2009

There were 163 posts published in 2009 (this is page 6 of 9).

My Foray into the World of Firearms

My only experience with firearms prior to this weekend occurred when I was twelve or thirteen years old. I remember my dad taking me to a firing range and shooting a .22 handgun, a .22 rifle, and a 9mm handgun. (I remember the 9mm being so heavy that I couldn't even hold it up!)

Neither my dad nor myself shoot regularly, or for that matter own any firearms (he rented at the firing range) and I haven't shot a single round in the past fourteen years. I assume we visited the range those few times when I was younger only because it was something he wanted me to try, and for that I'm grateful. The experience most likely helped with my respect and total comfort with being around guns, despite having no real knowledge or experience with them.

Growing up vegetarian, hunting was not exactly a family tradition and, at least I suspect, my mom hated (and still hates) guns enough to have never allowed one around the house anyway. The most we were allowed to have (much to the disapproval of my mom) were tiny hand pump powered BB guns -- so harmless that my younger brother was able to shoot me in the butt and thigh with nothing more than an angered response from his victim.

A few hundred years ago, nearly every person living in the United States was expected to know how to use and operate a firearm. I'm someone who believes that possessing a vast array of skills and experience helps us grow as individuals, and I decided that experience with firearms was one of those must-have skills. A gun is a tool, nothing more. It can be used as a weapon, yes, just like your kitchen knife or screwdriver can be used as a weapon, but guns don't kill people. People kill people.

I spent most of this weekend taking a National Rifle Association (NRA) course on basic handgun usage and safety, taught by Thomas Brown at the Manchester Firing Line range. The course was split into two days, the first of which was eight hours of classroom time where we watched a few videos and got comfortable dry-firing a mix of various handguns, including revolvers and semi-automatics. The second day (that was today) consisted of four hours of range time, where we fired 200-300 rounds from a variety of different handguns. We also got to shoot a 9mm rifle and a 20-gauge shotgun (that's got quite a recoil!).

Everyone had a primary weapon that they used for shooting during most of the range time. I chose a handgun used by those in the military and many U.S. government agencies, the SIG Sauer P229, a .40 caliber semi-automatic (its got a lot more kick than a 9mm):

SIG Sauer P229

Towards the end of the class, the instructor and his assistant set up a fun competition: a timed drill. One at a time, a student would approach the bay and stand in front of his chosen handgun with the magazine loaded, but separated from the gun. The instructor would tap on the shoulder of the student to indicate the start of the timer and, as fast as possible, the student loads, racks, and decocks the gun. He then fires at two targets, steps around a corner (maintaining proper gun safety) and then tries to hit a third target with a single shot.

The first two targets were rigged so you had to shoot at a specific (hidden) area in the center to pop a balloon hidden behind the target which was holding up a piece of cardboard. When you hit the center of the target the balloon pops and the piece of cardboard being held up by the balloon drops to display a red X. You can then move to the second target. After the second target has been hit in the same manner as the first, you need to step around a corner and shoot a third plain target with a single shot.

The winner of this timed competition (the lowest time) won a free t-shirt. Most of the eighteen students completed the run in 25+ seconds. The second and third fastest times were 12 and 18 seconds. I completed my run in 9.25 seconds and won the t-shirt. (After this, several people came up and asked me if I was in the military. If I was in the military, why would I be in an introductory firearms class?)

New Hampshire is one of the few states in the United States where no license is needed to legally purchase and transport a handgun (however, a CCW license is needed to carry concealed, which, inside a vehicle means anywhere within reach). In Massachusetts, to purchase, posses, or transport a handgun or ammunition you must have a proper LTC license and, unlike most of the other states, it does not recognize any out-of-state firearm licenses. The firearm laws in Massachusetts are very strict, compared to neighboring New Hampshire (or Vermont, which has virtually no gun laws!).

I had lots of fun learning and firing various firearms. I plan to attend more advanced classes at MFL in the coming months and to practice somewhat regularly at the firing range. If you're in the area, I highly recommend you give it a shot (pun intended). And if you're curious but hesitant and uncomfortable, I'd be happy to show you around the range where we can fire a few rounds (you don't need to be an NH resident, and no permit/license is necessary to shoot on the range).

Playing Tetris and Pong with Emacs

I'm vi user, but I'm slowly trying to pick up Emacs too. I discovered today that Emacs has a built-in Tetris game. Simply launch Emacs, press Esc and then the letter x, and then type tetris and press Enter (or simply start emacs with emacs -q --no-splash -f tetris). You can also play Pong using the same method!

