Watch MSNBC Live

Sorry that I have not posted recently (I've been working on finishing my Ph.D. dissertation). Anyway, more to the point. For those of you who don't have cable or want to explore other ways to watch TV over the Internet, check out this link to a live version of MSNBC:



Enjoy! I should be back to full speed in December (after my defense)...

Hulu.com: Watch Free TV, Movies, & Clips on the Web

Hulu.com let's you watch full, high quality TV episodes and movies over the Internet for free. And, unlike other applications that you have to install on your computer, Hulu plays the videos in your web browser. Hulu was founded in 2007 by NBC Universal and News Corp, which means that the videos you're watching are legitimately licensed. The only catch--nothing is truly "free"--is that there are brief commercial interruptions from paid advertisers; however, they seem minimally intrusive to me.

TV
You can watch full episodes of "The Daily Show," "The Simpsons," "Family Guy," "Scrubs," and even shows on PBS.

Movies
Currently playing are a wide range of movies like the classic "The Usual Suspects," the romantic comedy "Fever Pitch," the odd, but funny "The Big Lebowski," the horror flick "28 Days Later," and the indie "Lost in Translation."


Link to Hulu.com

Monitor System Hardware [Windows Only]

If you want an excellent (and free) program to monitor sensors on your motherboard, as well as other hardware, you should check out Everest Home Edition 2.20.
It offers accurate system information and diagnostics capabilities, including essential system and overclock information, advanced hardware monitoring, and diagnostics capabilities to check the effects of the applied settings.

Here are some of its many features:

* Motherboard & CPU: Provides low-level information about your motherboard, CPU, and BIOS, including chipset details, CPU instruction set support, SPD memory modules list.

* Video Adapter & Monitor: Provides detailed information about the video adapter, video drivers and monitor, including monitor serial number, low-level GPU details, and OpenGL features list.

* Storage Devices: Provides information about all hard disk and optical disk drives, including IDE autodetection, S.M.A.R.T. disk health monitoring, ASPI SCSI devices list, and partitions information.

* Network Adapters, MultiMedia, & Input Devices: Provides exhaustive information about network adapters, sound cards, keyboard, mouse and game controllers.

* Other Hardware: Provides information about PCI, PnP, PCMCIA and USB devices, communication ports, power management information, device resources list, printers information.

* Hardware Monitoring: Provides sensor information including system, CPU and GPU temperature, fan status, CPU, GPU, AGP and DRAM voltage monitoring, S.M.A.R.T. disk health status.

* Memory Benchmarks: Tests memory read and write speed, memory latency measurement to stress the memory and cache subsystem, including references list to compare actual performance with other systems.

Note that there is a newer, supported version, Everest Ultimate Edition 4.50, but you'll have to purchase a license for $34.95.

Link to Everest Home Edition 2.20

Metered Internet Usage?

Bad news on the technology front. According to an AP article posted today, Time Warner Cable has unveiled a new plan to cap monthly downloads and uploads. Here's a taste of the full article:

"On Thursday, new Time Warner Cable Internet subscribers in Beaumont, Texas, will have monthly allowances for the amount of data they upload and download. Those who go over will be charged $1 per gigabyte, a Time Warner Cable executive told the Associated Press...Tiers will range from $29.95 a month for relatively slow service at 768 kilobits per second and a 5-gigabyte monthly cap to $54.90 per month for fast downloads at 15 megabits per second and a 40-gigabyte cap. Those prices cover the Internet portion of subscription bundles that include video or phone services. Both downloads and uploads will count toward the monthly cap."

The problem is that the business practices of the leading telecommunications corporations hurt the U.S.'s standing as a world leader in technology. According to an article published in USA Today last year, the U.S. already trails other industrialized nations in inexpensive access to high-speed Internet service. The article cites a report released by the Communications Workers of America, in which the median U.S. download speed is 1.97 megabits per second—a fraction of the 61 megabits per second enjoyed by consumers in Japan, South Korea (45 megabits), France (17 megabits), and Canada (7 megabits). "We have pathetic speeds compared to the rest of the world," CWA President Larry Cohen says. "People don't pay attention to the fact that the country that started the commercial Internet is falling woefully behind."

Similarly, a study published by Dr. Robert Atkinson, president of the non-partisan research and educational institute Information Technology and Innovation Foundation finds that the U.S. currently ranks 15th in average broadband speed by country (see the Figure published by the World Politics Review). A recent article in the Washington Post tells the story of how incredibly fast Internet access is taking off in Japan because of "better and more aggressive government regulation." In fact, the price of Internet access is less than $1/month for each 1Mbps in only three countries: Japan, Korea, and Sweden.

