J. Kevin Crowell – Java, CSS, Music, Guitars, Cars, Politics

I realize that one of the main points of contention with the Obama health care laws is the requirement for coverage.  I believe I have a very fair way to solve that problem.

In essence, the root of the problem is this:  if you don’t pay into some from of health insurance, then you should not expect health care to be delivered to you.  This is a point outside of if it’s the government providing the insurance, or a private company.  It’s the same thing if say I purchase a new motorcycle and don’t get motorcycle insurance.  I would expect that if I crashed and destroyed the bike, it would be a total loss.  To me, that’s a fair outcome, as I knowingly took that risk.  Insurance at it’s core is a way to spread risk over several people, in exchange for most of those people paying slightly more than they would have if they didn’t have insurance and payed their costs directly.  That’s the core reason you shouldn’t buy insurance on things you can easily pay to replace, like your TV from Best Buy, but you really need it for things which might otherwise ruin you if you have to pay for in total, like your house or your person.

That said my proposal is simple: allow people to opt out of the insurance requirement.  Essentially they would simply need to agree to something which states that in the event they need medical care, they are on the hook for the entirety of the payment.  And in the event it cannot be reasonably assumed that they will be able to cover a large payment for something like a ER visit after an auto accident or say cancer treatment, then they decline to be treated.

It might sound harsh at first blush, but I believe that you would solve the problem of requiring people to purchase something, which I can understand the arguments against.  And most importantly, it’s fair: meaning that if you are not contributing into the risk pool though insurance, you also don’t expect me (and other taxpayers) to cover you in the event it turns out you need something.  It would make a lot of sense for the very wealthy to not have insurance as they can easily cover their own expenses.  And the same way that we allow people the choice to do dangerous things like go hang gliding or base jumping, we’d allow people to take a risk with their health, so long as we were not expected to bail them out in case of an emergency.

I’d thought about writing about about politics before but at first, I never got around to it.  Later, I actually hesitated because I thought if I put my beliefs out there, I could have some backlash for it.  Thinking about it further, I can see no valid reasons for backlash against someone’s political stance, unless they are encouraging violence or some other evil.  Rather it seems to me that if more people really thought about what they believed in, and if their representatives are reflective of those beliefs, that politics in general would likely be a better place.

With that in mind I’m going to post my First Rule of Government, which is very likely echoed somewhere else though I’m not aware of where.

1. Crowell’s First Rule of Government – You cannot trust the government.

Isn’t that really the core of what the Constitution is about?  The whole reason for the need of checks and balances is so that you can have a system which is full of flawed humans, but still will operate as close to fairly as possible.

I think there’s a corollary to this: you cannot trust people.

I don’t mean that as a whole, or as individuals.  But I do mean that as a group, and especially in parties and organizations.  The cause of this what Nietzsche had in mind when he said:

Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule.

With that in mind, I think that belief spills into my main concept of economics.  Once again this has probably been stated before by someone more eloquently that I, nevertheless:

1. Crowell’s First Rule of Economics – Competition is the Key Factor for Driving Efficiency.

This outcome really relates to my thought on the government.  What keeps people honest is competition, whether it be in business or in politics. When you get collusion, conspiracy, nepotism, etc, you are eroding that efficiency.

This is a little Google experiment to see if/when they pick up this link to www.smartcredit.com. C’mon Google, show daddy some love.

Update – Google did pick this up.  Interesting.  I wonder if it counts for anything?  It took maybe 3 weeks.  And I have a pretty low traffic/low post count blog.

Rock has had a tough go of things lately. There have been lots of great albums released, but most of them have not fit into that category. For instance I think Passion Pit or Fleet Fox’s debut albums are brilliant, but they are not what I’d call Rock.  Not with a capital R. They just don’t make you want to throw up the devil horns.

Them Crooked Vultures, though imperfect, do.

Something like this just rocks so hard.  Yea, I know the part at the end sounds a lot like Led Zepplin, but is that really a criticism?  When so much of hard rock has been taken over by screamo bands who sound like they had the lofty goals of appearing as background music in the newest PS3 snowboarding game, it’s nice to have a band who appears just to want to rock you out of your socks.

