19. May 2012 by admin.

I was having trouble with Matlab’s code editor and command line window becoming incredibly sluggish following an Apple software upgrade - probably a Java update (I wasn’t paying attention to exactly when this problem arose).

After searching numerous user community posts and grousing about Apple and Mathworks, I came upon this fix that solved the problem.  I am replicating it here to help others who might be looking for a solution.

I use R2007b on Snow Leopard.  I do not know if this works with other versions of Matlab and OS X, but it helped me tremendously.

Procedure:

1. Create a plain text file called java.opts, with the following contents:

-Dapple.awt.graphics.UseQuartz=true

2. Put the file into the following directory:

/Applications/MATLAB_R2007b/bin/maci (or wherever your installation resides)

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15. May 2012 by admin.

Bought some Tilsit cheese the other day.  The label indicated it was from Germany, but my apres-purchase research indicates the type of cheese was invented by Prussian-Swiss settlers in Sovetsk, Russia and the recipe re-imported by the Swiss.

It smelled like cow manure. But, I didn’t know that when I bought it.

In fact, I knew nothing about Tilsit (or Tilsiter) when I tossed it in the shopping cart. It just looked interesting.  Semi-firm, with little irregular holes throughout. Light, milky color. No blue-green mold colonies, or anything like that.  It looked a lot like Fontina, just a little firmer.  When I got it home, it went into the fridge with a couple of other cheeses, safely isolated in its tight plastic wrapper. The next day, I got a hankering for some cheese and crackers, so I broke it out. Seconds after I opened the package, Emma, my teenage daughter, entered the room.

“Ooh!  What’s that smell?  It’s like cow manure.”

 

“Ah!  Yes. Thank you. I knew it was familiar, I just couldn’t place it.  Context, y’know?”

 

“What is it?”

 

“It’s a cheese I decided to try. From the co-op. It’s German I think”

 

“Is it bad?”

 

“I don’t think so; I just got it. It looks ok.”

 

“Did you taste it?”

 

“Not yet. I’m still trimming the slime off the edges.”

 

“Ooh.  I don’t have to taste it. I can tell you it’s just disgusting.”

 

“Gimme a sec.”

 

“Its gross.” (nose wrinkled)

 

“It doesn’t taste gross. It doesn’t taste like much, actually.”

 

“It smells.”

 

“I know. Believe me, I’m not thrilled about the smell myself.”

 

“That’s ‘cuz its bad.”

 

“Well…I’d say its certainly not very goo–”

 

“Yeah.” (head nodding slightly and rapidly) ”It’s bad.”

 

“You’re right. It is bad. Willow-willow!  Doggie wanna treat?!”

The dog seemed to enjoy it. But then again, she is known to roll in cow manure when she can find any.

There is another cheese, Gamalost, that is Norwegian. Viking, to be specific. Gamalost is said to mean “old cheese” in Norwegian. It is said that Gamalost is aged by stuffing the cheese in an old sock and burying it in manure. When it crawls out of the manure on its own, it’s done.

After trying the Tilsit, I believe it must be made the same way as Gamalost.

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8. May 2012 by admin.

Why not receive FAXes direct to PDF files from your all-in-one printer without having to print and re-scan or subscribe to an online FAX-to-email service? Why not send PDFs from your computer through your all-in-one as FAXes through the telephone line?

It seems like such a simple concept and the pieces are all already there.

I have a couple of nifty all-in-one printer/FAX/scanner machines from Canon - which, by the way, are so much better in every way than the string of HPs I was once foolish enough to own, but that is another story.

These machines can scan a PDF file and shoot it directly into my laptop via the WiFi home office network.  They can receive a FAX through the connected telephone line and print it to paper.  They can receive a PDF file from my computer and print it to paper.  And, I can place a paper document in the ADF tray or scanner bed and either copy it to more paper, scan it to a PDF on my computer, or FAX it to a receiving phone number through the telephone line.

It seems to me there are two obvious and simple functions missing:

1. Receive a FAX from the telephone line and have it shot straight into my computeras a PDF without printing it to paper.
2. Send a PDF file from my computer to the machine and have it transmitted as a FAX through the telephone line.

It seems absolutely silly that the existing, mature functions of scanning, sending, receiving, and PDF encoding and decoding are not combined in these two simple ways.

Instead, when I need to send a document to someone who requires a FAX, I have to first print it, then scan and FAX it. And then throw away the paper (and ink).

When I need to receive a document that I would like to archive digitally (as I do with all my paper) from someone who can only send a FAX, I need to first receive and print it. Then scan the hard copy to my computer. Then throw away the paper (and ink).

I searched high and low on Google for an all-in-one machine that performs these seemingly obvious processes, and could not find a single one. If anyone knows of one, please post a comment.  Thanks.

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12. January 2012 by admin.

