Entries Tagged 'miscellaneous' ↓

Last week, while I was making sure my privacy settings were fined-tuned after reading all the buzz about Google Buzz, I stumbled onto a neat feature of Google Accounts that I hadn’t seen before. It’s called Dashboard, and it’s a great concept: most of the information that Google has accumulated about you is collected in one place, and you’re given options to manage how you share it all.

If you’re like me, you have almost a dozen Google services — Gmail, Picasa, Voice, Reader, Checkout, Alerts, Analytics, etc. Making sure that everything is set up correctly and not inadvertently exposed to the world is an otherwise painful task that is made easy with Dashboard. By scrolling down and glancing at the summaries of your various services, you can make sure that the pictures of Grandma’s birthday party aren’t visible to the world.

So, despite some other privacy setbacks (really what were they thinking with Buzz?), I think this is a leap forward for a company to expose the data they have about you and give you choices about what they do with it. Imagine the grocery store doing this with your preferred card or your phone company with the data they collect from your wireless bill (and location data they get from your GPS). It’s great when consumers have the choice about how their information is used, and kudos to Google for getting this one right. They still have some work to do given how much info we end up giving them, but definitely a step in the right direction.

I’ve noticed more and more lately that there seems to be an air-conditioning problem nearly everywhere I go. Businesses for some reason think that their customers want to be kept at a frosty 68 degrees while they shop. Office buildings think that the computers and inhabitants will melt if the temperature leaps beyond the 70 mark. At the offices I’ve worked at, it’s typically so cold that people bring sweaters or fleeces to wear during the day!

The Department of Energy says that HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) account for 40-60% of the energy use in buildings. Given that it’s expensive, inefficient, environmentally harmful and just plain uncomfortable, why not just turn the thermostat up a few degrees!

I came across this the other day, and thought it pretty much hit the nail on the head. Published 15 years ago.

(Click to make the image bigger)

More at GoComics | Calvin and Hobbes

Over the last year and a half, I worked as a convertible trader at Merrill Lynch. Last week, I was laid off as part of the headcount reduction initiative for the Bank of America merger. Rather than focus on the termination, I’d rather focus on three key ideas that I learned while employed: devotion to the cause, the value of personal connections, and the importance of constantly learning. Ultimately, these concepts will help me well into my professional career and ensure that the last year and a half was not wasted.

With money coming out of Wall Street and going into science and research, the time has never been better to go into the sciences. The TARP will severely limit Wall Street pay for the next several years while at the same time increasing funding for research and science-related careers.

For several months, I’d been having a problem with my Macbook where the fan ran around 6000 rpm constantly and the battery life was about a third of what it should be. I tried everything — physically cleaning out any visible dust or debris from the vents, zapping the PRAM, looking for stray user processes that might be using the CPU constantly — but nothing seemed to consistently work. Rebooting helped for a short period, but after a few minutes, the fan came back on.

SealedMedia using nearly 100% of my processor

Finally, I gave up and chalked up the battery problems to an older (about 1.5 years) computer and the fan problems to poor heat management in my laptop. It wasn’t the perfect Apple experience that Steve Jobs maybe have liked, especially with a noisy fan running constantly, but it worked.

One day, I was poking through my process viewer, and changed the filter to show ‘All Processes’. Lo and behold, I noticed that one process was taking up 97% of my processor. Since at that time I was only browsing the web with Safari, this was entirely unexpected. After a bit of Googling, I found out that the process, titled ‘SealedMedia Righ’ belonged to some sort of DRM installed on my computer. Whether it came with the system somehow or was installed with a program remains a mystery, but what I do know is the following:

• It was started by launchd, which is a system process kicked off by the kernel
• Killing it immediately brings the processor usage back to normal, the fan almost immediately from 6000 rpm to under 2000 rpm, and the battery life moves to over 3 hours from about 1hr on a full charge
• It doesn’t come back (that I’ve noticed) after I kill it
• It does come back a short time after a reboot.  
• Killing it doesn’t seem to have any undesired effects whatsoever
• I’m running OSX 10.4, not sure if its unique to this version or not

Given that 100% processor usage generates a lot of heat, which is particularly bad for the expensive battery and hardware inside, this malware DRM app is destroying my computer. Googling for a while didn’t turn up much to solve the problem, so I’m asking users — anyone else have any more information about this program, what it does, how it got there, or how to stop it?

SealedMedia killed, CPU usage back to normal.

Unfortunately, while I’ve come to expect nasty DRM from Apple, this takes the cake because ultimately it will greatly reduce the life of my laptop.