntu! Improved? I don't know, but here's Unity!

2011-05-09T14:44:00.000-07:00

I'm a Nanach (Soul Rebel) אני נ נח

2011-05-01T01:56:00.000-07:00

Burning the chametz

2011-04-18T07:44:00.001-07:00

Before Passover we burn the chametz.

Scripting News: Mel Gibson's career should be over

2011-04-12T02:35:00.000-07:00

Scripting News: Mel Gibson's career should be over

CyanogenMod 7 released

2011-04-11T23:10:00.000-07:00

The most popular open-source (and developed in an open fashion) version of Android had a major release recently, CyanogenMod 7, which is Gingerbread (Android 2.3). It should be noted that very few devices have been upgraded to Gingerbread so-far, so for some people this is the only way to run it. (The HTC HD2 of course doesn't run *any* version of Android officially, but it can run an unofficial version of CyanogenMod 7.)

Google Exodus

2011-04-05T13:15:00.000-07:00

Samsung does keylogging, but not on PCs, on smartphones.

2011-03-31T11:23:00.000-07:00

Samsung/Sprint Android phones have keylogger/screenlogger malware

A false story was circulating about PCs made by Samsung having keyloggers built-in, this story was false, but someone left a link to this XDA Developer's Forum post on one such article leading to this information about Samsung and Sprint putting "Carrier IQ" malware on their smartphones which shorten battery life and take away all your privacy.

Live web cam of Large Hadron Collider (LHD)

2011-03-23T02:27:00.000-07:00

Purim 5771 with Rav Shalom Arush

2011-03-23T02:18:00.000-07:00

סיבוב שערים ר"ח אדר ב | Circling The Jerusalem Temple Mount

2011-03-17T00:37:00.000-07:00

Ubuntu on HTC Touch Pro 2

2011-03-11T11:57:00.000-08:00

The good news is that even though it runs Android a bit worse, it runs Ubuntu much better - because it has a real keyboard and touch screen keyboard support for a capacitive screen is unsatisfactory in Ubuntu.

XDAndroid (HTC Touch Pro 2)

2011-03-09T17:05:00.000-08:00

DFT ROH Android NAND ROM testing

2011-03-09T15:52:00.000-08:00

HTC Touch Pro 2

2011-03-09T14:20:00.000-08:00

Glenn Beck says Google is formenting revolution

2011-02-23T08:05:00.001-08:00

A web page you might want to look at

Russia agrees...

Google likes my hacked HD2. :-)

2011-02-22T01:59:00.001-08:00

We don't only report bad news on this blog

2011-02-19T22:34:00.000-08:00

I just got off the phone with godaddy in order to transfer my domain to a different registrar (I switched it to my ISP's domain service, my ISP makes it simpler to manage the domains I serve through them, and now I can run servers on port 80 here, and it's free of charge with a pre-existing domain, and as far as I could tell, I continue to own my domain and can switch it over later if need-be, so this should save me some money.)

It only took a few minutes to get customer service, and they were very helpful in all the details of unlocking and telling it to send the authorization code my new registrar will need. Not a single time was I given a sales pitch, they were very courteous about losing my business. :-) I'll consider them again if I need services they provide, due to the high quality of customer service I got.

OTH AbrahamsDNA

2011-02-13T17:48:00.000-08:00

Mubarak: "What does the Lubavitcher Rebbe want from me?"

2011-02-10T15:02:00.000-08:00

Testing

2011-02-06T00:30:00.001-08:00

Testing photo feature for Blogger app.

Testing Blogger app

2011-02-06T00:27:00.001-08:00

Testing official Google Blogger app.

Microsoft X-Box Live Gold digging

2011-01-27T17:54:00.000-08:00

Microsoft X-Box Live Gold is quite easy to activate, just click on your xbox or on their website and fill in a few details. It is quite hard to de-activate, unlike Blizzard and many other subscription-model game companies, you can't de-activate it online, and auto-renewal is the only choice you have so if you don't want to keep paying for it you have to find out their phone number, buried in their support website, and call them up and talk to a representative to deactivate it.