BigDog: The Most Advanced Quadruped Robot on Earth

Boston Dynamics, a Waltham, MA-based robotics company with funding from DARPA, has created what they're calling "the most advanced quadruped robot on Earth". The robot, named BigDog, weighs 170lbs and can carry loads of 340lbs. A recent video of BigDog in action shows it operating in several different terrain conditions, including an icy surface. Do you think you can kick this bad boy over if he comes to attack you? Think again! The video shows a guy trying to kick him over with full-force and it doesn't even knock him down! (When you're finished watching that, check out this video for a funny spoof.)

A busy past few days

The past few days I've been extremely busy with projects at work. That plus my two hour daily exercise commitment hasn't left me with much time for writing. Never the less, there is light at the end of the tunnel and by this evening I should be back to somewhat of a normal posting schedule.

Comparing the iPhone with the BlackBerry

For the past eight months I've been an iPhone user and during that time I've kept notes on the things that stood out most when comparing the iPhone to the BlackBerry. This post is a compilation of those notes.

I was a dedicated and happy BlackBerry user for close to five years prior to switching to the iPhone. I decided against jumping at the first iPhone for two big reasons: it was an entirely new device and I was already very happy with my BlackBerry.

When the iPhone 3G was released and I had heard reports of near-100% satisfaction from current iPhone owners, I decided I couldn't wait any longer. Two big motivating factors were having a camera phone (I was using a Blackberry 8700g at the time) and the ability to carry my music on my phone and get rid of my iPod. I hate carrying more than three things with me wherever I go (wallet, keys, phone).

Important BlackBerry email features that are missing from the iPhone

Being an avid email user, I immediately noticed several features missing from the iPhone:

  • Mark as Read (without opening the email)
  • Mark Prior Messages Read
  • Search
  • Copy and Paste (anywhere!)
  • Save as Draft Edit: A friend pointed out that a Save as Draft feature exists, and he's right. They must have added this in a software update, because it definitely wasn't there when I got the phone!

The above missing features are why I still steer business class users (at least those who intend to use their phone for receiving and replying to large volumes of email) away from the iPhone. It's just not ready and it can't compete with the refined email features of the BlackBerry. I've definitely changed my email habits and I reply to fewer emails from my phone than I did with the BlackBerry.

Touchscreen Interface

While contemplating switching to the iPhone, the on-screen keyboard was my biggest worry. However, when I tried a friends' iPhone I was pleasantly surprised that software does a very good job of correcting any mistakes made while typing fast using the on-screen Qwerty keyboard. Although lacking the tactical feel of a real keyboard, it does its job exceptionally well for a touchscreen interface. Still, typing more than a few sentences is uncomfortable and the lack of saving an email as a draft makes typing long emails risky (the need to reference another email for information, etc.).

The all-touch interface was easy to get used to and it still amazes me how intuitive it is, even for the technically-challenged who give it a try. But the quirks that seem to come with every touch interface are still there. For example, to unlock the phone you need to press and slide a button across the bottom of the screen. Most of the time this works fine, but sometimes the interface will mysteriously be unresponsive and nothing will happen.

Heat-sensitive Touch Interface

The iPhone implements the same heat-sensitive technology as the iPods to prevent accidental key presses by anything but your skin. Most of the time this is really helpful for preventing accidental calls, but when your hands get really cold (shoveling snow, skiing/snowboarding, etc), the temperature of your fingers can actually drop below what the iPhone is expecting and suddenly you can't even use the phone!

Applications

One of the strongest points for the iPhone has been the amazing success of the AppStore. The store is integrated with the iPhone and applications can be purchased and downloaded right from the phone. With over 10,000 applications there's an application for almost anything. Some of the games are simply amazing and the huge variety of games means there is sure to be something fun for everyone.

With the BlackBerry, finding new applications was a nightmare (and finding a good quality, free applications was nearly impossible).

In Summary

In recent comment on HN, I wrote this comparison summary between the iPhone and the Blackberry:

As a former 5-year, very satisfied Blackberry user who switched to the iPhone 3G last June, I have this to say about the comparison:

For business use that requires lots of replying to email, management of large volumes of email, copy/paste functionality, and the possibility of integration with existing Enterprise systems, the Blackberry is a must.

If you mostly just need to read email and only occasionally reply, you have a moderate volume of email (< 30 per day), and you are more interested in a device you can have fun with on the train and use as a replacement for your iPod, then iPhone is perfect. The apps available on the iPhone are truly killer. Real, playable games that you can fully enjoy. Also, web browsing on the iPhone is beautiful -- sometimes I find myself using it in front of my laptop! I've convinced both my boss and my manager NOT to get an iPhone and to instead upgrade their phones to either the BB Curve or Bold. They both thanked me afterward when they realized just how much they relied on easy email reply and the ability to "mark as read" multiple messages (come on iPhone!). The iPhone is definitely a more media-centric device, whereas the Blackberry has been refined for the specific needs of business users.