Vermont Digger reported today that “the state has now provided broadband access to nearly 95 percent of Vermont and is on track to meet Gov. Peter Shumlin’s ambitious goal of connecting 100 percent of the state by 2013.” According to Karen Marshall, chief of ConnectVT.

What a crock of bullcocky!  We’ll get to that, but first let me say that this is no trivial matter.  The FCC’s 7th Broadband Progress Report in July 1022, said:

“Many Americans remain unable to fully participate in our economy and society because they lack broadband. Although this is a nationwide concern, the situation is particularly bleak for Americans in rural and Tribal areas.”

Yeah, that’d be us here in Vermont.  Rural, and particularly bleak.  The Vermont Digger article went on:

“At the same time, [Karen Marshall] said the telecommunications landscape is constantly changing as more and more devices send and receive more and more data. She cited one study that indicates the average household now downloads and sends 28 gigabytes of data a month. By 2015-16, she said that is projected to increase by a factor of seven. Broadband and wireless speed is increasingly going to become the key issue once universal connectivity is reached, she said.”

Yeah, no kidding.  If it didn’t hit so close to home, it would be hilarious that Ms. Marshall looks ahead to an expected seven-fold increase in household internet data usage by 2015 while at the same time reaching back to a 2008 definition of broadband to enable her claim of reaching “95 percent of Vermont” now.

The FCC updated the old definition two years ago, increasing by a factor of five the speed that is the minimum for the lowest tier of broadband service (4Mbps upload and 1Mbps download), while Ms. Marshall continues to measure success based on a conveniently nostalgic 768kbps download speed. Even with this laughably low standard, she merely parrots coverage numbers from the select few telecom carriers at whom we’ve thrown hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars with no program in place to “ground truth” their claims.

Heck, if Governor Shumlin and Ms. Marshall simply adopt the 1996 definition of “high speed data access” (a 56kbps modem) tomorrow, they will easily make good on the promise of 100% broadband availability, and do so a year early.

I shouldn’t joke—that could be exactly what they plan to do. But my prediction is, they will instead publicly fall short a percentage point or two, so they can tell the tens of thousands of Vermonters left to wither away shackled to last century’s technology: “Sorry, you are in the unfortunate one or two percent the topography kept us from reaching.”  Whereas if they remain vapid enough to claim 100% broadband penetration in 2013, everyone will realize the emperor has been strutting about in a birthday suit all along.

For Further Reading:

• Measuring Broadband America: A Report on Consumer Wireline Broadband Performance in the U.S. 
• FCC’s OBI Technical Paper No.4
• FCC’s Sixth Broadband Progress Report

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10. January 2012 by admin.

Something insidious and damaging is going on in Congress and the mainstream media right now, and it could represent a turning point for the future of American democracy—if any really still exists.

With the urging and backing of big media, an alarming number of congressional delegates are falling in line to support a House Bill, benignly named Stop Internet Piracy Act, or SOPA, and it’s companion bill in the Senate.  The name is a smokescreen. The substance of the bill actually paves the way for widespread Internet censorship.

Opposition to SOPA is widespread and growing.  It includes Internet giants like Google and Twitter. But the mainstream media aren’t reporting on it at all.

Why? Because SOPA is designed to help protect the failing business model of mass media monopoly.

You can read all about SOPA and the media blackout Save’s The Internet’s Blog, and you can add your voice to two petitions opposing SOPA and the big media blackout: Save The Internet’s petition to Congress, and a petition to big media news directors.

Below is the message I added to my signature on the petition to Big Media news directors.

To Big Media:

You obviously don’t care about the philosophical argument that an independent press is a cornerstone of democracy.  But consider what it might do for your viewership and your bottom line if you lead, ahead of your real competition (other big media), to provide what new generations of market consumers are demanding. Your business will remain threatened by internet media only if you continue to distinguish yourself from it by failing to provide what it promises—unbiased investigation and reporting. Have the courage to lead, and you might win. Continue to fight the irresistible forces of socio-technological evolution, and legislative fiat will only delay your extinction.

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1. October 2011 by admin.

We are still seeing the rubble along the sides of the river everywhere we travel, more concentrated in some places than in others.  In some spots, the empty broken cellar hole on one side of the road is balanced by a mass of splintered, randomly intertwined building materials on the other.We are becoming accustomed to the sight, more comfortable with it as each day passes.  We shouldn’t.

Buried these piles of splintered boards, trees, root bulbs, soggy furniture, water heaters and fuel tanks are some people’s entire lives.  These were the material reminders of the pattern of personal experience that makes us each who we are.  Wedding photos, grandfather’s pocket watch, the high school year book, Mom’s apple-cake recipe, the favorite stuffed animal of the son now grown.  They are dispersed now, broken to pieces, re-ingested by the earth or hung by her forces on display for gawking strangers from here to the Atlantic coast.  Reduced to entropy.

