Linux, finance, rants, politics

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.

If you’re a power user but haven’t yet given Linux a shot, you should definitely try it out. Here are 10 things that you will love about Linux over Windows or OS X.

MythTV turns your computer into a media center

1. Linux can be customized far more than Windows or OSX, so your system can be set up to do exactly what you want it to do. In college, I had a spare Pentium 3 computer lying around that I wanted to use as a frontend to my media server. I didn’t care about (or want) a desktop or anything other than a media player that would play my files fullscreen. Since I had a wireless keyboard but no mouse and no remote, I wanted everything to be completely keyboard-driven. There were a few options from a “nice frontend” standpoint, most notably MythTV. However, since I wasn’t recording shows and I didn’t care so much about a fancy interface (I was fully happy with doing everything from command line since its easy enough to browse folders and play files), I settled on Ratpoison for the window manager. I set the system to boot up to a full-screen command line with a large font, and did all browsing from the command line. When I wanted to launch a file, I used mplayer set up to launch full screen. As a result, I could very quickly play a large variety of files without any GUI hassle or slowness.This was a special use, but it goes to show that Linux can be tailored in a nearly infinite number of ways. Want a large, cushy GUI? Try KDE. Want something barebones? Try XFCE or Fluxbox. Want to create a server and stick it in the closet? Just leave off the GUI — everything can be done command line. Choose what servers and services you want installed and what you want to run in the background. Finally, perhaps the best part — if you build a system using a distro like Gentoo (my distro of choice), you know and have control over everything going on. That’s power.

 

2. You can chain together basic system services to create your own custom software routines. A few months ago, I decided I wanted to wake up each morning to a different song from a playlist of about 100 songs that I had on my computer. When I got up, I wanted to first hear a random song from the playlist, then listen to current business headlines and weather read to me as I got ready. With Linux, setting this up was pretty basic. See my other blog post Talking Linux RSS Alarm Clock if you’re curious how I strung together several off-the-shelf components to create this app in only a few minutes.

 

3. You can custom-configure the OS to run well on even your old, underpowered computer.
   

   SSH clients like TouchTerm allow you to administer your machine from anywhere, even a cell phone

   
   The newest versions of Windows or OS X will run painfully slow on a computer that is more than 3 years old. This is because Vista and Leopard have become extremely bloated because of “features” like enhanced visual effects, indexed search and always-on spyware and virus protection. Visual effects are nice, but you certainly don’t want or need them when you’re using older hardware for basic tasks. Spyware and viruses are much less of a problem on Linux than on Windows, so you can get away without running any protection software on Linux (provided that you update they system regularly). Indexed search is one of the better features and almost worth the cycles it takes; however, if its an older computer, its nice to be able to forego this. Granted, you can turn off or lessen the effects of any of these three, but your system will still not be as peppy as it could otherwise be. With a stripped down Linux install, your old Pentium II can run basic apps with plenty of speed.

 

4. The system is fully accessible remotely, even over the slowest connection — even from a cell phone!With Windows, you only have control over the system remotely if you set up remote desktop, and even then, you’re severely limited to where you can connect from because sending a full screen requires a pretty fat connection. OSX is a little better — you can do the remote desktop, but you can also connect remotely over SSH, which only sends text and commands, so its a lot speedier. The problem with OSX is that most of the Apple software is designed to be used and configured through a GUI, so often there isn’t much that you’re able to do over command line. Almost anything in Linux is available over the command line, so when you connect remotely over SSH, you have as much (or almost as much) power as you have when sitting right at the desktop. If you regularly login this way, you can find applications that easily let you access your mail, play music (on the server computer) and even chat on IM all through the text-based terminal. Perhaps a special use, but its pretty convenient to be able to reboot your computer or restart your web server over your cell phone when you’re in the next state and need to retrieve a special file.

 

5. Its free, and you can try it without reformatting a computer. Check out a LiveCD like Ubuntu or Knoppix, both of which will bring you to a full-fledged Linux desktop as soon as you pop in the CD/DVD and reboot the computer. They allow you to get a very basic feel for the system without having to remove or disturb the existing OS underneath. Knoppix especially has a huge suite of applications that let you test out several programs for any given use without having to worry about downloading or installing them

 