The reason I say imperfect is that the songs are a little hit and miss.  Some are great, some have brilliant parts but nothing here screams incredible album like Led Zepplin IV.  But I hear the promise there.  I’m really hoping that this band is not just a one off project, but something that might grow on another album.  A band with this type of rhythm section, and stellar guitar work, is almost destined for something even more amazing down the road.

So I heard there was some debate about the best place to put some funds: either into reducing the payroll tax to help create jobs, or extending unemployment.

Guys, don’t make me lose faith. If you can’t figure out this one, what hope have we?

You can feed a man fish…

I recently was trying to embed several maps into one page using Google Maps, using the iframe method. When I did, all of the maps were showing the first map’s location, even though all of the addresses were correct in the URLs.  I did a little searching, and all I found were more advanced examples using the JavaScript API, but I just wanted the more simple iframe links generated by Google Maps.

As it turns out, the fix to this is just using a Google Maps API key. You can get a key here:

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html

After you have a key, just use it in the map call that you got from copying the “Link” button on the top right in Google Maps.  Now all of your maps should display correctly.

This is definitely a work in progress, so please be careful with anything published so far and please provide feedback if you get into trouble.

In my prior article, I showed how to use a USB flash drive to install a new bios on a Via Artigo.  But now that you’ve got the latest BIOS on there, you’d probably like to install an OS.

Here’s why I chose Ubuntu:

• Comes in a server edition
• Easy install
• Good community forums for support
• Software manager provides a nice way to install packages, as to apt-get

I’m sure other common distros would be nice as well, like Fedora, but I do like the ease and popularity of Ubuntu.  Another good alternative is FreeNAS, and I can see from their updates they are now specifically supporting the Artigo.  My only desire was to have a bit more flexibility than FreeNAS provides.

My goal in this How To is to cover everything you need to take the bare bones hardware and make it into a NAS with most of the common features people would want in a home NAS.

I’m going to assume that you have a CF card installed on board which is big enough to handle all of your system software.  I used a 8gig but I’m sure that 4 or even 2 could be enough, however the nice thing is with 8 is that you don’t have to be overly careful about optimizing what you have installed.  16 or bigger would just be gravy, but go for it if you’re feelin’ it.  I’m also going to assume that you have two discs installed in the SATA channels which you’d like to use in a RAID.  Given the hardware config of the Artigo, I’d think this is the most common setup.

Step 1) Install Ubuntu on the CF card

This article at Ubuntu details several methods of getting Ubuntu onto a USB drive.  I chose UNetbootin because I didn’t feel like burning the Ubuntu image to a CD as I wasn’t going to use it that way.

Once you have your USB drive ready to go, hold escape when the BIOS of the Artigo boots to choose the USB drive to boot off, and install Ubuntu.  You don’t have to set up a RAID during the install because you’re not using the raid to boot the OS (that’s what the CF card is there for).  This does certainly simplify things.

For some reason, my Artigo didn’t seem to want to see the USB Flash until I booted from USB-ZIP. Which is odd, but that’s what worked for me.

Step 2) Initialize the discs using GParted

I wanted to use GParted here because it’s a simple GUI and it takes some of the scare out of using fdisk to do everything. If you already have the discs ready to go, you can of course avoid this step.

To installed GParted:

a) Start Synaptic Package Manager

b) Search for GParted

c) Mark for install

d) Apply

Then use GParted to partition as msdos, format as ext4 for both disks, full size (don’t need swap as that’s on the sdc which is the flash).

Step 3) Configure the RAID 10 using mdadm

Using drives only for storage simplifies the system and allows them to remain powered down except when data is needed.  I chose RAID level 10 because it should provide the speed of RAID 0 with the recovery of RAID 1

sudo -s
#make a directory where you can mount the new raid software device.  This can be any name you like, and /mnt is the standard area to create this folder.
mkdir /mnt/raid
#Chunk level here could be experimented with, 64 is default but smaller sizes are better for bigger files.  I tried 32
mdadm -v --create /dev/md0 --chunk=32 --level=raid10 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1

VERY IMPORTANT here: Everything up to here will work fine while the computer remains on, but mdadm has to be configured so that the raid array will work on the next boot. The standard location /etc/mdadm.conf WILL NOT WORK ON UBUNTU! This part had me twisted for a while. On Ubuntu 9.04 server, the correct location is /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf.

