Surfing the Luminiferous Ether

It’s a long-held article of truth among frequent travelers that avoiding O’Hare in the winter is a good idea. Actually, it’s avoiding O’Hare period, since the summer brings nasty thunderstorms.

I, like a fool, have disregarded The Truth, and I am paying for it as I wait for my plane to arrive on a two-plus hour delay. How bad is it? Well, this snapshot of the American flight status boards should tell you. Yellow indications on the boards indicate delays. Of the six displays in the picture, the left five are for departures. 26 flights are departing on time, out of, oh, lots…

Once upon a time, a company called Harris produced a chipset called the PRISM. It was the chipset to use for building early 802.11 devices. Way back in 2000, I remember building the linux-wlan project driver on an ancient Pentium laptop to get the 802.11 card working. Back in those days, 802.11 was a Mbps standard, with the glimmer of an 11 Mbps “high speed” 802.11b in the distance.

(Interesting fact: “PRISM” was an acronym for the chip, which stood for “Programmable Radio in the ISM band.” ISM refers to the widely-used slice of spectrum around 2.4 GHz that all these devices use.)

Harris spun of the chip business as Intersil in February 2000, raising $500 million in what was at the time, the largest semiconductor IPO in history. Intersil chips were the chip to use. The venerable PRISM was succeeded by the PRISM-II, which added support for 802.11b. Intersil was flying high. As an example, in 2001, an analyst for thestreet.com wrote that you should ignore all of the brands you saw on 802.11 equipment (notably Apple, which had gained notice with the success of the AirPort access points). To bet on the future success of 802.11, he advised, buy Intersil stock:

Intersil is the enabler of the 802.11b revolution. Intersil’s Prism chipsets power more 802.11b networks than anyone else, and its technology is right out there on the bleeding edge. It is profitable, and Intersil is divesting itself of its slow-growth businesses, making it a pure play and developing a strong balance sheet at the same time.

In July 2003, Intersil sold its wireless LAN business to GlobespanVirata for about $350 million. A few months later in November 2003, Conexant systems then acquired the wireless LAN chip business through a $970 million acquisition of GlobespanVirata.

Last week, Conexant’s fourth quarter financial results press release announced the end of the line for the Prism:

Effective immediately, Conexant is discontinuing further investment in standalone wireless networking product development and will eliminate approximately 140 positions worldwide. Beginning in the second quarter of fiscal 2008, the company expects these actions to save approximately $5 million in quarterly operating expenses. The company plans to maintain the staffing levels required to support existing wireless networking customers with current solutions. Conexant’s remaining wireless employees will join the company’s Broadband Access organization and support DSL gateways that incorporate wireless connectivity.

The Prism chips have long been supplanted by newer vendors like Atheros, Intel, and Broadcom, but I still feel a little bit misty-eyed at the end of the era. It was an early Prism radio that inspired me to get involved in 802.11, and their early support of open source drivers like linux-wlan made them the nexus of experimentation on Linux until other vendors decided to get with the program.

Last night, shortly after 8 pm, there was an earthquake near San Jose. I’d just made it home after a particularly ugly BART delay, due to an apparent suicide at Powell Street station around 6 pm:

BART’s Powell Street station in San Francisco was reopened just before 8 p.m. tonight after authories shut it down for two hours to investigate a death on the tracks.

Up in San Francisco, the quake was fairly mild. I mistook the shaking for vehicles on the street at first, until I realized there was no noise and the shaking was continuing for much longer than I expected.

I was the first to fill out the shaking report from my ZIP code in San Francisco. (At the time I write this, there are now almost 250 reports.) Magnitude is an important measurement of earthquakes, but the Mercalli intensity scale is a more useful answer to the “how did it feel?” question. In the USGS map, brighter colors (yellow/orange/red) correspond to higher intensities:

(Click through for a full map with the color code.)

Most of the Bay Area reported intensity III (”Slight”), described as: “Felt quite noticeably by persons indoors, especially on the upper floors of buildings. Many do not recognize it as an earthquake. Standing motor cars may rock slightly. Vibration similar to the passing of a truck. Duration estimated.” In other words, it’s only slightly more than a non-event. Pay no attention to the breathless media news briefs squeezed into the gaps between TV shows.

One of the reasons why I’ve delayed buying a big-screen TV is trying to figure out how to store it. I’ve yet to find a way to store a big-screen TV that meets my requirements:

1. Material and construction. No metal-and-glass here in earthquake country! The furniture should be made of wood. I’d strongly prefer that it not be a particle-board veneer, but that’s because most veneers are cheap. A high-quality real wood veneer, as opposed to a “wood-esque” plastic coating might work. Wall-mount brackets are a strong plus near to the Pacific Subduction Zone, too.
2. Color. If we’re talking wood, I like dark colors. A deep red cherry stain is ideal, but that seems impossible unless I build the thing myself and pick out the stain color.
3. Doors. It’d be nice to be able to close the doors on the TV and hide it from the world. Even with the existing small (20 inch!) set, it feels like the room is built around it. That feeling is only going to be worse with a large set.
4. TV Size. I keep dancing around which TV to get, but I’m leaning towards the Sony SXRD line. I don’t need the ninja-rific space-savings of LCD or plasma, so I’d rather get an RPTV at half the price. In the Sony SXRD lineup, there are variety of TVs available in the 50″ to 60″ range. As much as I’d like to get an XBR-series TV, the only one in the current model lineup is a 70″ TV, set to come out next spring. I’m going to draw the line at a TV that has a diagonal that is almost my size. (I am 74 inches tall.) There’s a minor constraint here, in that the TV shelf needs to support about 80 pounds and have a shelf depth of about 16 inches, but most furniture easily accomodates that.
5. Home Theater and Audio/Visual component size. This seems to be the biggest problem I have. Two of my components require a very deep shelf of about twenty inches, and they’re both vital components. One is the Yamaha A/V receiver, and the other is a home theater PC running MythTV. If they were unimportant components, I’d let it go and consider using a small rack of components to the side of the TV. However, the receiver is the hub of the system, and it’s pretty rare to use the TV without pulling the signal from the MythTV machine (whether live TV, time-shifted HDTV recordings, or DVDs). Both of the problematic components need to be accomodated in my storage unit.
6. Reasonable ventilation. Stereo components hate heat. Computers hate it even worse. If the MythTV computer is getting stored in an enclosure, it’s going to have to stay ventilated to avoid disk failure. (Thankfully, I can use lm_sensors to monitor temperatures.)
7. Cost. Oh, and in addition to being demanding on what I want, I don’t want to pay a lot, either. Preferably, it doesn’t cost more than the TV that it’s holding. Between the changes in TV, and the changes in video technology, I can’t feel comfortable buying a really expensive piece of furniture that will hold today’s technology. Any TV furniture that’s more than a few years old is great for 4:3 aspect ratio TVs, but I find that nearly everything I watch these days is letterboxed to 16:9. I wouldn’t want to bet on technology staying the same, so I’d like to feel comfortable replacing it.

This blog is brought to you today by the word pleonasm.

It’s a fancy word that refers to redundant words in an expression. I’ve always been annoyed by the phrase “NIC card,” since the acronym “NIC” stands for “network interface card.” Technically, when you say “NIC card,” you’re saying “network interface card card,” and that just makes you sound silly.

After my recent visit to Los Angeles, a colleague pointed out that referring to “the La Brea Tar Pits” is even worse, since “la brea” means “the tar” in Spanish; technically, “the La Brea Tar Pits” translates as “the the tar tar pits.” Somehow, it doesn’t seem as silly when the phrase is a mix of different languages, though.

A couple of months ago, I purchased a set of eneloop low-discharge rechargeable batteries for use in my programmable remote control. On August 19, I installed the first pack of four, promising to follow up when they needed replacement. I finally needed to do so last Thursday, for a lifetime of one day shy of two months.

The batteries that I installed were not fully charged. I pulled them directly from the packaging as they arrived at the house, and had whatever charge they had from the factory. (eneloops are shipped to retailers fully charged because they have such a low self-discharge rate.) I’ll continue to monitor my experiences and post further updates as I continue to gain experience.

I was in Helsinki for an IEEE ad hoc meeting recently. On my last night in Helsinki, I went out for a walk after night, and took this picture of the statue of Kaarlo Juho Ståhlberg, the first President of Finland, in front of the Eduskuntatalo (house of the Finnish Parliament).

What I found remarkable about the experience is that the statue is only the width of a driveway across from the front steps of the building. I pulled out my tripod and proceeded to fiddle with my camera to set everything up. Nobody approached me and told me that photography was forbidden, or that mysterious security rules dictated that I move along, even though I was only a few meters from the entrance to the building. The parliament may not have been in session, but I can’t imagine that I’d be allowed to set up my tripod anywhere I wanted to on the U.S. Capitol grounds.

More photos from Helsinki are in the Helsinki gallery here.

Since September, I’ve been traveling a lot and posting has been light. A few days ago, I logged in to the American web site, and I was greeted with a new elite status:

(This month, I also re-gained elite status on United, due to a two-week period where I took four trans-Pacific flights.)

I’ve never been an Executive Platinum before. I’ve had lousy luck on using first-class upgrades most of the year, so I’m curious to see if my new status helps out my low percentage.

As a result of the Zap2It Labs shutdown, I recently had to upgrade my MythTV installation from 0.20.1 to 0.20.2.

Graciously, Zap2It Labs was scheduled to shut down on September 1, but they extended guide data past that date. For a few days after the shutdown, it was possible to fetch the full 14 days of upcoming data. Once the data service was deactivated, no more data was put into the database and the amount of remaining data dwindled. As I stared at the MythTV status screen, it was obvious that my schedule data would run out during an upcoming trip:

(Furthermore, the new TV season starts in late September, so I’d also miss all the season openers on the week of the September 24!)

I’d been delaying the upgrade because Gentoo’s Portage system wanted to upgrade from MySQL version 4 to MySQL version 5. The database upgrade seemed like it had high potential to go wrong, and would not add obvious functionality to MythTV. I’d already experienced one crash that took out the database, and it was painful enough to recover from that.

However, my hand was forced by the Zap2It shutdown. I was out of the country attending an IEEE ad hoc meeting, and I didn’t want to do the upgrade remotely. Fortunately, Zap2It extended listing data beyond their September 1 shutdown date, so I had a few days grace period after returning home.

I wasn’t concerned about the switchover to SchedulesDirect within MythTV, which was described as drop-dead simple everywhere. It was getting there.

MySQL upgrade. Thankfully, I heeded the advice to back up the database before starting. The upgrade process doesn’t convert over the data, and it turned out to be much simpler just to delete the existing database, install MySQL 5 from scratch, and have MythTV set up the new database.

When I attempted to restore the database, I received the following error message:

That’s in part because the default character set needs to be configured on the database. What happened is that the table definition for the “people” table uses the name as a primary key, and it doesn’t allocate enough space for the table unless you restrict the character set that field is stored in.

However, when I attempted to restore the database from my backup snapshot, I received another error message:

The error was caused by having two entries with the same text value:

At first, I tried removing the name “Monika Sanchez” from the database, but as it turns out, there are lots of duplicate spelling. The easiest thing to do is to not restore the people table.