Rolls Royce sells more cars in 2011 than any other time in their HISTORY.
Need more proof that the top is getting further separated from the rest of us? Yes they introduced a new car in their lineup, at a lower price point... a *paltry* $250,000... instead of the $350,000 Phantom. What really irks me tho, is the battle between Democrats vs Republicans... like one is completely without fault and its all solely the result of the others politics. I know I vote for a lot of alternate party members when I vote. I'm tired of the two party system, its not productive, an hasn't been for much longer than I've been alive.
But, in the end... I don't even think a 3 or 4 party system would fix anything... until the money in politics is fixed. Corporations are not people, and money is not speech. Until then... The Zombie Apocalypse is just a matter of when, not if.
November 29, 2011 Posted by mitch |
BRZ, cars, Subaru |
I will start off with saying that I love my Subaru WRX. Its alot of fun to drive. However, I couldn't really call myself a "car guy" if there wasn't a apart of me that still wants to drive a BMW, or any of the other number of cars out there that... are Real Wheel Drive. The all-wheel drive of the Subie is lots of fun in the snow... but provides little added thrill in the dry. Since, I can only afford one car for myself at the moment... I chose one that will work in all weather here in Utah. I would however remind that, I've always wanted an M3 (and now, more so the 1M). I could do a MX-5, but I just have a hard time seeing it beings much more than a girl car without a roll-cage, and that wide body kit I've seen on a few of them. The S2000 doesn't seem to carry that stigma in my mind for some reason tho? So... I'm actually looking at the BMW as being the only option.
Until the rumor mill produced the Subayota, and the result... the Toyota GT-86/Scion FR-S/Subaru BRZ. I would opt for the Subaru release... while more expensive...will come turbo charged. But, ultra light ~2700lbs, RWD, 6 speed manual, small sport coupe.
I honestly... can't wait... I really want to give it a test drive.
In some other universe... I think I'm a Civil Engineer. As its always interested me from when I was little and building my Cities out of Legos. However, One thing that really annoys me is road construction, and my belief that they always do it wrong. It stands to reason that the largest costs in the roads built by cities is in labor... and equipment, not necessarily in supplies for the common 3" asphalt road I see built. But, when the city (or state for that matter) pushes for a longer lasting road... why is it they do it in Cement? If you couldn't tell... I'm kind of a car nut... and as one... I love driving. (In yet another universe... I'm a car racer... and a fourth... i'm racing motorcycles...) Anyway... driving on tarmac/asphalt is much more pleasing of a surface, however I feel its got a bad rap because of these ill conceived 3" thick roads. If you were to make an asphalt road as thick with as much preparation under the road as what they put into cement roads around here... I believe they would get just as much life out of them for a third the cost. Granted... I'm pulling numbers out of my ass... but the Germans build the Autobauhn out of asphalt, but they're doing 12" of asphalt. And they have less maintanance! Anyway... thats been my opinion for years... and its irritating... because of the afore mentioned percevied bias of the only lasting road being cement... just isn't true.... least not for the lower traffic city roads... I think they could double the thickness and see tripple the life expectancy of it. But I know its all comes down to the money now... not what the future will bring. I know both political parties at the moment can't seem to guide the country out of that idiotic mindset... we're like a bunch of 2 year olds... need everything now... to hell with what will come later....
Why American Roads are So Bad
Well... They did it... not sure what their real goal is... but Unity is unusable in my mind. Its not that it doesn't "work"... its that it won't work for what I do. I can't find the 5+ different windows of the same app I'll have open on multiple desktops. I upgrade to 11.10... and after a week of using it... found that I'm more frustrated that ever with it. This is the same reason... I can't work with MacOSX. Windows 7 with my limited uses of it... does seem to actually have a method which might possibly work with this new design for desktops... but I have no way of knowing for sure... since I've yet to see multiple desktops on them. Gnome Shell might not have the same flaws as Unity in this respect... however with Ubuntu going full steam into their Unity desktop. I split the jobs I have at hand between 5 desktops on my current laptop. Work Email + Random simple tasks on desktop 1, development tasks on desktops 2 and 3 (separate projects), Music/entertainment stuff on Desktop 4... and whatever else comes along for desktop 5. This is what works for me... and forcing me to change... means I'll find something else that won't. So... I reinstalled my desktop yesterday to ubuntu 11.04... I will stay there until I find a suitable replacement... which will probably be Straight up Debian again. (I ran Debian Unstable on my desktop back in high school) But... I hate to say it Ubuntu/Cannonical... you probably will loose any and all recommendations from me. My laptop is not a Tablet, nor a Phone, I still have a laptop because I need to really work on it. My phone is NOT a replacement for it, and won't be for the foreseeable future... eventually probably... but not yet. That is all.