#This sets up the base configuration file for mdadm
mdadm --examine --scan --config=mdadm.conf  >>/etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf
#Edit /etc/fstab to add entry for /dev/md0
nano /etc/fstab

Add a line like:

#raid10 array on /dev/md0
/dev/md0        /mnt/raid       ext4    defaults        0       0

View the status of a multi disk array, just to verify everything is OK. At first, the drives will have to be created and synced, so you will see that when you run this command.

mdadm --detail /dev/md0

After the raid is synced you’ll see something like this:

/dev/md0:
        Version : 00.90
  Creation Time : Tue Jul 28 00:15:04 2009
     Raid Level : raid10
     Array Size : 1465135936 (1397.26 GiB 1500.30 GB)
  Used Dev Size : 1465135936 (1397.26 GiB 1500.30 GB)
   Raid Devices : 2
  Total Devices : 2
Preferred Minor : 1
    Persistence : Superblock is persistent

    Update Time : Fri Aug  7 20:54:18 2009
          State : clean
 Active Devices : 2
Working Devices : 2
 Failed Devices : 0
  Spare Devices : 0

         Layout : near=2, far=1
     Chunk Size : 32K

           UUID : 7a6763e8:9cfe80d1:01f9e43d:ac30fbff (local to host server)
         Events : 0.54

    Number   Major   Minor   RaidDevice State
       0       8        1        0      active sync   /dev/sda1
       1       8       17        1      active sync   /dev/sdb1

If you get stuck at this step or want more detail, an excellent post is available from:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=408461

Step 4) Enable resolutions past 640×480 with VNC in a headless (monitorless) configuration.

This will give you the basics of the file if it’s not already configured;  also a nice way to recover if you’ve made a mistake.

dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Configuring Xorg resolution http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=83973&highlight=reconfiguring+Xorg

Using the basic file configured above, now you can make edits.  Add these lines to go up to 1920×1200 resolution, in the appropriate section of the file:

Section "Monitor"
Identifier      "Configured Monitor"
HorizSync 32-75
VertRefresh 55-120
EndSection

In the next post, I’ll get into the installation of the software which makes using the NAS worth while: Samba sharing, UPnP server, Bittorrent downloads

This process could really apply to any computer you want to flash, but since the Artigo typically will not have a CD-ROM attached, this is probably a common problem with the Artigo.  Here’s what I did:

Download the HP Drive Key Boot Utility

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?swItem=MTX-UNITY-I23839

Use a Windows XP machine to format the flash drive.  Size doesn’t really matter as it will act like a floppy when you’re done.  Unfortunately, this utility didn’t work when I tried it from Vista, so hopefully you have an older XP machine around, or possibly it would work in the XP mode of Windows 7.  I don’t yet have my copy to try.

Format the drive using a DOS image from:

http://www.bootdisks.us/ms-dos/5/ms-dos-bootable-cd-images.html

When I booted from my Artigo, oddly it didn’t find the USB flash drive until I told it to look at the USB-ZIP in the BIOS options.  I don’t know why that particular option worked, but it did.

After you have DOS booted up, you can pull the USB drive and put the VIA flashing utility and BIOS on the drive.  Since 1.44MB doesn’t give you enough space to include these files along with the rest of DOS, you might want to delete the other files from the USB flash drive when you’re done.  Or use a second flash drive.

It would be nice if VIA made it a little easier to do this with a flash utility which ran from Linux, but I am not going to hold my breath.

By default, all Hibernate ToOne assocations are treated as Eager. This is because “Lazy fetching is only conceptually possible for a mandatory association since we have to hit the other table to determine whether the association is null or not!”