My suggestion: Don't sit back and quietly accept metered or tiered service from your broadband provider. Instead, do what they already do--lobby Congress. It's the only way to protect against telecommunications' monopolies.

Some resources:

Speed Matters

Network Neutrality

Ubuntu Hard Drive Cycle Problem [Linux Only]

If you own a laptop and use Ubuntu, then there is a chance that your hard drive is wearing much faster than it should be. The good news is that there is a relatively simple fix that can dramatically increase the life of your hard drive.

The problem occurs when Advanced Power Management (APM) is much too aggressive for certain hard drive models. As a result, Ubuntu constantly parks and unparks your hard drive dramatically increasing the total load cycles of your drive. Many drives are rated for a maximum of 600,000 cycles, which means that they could fail at any point beyond this number, which is why we should be concerned if Ubuntu is increasing the load cycle count unnecessarily. For confirmation of this issue, see Ubuntu Bug #59695.

Note: For a full discussion of this issue, check Ubuntu Forums Thread #795327. In other words, I didn't identify or solve the problem, I simply recapitulated the hard work of others on my blog.

Do I Have a Problem, Too?

to find out if you even have a problem, you'll first need to install Smart Monitor Tools:

$ sudo aptitude install smartmontools

Then, identify your hard drive--either "sda" or "hda"

$ sudo fdisk -l

If your system identifies your hard drive as "sda" like the following:

Disk /dev/sda: XXX.X GB

where XXX.X is the number of total gigabytes of your drive, then type the following to list your hard drive's current load cycle count and temperature:

$ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda | egrep '(Load_Cycle_Count|Temperature)'

Likewise, if your system returns "hda" after the "fdisk -l" command like the following:

Disk /dev/hda: XXX.X GB

then change "sda" to "hda" and type:

$ sudo smartctl -a /dev/hda | egrep '(Load_Cycle_Count|Temperature)'

Now, you should see your hard drives readings. My output reads as follows:

193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0012 058 058 000 Old_age Always - 421916

194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0002 148 148 000 Old_age Always - 37 (Lifetime Min/Max 17/49)

What we're looking for are the two numbers at the end of each line. First, my hard drive load cycle count is already at 421,916, which is really annoying considering that my hard drive is less than 8 months old! The temperature is currently 37 degrees Celsius, with a lifetime minimum of 17 degrees and a maximum of 49 degrees, which are acceptable ranges.

Based upon these results, I will need to fix the problem. If you're not sure if you have a problem, then wait a few minutes and check your load cycle count again. If the number has jumped up in such a short time, then you know you probably have an issue.

The HDD Load Cycle Count Fix

We're going to create a simple script to ensure that APM settings are turned down on the affected hard drive. Open a new text file ("Applications-->Accessories-->Text Editor") and save it to your Desktop as the following name:

99-sda-load-count-fix.sh (Note that you would replace "sda" with "hda" if your hard drive is labeled "hda")

Now type the following into the file exactly as it appears:

#!/bin/sh
# hdparm -B parameter can be adjusted between 200-254
# 255 means no APM power management for the drive
# replace "sda" with "hda" below if necessary

hdparm -B 200 /dev/sda

Close and save the file. Right click on the file and select "Properties." Now choose "Permissions" and check the box that says "Allow executing file as program" to make sure that the script will work as it is intended.

Now we're going to copy this script to various locations to make sure that the settings we want will remain even when restarting the system.

$ sudo cp -f ~/Desktop/99-sda-load-count-fix.sh /etc/acpi/ac.d/

$ sudo cp -f ~/Desktop/99-sda-load-count-fix.sh /etc/acpi/battery.d/

$ sudo cp -f ~/Desktop/99-sda-load-count-fix.sh /etc/acpi/start.d

$ sudo cp -f ~/Desktop/99-sda-load-count-fix.sh /etc/acpi/resume.d


Finally, type the following command:

$ sudo hdparm -B 200 /dev/sda


That's it. Now you should recheck your hdd load cycle count and temperature in about an hour to make sure that your results are acceptable. If not, adjust the "200" in the script and commands above to something between 201 and 254.

Enjoy the longer life of your hard drive...

Link to Ubuntu Forums Thread #795327