First off, Verizon sucks balls. Last week, I called Verizon to try to order FiOS. The first lady I spoke to, took an hour to figure out why their “system” said my ~800 credit score wasn’t good enough to get service, at which point my Verizon Wireless cell phone dropped the call. I called back and spoke to some other lady, who almost had my order put through, when the original person called me back… she insisted that I finish the order with her, so I hung up on the other lady. An hour later I was still on the phone with the first one, when she finally confirmed my order, which included phone service I did not ask for. I told her to get rid of it, and she said she would have to cancel the order and create a new one, which sounded fine to me. Obviously it didn’t sound fine to her, and she told me she would do it tomorrow and then call me back. She then abruptly hung up on me. That call back never took place.
So, I called back a few days later, and was told I could not get FiOS at my location. If I go to their website and check for FiOS availability at my apartments address, it says I can get it, but if I specify a floor (which I don’t have to, since my apartment has it’s own street number with no floor in it) it tells me it’s not available — sounds like a bug in their system, right? I told this to the lady on the phone, and she said she would check with their Fiber team. They confirmed that FiOS isn’t available in my area, and offered to set me up with DSL that costs the same as FiOS and is 50 times slower — I declined.
I was shocked to find that I couldn’t get FiOS, especially since the entire building has conduit running throughout, with “VERIZON OPTICAL CONDUIT” clearly written all over it. There is one terminating in my closet… I guess this means I can only get DSL.

I still have to call the fuckers back to ask them what the hell is going on, but I think it’s a wise investment for Verizon to spend money running conduit that I imagine can support fiber running through it, and then not let customers pay sign up for service to let them get some ROI. It’s really a matter of who do I hate more… Verizon or Cablevision? That is yet to be decided, I guess.

That’s really all I have for now. I need to finish packing my suit case, and then pop some sleeping pills to be up at 4:30 to get through those wonderfully useless security lines at the airport.

It looks like the current update of the MBP was forced upon Apple, due to Intel trying to phase out the last generation of notebook processors and bring in the new ones, which I guess aren’t all ready for prime time. So, the next update in June is supposed to sport some new Montevina chipset, along with some other improvements.

What does this mean for me? Back in the perpetual state of waiting. It was a mixed blessing though… since the money I had put aside for the MBP now has another couple months to grow, I withdrew some and picked up a PS3. Originally, I had planned to get a Blu Ray player, since HD-DVD is now officially dead (glad I waited out the format war), but given they are priced within $50 of a PS3 with extras, I figured why not get a full gaming system and Blu Ray player, complete with remote control and Spiderman 3 (which is sitting in my garbage can).

So, while on that note, this news gave me the opportunity to re-organize my TV watching apparatus into a more efficient machine. I had my Slingbox IR blaster cables precariously placed atop my TV, such that the slightest gust of wind or earthquake would send them to the ground, rendering the Slingbox mostly useless. I didn’t want to use the crummy double sided tape they provided, so instead I picked up some Elmer’s “Tac ‘N Stik” Reusable Adhesive (how’s that for product placement!) for 95 cents. I stuck some of the clay-like substance to the bottom of my IR blaster pieces as well as to the bottom of my Wii sensor bar and squished it down onto the top of my TV, and it sticks like glue… removable and readjustable glue. It’s likely the best 95 cents I’ve ever spent.

Here’s what it looks like

Well… I’m not going to speculate… I’m just going to flat out say what I want in my next notebook, and hope it magically comes into existence. If it doesn’t, I’ll be in the area in a few weeks, so I’ll pay Steve Jobs a visit and give him a piece of my mind… or maybe a piece of some cake, if I happen to have some on my person. I like cake… especially yellow cake. I know, I know… it’s cheap and low class, but it tastes so good, especially the Entenmann’s chocolate covered yellow cake. Man, that stuff is good.

So anyway, I’ve read quite a number of articles suggesting that Apple will soon be coming out with a new MacBook Pro. Since I’m looking to upgrade my current 1st gen MacBook and I will never ever ever get my small form factor MacBook Pro, I may as well go for whatever new 15″ is coming out, and here is what I want:

• A video card capable of handling Unreal Tournament 3. Every other game I would want to play would require no where near the performance of the aforementioned, so ya.
• New processors. Give us some of that lower power usage and higher clock speed love the MacBook Air got, even though it doesn’t deserve it
• Hybrid hard drives. SSD is overpriced and pointless… unless you happen to run highly concurrent databases on your laptop computer, and require amazing random seek performance. HOWEVER, I read about some drives proposed a while ago that would have a few gigs of flash and many gigs of platter, that would let you live off flash when you don’t need to access anything that requires spinning, and any time you need to dump the flash to platter, power up for a few seconds to do that, then go back to sleep. Good idea and I want that.
• Who cares about multi-touch? I don’t think it’s really a big deal on a laptop, but if Apple wants to throw it in, I’d be glad to disable it in my System Preferences.

That’s it, I guess. I hope whatever is coming out, comes out soon, since I want to spend spend spend. No saving! Just spending!

Right out of the box, I switched the picture mode to Cinema to get a half decent setup, without much work. Cinema, of course, looked sort of crummy, so some tweaking was necessary. I decided to go the expensive route and pick up the Digital Video Essentials HD-DVD/SD-DVD, and use their guided tour to get all my picture settings tweaked to perfection, for the environment and whatever unique characteristics my set has. While the outcome of my configuration ended up looking pretty good, it took me quite a while to complete and after I was done, I found there was a thread on www.avsforum.com where many other people had posted their optimized settings, most of which were scarily identical to my own… so, I could have saved myself $25 and a couple hours of time if I had just searched the internet first, but whatever… at least I can use this DVD for helping out friends and family with tweaking their sets.

