Heading East, or Maybe West: Going to Malaysia

So this month I need to go to Kuala Lumpur, capital of Malaysia. I will be delivering the keynote at a conference on enterprise [information system] security. I've been there before, about 7 years ago. Back then I was living right next to LAX (right next, like the first flight of the day was my wake-up call). So getting to KL was fairly simple. Fly LA to Singapore or Taiwan and then a short hop on to KL. But getting there from Florida poses an interesting question: Fly East or West?

My final decision came down to dollars and sense. The lowest fare from Jacksonville was out via JFK, then Korean Air to Seoul, thence to KL. Return is going to be China Air to Taipei thence to LAX and JAX. All are Delta code-share and so I will rack up some nice SkyMiles. But, and it could be a sore but, the layovers are loooong, particularly on the way out. So stand by for tips on how to kill 8 hours in JFK and Incheon, Seoul.

Also stand by for photos of KL, famous for the Petronas Towers and other impressive urban architecture. Last time I was there I killed a whole afternoon in the galleria-style mall in the base of the towers. Mainly people watching. And there are plenty to watch--24 million in a country not much bigger than New Mexico (according to the CIA).

Ink Jet Printer Cartridge Rip-Off? Brother 3820CN won't print without removing cartridge that still has ink

I was going to write something nice about Brother recently because I continue to find their 3820CN to be an eminently useful machine. It makes good copies and does printing, scanning, and faxing over my home network. It has a very reliable paper feed which is unusual at this price point. Furthermore, Brother recently repaired my 3820CN free of charge even though it was, strictly speaking, out of warranty. However, something happened today that needs to be addressed.

The control panel told me the Cyan cartridge was empty (the printer has cartridges for Black, Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow). I took the Cyan cartridge out and found it was not empty. I put it back in but could not get the machine to accept that there was still ink to be used up. This means I paid for ink that was not used. Furthermore, when any one of the four cartridges is empty the 3820CN will not print. It won't even print in black, as far as I can tell, if a color cartridge is reported to be empty. This means faxing is impaired because the fax confirmation will not print (even though it is a black and white document).

Now, I am not accusing Brother of anything, not yet. I am prepared to think this was an isolated incident, not a devious corporate plot to sell more ink. I have used Brother printers since 1982 (yep, way back in the good ole daisy wheel days). I will hold off any sort of judgment until I get a response to the letter I am sending them. But I am blogging what happened in case anyone else has had the same problem. Please let me know.

Meanwhile I am sending the 'not empty' cartridge to Brother to ask for a refund. And I will update this post with some pictures as soon as I can.

Hegel's Aesthetics: A handy way of looking at things

I have long been an admirer of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the German philosopher (1770-1831). Like another German philosopher, Nietzsche, Hegel has tended to suffer by association. This is a pity because Hegal has a lot to teach us about art.

Whereas Nietzsche was [quite unfairly in my opinion] tainted by the admiration of the Nazis, Hegel was over-shadowed by Karl Marx--a much less perceptive thinker, IMHO--who drew on Hegelian concepts to lay the groundwork for the dialectical materialism of Lenin and that whole mess.

So Hegel deserves, I humbly suggest, serious reconsideration. Some of his thoughts and interests were very modern. He was very interested in why people think the way they do, why they hold certain beliefs , which have tended to change over time, and why they behave in certain ways, which also evolve over time (although he died the same year Darwin graduated from Cambridge and so never knew of the latter's theory of evolution).

In short Hegel was interested in explaining observed phenomena, so in some ways he was a very practical philosopher, although you don't really get that when you open up something like Phenomenology of Mind, with its dense prose and page long paragraphs.

One of the most useful concepts that I have drawn from Hegel is that of genuine and ersatz manifestations of the same phenomenon which tend to reinforce, not diminish the importance of the phenomenon. Take the modern obsession with the lives of other people. The latter half of the twentieth century was a golden age of biography. Some truly great biographies were written, genuine works of art. At the same time we saw the rise of People magazine and lower-brow populist knock-offs. In trying to understand what is happening to the human race, some philosophers might ignore populist or crass manifestations of what are, when you scratch the surface, the same yearnings as you find reflect in more serious works of art.

But to Hegel they were both of interest. The existence of the same yearnings in different forms only heightened the importance of spelling out those yearnings, in this case the desire to understand how other people live their lives, something that fascinates us because we somehow sense that the way we live our own lives is a work in progress, but a body of work nonetheless. My own interpretation of Hegel, and my own belief, is that our lives are works of art and we are hungry to know how other artists are doing.

