Looking around for a new chair, I couldn’t find much except IKEA, and their chairs aren’t really good quality. Don’t get me wrong, I buy a lot of stuff at IKEA, but I wouldn’t buy an office chair there. I didn’t find any other decent brands that I could test and experience, either. There are lots of brands and types, but it’s very hard to find a store where you can check them out, and I won’t buy an unknown chair sight unseen or seat unsat. About the only chair I would dare buy on reputation alone is the Aeron. It’s the chair a lot of programmers expect to get, just as they expect to get top end workstations. It’s a top end office chair. Just google it.

Now, price… in the US, you can find the Aeron for around $950, which isn’t exactly cheap but considering the current exchange rate, it comes out to around 6000 SEK (I’m in Sweden), which is only twice the price of most decent office chairs.

Checking out the official Aeron prices from the Swedish distributors is bound to make you sick; around 15000 SEK, plus tax. That is $2500 plus tax! Jeez… how the h… can they mark it up like that?

Second hand, you can find Aeron chairs in Sweden for around 7-9000 SEK, but then you have no guarantees. I found them on Blocket.

Next, I checked out prices in the USA and found Home Office Solutions. They’re selling it new for around $750 and free shipping within the USA. I called them and asked if they’d ship to Sweden and they told me they can’t sell new chairs to me, due to Herman Miller prohibiting them from selling outside the USA. Good old market protection in action. However, they can sell “Certified Refurbished” chairs anywhere they want, and these go for a little less, $718 plus $199 shipping (when I bought it), including a 12 year warranty. Yes, I ordered one, plus the casters for hard floors, around $30 extra. I expect to pay around 5% customs. The VAT will be added by Fedex, but I’ll get it back on the company VAT account, so it’s of no consequence. At the current exchange rate, this chair will cost me around 6000 SEK.

The chair arrived today (it took a week) in perfect condition. Even examining it in detail, I can find no sign it’s ever been used. I’m sitting in it right now and it’s simply great. Here are a couple of pictures of it, including my little son who I had a lot of problems convincing to let me use it.

I highly recommend buying this chair, and if you do to get it from Home Office Solutions. There may be other good places to get it, of course, I didn’t check them all.

Update 26 aug 2008: just got the invoice from Fedex, and I was only charged 100 SEK admin costs and VAT. No customs charge. So the grand total comes to around 5600 SEK plus VAT, just a whisker over a third of the Swedish internet mail order price for a new chair. And as I said, you can’t see the difference. What a deal.

It has been said that it was created under pressure from our uncle in the west, since so much former-east-block traffic passes through Sweden. I’m inclined to believe that, but I see no reason why our government can’t decide for themselves, so the responsibility for being pussies is all on the Swedish government.

I can see only one upside to the whole thing: anonymous proxies like Relakks, new methods of hiding traffic information, message encryption, etc, will get a real boost. This is a country of contrarians and inventors, so my hopes are high. Even some regular good citizens start asking me how to make life difficult for the buggers. That’s a very good sign.

I think, or rather hope, that this was a crucial mistake by the “who needs privacy” crowd, creating some real legimate reason to start fighting government initiatives like this. Sweden has no 9/11 to use as an excuse. Sweden has no “boys in Iraq” to support. There is very little unconditional patriotism or flag waving. There’s not even any terrorism here to defend against. IOW, there is very little emotional argument to quiet the crowd with, if the crowd gets upset.

OTOH, to get Swedes visibly upset about anything is pretty hard to do, so we’ll have to wait to see if this particular leather boot does the trick or not.

See http://www.thelocal.se/12514.html (english)

Update: another excellent article about it in The Intelligence Daily.

If you watch really closely, you’ll see the error message “the windows logon process system process terminated unexpectedly” (you also see it in the screenshot above, of course). Using “the Google”, I found an article on MS Support that seems to describe what’s happening. I really don’t want to go through the recommended steps in that article and since I presumably have a pretty good backup, I’ll try my backup first.

I have a full copy of the VM from 3 months ago, but that’s too old. I also have a snapshot of this instance from 4 weeks ago just before I installed SP3. Good of me. I also have my Retrospect update from yesterday noon. Yay!

First step in recovery is to copy the current non-booting XP instance, so I can try to recover files from it if all else fails. Parallels has a utility that allows me to mount the Windows system disk to get at the files, even if it can’t boot. We’ll see if I’ll need that.