Safari 4 Beta

The new Safari 4 Beta web browser seems just as fast as the reviews are saying (42x faster than IE7; 3.5x faster than Firefox) and some of the new features are pretty cool: cover flow for bookmarks, CSS animation (now part of WebKit), and even 3D animation using the new HTML5 canvas element. I'm eagerly awaiting a Mac release of the Google Chrome browser to compare with Safari 4. (In the meantime there's always CrossOver Chromium, a Mac & Linux port of Google Chrome.)

Configuring Static DNS with DHCP on Debian/Ubuntu

Note: This article is outdated as of Ubuntu 12.04. Please see this article if you're using Ubuntu 12.04 or later.

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is a commonly used method of obtaining IP and DNS information automatically from the network. In some cases, you may wish to statically define the DNS servers instead of using the ones provided by the DHCP server. For example if your ISP commonly experiences DNS outages, you might want to use the DNS servers provided by OpenDNS instead of the ones provided by your ISP.

When using a static IP configuration on Linux, you normally add the DNS servers to the /etc/resolv.conf. However, if you try to add a DNS server to /etc/resolv.conf under a DHCP configuration, you'll notice that your static entry disappears as soon as the DHCP client runs (usually on boot). To prevent this, you need to tell the DHCP client to prepend the static DNS server(s) to /etc/resolv.conf before adding the ones provided from the DHCP server (if any).

The configuration file you'll need to edit is the same on both Debian and Ubuntu, however depending on your setup the location of the file may vary. Here are the two common places I've found the file:

Debian: /etc/dhclient.conf
Ubuntu: /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf

Open the file in your favorite editor and add one of two lines at the top, separating multiple DNS servers with a comma and ending the entry with a semi-colon:

If you simply want to add static DNS servers to be used in addition to the ones provided by DHCP, use a prepend entry:

prepend domain-name-servers 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220;

If you want to override the DNS servers provided by DHCP entirely and force the system to use the ones you provide, use the supersede entry:

supersede domain-name-servers 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220;

Before these static DNS servers will to be appended to your /etc/resolv.conf file, you'll need to re-run the DHCP client. The easiest way to do this is by running /etc/init.d/networking restart (sudo required) or you can try running the dhclient command.

After re-running the DHCP client, check your /etc/resolv.conf file to confirm the static DNS servers have been added.

Vimperator Plugin Causing Accidental Post Publishing

After several drafts on my new tech blog mysteriously appeared publicly as published, I discovered that the new WordPress keyboard shortcut for Publish is the same as the Previous Tab shortcut in Vimperator (the Firefox plugin that allows me to browse the web using only the keyboard). Regardless of what mode I'm in (Insert mode or Normal mode), pressing CTRL+P publishes the post and switches to the previous tab.

Going Cold Turkey on Coffee

Coffee is the one thing that I have tried to quit several times over the past few years and failed (it's been my new years resolution several years in a row). Failing is not like me. If I want to quit something, I just do it. I've never been addicted to anything in my life... except coffee.

I started drinking coffee with cream and sugar when I was 16. When I got into fitness a few years later, I slowly decreased the amount of cream and sugar in the coffee until it was black. From that point on, cream and sugar in my coffee ruined it for me so I continued to drink it black.

The average cup of black coffee contains between 115-175mg of caffeine. More than 300mg of caffeine a day on regular basis has been shown to cause several negative side effects, including increased urination (and dehydration as a result), disruption of normal diet (drinking coffee when hungry makes you no longer feel hungry, even though your body needs food), headaches, irritation, and mood swings. I have experienced all of these, but I'm only now beginning to realize how much they're affecting my fitness and overall health.

I recognized a pattern in my coffee consumption. Over a three month time span, I would go from drinking 1 cup to 4 cups of coffee per day. Eventually I would feel so sick of the high caffeine intake (or its side effects) that I would drop back down to 1 cup a day, only to begin the process all over again. Here's a chart of what I'm talking about:

Cups of Coffee Per Day

For some reason I've felt extremely motivated and strong about the fitness goals I set for this year, so since I'm on a roll I decided to go cold turkey on coffee last Tuesday (February 17th). The first few days were rough. Tuesday the bad headaches started. Wednesday the headaches were slightly better, but the mood swings crept in (mood swings are rare for me, so it was easy for me to recognize them). Thursday it was a combination of mood swings and headaches but by Friday the side effects were starting to wear off.

I had considered leaving the weekends open for one or two coffees, but I remembered when I did that in the past it resulted in eventually making exceptions during the week. I almost gave in on Saturday, almost. Today is Sunday and I can already feel my desire for coffee is slowly but surely wearing off. I feel so much better overall. I'm able to wake up easier in the morning, I'm spending less, my diet and digestion are better, and I don't feel this constant need for something external to keep me going.