Piss-tec? No, it's true, Mercedes E320 diesel uses urea

This one snuck up on me until I saw an ad for it in the Florida Times Union.

It's a diesel sedan that gets 37 mpg on the highway but can still do 0-60 in under 7 seconds. It can meet ultra low emissions standards by using urea: "For more aggressive emissions aftertreatment, a BLUETEC system can move up an AdBlue injection system. A water-based urea solution, AdBlue is carried in its own small tank and metered into the exhaust in minute quantities..." Check out the details here and at the Daimler Chrysler site (and look for a future Jeep to use the same technology--I'm saving up already).
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Suicide is Painless? Ads need many changes...

I am by no means the first blogger to highlight the absurdity of commercial use of popular music out of context or toned town.

Probably the most glaring example is Royal Caribbean Cruise Line's use of Iggy Pop's "Lust For Life". The tune is there, big and bold, but the lyrics skip from "Here comes Johnny Yen again" to "With his lust for life" and thus bypass "With the liquor and drugs, And the flesh machine, He's gonna do another strip-tease...Well I am just a modern guy, Of course I've had it in the ear before, 'Cause of a lust for life." The whole thing is laid out nicely at Dick Mac's blog.

The incongruity has had a lot of people who respect Iggy's music outraged, amused, bewildered, and more (on the other hand it may have turned some folks on to Iggy, which would be a good thing). Still it was hard for some to accept the punk counter-culture subverted by commercial interests. But this is nothing new. The sixties were not over before the free love vibe was subverted by advertisers serving major corporations. Indeed, a lot of the cultural history of America over the last forty years has involved the commercialization ands mainstreaming of what began as anti-commercial, anti-establishment.

Remember how the biting 1970 anti-war movie M.A.S.H. became a TV sitcom and everyone was humming the word-less theme song blissfully unaware [in 99.9% of cases] that the title of the song, and it's refrain, is "Suicide is painless"?

p.s. The lyrcis to "Suicide is Painless" were written by Michael Altman, son of the late great Robert Altman who directed the movie. You can read them here.

No More Ham, Eggs, & SPAM: Blog categories revised

Okay, so I admit that I didn't get the point of categories when Blogger first introduced labels. So there I was, merrily labeling my posts with all manner of terms. For example, a post about email security had the following labels: AOL, ham eggs and spam, Microsoft, spam, TurnTide, Yahoo.

Now I have realized the error of my ways and have revised the labels to create meaningful categories. After all, if you want to find any of my posts that deal with ham or USB or AOL you can always use the Search function. I don't plan to have separate categories for those subjects.

For a start, the blog is Cobb on Technology, so there is no need for a technology label. Technology is assumed to be the subject of every post (however tenuous the link might be). There is a need for a general category that includes housekeeping posts like this one that you are reading right now.

And a humor category will denote posts that are [supposed to be] amusing or at least light-hearted. Different kinds of security are given their own category, but most of my security posts are done at scobbs.blogspot.com. A category that is likely to cover a lot of posts right here is "Gotchas."

Gotchas include all manner of quirks, snafus, annoyances, like the fact that there is no Backspace key on Macs and no grayed out File Save command in Microsoft Office apps to let you know something has been saved, or the fact that PS/2-to-USB adapters rarely work and Control-Tab doesn't work the way it should in Microsoft Word. Of course, some posts will have more than one label, like this one, which is mainly 'general' but also now contains some 'gotchas.'

So, I hope this reformed approach to labeling will be useful and make the blog more accessible.

On National Health Insurance: Political history has much to teach

As we recover from the shock of President Bush actually finding something worth talking about in his 2007 State of the Union address--health insurance--we would do well to keep some historical perspective. There is a long but very worthwhile article in the New Yorker that I found very helpful. For example, consider this:

In 1945, when President Truman first proposed national health insurance, they [union leaders] cheered. In 1947, when Ford offered its workers a pension, the union voted it down. The labor movement believed that the safest and most efficient way to provide insurance against ill health or old age was to spread the costs and risks of benefits over the biggest and most diverse group possible. Walter Reuther [the national president of the U.A.W at the time]...believed that risk ought to be broadly collectivized. Charlie Wilson [president of G.M.], on the other hand, felt the way the business leaders of Toledo did: that collectivization was a threat to the free market and to the autonomy of business owners. In his view, companies themselves ought to assume the risks of providing insurance.

In a nutshell, that is why America does not have universal health insurance today. And as today's G.M. crumbles under the crushing weight of the burden Wilson took on, losing ground every year to car companies based in countries whose governments provide universal health care, it is instructive to ponder how--albeit with the benefit of hindsight--how wrong Wilson's call was.