Next step is to roll back the XP VM to the snapshot from just before the SP3 and see if that boots. This looks very promising:

Let’s try it… that was quick, less than a minute, and it runs:

Let’s try rebooting:

Yes! SP2 as you can see. And Parallels automagically upgrades the tools, since my current Parallels desktop is more recent than the one that saved the snapshot.

Time to do the restore from Retrospect. I’m running Retrospect for Windows, since it has more features than Retrospect for the Mac. Only one feature is missing in the Windows version and that is backing up to FTP, but I can live without it. The Retrospect I’m using came with the Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ I bought. I then bought a 5-pack of client licenses extra, so I can backup 10 clients with it. The ReadyNAS has 4 drives, each 500 Gb in an XRaid configuration (similar to RAID 5 but expandable on the fly), giving me around 1.5 Tb of backup space.

So, I start up the XP Pro instance I use for Retrospect (and nothing else). This one runs under VMware Fusion, for no particular reason.

Do you see that little yellow popup above the systray that says “Updates are ready for your computer”? Do you think I’m going to click on it? Do you? (Honestly, this instance is also upgraded to SP3, but since I also back up the backup instance, I can limit my sweating to the palms of my hands. Mostly.)

In Retrospect, after selecting the client, I can choose the snapshots I want to restore:

As you can see, each source in a backup script gives its own snapshot, so I’ll need to restore three snapshots separately (can’t multiselect). You see only one in the screenshot, but there are two more with the same date and time as the marked one. There’s several screens to walk through, like destination and type of restore:

I chose restoring everything, deleting what shouldn’t be there. I think that’s the right thing to do in this situation.

The restore of this snapshot took less than a minute. After that, I did the other two snapshots, but I’ll spare you the details. It all took another five minutes or so of time. After that, I rebooted the XP and started up Visual Studio 2008. Got one screen where it asked me to recover three source files, I clicked “yes”, then everything compiled and worked fine. Seems I lost about two hours of work from after the backup.

I gave the ReadyNAS, Retrospect, and Parallels each a wet kiss. And pulled an ugly face at Windows XP. It almost came to spitting, but I restrained myself.

I did get it to work by downloading and running smcFanControl, and excellent little utility that sits in the menu bar and allows you to adjust the different fans in the Mac Pro (and other models). If I run the IO exhaust fan at 1200 rpm instead of the default 800 rpm, I can use WoW in normal Swedish weather. During the current heat wave, I need to run the fan at 1400-1500 rpm, which causes too much noise to be comfortable. On top of that, the frame rate isn’t that great. Yes, I did check if the fan on the card was clogged up, and it wasn’t. Clean as a whistle. Talked to the Mac repair shop, and they’re certainly prepared to take a day to check out my machine, but I don’t know if I want to waste a whole day just because of this problem. It seems I’m far from being alone having problems with the 2600 XT, so I’m sure that even if they gave me a replacement, I wouldn’t be happy in the long run.

Looked around the net for good suggestions on other cards. Very many people complain that the ATI 1900 XT card is having thermal problems too and that it’s very noisy. I hate noisy. I’m not too fond of thermal problems either. The performance, when it works, is supposed to be pretty good though.

A cheaper alternative, the NVidia 8800 GT, is uniformly described as reliable and quiet. Generally it’s claimed by users to improve gameplay considerably, but not have much impact on graphics performance in regular apps like Photoshop and Final Cut. Since I’m only using those apps every now and then, I don’t care.

I ordered this card from the Apple Store, to be certain I got the right version with the right firmware. Take care when ordering you get the one for your particular version of the Mac Pro, since there are two different cards depending on your bus speed (1.3 or 1.6 GHz). Since I have an “early 2008″ Mac Pro with a 1.6 GHz bus, I ordered that one. Next day I got it and installed it. (I really don’t get this; time and again I order something from Apple and I get it hand delivered at my door less than 24 hours later, even though it’s delivered from The Netherlands and we live out in the sticks.)

As far as I can see, this card has no thermal problems at all. I don’t need to increase any fan speeds above defaults anymore. No hangs in WoW or anywhere else. It seems more quiet than the original 2600 XT even under max stress and finally, it bumped the framerates in WoW three- or fourfold, even with all the settings in WoW to the max. What a difference.

Windows, under Parallels and Fusion, runs just fine, since they don’t even know what card I actually use. The 8800 GT is said not to be all that well supported under Boot Camp Windows, but I don’t run Boot Camp.

