Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

A friend of mine is moving to Chicago and needs a new car.  She is 25 years old, of medium height, and conservative in her tastes.  She wants a four-seat sedan with back seats large enough to carry passengers but very seldom will she have anyone in the back seat.  Cost is not an issue but she doesn’t want something that screams “I am a rich bastard”.  We test-drove the Acura RL sedan yesterday afternoon.  It seemed like it did just about everything that you’d want a car to do.  The RL is big but not huge.  It has great acceleration and reasonable mileage (18 city, 26 highway–not quite as good as the latest minivans!).  All four wheels are driven for better handling, especially in slippery conditions.  The seats are perfectly comfortable and heated (but sadly not air-conditioned; right now with global warming we really need liquid coolant flowing through the seats themselves).  A good navigation system is standard, complete with real-time traffic data for various cities, delivered via the XM radio.  Onstar is also standard.  Operating all of the electronics via the big control stalk/wheel/button/thingy seemed challenging but not impossible to learn.  The RL won Car and Driver’s “Best Luxury Sedan” award (I think they limit this to cars costing less than $70,000). The car lists for $49,000 but right now they are try to get rid of the 2005s at “employee” prices (on the radio in Alaska this proved to be around $43,000 but somehow the dealer in Boston wants $44,000+).

Are there any other cars she should consider?  I liked the Chrysler 300 that I rented in Yellowknife but I think they are selling for list price due to high demand, which would make an all-wheel-drive version almost as expensive as the RL.

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Suppose that you have a single computer in a room somewhere.  This plugs into an Ethernet jack in the wall.  At this point you want to add a wireless access point in case someone with an 802.11b/g laptop walks into the room.  Upstream is a router that provides DHCP to whoever asks.  What is the best way to add wireless access to this room?  My initial idea was that the simplest configuration, leaving all computers on the same subnet, would be to add a hub or switch and then plug both the existing computer and a new wireless access point into the hub/switch.  This would seem to be kind of annoying, though, requiring two little boxes and two little wall transformers.  A quick scan of the Linksys Web site doesn’t turn up any boxes that have just the switch and the wireless access point but not the router.  Is it easy to configure a Linksys router/switch/WAP box so that the router doesn’t actually route?  Is there some other company that makes a simple one-box solution?

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After renting dozens of new cars in the last year it struck me as odd that the factory stereos can’t do two simple things:  (1) bring an aux input out to the front of the dashboard for plugging in an MP3 jukebox, and (2) read a CD containing MP3 files.  These features would only add about $1 to the cost of the car and presumably would give MP3-crazed yupsters a reason to trade in their older vehicle.  You’d think that the car companies would jump at this chance to add value without adding cost.  Why aren’t they doing it?  And as long as they are tweaking their electronics you’d think that they would add remote start, something that would cost them $2 max and that consumers are willing to pay $400 for in the aftermarket.

[My favorite rental cars:  Chrysler 300 sedan from Hertz in Yellowknife, Ford Freestar minivan from Hertz in Anchorage (rented a mountain bike and kept it in the back; Alex loves the space to spread out), Toyota Avalon (redesigned for this year) from Hertz in Jackson, Wyoming, nimble Mazda 6 from Hertz in Oakland, California.

The worst rental cars:  various Pontiacs (GM had better hope that no potential customer ever test-drives a Chrysler 300), a Ford Escape SUV presented by Hertz of Quebec City as an “upgrade” from a Taurus (incredibly bumpy and ineffective suspension).]

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http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html contains some hard numbers (halfway down) on the standard deviation in productivity among computer programmers.  The study is among a population of fairly bright folks (Yale undergrads) and even when only the best students are considered the standard dev. is still quite high.

[Note:  The article does not say whether or not the students were all using the same languages and tools but as the data seem to be from a course with a heavy emphasis on Unix code-monkeying it seems reasonable to assume that all of the students were using C.] 

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American women have seemingly achieved most of the goals of the folks in the 1960s who called themselves “feminists.”  Women can work 24/7.  Women can vote (for the white male of their choice, at least in the last few presidential elections).  Women can get abortions without having to travel beyond their home state.  Women constitute close to 50 percent of the young folks training for and holding jobs that are actually worth having (e.g., medical doctor).

What then does someone who calls him or herself a “feminist” think about in 2005?  http://melancholicfeminista.blogspot.com/ is an interesting place to start looking for the answer.

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I’ve decided to amuse myself and, I hope, inspire some young hard-working folks, by writing up ideas for businesses that should be profitable.  Here’s the first one:  http://philip.greenspun.com/business/chinese-rv

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One challenge in admitting to having spent some time as a computer nerd up in Alaska is that folks sometimes ask “What is the next improvement in computer technology going to do for me?”  Mostly they are just trying to be polite and make good conversation.  What should one say?  These are folks who use a Web browser but that’s about it.  They don’t care about the latest operating system tweak from the lumbering Microsoft elephant or the competitive fleas on its hide.