Image from coloribus.com.

PS on DST: Vista is pre-fixed, Mac OS X 10.4.6 also

After my posting a few days ago on the changes to Daylight Saving Time in the US that will be happening this year, it occurred to me that I might have raised more questions than I answered. In fact--surprise, surprise--I still don't have ALL the answers. But here a few more that might be helpful.

Q. How long until the change?
A. 47 days (March 11 is the first time the new DST rules go into effect, but there is another date of importance, October 28, 2007, which is when you might have expected DST to end, but in fact it will end November 4).

Q. What about Windows Vista?
A. Vista is aware of the new rules. You have to remember that, back in the summer of 2005--when a change to DST rules was mandated--Microsoft was talking "second half of 2006" as ship date for Vista. And the perpetual optimism in Redmond probably led coders to think a large percentage of PCs would be running Vista in time for the change.

Q. What about Mac OS X?
A. The version 10.4.6 update set the clock straight, so to speak, for Mac users. BTW, that update was released in March of 2006, considerably in advance of the Microsoft patch for XP.

Q. What about my iPod? Palm? Treo?
A. I am still looking into how these devices, which all have date and alarm functions, will handle the DST rule change.

Q. What's that weird clock at the top of the post?
A. It's a clock made out of computer parts. The face is a hard drive platter and it's reflecting my hands holding the camera as I took the picture (with a Sony DSC-T1). As the song goes: "It's always 5 o'clock somewhere."
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USB in the SUV? JVC car stereo lets you plug in MP3s via USB as well as iPod

When I first saw this idea I knew I had to check it out: a car stereo with a USB port on the face plate. In other words, you can put tunes on a USB thumb drive and play them in the car. In fact, I liked the idea so much I now have a JVC KD-G720 installed in my Jeep, as shown here.

Oddly enough, JVC seems to have dropped this particular model. When I went to get a link to listing at Circuit City (which is where I got mine) the search came up empty. Over at Crutchfield the model is listed as "no longer available." There are some links here that might work. Note how happy the reviewers sound--so it is not just me. I gave the unit a good write-up on epinions and also put in aq good word for Circuit City which had the unit installed in under an hour, for under $240 including the iPod connection in the glove box.

Obviously an iPod playing through the car stereo can be a life-saver on road trips and a lot of units are now offering this, either via a simply AUX connection, or through an intelligent link, like this unit, where you can select songs and functions, like shuffle, through the faceplate controls. But it was the USB port that really caught my eye. By using a USB adapter I can quickly take the SD card of tunes out of my Treo 650 and plug them into my car radio (there is a one gig limit ,but that is still a decent chunk of music). I can do the same thing with Sony Memory Sticks--drag a bunch of songs from iTunes on my Vaio laptop to a stick and stick it in the car.

Why would I do that instead of use my iPod? Just seems easier sometimes. Several mixes that I really like are already set up on SD cards for my Treo. Besides, I have my iPod docked in my home streo a lot of the time and it is a lot heavier than a USB key...and oh heck, maybe I'm just lazy.

Anyway, if you do like the idea of using a USB drive for tunes, this is the unit to play them. If you set up six different folders on the USB device the JVC KD-G720 will treat them as different CDs (the same holds true with MP3 CDs, which this unit also plays). You get song title info displayed and a number of shuffle options (within folder, across folders).

What Comes Next? Try Brussin's blog

There's a new tech-oriented blog on the block and I'm betting it will become a "must-read" for anyone serious about Web 2.0, Business 2.0, and the whole intersection of technology and business. The blog is called "What Comes Next" and the blogger is David Brussin.

While David Brussin might not be a household name in high tech households, I would add the caveat "yet." I've been in the high tech field for over 25 years and have yet to encounter a sharper mind than Brussin's. It was no coincidence that he was named to the 2004 list of the world's 100 Top Young Innovators by Technology Review, MIT's Magazine of Innovation. Brussin has that rare combination of a. technical brilliance (he was building serious commercial networks before he graduated from high school) and b. business acumen (he had co-founded two successful hi-tech startups before he was thirty, and both were snapped up by public companies).

Then there is c. he is very articulate. So, not only does Brussin come up with valuable and sometimes highly complex insights, he can put them into full sentences that are easily understood. Now, you sometimes meet people who have a or b or c. Occasionally you meet people with two of the three, but rarely do you encounter someone who has all three AND a sense of humor AND above average scores in tact and diplomacy.

So check out Brussin's blog. I hope you find it as interesting as I do.