From Dave at just procrastinating:

Should I be drinking wine or beer? This study suggests beer for cancer prevention. While there are all kinds of studies that show red wine is good for heart disease. There really aren’t enough hours in the evening for me to be doing all this drinking for my health. If I am going to have 2 glasses of red wine a day to help my heart and now 2 or 3 beers to fight off cancer, I might have to start drinking at the office.

Basecamp: Web-based Project Management, Idea Management, Client Extranet, Project Site System (simple, elegant, powerful, fast, and usable) – looks cool. $19 a month for 10 projects, unlimited users. – not bad.

I wanted badly to like Hacking Matter: Levitating Chairs, Quantum Mirages, and the Infinite Weirdness of Programmable Atoms but it put me to sleep, I couldn’t finish it. Too much dragging thru the details of shoving electrons around. Not enough of the human side of the story – the scientists on the frontier and what drives them, the future implications for our lives, the unbelievers in the scientific community and the conflict between them and the advocates. There were hints of this but just not enough.

I’m wondering if it makes sense to broadcast my Halloween background music this year via FM, rather than running speaker wires all over the place. Ramsey has a lot of FM kits. I’m not sure what the legality of running your own FM broadcast is, even if I just limit it to my yard. The rules for Low Power FM don’t permit individual stations. Sites like Radio4All give a lot of guidance tho on how to set up a station.

InfoWorld: Update: HP to acquire Novadigm, Consera

Re my earlier post about the Blackberry and Outlook2003, there is now a fixed version of the bberry client – 3.6.2.9 – that works with Outlook 2003.

Continuing this year’s magazine reading adventure, my next two reads:

Coastal Living – at its best, this is a nice walkthru of design ideas for waterfront homes. If I was building such a home, I’d buy this mag and peruse it for ideas. At its worst, the magazine seems typical of a magazine created by an industry trying to flog its wares – the magazine is all about encouraging you to buy more stuff, to feel bad about the stuff you have. There were some beautiful places featured in the mag – Casa Morada in the Keys, Shorepine Village in Oregon. Oh and I never knew Hobie Cats were named after a guy named Hobie.

Conservation in Practice – A very pragmatic magazine about conservation. No extremism here – just practical articles on small realistic steps in conservation. An interesting article on Virtual Ecosystems – I guess I’d call this computational ecology. Another article on distributing risk – creating multiple independent habitats for endangered species. Good guide to wise seafood eating at Blue Ocean Institute.[PDF]

So for the last several weeks I’ve been playing around with KVMs at home.  I built a new Shuttle box and I wanted to use it and my existing PC from my desk.  I’ve used a KVM for years at work to switch between my desktop and server and have never had a problem, although the KVM doesn’t support audio switching.  So I thought this would be easy at home.

My first realization – my home desktop is a lot more complicated than work.  Besides KVM switching, I really need audio switching, I’d like USB switching (for modern KBs and mice, as well as cameras, label printer, etc).  And audio switching is getting complicated as I move from 2.1 speaker setups to analog N.1 and then to SPDIF.  And video switching is getting complicated as we move from analog to DVI and beyond.  I’ll talk later about this, but the connection story between the PC under the desk and the desktop is a mess – video, power, mouse, kb, audio, usb, maybe firewire.  Putting a good intermediary in place like a KVM is crazily complicated. 

My second realization – Belkin has the world’s best retail distribution strategy.  I’m not sure who runs their distribution but that person is kicking ass.  It is hard to find anything besides a Belkin choice in the retail channel.  Too bad their products don’t quite measure up…

My first attempt was the Belkin Omniview 2-Port USB KVM with Audio.  It promised VGA, KB, Mouse, Audio (2.1 analog), and USB switching.  It wasn’t too hard to setup, you do need to buy the cables separately.  The biggest pain about setup is that this KVM is a USB hub and each of the connected deskstops needs to recognize the hub, install drivers, etc.  But once set up, it seemed to work.  But after about a day of use, it was clear this box was a failure.  The problem, I believed, was due to its buggy USB implementation.  The mouse and kb routed thru the USB hub, and the KVM would routinely drop kb events – for instance if I held down the CTRL key and tried to select a lot of items in my inbox, after about 5 seconds the system would forget that the CTRL key was held down.  And games were unplayable for the same reason.  And finally this KVM only supports USB 1.1, and some of my desktop devices were 2.0 compatible, and XP kept chattering about the incompatibility.