I was placed on hold for 20 minutes, then went through a bunch of baloney (the guy said I wasn't signed up for auto-renewal at first, then somehow figured out I was, as the website claimed) for another 20 minutes before I could deactivate. I am very displeased with Microsoft, a multi-billion dollar corporation with cash reserves that dwarf the GNP of some medium-sized nations, is treating it's customers like some cheap subscription-scam fly-by-night business. I am not a happy camper.

Update: although their website (xbox.com) and the phone conversation I had claim that I am no longer subscribed, I just got billed for another month according to my bank. I am extremely angry, and recommend that anyone get *any* console other than an xbox 360 because of Microsoft's behavior.

Update 2: it turns out their "subscription date", and their "billing date" are two different things. Doesn't change my advice though, the fact that they make you go through all of this to cancel auto-renewal is enough for that.

Snow Day

2010-12-27T05:05:00.000-08:00

Gingerbread Android on HTC HD2

2010-12-24T09:20:00.000-08:00

My HTC HD2 running Windows 95

2010-12-22T05:46:00.001-08:00

Windows 95 Running on a HTC HD2

2010-12-20T15:16:00.000-08:00

Why Linux is not ready for the desktop

2010-12-02T19:55:00.000-08:00

Read this article and figure out why. Note to Ubuntu fans, he tried it too, it looks like really for his hardware, anything is a mess, and what he described he needed to do to get Debian "optimized" to run flash and mp3s is beyond normal users and is par for the course for Linux, who's distributors seem to think that GNU gnash (open source flash) and ogg files should be good enough for anyone.

I should note the article writer doesn't seem to see anything wrong with his user experience, and is obviously a Linux user who enjoys it. :-) There is something fun about having a computer that doesn't work and getting it to work, then there is the fun of having a computer that just works. ;-)

Apple store down - wonder what's in-store.

2010-11-30T21:49:00.000-08:00

Rabbi Nachman Meuman Breslov Israel 2

2010-11-29T04:37:00.000-08:00

Rabbi Nachman Meuman Breslov Israel 1

2010-11-29T04:36:00.000-08:00

Nigun "Yemin HaShem" with the Rebbe

2010-11-21T18:06:00.000-08:00

The Rebbe zy"a cries in this video!

Rabbi Ya'akov Meir Schechter

2010-11-21T07:29:00.000-08:00

Latest computer setup

2010-11-21T07:27:00.000-08:00

Clues suggest Stuxnet Virus was built for subtle nuclear sabotage

2010-11-16T07:14:00.000-08:00

Clues suggest Stuxnet Virus was built for subtle nuclear sabotage

Who thought malware would be this sophisticated in the way it is targeting the Iranian nuclear program? You can see divine providence at work, in a computer virus!

flashing!

2010-11-08T23:54:00.000-08:00

The Lubavitcher Rebbe: International Mission

2010-11-07T06:15:00.000-08:00

2010-11-04T15:44:00.001-07:00

Midrash Rabba (Artscroll)

2010-10-19T18:08:00.000-07:00

This is the first volume published of what will be a 16 volume set. (By comparison, the Artscroll Talmud is over 50 volumes, though each are somewhat thinner than this one.)

The Lubavitcher Rebbe: Schools or Jails

2010-10-17T21:49:00.000-07:00

Lubavitcher Rebbe on the Native Americans and Columbus

2010-10-14T20:00:00.001-07:00

Ubuntu 10.10 installing!

2010-10-10T05:16:00.001-07:00

HTC HD2 Android Benchmark

2010-09-27T18:11:00.001-07:00

HaRav Chaim Kanievsky Shlita reciting Krias Shma by the Kosel - Chol HaM...

