Entries Tagged 'miscellaneous' ↓

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.

As I write this, I’m sitting in Newark airport, waiting for our airplane to emerge from its holding pattern and land so that we can board and get on our way. We’re already 5 hours delayed (might be a new record for me), and its Christmas Eve, so at this point, I’m just glad there is some end in sight to the waiting.

As I’m sitting here, I’m thinking about my other options to Chicago if the flight were to be cancelled. Flight-wise, there isn’t much. A bus takes about 18 hours, so thats not really feasible. A train isn’t much better — it takes around 12 or so when you factor in all the stops. So really, its fly or nothing.

In Japan and parts of Europe, people have another viable option for quick and efficient medium-distance travel. The high-speed trains in these areas can travel 300km/hr (186mph), which would get me from NY to Chicago in under 4 hours. A flight is 2.5 hours in the air plus another 2 hours or so of security and delays, so 4 hours by train certainly gives air travel a run for its money. There are other advantages too — a train can take far more people at at time, so on really high-traffic routes (like NYC to Chicago), plenty of seats are available and they can [conceivably] be sold for a lower price. Weather isn’t nearly as much of a concern, and congestion during crowded times can be solved by simply adding more cars to the train, instead of trying to pack more planes into a finite amount of runway and airspace.

Energy efficiency is a huge upside as well. When oil was above $140/barrel, the airlines couldn’t raise fairs and cut costs enough to make money. Trains don’t have nearly the same voracious energy demands — to put it in perspective, a freight train move 1 ton of cargo 423 miles on 1 gallon of diesel fuel. Admittedly, there is a definite difference between a diesel freight train and a electric magnelev train, but the scope is similar. A story on inhabitant.com (linked below) says that these trains use 1/3 of the energy of planes and 1/5 of the energy of cars. The greenhouse gases that a network of trains would save is huge, and the benefits would go beyond just environmental.

Obviously the main concern with building such a system is the huge cost of creating such an infrastructure. The solution? Start small. California recently approved 800 miles of high-speed rail that will connect every major city in the state. How about a similar system for the east coast? Connect very high-traffic routes between DC, NY and Boston. These routes are heavily trafficked by business travelers, and airline routes such as the Delta Shuttle between New York and Boston are consistently among the most profitable routes in the industry. Replacing a 1hr plane ride subject to delays and security hassles with a 1.5 hour train ride that is essentially “hop on, hop off” will certainly be attractive to many or most of these travelers. Once these routes are established and profitable, build out capacity to other cities.

Air travel ultimately is an inefficient means of transportation for short distances. Allowing a plane to use an airport slot for a 500 mile trip is a very poor use of resources, and certainly something that could be improved upon. As the government looks for the best possible ways to productively spend money to stimulate the economy, rail improvements should be near the top of the list.

As the saying goes, there is certainly no love lost between Time Warner and me. For starters, their internet service to my apartment in New York tends to be extremely slow, especially at peak times. The TV, while more reliable than the internet, also cuts out from time to time, and definitely isn’t as good as offerings from Verizon FIOS or even some of the stuff I’ve seen Comcast do.

However, I was watching today, and when I clicked on a channel to watch a movie already started (Click! with Adam Sandler…so/so), I was presented with this option:

I clicked it, and sure enough, the movie started over! Pretty cool. It was a on FX, so I figured that it was just some gimmick that FX had going.

Later that night, I flipped on House on TNT. Same message! Seems like a bunch of channels are participating.

The ‘Enhanced TV’ features allow you to start from the beginning, pause or rewind the shows (no fast-forward, however, presumably to prevent you from skipping commercials). I checked out the Time Warner Enhanced TV site and it seems like there is a whole slew of features available in certain markets:

	Start Over – Missed the start of your favorite show? With Start Over™, you’ve got the power to restart and watch it from the beginning. Over 60 popular TV channels currently offer Start Over™ and it’s free with digital cable service.
	Quick Clips – Watch video clips of your favorite shows and news programs whenever you like with Quick Clips. New content is added every day and it’s free with digital cable service.
	Look Back – Ever wish you could go back in time and catch a show you missed? Now you can. Look Back lets you watch shows you missed, as many as 48 hours after the program originally aired.
	PhotoshowTV – PhotoShowTV is a new, easy, and FREE way to share your digital pictures and videos with friends and family, right through your computer and TV! It’s free when you subscribe.

Not bad. Seems like Start Over is the only feature available for me right now, but I’m particularly intrigued by the PhotoshowTV option. If they do it right (a big if — pictures are hard, since everyone already has their favorite backup and picture services, and its a pain to switch), it would be pretty neat to be able to pull up your pictures on your TV to show. Those photos from Costa Rica probably look a lot better on a 52″ plasma than on your smaller computer monitor in the den.