The reason I even wrote this post, was because I saw an article in Forbes talking about this exact topic and wanted to throw in my two cents. Ya

Also, I want to give some props to Apple and the awesomeness of Time Machine. After about 24 hours of running Disk Utility trying to repair my disk, due to numerous files that magically became unlinked (e.g., deleted), I gave up and popped in my Leopard DVD, and hopped into Time Machine restore mode, which was able to get all of my files back in place and working with really no difficulty at all — except the Mail had to re-index my email or something, but that’s fine with me. Everything else is running smoothly.

I just really wish that Apple would finally ditch crappy HFS and go ahead with ZFS, so that I wouldn’t have had this issue in the first place.

Also, some side props to SuperDuper, which allowed me to boot into a working copy of OS X, from my separate functioning backup disk — something Time Machine does not allow. I also found out today that SuperDuper is now 10.5 compatible… not entirely sure how, but the release notes say so!

So I did some due diligence and found an application for Linux called cpulimit, which lets you specify a process by name, PID or by full path, and this program will limit it to a certain amount of CPU utilization, so I can tell the BOINC client to only use 25% of my CPU, for example. Now, while cpulimit is a pretty neat application, it has one problem, and that is its inability to limit the CPU usage of child processes spawned from one of your existing limited process. This means that in the case of BOINC, I can’t just start it and then tell cpulimit to limit the boinc_client process, since that process kicks off any number of additional processes.

However, what you can do is write a script that will find all processes being run by your boinc user (I did an apt-get install boinc-client, and the Debian package automatically creates a boinc user and runs all of the processes as that user), and throttle them, then just toss that into cron and make sure that none of the processes use more than your specified limit.

Take a look “after the jump” for the bash script that does the above. It’s quite simple, but amazingly I couldn’t find any off-the-shelf ones on Google.

Run this bad boy in cron every 10 minutes, to make sure anytime a new boinc process starts it gets limited:

#!/bin/bash
#limitboinc.sh: Limit percent of cpu used by a user, using cpulimit -- paul@supz.org
LIMIT=25
USER=boinc
PID=$(ps h -o pid -u$USER)
for a in $PID ; do
  echo -n "Checking if process $a is already limited. "
  ps -fC cpulimit | grep $a >/dev/null
  if [ $? -ne 0 ] ; then
    echo -n "starting"
    nohup /usr/bin/cpulimit -p $a -z -l $LIMIT >/dev/null 2>&1 &
  else
    echo -n "cpulimit already running"
  fi
  echo "."
done

Pop this into your crontab:

*/10 * * * * /root/limitboinc.sh >/dev/null 2>&1

It’s funny that I even spent money on it, since I had written something that did the same job using a TV card under Linux, and ffmpeg’s ffserver to stream content from the TV card using V4l and xawtv to change channels, etc. It did a pretty good job, however since it was a bit of a hack job it had it’s issues. It was all web based and fun. Slingbox takes out all the work and puts it all into a nice appliance, with no associated service fee — w00t!

So anyway, I installed the software on my MacBook, and went through the setup assistant and everything, until I got to the last step where it tells me its registering or something, at which point it crapped out and gave me an error saying it couldn’t register. So, I said whatever, I’ll try launching SlingPlayer to see if that will work. SlingPlayer also gave me the same crap, with some associated nondescript error message along the lines of “We’re really sorry but the application must quit. You can restart and try again later.”

This wasn’t cool, so I tried over and over again, but to no avail. Re-ran the setup assistant, and it gave me the same error… so being a resourceful hax0r I busted out Wireshark (which is now available in a Leopard all-in-one package) to see if it was trying to get something over the internets or what… I found that yes, indeed it was, and it was opening an HTTP connection with 157.22.2.7 (spas.slingmedia.com), and sending an HTTP GET for mac_register.php?VersionNo=1.0.4.214&uuid=<removed>&OS_Identifier=SP_MAC&FinderId=<removed>

The problem is that this HTTP GET never got a response… after about 2 minutes, it eventually got a FIN from the server, and the connection got torn down, at which point SlingPlayer complained and told me I had to restart the application. So, I went ahead and modified my /etc/hosts on my Mac to resolve spas.slingmedia.com to 192.168.0.1 (my server’s IP), instead of the real IP, and then I created a dummy PHP script on my server called mac_register.php that simply returned the posted data. After doing this, SlingPlayer started up just fine, and was able to stream and do all of that fun stuff.

Of course, a while later it eventually started complaining that my copy of SlingPlayer hadn’t been activated, so I went and reverted the /etc/hosts changes, and fortunately by this time, SlingMedia had fixed their mac_register.php script to work again, so it was able to register and activate and all that fun stuff… but while it wasn’t functional, I wasn’t oppressed by the man! Huzzah!

I found a really good thread on the VMware forums where a number of people are trying to get ESX 3.5 running on their unsupported SATA based devices and a lot of them are actually able to do it. I, on the other hand, am unsuccessful so far, but I’ll keep trying. Regardless, If you’re seeing the following after installing and booting up into ESX 3.5, head over to the forum and see if the scripts provided there can lend you a hand:

Mounting root failed. Dropping into basic maintenance shell.
To collect logs for VMware, connect a USB storage device and
run 'bin/vm-support <devicename>'.
Machine will be rebooted when you exit from this shell.

And make sure to post a comment if you get your unsupported SATA-based server working.

Update: One of the guys participating in the thread has created a list of unsupported SATA controllers and motherboards that are known to work with ESX 3.5, and the necessary hacks to get them working. I love the internets.