2010-09-27T14:41:00.000-07:00

Birchas Kohanim at the Kosel - Chol HaMoed Sukkos 5771

2010-09-27T04:44:00.000-07:00

הרב אלישיב בשמחת בית השואבה - וידאו נייעס

2010-09-27T04:28:00.000-07:00

HTC HD2 running Android and a cooked ROM, both using HTC Sense

2010-09-21T08:58:00.000-07:00

Android booting


Froyo with HTC Sense


Here is the home screen


Booting cooked ROM


More booting

WinMo home screen (almost identical to stock, I'm not big on customizing)

HTC HD2 experiment

2010-09-19T11:31:00.000-07:00

As some of my readers know, I have now a used but mint condition HTC HD2 that runs Windows Mobile usually, that I have gotten to boot Android. It has *very* similar hardware to the HTC Desire and to the Nexus One, both Android phones which have a variety of stock and custom ROM options, so it runs a variety of forms of Android. (I'm running Shu8craft, a version of Cyanogenmod, at the moment. It can also run "normal" ROMs with either vanilla or with vendor mods like HTC's Sense, and can run Froyo 2.2 as well.)

Anyhow, I'm doing an experiment to see how long the battery lasts, it's been on since 6:00 AM, and now is 2:18PM with about 40% battery left. Now, this isn't as good as Windows Mobile, which lasts close to 48 hours, but it looks like one can more or less run Android while away for 8 hours or so, easily, which is something I could barely do with a Cliq XT, by turning off continuous data, for example, and the Palm Pre also had a similarly short battery life. I've played a little Angry Birds Lite free beta, and taken two phone calls, email, and done a little bit of web browsing and RSS reading. (It has NewsRoom available, a reader I was very happy with on the Palm Pre.), nothing heavy duty like playing lots of videos or hour-long phone calls, but pretty typical usage.

It looks like I'll have quite practical usage of Android on this device, at least, until it kills my class 10 microSD card, but at $18 or so, I can get another class 6 or better microSD card for running it (I don't know how long it would last, I'd guess for months, maybe even a year or two, I don't know what the wear cycle is on a modern microSD card), and since everything's, for good or bad, on the cloud with Android, quickly restore all my data to exactly where I left off. Of course, they're working on NAND (putting it on the device to boot), but I'm waiting until they have that working good, it currently is only in the very early stages. (A lot of the interface to the device is via the dual booter and the drivers of Windows Mobile, that can be surmounted though, like I said, the hardware is very similar to Android devices, unlike some other HTC Windows Mobile phones, some of which *do* have NAND already!)

Windows stuck at rebooting after MS installer fails

2010-09-05T13:54:00.001-07:00

Screen shot 2010-08-31 at 5.55.03 PM

2010-08-31T15:03:00.001-07:00

Jewish beans!

2010-08-26T23:23:00.001-07:00

My Cliq XT is rooted!

2010-08-26T19:07:00.001-07:00

A Month to Prepare

2010-08-24T22:40:00.000-07:00

Second update in two days

2010-08-24T14:14:00.001-07:00

This comes after getting an update for graphics on Snow Leopard....

New book

2010-08-03T19:12:00.001-07:00

Hello Android, a book on programing Android.

Cherry Dr Pepper

2010-08-03T18:03:00.001-07:00

Yum

Street Trance from Israel

2010-07-25T19:37:00.000-07:00

Scripting News: Apple as Captain Queeg

2010-07-25T08:26:00.000-07:00

Dave Winer called this one right, Apple makes themselves look petty by making a video about the latest competition dropping bars too. The press conference was enough, we get the point, all phones suck.

Trailer for Paul Mazursky's documentary Yippee

2010-07-25T05:53:00.000-07:00

Borsht

2010-07-22T00:38:00.001-07:00

Borsht, fresh from the jar.

Testing pixelpipe and swiftkey beta simultaneously.

2010-07-21T23:59:00.001-07:00

First App

2010-07-12T18:58:00.001-07:00

First application, really just a sample to help me get used to the SDK.

Hello, Android!

Hello world app running on my phone (didn't bother putting it in the emulator, this is a screen shot of my phone running it.)

Default Motoblur central home screen

2010-07-12T18:17:00.001-07:00

Just a screenshot of my phone, as I wrote on my blog before, you've got to fire up the SDK to do it.

Satmar Rebbitzen levaya

2010-07-07T12:25:00.000-07:00

Features on Android

2010-07-05T14:41:00.000-07:00

In a public conversation with a Google engineer on the Freenode #android channel, they said the current limitations on screenshots (you have to fire up the debugger, and capture it while it's plugged into the computer with USB) are here to stay. So no more blogging about what's on my Android screen and the like, like I did with the Pre, unless I have my camera handy.