October 1, 2011 Posted by mitch |
android, G2x |
I said I was going to write about my experiences with this... and never came back to it. I've been running custom ROM's since my first post about rooting my G2x. However, I honestly was a little unsure about the whole process so I didn't want to write about the other bits. I went back through and upgraded ClockWorkMod Recovery again, this time it was a little less unnerving so, I will write down my steps here.
First... I'm following bits from this xda thread
I downloaded the rar file and pulled out the bits needed for ClockWorkMod (CWM) 5.0.2.0, so I could flash it from linux. I originally had a script that I used to flash this... my appologies I don't remember where, nor do I want to claim it as my own... I will include it however at the bottom of this post. Anyway, here goes. After grabbing the files above and the nvflash bin and a script, I put all of this in a CWM-5.0.2 directory
mitch@kraven:~/g2xroot/CWM-5.0.2$ ls -l
total 5008
-rw-r--r-- 1 mitch mitch 3563520 2011-09-06 20:58 CWM-5020.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 mitch mitch 4080 2011-04-21 00:40 E1108_Hynix_512MB_H8TBR00U0MLR-0DM_300MHz_final_emmc_x8.bct
-rw-r--r-- 1 mitch mitch 1024992 2011-04-21 12:00 fastboot.bin
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mitch mitch 125 2011-10-01 15:59 flash-recovery.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mitch mitch 526131 2011-10-01 15:58 nvflash
Before running the script, you need to connect your phone, follow these steps:
- pull the battery on my phone
- plug USB cable in laptop
- Hold Volume Up AND Volume Down
- *WHILE* holding #3, plug in USB to phone
This should result in a PCI connection to your phone... Your phone will not do anything.
mitch@kraven:~/g2xroot/CWM-5.0.2$ lspci
....
15:00.2 SD Host controller: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 21)
15:00.4 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter (rev 11)
15:00.5 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd xD-Picture Card Controller (rev 11)
From there, you run the flash-recovery.sh script.
mitch@kraven:~/g2xroot/CWM-5.0.2$ ./flash-recovery.sh
Nvflash started
rcm version 0X20001
System Information:
chip name: unknown
chip id: 0x20 major: 1 minor: 3
chip sku: 0xf
chip uid: 0x02884207417fe4d7
macrovision: disabled
hdcp: enabled
sbk burned: false
dk burned: false
boot device: emmc
operating mode: 3
device config strap: 0
device config fuse: 17
sdram config strap: 0
downloading bootloader -- load address: 0x108000 entry point: 0x108000
sending file: fastboot.bin
/ 1024992/1024992 bytes sent
fastboot.bin sent successfully
waiting for bootloader to initialize
bootloader downloaded successfully
sending file: CWM-5020.img
| 3563520/3563520 bytes sent
CWM-5020.img sent successfully
At this point... you phone will be showing a "software upgrade is in progress" screen...
even after it completes... the above output took around 15 seconds to play out... and they say you can
unplug right after this.. I left it pluged in for another 30 seconds... cause it makes me nervous... (probably
unfounded...)
Download files here
September 30, 2011 Posted by mitch |
site, thoughts |
I'm having a problem lately having the motivation to post anything here... as I feel lately all I've wanted to do was rant about something going on in the every day life. However... posting a couple lines here and there... without much of a "title" has been seeming more appealing... I'll probably work that into my next site update... no "title" just a "post"... to which I'll allow comments to. All showing up on the front page, interspersed with blog posts.