When using Hibernate Annotations, the critical bit is optional=”true”

Therefore, you need to map a OneToOne as @OneToOne(fetch=FetchType.LAZY, optional=false) To get lazy loading. The optional part is key, that way Hibernate does not need to check the other side of the association for nulls, since it knows in this case it cannot be a null. So it’s safe to put a proxy there, and proxies are how Hibernate does its lazy loading magic.

The bit that confused me was that if there is a @NotFound(action = NotFoundAction.IGNORE), that will still cause the relation to be EAGER, even if you’ve mapped it as LAZY and optional=false. You must have NotFoundAction.EXCEPTION if you have a NotFoundAction defined at all. This is clear once you think about it (you would be contradicting the optional=false in the ToOne mapping), but it took me a bit to realize this was the case.

I used to own a BMW E46 M3. It is not an exaggeration to say that it was my dream car. Silver with red leather, xenons, nav, 19?, SMG, the works. So why don’t I have it still? SMG.

SMG is a blessing and a curse. It does very well at keeping a high level of involvement with the driver, while giving the ability to switch gears automatically if need be, say to grab a drink of water to dial on a cell phone. Ideally, this sounds perfect for me. In some ways, it is. But the reality of SMG for me is that while it is perfectly possible to produce smooth shifts, the level of effort and concentration required is equal to (and even occasionally greater than) the concentration required with a standard manual. It’s just that instead of involving both feet, it’s just your right foot. But the position of the throttle, and how that influences when the clutch engages and how rapidly it engages, is so precise that it always has to be on your mind, similar to how shifting smoothly with a clutch requires you to be aware of engine speed, car speed, and other factors. And small changes in throttle make larger changes in behavior, making it easy to send passengers heads snapping back when you get too excited an really put your foot down.

And while I will not advocate not paying attention in a car, there are genuine times that you don’t want to focus on shifting a car. Say, on the way home from work. Or in traffic. Which is usually the same thing.

Earlier in my life I vowed that I would never own an automatic transmission. Obviously I was wrong. But I think the key here is that while it’s true that my priorities have changed, the bigger change for me is actually the quality of automatic transmissions now. They don’t immediately suck all of the fun out of the car. Even though steptronic type ideas have been around for a while, it’s not until this latest generation of cars that these transmissions can changes gears with that RIGHT NOW mentality that I demanded. The steptronic in the 335i feels nearly as fast as the M3, sometimes even faster, and definitely smoother and easier to operate.

The ride quality of the 335i is an excellent compromise as well. It’s amazingly good at absorbing bumps on the freeway, while still feeling fun and responsive while going around corners. BMW still sets the standard here, and anyone who has ever driven one can tell you.

The M3 handling is also a great compromise, though more in the sports direction. However, no car I’ve ever driven was so beautifully balanced. You could really feel like a driving hero with the traction control switched off, allowing the back to come out just enough to enjoy yourself before regaining traction and blasting off ahead. That feeling is something I miss in the 335i.

In the looks department, I’d still have to give the nod to the M3.  Not just because it rises above all of the more common 3 series, but because the E46 is a car of classic proportions.  The short front overhangs, flared fenders, hood bulge, and oft copied side vents all look the racer part, but in a way that stays classy.  It’s like wearing an Armani suit without a tie.   The E90, while decidedly more modern, is not quite as timeless.  Though it’s a prettier car than all of its current rivals.  And it does look quite a bit sexier with the M-Tech aerodynamic kit installed, as on mine.

Performance wise, it’s an interesting contrast.  The M3 feels like you have to push it a bit harder, but it’s more rewarding.  The M3 felt wrong going slowly.  The 335i feels perfectly at home at any pace, cruising around in a parking lot searching for a spot or tearing down the freeway.   The torque of the 3.0 liter twin turbo is amazingly satisfying in normal traffic, but I do miss the crazy machine gun/sportbike/turbine wail of the 3.2 liter six in the M3. You could often turn someone’s head just by revving to the magic 4500 RPM where the raspy wail would come out and wake up the neighbors.  And the M3 was definitely faster when you really, really were on it 10/10ths.  Just not below that.

Either of these cars could make an enthusiast happy.  But I’ve found out which one I’d rather live with, and that’s the 335i.  I just wish my 6’4? frame would have fit in the coupe.