I’m keeping the 2600 XT in case I get a third or fourth monitor. In that case, I’ll plug it back in another PCI slot. As long as it doesn’t have to run heavy graphics, it’ll be ok, I think.

So I downloaded and installed the Ikea planning tool. Admirably, Vista asked for the admin credentials to do that. Great. Then I started using the Ikea tool.

After a while, I leaned back thinking about what to do next and noticed in the task bar that “Windows Update” was running. It wasn’t signalling me in any way, but I idly clicked anyway and this is what I saw:

CRIPES!!! It’s like in those movies when you hear a sweet voice over the PA system, saying “Countdown to self-destruct…. 60 seconds remaining….”. And there I was with a layout for my living room unsaved in the Ikea tool and I didn’t even know how to save, it being the first time I’ve used it. Trying to click “Postpone” or change the “Remind me in:” dropdown was futile. They’re disabled. A close button? No. Just a countdown.

I found the save and saved the file in Ikea’s app, took about ten seconds. Then intentionally left the Ikea app in the foreground just to see what kind of warning and choice I’d get from Vista when the countdown reached zero. Well, nothing. When the time expired, Vista rebooted without any information or choices being presented. This must be the most intentionally hostile action I’ve seen from an OS yet.

I run as a non-admin, of course, which may explain why Vista spits me in the face (it being in the Windows world a despicable thing to do, it seems), but still, can’t say I find it an admirable way of treating the user. It’s possible I could have terminated the update through the task manager, but since I’m running as non-admin, I doubt it.

Be warned. Be afraid. Either dig into the update settings and disable that crapola before it clobbers your work, or save every minute. Also, always keep an eye out for “Windows Update” in the taskbar. Never leave your computer unattended without saving everything first.

And this is progress?

There are a small number of people around that I’ve had a very bad experience with. Anyone that recommends any of these guys or is recommended by them, is automatically very suspect to me. One explanation for the recommendation is that they’re similar in character (a bad sign). Another is naivité (not a much better sign).

In other words, LinkedIn may be a valuable tool to filter out people you should avoid and not waste time on. Maybe even more so than the other way around. When someone you know and trust links to someone you know and mistrust, it has a tendency to diminish the trusted person more than it enhances the mistrusted person. Especially recommendations have this effect. Simple links may not mean that much.

So, be careful who you link to, and especially who you recommend. Or who you accept recommendations from (you can decline, you know). It may reflect badly on you.

…in which I am accused of being a profiteer and someone who doesn’t care about promises made. Jeez.

Fact is, as soon as FON appeared on the Swedish market, I was one of the very first ones to apply for a free router. In exchange for providing an internet connection and a bit of power, I’d be entitled to use other FON routers for free. I wasn’t planning on using it myself since I have a 3G modem for my portable, and I never did use the FON service myself. I never used the FON router locally for myself either, since WiFi routers is one thing I do already have more than enough of.

In short, I volunteered to provide power and internet for this router since I think FON has an idea that needs supporting.

I’ve noticed that the crappy little FON router hangs every now and then and needs a power cycling to get going again. I must admit that it’s been a while since I checked it last, it being on the top shelf and all. Since I don’t use it for myself, I have no way of knowing if it’s up and running unless I specifically look. Sure enough, I just checked and it had hung again, so I power cycled it and up it comes. For how long?

My point is this: FON ought to know that their routers are crappy and they ought not to insult me before at least checking if I know that the router has crapped out again or not. But, as you can see, they love insulting people instead. So as far as I’m concerned they can shove their stupid little router where the sun don’t shine. This was my response, BTW:

Hey,

This pisses me off. Yes, I have a FON router which gives me no advantage whatsoever for anything, since I don’t use your service myself. Yes, you’re right, the router seems to have hung. I cycled the power and it seems to struggle to get up and running again. This piece of junk obviously needs more care than it should require.

Now, I would not have minded a note about “please check your router, doesn’t seem to work”. I would have done that. But with the shitty tone of this email, I’d say my voluntary service to a laudable initiative is over.

If I provide power and an internet connection for your system without *any* advantages in return, I do expect at least rudimentary politeness. But since you can’t provide that, I’d say you really ought to take this router back and find someone else to insult.

Let me know who of my neighbors want to be abused next and I’ll hand it over to them, happily.