The Pursuit of Knowledge

I started writing this as a comment in reply to Adam Bossy's post The Paradox of Self-Education. The comment became so long that I decided to turn it into a post here on my blog.

I grew up wanting to "be everything", from astronomer, to musician, to entomologist, to geneticist, to Navy SEAL, to writer, to geologist, to computer scientist. Hell, even meteorology (the study of weather, i.e., what the weather man does) fascinated me! I was home schooled through high school and never spent a single day in public or private school. (I actually ended up teaching myself through high school because my parents were busy teaching my younger brother and sister.) This gave me great freedom to study anything that happened to interest me. Over the course of a year, I probably switched between being totally engrossed in a dozen different fields. But in my teens, I realized that "being everything" wasn't a career path and just knowing a little bit about many different fields wasn't going to pay the bills. So I picked the most developed of my skills and went into IT.

Now at 26 and no college degree, I'm working for a software start-up doing a whole variety of things (programming, sysadmin, tech support, editor, you name it) and I run my own small but successful web hosting company. My interest in many other fields has not changed or decreased in any way. The only thing that has changed is my ability to spend ANY amount of time exploring them.

While pondering many of the same points as Adam does in his post, I came to the conclusion that it's our bills and our standards of living that are holding us down. By living paycheck to paycheck we make it impossible to take six months or a year off from work to explore some new thing that has peaked our interest. Socially, we're expected to follow the same routine advancement in our current field from one position to another, making a bigger paycheck and being able to raise our standard of living that much higher (thereby putting us back to where we started and resulting in yet another desire for a raise and advancement).

I went from spending upwards of $2,500 a month down to $800 a month by making lifestyle adjustments. "Do I need cable TV?" No, I have the Internet. "Do I need this two-bedroom, 1,500 sqft apartment?" No, I'm a single guy and the rent is a huge part of my paycheck -- 400 sqft will do. "Do I need to drive into work?" No, I can take public transportation. "Do I need this $5 coffee every day?" No, a $.50 green tea will suffice and it will be healthier.

My goal now is to continue living frugally so I can set aside a big enough bucket of money to get me through one year without work. Then, when the time is right, I'll spend a year learning something of interest, possibly making small amounts of money on the side. When needed, I'll start working and hopefully keep repeating this process. If something I do makes me tons of money, great. If not... well it's not about the money.

The pursuit of knowledge is to me more important than all the money in the world. Sure, money would make that pursuit easier, but life isn't easy. This is where I feel society gets it wrong. We put money and status first and education and knowledge second, using the latter to obtain the former. Imagine a society where the pursuit of knowledge defined our standards of living. (Oh no, what would happen to all the ads?!)

If we're willing to sacrifice our high-strung lifestyle for the ability to spend time learning and increasing knowledge, then we can accomplish amazing things, both individually and as a society. A world pursuing money and status has all the reason to fight amongst themselves and start wars, but a world pursuing knowledge and advancement has all the reason to maintain peace.

Additions to My 2009 Resolutions

While my current set of resolutions for this year includes getting in the best shape of my life, I want to set a few particular goals:

  1. 500-yard swim in under 10 minutes (using sidestroke or breaststroke)
  2. 80 Push-Ups in 2 minutes
  3. 80 Sit-Ups in 2 minutes
  4. 25 Pull-Ups (no time limit)
  5. 1.5 Mile Run in under 10 minutes
  6. Become a certified scuba diver
  7. Complete the AFF program

Those are some seriously tough fitness goals, but they're definitely reachable. I plan to do a lot more swimming this year and I'm going to work hard to increase my lung capacity. If you're not sure what the AFF program is, I'm sure you can figure it out. 🙂

Busy Free Time

I've been spending a lot of my free time working on the new website for my hosting business and integrating the new site with WHMCS (the web host management software I'm switching to). I'm currently using WHM.AutoPilot but it has failed to meet the needs of my growing business and it still seems quite buggy. I'm also working on a couple of posts -- one for this blog about how I hacked together remote Growl notifications from irssi, and one for my new tech blog about setting up a great local web development environment in OS X.

Zoomism: Navigate by Zooming

Zoomism allows you to navigate the site entirely by zooming. It's actually really fun and works quite well -- a lot more adventurous than scanning and clicking URLs on a page. The site is using Flash to make all this happen so obvious downsides exists (e.g., you cannot select text or easily save images), however I think there is real potential in this concept. I would love to have a tool that allowed me to generate a gigantic map of an entire website that I can explore by zooming!

The End of Alone

The End of Alone, an article in The Boston Globe, talks about how technology is removing what may be vital to our well being. I for one hate feeling connected 100% of the time and I have decided to make it a point to take regular (weekly) breaks from technology. This means turning off my phone and being disconnected from the Internet (but preferably not at my computer at all!).