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15. September 2011 by admin.

The cavalry have arrived, and they are working to restore River Road near Abbot Cemetery in Gaysville (part of Stockbridge, Vermont).In my previous post, I wrote about the disconnect between the hierarchical system-of-systems that is the ownership and administration of the road network in Vermont and the difficulty that poses for restoring functionality to what is to the user a non-hierarchical random network.

Well, it seems that someone in disaster management has figured out how to erase the administrative boundaries between, and move resources across, the hierarchical governmental entities that compose the systems within the system that is Vermont’s road network.  A well-equipped crew of State controlled resources started working yesterday to restore this key link between Stockbridge and Bethel.The section of River Road taken by the White River was huge in comparison to the town’s resources available to replace it, but it was tiny in comparison to the amount of VT Route 107, parallel to River Road and on the opposite side of the river, that formerly connected the same nodes and was also taken by the floods.  Therefore, from a global perspective, it made a lot of sense to focus the state
resources on the town road, to restore maximum serviceability in minimum time to the residents of the area.The state did a wonderful thing in adopting this strategy.  And we users of the network are all grateful, or soon to be so.

What comes next are just some thoughts about how to represent and study the effect of floods from a network theory perspective…ignore it unless you’re a geek like me.

Road networks in a geographic setting such as Vermont are largely random network whose topology evolved opportunistically with links added as needed to traverse the steep inclines and drainage network.  This random network of roads is underlain in the same two dimensional space by a dendritic network (streams and rivers) that is normally uncoupled from the random network (crossed by bridges and culverts).But in times of flood, the dendritic network and the random network interact, with the effect of eliminating or profoundly weakening the strength of links (washes out bridges and culverts) in the road network.  The problem that requires study, then is how to strengthen the random network through non-random topological adjustments, to make it less vulnerable to flood events.

Footnote: Alternatively, a flood can be thought of as eliminating nodes, if the representation of the road network is inverted to think of the roads as nodes and the intersections as links, which advantages for analysis, since every trip origin and destination along a road segment is then encapsulated by a single node until such time as that node is bifurcated by washout due to flooding.

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14. September 2011 by admin.

Tropical storm Irene caused floods that recently wiped out numerous bridges and stretches of road throughout our beloved state of Vermont.  Here in my local town of Stockbridge, the community was isolated from by the washout of many routes.

So we’ve been having lots of discussions about what “they” (the state, the feds, etc.) should do to restore the highest level of service in the fastest manner possible before winter sets in and we have to deal with snow removal, ice storms, and eventually spring thaw conditions (see my article “Mud Therapy” in Roads & Bridges Magazine).

Something I’m used to hearing a lot about from the Department of Defense is the notion of “Systems of Systems.”  This is a real thing and a very applicable construct for understanding or developing solutions to complex situations and phenomena.

Thinking in terms of systems-of-systems is kinda the way our brains work naturally…because it’s kinda the way our brains are built…which makes it all the more fun and cool to analyze things from the system-of-systems perspective.

The administration, operation, and maintenance of Vermont’s network of roads at first blush appears to fall nicely into a system-of-systems cast.  We have the State AOT system, for dealing with state highways and their bridges and culverts.  We have the town road commissions for the town roads.  We have private homeowner associations for private roads.  And we have the Federal Highway Administration for Interstates 89 and 91.

And since Irene didn’t discriminate in her destruction of the entire Vermont road network, we have a system-of-systems for making decisions and taking actions on how to restore transportation to the Vermont traveler. 

Problem is: to the Vermont traveler, the roads do not look like a system-of-systems.  They look like a simple network of roads and intersections (links and nodes).  Which is exactly what they are, both physically and functionally.  And they are not hierarchical. 

Hold that thought - network not hierarchical.

Now, in disaster response operations, such as the one in which we now find ourselves after Irene, all the acting authorities correspond, not coincidentally, to exactly the hierarchy of governmental organizations who ordinarily have individual responsibility for each of their own systems of roads within the system-of-systems that composes the simple network on which we travel.

See where we’re headed here?

The administrative and governance structure of the system-of-systems that encompasses transportation infrastructure is an artifact of, and mirrors, the structure of a hierarchical government.  A structure that is completely de-coupled from the physical and functional topology of the network of roads for which it is responsible.

Therefore, to optimally (e.g., quickly and economically) restore the functionality of the network for the traveler, disaster recovery demands a mechanism for temporarily erasing the hierarchy of the system-of-systems and the administrative boundaries between the individual systems that compose it, so that the resources commanded by each governmental authority can act in concert with the others, and can be brought to bear on each other’s roads as best suits the needs of the collective.

This is what we’ve been talking about in my little town of Stockbridge lately.

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2. September 2011 by admin.