When asked the reason why, he claimed that it was a security issue - especially for replacement screen shot makers, but even if it were built into the OS. I find that latter objection rather unlikely, because iPhone and the Pre manage to have this feature, yet neither has more malware than Android as a result. I'm not an expert on the subject of mobile security, but I'm sure Apple and Palm have implemented it in such a way that it's safe, and if you have access to certain levels of OS functionality outside of your own process space, it's going to be game-over anyway. Another objection given was that the hardware is different from 'droid to 'droid for 3D. Well, just don't have 3d program screen shots if that's impractical, I'd really like my screen shots for themes and to give folks an idea of the capabilitities of Android. This is also free publicity, I shouldn't have to tether it via USB and run the debugger with the SDK to do it, when the iPhone does it with a simple button click sequence and the Pre with a single hot-key command. I don't understand why the Google folks have to be so stubborn about this feature, apps don't have access outside of their own process space anyway, they're sandboxed, it's not so hard to make this secure from what little I know.

New blog design

2010-06-27T17:05:00.000-07:00

Inspired by my friend HG at Geek Drivel, I decided to use a different theme. Hopefully it will work smooth. :-)

new phone

2010-06-27T17:02:00.000-07:00

I'm getting a Motorola Cliq XT, an inexpensive Android phone with some interesting features for a blogging enthusiast. The link to get one on T-mobile is on the right, but you can get whatever you want from that link I think and it'll be credited to my referal - or use the handy search box as usual. More on my new mobile ~~computer~~, er, phone as things develop. :-) (You'll see more photoblogs again as it has a 5 megapixel camera! Not bad for a free phone, eh?)

Three OSs at once

2010-06-26T22:39:00.001-07:00

Windows, Linux (Ubuntu) and OS X in Unity mode

You really don't want me to remove MS Office from my Mac, do you

2010-06-20T00:43:00.001-07:00

it's been at least 10 minutes like this, every other Mac app either has an uninstall app, or can be simply dragged to the garbage. MS Office:Mac instead thrashes your entire hard drive filesystems looking for traces of itself.

upgraded!

2010-06-16T17:58:00.001-07:00

After a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, I upgraded my Hackintosh to 10.6.4!

Blackberry Security

2010-06-06T21:21:00.001-07:00

A picture of how BB can keep apps from doing nasty stuff like the recent WinMo malware incident.

Blackberry Sync on OS X

2010-06-06T20:02:00.001-07:00

Syncing everything with OS X, including Google thanks to Spanning Sync http://spanningsync.com?r=WPU679 ($5 off link!)

iPad Bait and Switch — No More Unlimited Data Plan

2010-06-02T05:53:00.000-07:00

iPad Bait and Switch — No More Unlimited Data Plan

Apple also removed the ability to purchase the iPad from the online store.

The second time Windows needed validation!

2010-05-30T17:49:00.001-07:00

This is the second time Microsoft has made me jump through hoops to verify Windows 7!!

MacBook upgraded

2010-05-20T23:10:00.000-07:00

Apple quietly upgraded the MacBook White.

It now boasts a CPU speed bump and better nVidia graphics than before.

Israeli Coca-Cola

2010-05-13T19:08:00.001-07:00

Lots of the food at the kosher supermarket's imported.

Cat wallpaper

2010-05-09T21:39:00.001-07:00

I ordinarily don't like cats, but this is neat!

Volcano wallpaper on my Pre

2010-05-01T21:25:00.001-07:00

Eyak... You know, the volcano

Cherry Dr Pepper

2010-05-01T20:57:00.001-07:00

They were out of regular but had this! Yum...

Ubuntu 10.04 makes my eyes bleed, scares small children

2010-04-29T16:48:00.000-07:00

Ubuntu, I'm sorry, but you make my eyes bleed. ;-)

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : We are removing Flash support from OS X

2010-04-29T16:26:00.000-07:00

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : We are removing Flash support from OS X

Haha! If only if this were the case. ;-)

Ubuntu 10.04

2010-04-29T13:56:00.000-07:00

Installing Ubuntu 10.04, released today!