The Substantially Similar Weblog

I just spent about an hour-and-a-half trying to find a monitor cable. What I wanted was a 10-foot DB15 male to HDDB15 male cable. DB15 is the old “low density” (two rows) monitor connector used on old Mac monitors. HDDB15 is the newer “high density” (three rows) monitor connector used for PC VGA monitors. I found lots of adapters, but no cables that had the DB15M-HDDB15M ends.

I have this very old gigantic monitor (weighs about 70 pounds) that actually has both the HDDB15F and DB15F ports; however, the HDDB15F port doesn’t seem to work, so I’m stuck with the DB15F port. I was using an adapter/cable combination, but because the set screws in the back of the monitor are broken, it kept falling out and I couldn’t figure out a way to keep it in—I tried tape, string, etc.. So I thought a single cable would be easier to keep from falling out.

I’ve discovered in this experience is that, despite the huge variety of offerings from pricewatch and froogle, there really is only a small set of products out there, and everyone is offering the same thing, albeit at different prices. I suppose what I really need is a custom cable, since what I want doesn’t appear to exist.

In any case, I ended up settling for a monitor/adapter combination where the adapter would be on the computer end rather the monitor end, hopefully making it easier to get the cable to stay into the monitor.

This is the kind of thing the web is supposed to make easier (Radio Shack certainly doesn’t have this item!). But I couldn’t find any cable website where I could just type in the names of the two ends of the cable and the length I wanted. That would have saved me a couple of hours.

Donald Knuth was featured on a National Public Radio story this morning, Donald Knuth, Founding Artist of Computer Science. For all his brilliance, I think Knuth does a decent job of avoiding the limelight. It’s an interesting interview and I’m happy that many people who had never heard of the guy (or thought about the importance of hyphenation and typesetting) have been exposed to something new.

NPR is good that way: although much of their content is similar albeit more in depth than commercial radio news, they often throw in these important but not “immediately” topical stories.

NPR also suffers from a similar problem to the Free Software movement: figuring out a way to make money without limiting access to content or allowing advertisers to control the product. Of course, both NPR and Free Software do, in fact, make a lot of money, but with NPR it’s a particularly painful process. WBUR, one of several Boston Area public radio stations, seems to be in perpetual pledge drive mode. If they’re not doing a pledge drive currently, they’re running frequent on-air announcements encouraging people to donate before the next pledge drive so that the drive can be shortened.

Growing up in Vermont, I remember WVPR having one or two pledge drives a year—WBUR seems to have one every month. I realize that creating news has gotten expensive, especially with correspondents permanently stationed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and throughout the world, but there has got to be a better way to do this. It would be nice if NPR had a large enough foundation that it could largely subsist off investment income — but this is probably a long way in the future.

This might also be a good time to remind people to use email and not e-mail. Knuth has a great explanation: Email (let’s drop the hypen). It’s a bit ironic that Knuth is the best authority on the proper way to write “email,” since he himself abandoned the medium in 1990 (he writes, “I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.”). I hope it’s only a matter of time until the hyphenators see the folly of their ways, and email becomes the standard.

I don’t know if this (5.6M QuickTime MOV) is making the rounds of the blogosphere, but it should.

Okay, I lied. One more blog entry—but only because the honeymoon hasn’t started yet.

We’re currently driving down Route 89 in New Hampshire on the way to our wedding in Vermont, with our friends (Greg, Dylan, Ken, Nirmal, and Steve—all five GNU/Linux users) in the car behind us. When we stopped at the New Hampshire liquor store (famous for cheap, tax free alcohol), we decided to set up an ad hoc WiFi network between the cars with essid ‘wedding’. I had just copied my 60 gigabytes or so of music to my laptop for the trip, so now as we drive up Route 89 I’ve set up a server so they can listen to whatever interests them.

And this area doesn’t even get cell phone service, so the only way we can communicate between the cars is SMTP. Actually, it turns out it was more efficient to set up an ssh account for the other car on my laptop so we can use ytalk locally on my laptop.

Are there any WiFi gurus reading this? I’ve been banging my head against a problem for a couple of weeks now to no avail.

The short story is that my SMC 2632W V3 can see my WLAN perfectly; my Xircom CWE-1100· (Cisco 340 chipset) is connecting to a neighboring WLAN which (from the essid) appears to be quite far away. I’ve tried numerous network scanners (including kismet, airtraf, wavemon) and the local WLAN just doesn’t show up on the Xircom card. I have two of the Xircom cards, and they both behave identically. My local wireless access point is a USR8054 (actually a router, but set to run in access point only mode). I’m using the airo_cs Linux driver for the Xircom card, which seems to communicate fine with the device.

I’ve posted a more detailed description of my problem on debian-laptop·, as well as a request for help to linux-elitists· and a newsgroup posting on comp.networks just for good measure. I also contacted tech support at Xircom (now Intel) and USR and have not received any helpful advice from them.

Please send tips or pointers to other resources! I’d like to get these cards working and have run out of ideas. See my debian-laptop posting· for a more complete run down of my problem.

I often have questions that don’t really belong in any particular forum and that aren’t readily answered by googling. I’ve decided to try fishing for answers in my weblog, to see if any of you have ideas.

So my first question is: has anyone found a method to stop the tabs at the end of CAT5 network cable from breaking? I carry a network cable with me everywhere, and inevitably the tabs break off every month or two from getting pushed the wrong way or simple wear and tear. It’s not that the cables are that expensive, but it just seems silly to keep going through them like this. So I’m wondering if anyone has come up with a brilliant home remedy to fix this problem.

If you don’t have a solution, you could at least sympathize with me if you also experience this problem.

Cardea· looks like a really cool invention. It’s a three-armed robot with a Segway Human Transporter· for a foot. It’s an MIT AI Lab project·—see the Project Page·. I mention it here—(1) because it looks pretty nifty, but (2) it’s a good reminder of the innovation that occurs in academic institutions, where — arguably — the typical intellectual property ownership incentive to create is at least limited. I’m wondering if the device is ever released whether there will be patent problems—will Cardea have to license the Segway from Dean Kamen·?

Incidentally, the Dean Kamen info page includes this clever little Q & A:

How do I contact Dean Kamen directly?
Unfortunately you cannot contact Dean directly.

(this entry also marks the birth of a new weblog topic, technology)