6. Installing, maintaining and upgrading your software is a snap.Modern Linux distros (short for distributions) have very advanced package managers, which are programs that handle the search, installation, and maintenance of all of the programs on your system. Gentoo uses a system called portage, which downloads the source code for all the applications, compiles it, and installs it. This is a bit slower than just copying over pre-compiled binary packages, but [in theory] results in software thats exactly tailored for your PC. Ubuntu uses a system called apt, which is much faster than portage because all of the packages have already been compiled. In either case, finding an application is a quick command away, and installing it is only a few more keystrokes. When it comes time to upgrade, another few keystrokes can update an individual program, only system files, or every program on the computer. This is heads and shoulders above the OSX or Windows way of doing it, where you need to browse the web for a file, download it, and then go through the setup routine.
7. Linux is great with networking. Sharing files across a network? Want to set up your own web page and serve it to others? Want to connect automatically every time to other shares that people have set up, and have them seamlessly integrated into your file structure? Linux has industrial strength support for a variety of networking applications, such as Apache for web serving and Samba, NFS, scp, and a variety of other protocols for filesharing. Many of these are a click away from installing on a major distro, and can be seamlessly integrated into your files. While OSX does a pretty good job at this sort of thing, support for these services on Windows is spotty and incomplete, especially on the home versions. For example, if you have a music directory shared on Windows that you connect to using SMB (Samba), you can just set that share to appear in your home directory as /home/user/music, so it looks identical to any other directory in your system and can be manipulated and used by other programs just as easy.

 

8. Almost all of the best software for Linux is free! Just about anything you want to do with Windows is relatively easy to do with Linux, and chances are someone has written some very good free software to do it. In fact, I’ve found that software for Linux tends to be better-written and more powerful in many [most?] cases than its Windows or Mac counterpart. The reason behind this is that there is a huge network of software developers that use Linux, so when there is a glaring omission application-wise on Linux, the community is quick to step in and fix it. Furthermore, as I mentioned above, it is relatively easy to string together tools with Linux, so often application development is quick because application C makes use of applications A and B in an efficient way. Here is a [very, very brief] list of great free software on Linux:- Firefox [same program as Windows and OSX]
   - Amarok [music manager, syncs with an iPod. Comparable with iTunes, has some other interesting features]
   - KWrite [text editor, far more powerful than Notepad]
   - AbiWord or OpenOffice [word processing and office software, comparable to MS Office]
   - EasyTag [MP3 tag manager, very powerful for getting your songs tagged and named properly]
   - KAlarm [alarm clock program, can set alerts, timers and alarms on a one-time or recurring basis]
   - Pidgin [IM application, connects to AIM, Google Chat, Yahoo, MSN, etc. Lots of cool plugins]
   - The Gimp [Powerful image editing program, comparable to Photoshop]   

   These are some of the applications that are free and useful to get going on a day-to-day basis. You’ll find that a huge amount of specialized programs exist, and are free, to do things like photo management, backup, games, etc.

9. LiveCDs exist for countless specialized uses, so advanced applications are just a disk image away Because Linux is so modular, any type of system can be built around the core. For desktop users, this typically includes a nice desktop graphical environment, a web browser, a word processor and a media player. However, not all computers and configurations need this much in terms of user applications.When I was in college, I wanted to be able to compile software on Gentoo faster by using a cluster of computers to break up the workload. The good news was that there was an abundance of powerful computers on the network (namely, my friends’ machines). The bad news was that none of them had Linux or the software needed to compile over the network. The solution was distccKnoppix, a LiveCD that came pre-setup with the DistCC compiler software I needed. After downloading and burning a few copies, I went around and rebooted the computers around me into the LiveCD environment and was soon compiling on 5 separate computers.
   Lots of other great LiveCD systems exist: MythBuntu turns your computer and TV into a media center, gOS creates a very simple cloud-computing enviroment built on Google Applications, Redwall Firewall turns a spare computer into a logfile-rich firewall for the network. Tons of other CDs exist for every other conceivable use from network attached storage (NAS) to kiosk-style arcade games. The old computer that was sitting in the closet collecting dust can easily be reborn in many different ways with a LiveCD install. Check out The LiveCD List for an extensive listing of LiveCDs.

 

10. New and cutting-edge features come very quickly to Linux because of the wide network of smart programmers all over the world.Since Linux is a collection of software made by programmers all over the world instead of simply an OS packaged by one company, you can have new developments on your desktop in days or weeks by simply updating your system instead of waiting years for the next release. Furthermore, the sheer number of different minds working on the problems creates a multitude of choices for any given application.For example, in the media player area, Amarok incorporates sophisticated music analysis and fingerprinting technologies that help identify your music and suggest music that you might also like. Similar features are now trickling down to iTunes, but Linux has had them for years. Users that were interested in incorporating information from databases like Last.fm could do much more quickly by using software in Linux than they could waiting for mainstream apps for Mac OS and Windows.Desktop environments like KDE 4 and Gnome are constantly pushing the envelope in user interface technologies and new features come every day that improve the experience and add functionality. Of course, not everything is a slam dunk, so some degree of willingness to test out cutting-edge technology is required, but for those that like to be at the forefront of new tech, Linux is the place to be.

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.

In the next decade, convergence will give way to deconvergence. Devices that “do it all” will become less important, losing mindshare to smaller, cheaper, simpler devices that do one or two things very well.