Attempt 2: The ATEN USB 2.0 KVM.  Since my problems above were USB-related (and since I had had problems with Belkin USB desktop hubs in the past), I decided to go try a different vendor’s USB solution, and go for higher speed USB.  Along the way I bought a Creative USB Audigy soundsystem (which works great by the way), so that I wouldn’t need audio switching in the KVM but could use the USB switching to achieve audio switching.  This solution lasted even less time.  Again USB problems – the two machines had trouble reliably seeing keypresses, and I kept hearing PNP insert/remove sounds, telling me that the machines were not able to reliably keep connections to the USB devices.  I concluded at this point that any USB-based KVM was likely to be trouble; I wanted a simpler KVM that was just electrically switching signals.

So attempt 3: A cheap PS/2-based KVM with Audio, I think this one from PPA, it was on sale at Fry’s.  I went back to switching 2.1 analog sound with this approach.  This solution worked for about 5 minutes and then I gave up on it.  The keyboard kept going dead – none of the keyboard lights would light, it seemed like it wasn’t getting power.  This KVM is supposedly “self-powered”, drawing power from the kb port on the host PCs.  I concluded this was a bad idea – I have had self-powered USB hubs in the past and they rarely work well, I don’t think the power delivery over the kb port on most PCs is adequate for these scenarios.  So onto…

Attempt 4: The Belkin Omniview PS/2 model.  No clever USB hub, nothing fancy, just electrical switching of analog signals across the board.  And separately powered.  So far, I am happy with this solution, it seems stable.  And doesn’t drop events.  Now I do notice it doesn’t respond to the soft-key “switch pc” command as well as the USB hubs, it is probably harder to detect the key combo.  But that is an error case I can live with.

So in summary, if you want to use a KVM at home today – stick with analog switching of VGA, 2.1 audio, PS/2 mouse, PS/2 kb.  USB switching is problematic. 

I’m not very satisfied with this, I want to start playing around with DVI and SPDIF switching – there are some kvms that do DVI.  And I wish I could switch USB but my learning is that the USB functionality in these boxes is crap.

What I really think I want is a really small form factor PC on my desktop – maybe integral with my monitor – that supports DVI/SPDIF/USB/Firewire outputs, and can take input feeds of all these signals over IP from arbitrary remote machines.  Then I could just have power and IP fed up to my desktop, and everything could hub out from one device on my desktop – probably my monitor.

I picked up Construction Failure a few years ago after a quake up here and have read it off and on for months. This is a textbook so don’t expect an enthralling story. But a great summary of failure cases in a whole variety of structures – bridges, dams, office buildings, arenas, wood structures, concrete structures, etc. In hindsight all the failures seem obvious; too bad we can’t harness hindsight as a design practice.

Whipped thru Krakatoa : The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 over last weekend. A very good read. Some background on Dutch colonial history in the area that was all new to me. And the story of the explosion is just phenomenal – the explosion was heard 3000 miles away – like hearing here in Seattle an explosion on the East Coast – amazing. The writer does a good job making it come alive. And I’m a sucker for plate tectonics, and the author provides a decent background on the topic.

Read Jupiter : A Novel at the airport the other day. Quick read. OK hard science fiction. Pretty familiar theme – humanity in near future discovers alien intelligent lifeform, forced to wrestle with definition of humanity and implications. Normal amount of scifi action and intrigue. An adequate read but forgettable. If you want a deeply interesting treatment of this theme, try The Sparrow instead.

Way behind on book reviews. Picked up The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T’Ang Exotics more for its title than any other reason, for some reason Samarkand sounds compelling to me. The book is a little dry but interesting insight into the culture of 7th century China – makes you realize how culturally and historically impoverished we are here in the States.

Last week I finished Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason. A moderately interesting history of the gin mania in Britain in the 18th century. A unique voice, and a lot of good period details. And great analysis of the flailing attempts to prohibit or control consumption. Obvious parallels to our own country’s attempts at prohibition, and our flailing attempts to control drugs today in our country. The lessons are pretty obvious – it is probably a waste of energy to attempt prohibition, probably the best we can do is try to clean up the distribution, and overconsumption is probably a social and economic issue and needs to be treated as such.

I wanted to add Google as an information source for the Research feature in Outlook (Office) 2003 but geez look at these directions – Google Sample (Microsoft Office 2003 Research Service Software Development Kit) – install sdks, on servers, or enable IIS on your machine, …

What a pain in the a$$. Not worth it. If someone has a simpler way let me know.