August 14, 2011 Posted by mitch |
boto, python, S3 |
I needed the ability to sync a directory to S3 for a client... so I wrote up a script I'm calling sync2S3.py. Some of the code came from the Django extensions project, which I modified to work without django and just sync a directory in an rsync like fashion. Enjoy
Thank you yet again George Carlin. You were well ahead of your time.
Its been a while since I've written anything... not sure why really... I've been feeling quite overwhelmed lately with work and home life... so I don't think I've had much time to work on anything cool.
I should have some puppet examples soon... as when I do get a little down time at work I've been working on setting that up for a cloud environment I've been maintaining. I also need to get some monitoring figured out for windows... why did microsoft change the WMI queries between their 32bit and 64bit OS? I mean... aside from having to do the obvious and change win32 to win64... why would they make it more difficult than that? or... better yet... why did they include the bit number at all? The move from 32 to 64 bit was inevitable... just like the eventual move to 128? or whatever will come next... so... why make your API's immediately dated by including something like that...
June 22, 2011 Posted by mitch |
blog |
I finally got around to fixing a few things that had been bugging me about my blog... comments now work again... not sure when they broke... but they're good now. and Style Sheet Changes! you can now actually read my write up on rooting my G2x!
June 10, 2011 Posted by mitch |
att-sucks |
Since my choice of phones would show that I have T-Mobile as a carrier... I just wanted the powers involved... that I will be moving to another provider should the buyout happen. I refuse to pay any more money to AT&T, so, AT&T... if you think your going to have more... I can guarantee I'm not the only one that feels this way.... and I will also not be the only one that will jump ship. Do you really need a really expensive eye opener to know how much your hated? (Yes this is still because of the comments and the start of the Net Neutrality discussions)
Since my only desktop is my work Lenovo ThinkPad running Ubuntu 11.04, and the bulk of the articles out there reference Windows... I did find a few articles articulating how to root the T-Mobile G2x, but I thought I'd do a full write up here over what exactly I did to root my G2x and will do a followup with flashing a CyanogenMod Nightly to it as well.
First, I downloaded the latest Android SDK from Google
I extracted the tarball and renamed it to androidsdk in my home directory:
$ tar -zxvf Downloads/android-sdk_r11-linux_x86.tgz
$ mv android-sdk-linux_x86 androidsdk
I then added the following to my .bashrc file and load it into your environment variables
$ export PATH=${PATH}:$HOME/androidsdk/tools:$HOME/androidsdk/platform-tools
$ source .bashrc
The directory, platform-tools, will not exist yet, and you will need to download the Android SDK Platform-tools. To do this, you will run the command
$ android
This will startup a GUI, click Available packages -> Android Repository -> Android SDK Platform-tools, revision 5 (Revision may be updated... this was the version when I did this)
Click Install Selected wait till finished and close.
Now, we need to update udev to setup the proper device permissions for when we connect our phone.
$ sudo echo 'SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="1004", MODE="0666"' >> /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules
the idVendor string is unique per manufacturer, there is a list of them on Android Development here, But I've used the LG one here, since they're the maker of the G2x.
Then you need to restart udev
$ sudo service udev restart
Now... we're almost done. I first attempted to use the SuperOneClick root... which wasn't working for me. I then found a shell script that was a simple root to... thought I'd give it a go, and it worked easily, which can be downloaded on xda
I will note that... at this point, you should be able to connect your phone via USB, turn on USB Debug Mode. Settings -> Applications -> Development -> USB Debugging. Then run: adb devices. Should return this... or something similar at least... not sure what the hex number is... serial#?
$ adb devices
List of devices attached
02884207417fe4d7 device
After Downloading the G2xRootMacLinux_v0.5.zip and unzipping it.