One idea that seemed to excite them was chucking their desktop machines and the associated sysadmin.  I mentioned that their mobile phone had a communications capability, a computer, storage capacity for personal info, and an authentication capability.  Why couldn’t it be their home computer as well?  They could plug their mobile phone into a dock at home that would let them use a full-size display and keyboard and maybe augment the storage and computational capacity of the phone.

What vision of the electronic future would the readers/commenters paint for a rugged Alaskan who has a DSL line and Web browser at home right now?

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A couple of Canadian newspaper articles caught my eye while flying down the Alaska Highway:

Murder Suspect Faces Extradition — “A New Brunswick man who arrived at the U.S. border toting a red-stained chainsaw faces a hearing tomorrow on whether he should be returned to Canada for trail in the murder of an elderly couple. … Residents in Minto, N.B. where the gruesome attack occurred, say they cannot believe [Gregory] Depres was allowed into the U.S. after arriving at the border with a backpack full of weapons and a chainsaw with red stains on it.” (Calgary Sun, July 20)

The article is accompanied by a truly scary looking photo of Despres, who wears a wide-eyed insane expression.  Perhaps the U.S. Customs folks thought that anyone with a “backpack full of weapons” would fit right in here in the U.S.

“Mohammad Momim Khawaja remains locked up … accused of conspiring in a plot to blow up British citizens.  … In the 1970s, Mr. Khawaja’s parents met in Ottawa after separately emigrating from Pakistan.  The family moved to Saudi Arabia for a few years. … An outspoken scholar, the father has written several essays denouncing ‘American-Zionist collaborative political encroachment in the Middle East.’  … Mr. Khawaja was also allegedly stepping up his Internet activities, reported logging on to chat rooms and running a blog. … In 2003, Mr. Khawaja went to Pakistan, telling friends he was off in search of a bride.” (The Globe and Mail, July 16)

What caught my eye is the photo that accompanies the story.  It shows a bearded perpetrator in the back of a police car.  The caption reads “Momim Khawaja, a computer programmer, leaves an Ottawa courthouse escorted by the RCMP on May 3, 2004.  He has been jailed since March 29 of last year.”  Anyone who say the photo and read the caption but not the article would assume that Mr. Khawaja’s crime was being a programmer.  (The prosecution in the Sami Al-Arian case is apparently having a tough time proving that Mr. Al-Arian, a tenured University of South Florida professor who was born in Kuwait,  is guilty of anything more than being a computer nerd as well.)

The Canadian equivalent of the FAA has some good publications too.  Posters in some areas where pilots of small aircraft gather read “Learning how to fly takes approximately 40 hours.  Learning when to fly takes a lifetime.”  (Given Canada’s harsh weather this tends to be tautological.  Or at the very least the lesson about when not to fly will tend to come at the very end of one’s lifetime.)  They offer an educational safety video entitled “To Kill a Whopping Bird.”

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A pilot coming down the Rockies from Alaska might be tempted to stop in Jackson, Wyoming (KJAC) as I did.  This is quite a rude shock if you’re accustomed to the easy pace of most Alaskan towns.  Jackson is clogged with cars, trucks, RVs, etc. waiting at various traffic lights.  The sidewalks are clogged with realtors trying to sell each other $5-10 million ranches (enough to buy a ranch in Argentina that is 10X the size, a bizjet to get back and forth, a pilot for the bizjet, and still have a few $million left over).  The popular hiking trails get at least 1000X as much usage as a typical trail in Alaska.  The sprawl of development extends out every road for 30 miles in every direction.  There are “no dogs allowed” signs in the main square and in various other strategic spots around town (also in the Grand Teton National Park where, unlike in Canadian national parks, leashed dogs are not allowed on trails).  The airport itself is sort of disappointing.  There is one sad little Cessna 172 available for rent and a single instructor.  The FBO works well for Hollywood stars and corporate looters coming to visit their tax-evasion homes (if you can claim Wyoming as your residence you won’t have to pay any state income tax) but it is not a place where you’re likely to meet other owner-pilots.

Driggs, Idaho (U59) is probably a better place for an airplane or helicopter nerd to hang out.  It is about a one-hour drive from Jackson if you must get into town for dinner or to visit the photography galleries.  The airport is slightly lower than Jackson, has a longer runway, and is in a more open valley.  Driggs has a lot of flight instruction going on and an airport restaurant where pilots congregate.  The surrounding area has a lot of National Forest trails with similar wildlife to what you find on the other side of the ridge in Jackson.

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My recent Alaska reading list:  Drop City by T.C. Boyle.  Coming Back Alive by Spike Walker.  The former, a novel, is highly recommended if you want to understand just how demented a person would have to be to want to live in interior Alaska (hot and buggy in the summer; unbelievably cold in the winter).  T.C. Boyle, familiar to New Yorker magazine readers for his short stories, writes about a commune of hippies who get pushed out of California in 1970 and move up to a little wilderness cabin near Fairbanks.  Coming Back Alive is about people who risk their lives every day trying to pull fish in from the Alaska coastal waters and/or pulling fishermen into Coast Guard helicopters, centering on a 1998 rescue of the crew from F/V La Conte..  This is a must-read for helicopter pilots and it will certainly make you stop whining about the difficulty of doing slope landings in an R22 with a gusty tailwind.

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