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.

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.