Today I want to share some reflections on my experience hiking in Tuesday.  Prior to the hike, I saw a lot of pictures on Facebook showing the flooding all around the state.  I thought I understood the magnitude of what had happened. I thought I was pretty well prepared for what I’d see.

But when I walked in through that stretch of the White River valley along the remains of VT Route 107, the reality was so much bigger, so much more shocking, so much more dreadful than I had imagined.

“I must get more pictures,” I thought.  I must show the world what it is really like here in Stockbridge. Shot after shot I snapped of the shocking reality lain before me.

And later, when I downloaded them to my computer and shared them through Facebook, they looked pretty much the same as the photos everyone else had shared from all over Vermont. But why?

I got thinking about this question earlier this evening. Is it the technology? The camera I was using? Did I unskillfully frame the shots? No. I don’t think so. I think it is two things: the peripheral perspective, and the temporal component.  Walking in, I experienced the scale of the destruction by the distance I traveled, measured in the mind by the duration of the sensory experience.  Even on video, it could never appear the same to the secondhand viewer as to the hiker. Not without the number of footsteps subliminally registered in the mind.

After all, the mind is a temporal experience. No thought, no personal experience occurs instantaneously in time. It is the changing pattern of stimulus over time that creates our experience of the world, even when viewing a photograph.

However, when viewing a photograph, the experience is of the eyes saccading over a static, 2-dimension projection of the incident light.  When hiking in for over an hour, it is something quite different, it is peripheral. It is engaging of all the senses simultaneously. And over a much larger area measured by the time required to traverse it. To take it all in.Photographs never will and never can convey to the secondhand viewer the magnitude of Irene’s destruction in Vermont.  And my photos look the same as everyone’s, so destruction everywhere in Vermont is as great as I have seen here in Stockbridge.

And that is just mind boggling.

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2. September 2011 by admin.

Woke at 6am this morning to an empty house - the wife and children did not hike in with me and have medical appointments today they wouldn’t be able to get to from here.  I brewed a great batch of coffee - hand ground and brewed with the vacuum brewer over the flame of a gas grill, in the driveway.

Then, expecting to volunteer for road work later, I threw some shovels, chains, and a chainsaw in the back of the pickup and headed off to see how far up Taggert Hill Road I could get before having to hike. The mission: to check on a few folks up there who hadn’t been heard from since the storm according to information disseminated at yesterday’s Selectboard meeting on the Gaysville bridge.

To my surprise, I found I could drive all the way to the top of Taggert Hill.  Someone had clearly been putting a lot of work into the road ahead of me.  I pulled up outside Phil’s place, but didn’t dare get out for fear of the pack of highly protective dogs he keeps around.  It took them about the usual zero seconds to spot the intruder and vigorously sound the canine doorbell better know as barking.  Phil’s wife came out - gosh I’m horrible with names - and then he emerged from the woods shortly after.  Apparently he had been heard from since the storm.  He had been checked on regularly by his neighbor on the road crew who had also made the road passable. And a medical crew had even been escorted in by two volunteer firemen the previous day to check in on his neighbor.  That neighbor and his son, also reported to be doing fine, were the other two out of three on my list.  Mission accomplished.  Phil also told me how Fletcher Brook road is gone and could probably not be restored.

Verifying that no formula or diapers were needed for his 3-month old, I went back down to make the 9am meeting on the common.  Kim was there and had learned from Angelique in Pittsfield that her town had completed their filing of FEMA application paperwork and she could help advise Stockbridge on it if we wanted the help.

After the meeting, Kim and I talked to the selectman who is the emergency response chief, and he assigned us the task of learning the application process and reporting back what we needed from town officials to complete it.

We were told the road over South Hill to Pittsfield was open and we could use it to get to where Angelique was.  First we had to find the selectman who was heading the emergency road repair crew and get him to radio the fire chief who is also the road commissioner so we could figure out when they would be available to provide information needed for the FEMA application.  That turned out to be impossible because the radios weren’t reaching each other in the mountainous terrain where they were working to place a culvert across Stoney Brook at the site of the bridge to Ranney Road so they could get families out who were stranded up Stoney Brook Road where all the bridges were out and there was a river where much of the road used to be.

We went over South Hill and back, twice interrupting the work still being done by Pittsfield workers on the road, and received a wealth of information from Pittsfield.  Boy, were they well organized.  They had established separate volunteer teams for several different activities, from road assessment, to road work, to medical emergencies, to technology and communications support. They all had meals together at noon and 6 pm to meet and exchange information.

In comparison, Stockbridge had several overworked town officials each performing myriad response and coordination functions with scant time for breaks and no outward appearance of a formal organizational structure or process. We also have a much more spread out population distribution with more damage along routes that connect enclaves.

Things are clearly different in Stockbridge than in Pittsfield. It will be interesting to see how sensitive to initial conditions the recovery ends up being. It will be interesting to live this process.

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