Ho John Lee’s Weblog

We recently had a mini film festival at our house featuring Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean. Some time ago, we watched Johnny English (2003), featuring Rowan Atkinson as a Bean-like British secret agent (sort of Bean-as-James-Bond), which was well received at our house. (I was dispatched in search of Abba’s “Does Your Mother Know” the next day to accompany toothbrushing and dancing the following evening).

Bean: The Movie (1997) seemed like a good bet for family movie night when we came across it at the video store.

There is a (so far) minor publicity and legal storm surrounding the fact that HP ink cartridge have a feature which enforces an expiration date for the cartridge. Aside from bad publicity and user frustration, there has also been some legal action recently drawing additional attention to the issue.

In the meantime, there are methods for working around these features for now.

Ever wonder what to do with some frequent flyer miles sitting in an account you don’t use enough to turn into a free ticket or upgrade?

You can trade in various sorts of airline miles for magazine subscriptions. I did this a while back to use up some orphaned miles on Northwest Airlines, which I basically don’t fly on. I had been considering trying their trans-Pacific service, as an alternative to United Airlines, as a hedge against United going out of business or otherwise being unreliable for travel to Asia a couple of years ago when UAL entered bankruptcy.

When I signed up for a Northwest frequent flyer account number, it gave me 2000 miles as a sign up bonus, which I used to get a free subscription to Time magazine. Over the course of the year I also realized that I mostly ended up tossing the issues in the recycling bin before reading them, since they’re usually available on the airplane, so I let the subscription lapse.

Saw this on Joi Ito’s Web.
Shinkuro is Steve Crocker’s company.

They have a software client aimed at secure collaboration between multiple organizations. It provides file sharing, chat messaging, e-mail, and shared desktop, and encrypts all of the network traffic at the message level rather than relying on SSL. This prevents traffic from being intercepted at a Shinkuro relay server, which functions something like an IRC server.

I keep looking for better tools to support remote collaboration, since almost everything I do these days involves people in at least two time zones, and usually two or three different continents.

Returned to California from India yesterday. I’ve made this trip often enough that it’s becoming sort of routine, but I’m always a little amazed at the fact that it is sort of routine, and always return with a greater appreciation for the many small things that work here.

The trip takes around 36 hours. Travelling across the Pacific, you get a day back crossing the international date line, so on the calendar it works out to a really long day, i.e. on this trip I left India on the afternoon of February 10th, and arrived in San Francisco on the morning of February 11th.

Some things that help make the trip more manageable for me:

1. noise reduction headphones
2. shower, shave, and brush teeth during stop over in Narita
3. minimize alcohol consumption during travel
4. drink lots of water during travel
5. get up and walk around every few hours during flight
6. eat small snacks between meal service, in my case, usually pieces of Balance bars

Press release at HP.com
Hewlett-Packard Fires Fiorina (TheStreet.com)

HP’s CEO Carly Fiorina Steps Down (Forbes.com)

Here are some links related to using WordPress for sites that aren’t blogs:

http://www.radicalcongruency.com/20040531-tutorial-using-wordpress-to-power-your-non-blog-website

http://www.grahamazon.com/wordpress-as-cms/

which describes the Stanford Community Health Resource Center site at http://chrc.stanford.edu/

While investigating fresnel zone impairment issues for a potential 29 km 2.4GHz link, I have been looking for a way to calculate the theoretical loss due to obstacles within the fresnel zone.

There are many online web calculators that will compute the fresnel zone radius and the 60% radius. If there are no obstacles along the link path that are within 60% of the fresnel zone radius, it is generally safe to ignore the signal losses due to fresnel zone interference. However, I’m having a difficult time finding a method to estimate the potential losses due to known obstacles within the fresnel zone radius.

I did come across a nice (Windows-only) free application for wireless network planning, called Radio Mobile, while looking at an overview on radio propagation.

See also the Radio Mobile Quick Start guide.

Update: figured out that I need to search for “knife edge diffraction loss calculator” and “rounded edge diffraction loss”.