mitch@kraven:~$ mkdir g2xroot
mitch@kraven:~$ cd g2xroot/
mitch@kraven:~/g2xroot$ unzip ../Downloads/G2xRootMacLinux_v0.5.zip
Archive: ../Downloads/G2xRootMacLinux_v0.5.zip
creating: G2xRootMacLinux_v0.5/
creating: G2xRootMacLinux_v0.5/files/
inflating: G2xRootMacLinux_v0.5/files/adb_linux
inflating: G2xRootMacLinux_v0.5/files/adb_mac
inflating: G2xRootMacLinux_v0.5/files/busybox
inflating: G2xRootMacLinux_v0.5/files/psneuter
inflating: G2xRootMacLinux_v0.5/files/shared.sh
inflating: G2xRootMacLinux_v0.5/files/su
inflating: G2xRootMacLinux_v0.5/files/Superuser.apk
inflating: G2xRootMacLinux_v0.5/Readme.txt
inflating: G2xRootMacLinux_v0.5/root.command
inflating: G2xRootMacLinux_v0.5/unroot.command
mitch@kraven:~/g2xroot$ ls
G2xRootMacLinux_v0.5
mitch@kraven:~/g2xroot$ cd G2xRootMacLinux_v0.5/
mitch@kraven:~/g2xroot/G2xRootMacLinux_v0.5$ ls
files Readme.txt root.command unroot.command
mitch@kraven:~/g2xroot/G2xRootMacLinux_v0.5$ less Readme.txt
mitch@kraven:~/g2xroot/G2xRootMacLinux_v0.5$ ./root.command
Checking for connected device...
Pushing temporary root exploint (psneuter) to device...
1262 KB/s (585731 bytes in 0.453s)
Running psneuter on device...
property service neutered.
killing adbd. (should restart in a second or two)
Waiting for device...
Remounting /system read/write...
remount succeeded
Pushing su to /system/bin/su...
635 KB/s (26324 bytes in 0.040s)
Pushing busybox to /system/bin/busybox...
1253 KB/s (1062992 bytes in 0.827s)
Installing Superuser.apk android application...
1283 KB/s (196521 bytes in 0.149s)
Removing psneuter from device...
Rebooting device...
Once device has rebooted you should be rooted.
Press Enter when you're ready to quit:
mitch@kraven:~/g2xroot/G2xRootMacLinux_v0.5$
And that was it. Phone is rooted.
Many Thanks to jnichols959 for the scripts!
Next up CyanogenMod Nightly
Took the family out to WSBK on Monday, and enjoyed it thoroughly. Everyone got a little sun burnt even... yeah... from the 10 minutes of sun there was, and the sub 55 degree temperatures. Zoey seemed to like watching a bit... until she discovered all the rocks on the ground... then that was more interesting. She was also a little shocked at first about the noise, but still managed to sleep through the AMA SuperBike race.... go figure... She was exhausted tho. Congrats to Checa for the 1 2 win! For Ducati claiming they aren't competitive.... he's the current leader on points with a non-factory team. Stop whining and RACE!
So... I was just looking back and I never posted that I bought the G2x when it came out!
Whats up with that... I mean... I really love the phone... and I haven't even root' it yet! I will more than likely... waiting for the gingerbread release to come out for it before I jump ship to another custom rom... Wanting to make sure I can always go back to stock. And I know I said it had to have a keyboard... but a dual core phone with a really good screen... and stock android... I went for it. and while at times I miss the keyboard... i'm getting used to swype. I find me avoiding replying to email with my phone however... so I guess it is telling... All and all tho... I don't miss the cliq in the slightest it was a horrible phone. The G2x however, is great. Only thing that I would change in it... a keyboard!
May 14, 2011 Posted by mitch |
thoughts |
With everything going on at work, and home... I have questions revolving around getting done what I see I need to...but aren't really a priority on anyone else's list?
While what I'm paid to do, is be a Systems and Network administrator... I'm also fairly competent and enjoy some development down time, but with the crazy schedule of projects at work, I haven't been able to set aside some time to do that aspect of what I view as my job. My fellow co-workers would benefit from the time I spent on it... once they learned how to use what I would create... but, really... they don't know that yet.... because they don't have the view of it all, like I do... does that make it my fault? Because I'm not communicating it clearly... or at all?
Whats more... whats up with feeling like I'm always two weeks behind where I should be? Is this really the future of what things will always be like... or is it still just the reality of my current job... and eventually... it will change...
Will my drive come back after I get some much needed downtime... I feel a bit burned out... because of the afore mentioned crazy schedule of project after project... never any down time to really fine tune anything.
I'm just saying...