– Martin

As a general rule, an organization that insults its customers (or in my case, backers), is an organization without much future. Bears considering.

- - - - - - -

Response from FON:

Hello Martin,

Thank you for your mail to the FON customer support team.

Soyyr if you feel like this. With the mail of ‘……..@wehlou.com’ this is the first mail we receive from you, so I don’t know how we could have helped you before. If you want to give the router away, simply follow the steps in the next mails concerning this campaign.

If you would like anymore information, please feel free to contact me anytime. I hope you found this useful. Have a great week.

Regards,
A… S……FON Customer Care

- - - - - - -

And my reply to that piece of nonsense:

A…,

You seem to be masters of confusion. *You* (FON) write to *me* saying you’re going to give my router to someone else because I’m an irresponsible jerk and don’t keep my promises. Now you say you don’t understand why I’m negative but if I want to give the router away (it wasn’t my suggestion, it was yours!) I can follow instructions. Which you helpfully don’t include.

BTW, which bloody “campaign”?

Best,

– Martin

- - - - - - -

Hi Martin,

I know you’re pissed off. You told me. We also could be. We gave you a La Fonera for free and I don’t see any mail from you asking for help. Ok, that is your thing. I will not discuss this with you.

At the end of the email there is this sentence: “You received this message because you have signed up with FON and have accepted receiving information about us. Should you wish to unsubscribe from further emails relating to the program communicated herein, please click here.”, so you have the trer options

1. get help to activate

2. opt out

3. wait till we contact you to handover or whatever the La Fonera.

Hope you understand it now.

Regards,
A… S…
FON Customer Care

- - - - - - -

On 25 Apr 2008, at 18:08, FON Support Team wrote:

I know you’re pissed off. You told me. We also could be. We gave you a La Fonera for free and I don’t see any mail from you asking for help.

Why should I ask for help? The problem is that the router hangs regularly. Needs power cycling. I have no reason to think any of your other routers are any better and I also don’t need help to power cycle. You could usefully and automatically send emails to people whose routers don’t work, with the clear subject line “please check your router”. You chose not to, you chose to be rude instead.

Ok, that is your thing. I will not discuss this with you.

Fine, no problem. I’m tired of the subject as well.

At the end of the email there is this sentence: “You received this message because you have signed up with FON and have accepted receiving information about us. Should you wish to unsubscribe from further emails relating to the program communicated herein, please click here.”, so you have the trer options

That’s an opt out of email communications. What does that have to do with wanting to hand over the router? More convoluted logic?

1. get help to activate

2. opt out

3. wait till we contact you to handover or whatever the La Fonera.

Hope you understand it now.

No, I don’t. The router looks nothing like an email communication to me. There’s nothing that says opting out of email will mean you’ll arrange a handover of the router. You people have a definite problem with clear communications.

Look, let’s turn this around. I will keep the router online and powered up another two weeks. That’s a deadline. If I don’t get a clear message who to hand it over to before then, it is powered down and goes into storage. I don’t want to interrupt your service more than necessary so I suggest you get a move on and see that I get a name of a “neighbor” to give it to ASAP.

Again, this is my final notice. In two weeks, it’s offline. I’m not going to do any clicking or navigating through your websites whatsoever, so it’s your problem to get this transfer arranged.

Best,

– Martin

- - - - - - -

Hi Martin,

if you turn your fonera on, you will be out of the program automatically and won’t receive more mail for the moment.

Regards,
A… S….
FON Customer Care

- - - - - - -

>
> if you turn your fonera on, you will be out of the program
> automatically and won’t receive more mail for the moment.

The fonera has always been on, I never turned it off. It hangs,
though, and I power cycled it so now it’s (temporarily) awake and
running.

As a courtesy to you, I’m keeping it running. If it hangs again, and I
don’t notice, I’d suggest you’d tell me in polite terms there’s a
problem.

Anyway, I didn’t ask to keep this router. I asked you to provide me
with a name and address of a neighbor that wants my fonera, just as
the subject line says. I don’t want to keep it, it’s of no use to me.
In the meanwhile, as I said, I’ll keep it powered up for your benefit.

So please provide me with a name and address of a neighbor that wants
it so I can get rid of it.

Best,

– Martin

- - - - - - -

And I told you, that you may wait for further mails. I can’t tell you any more. Sorry.

Regards,
A… S…
FON Customer Care

- - - - - - -

At this point I stopped writing or replying. I still can’t make out if they’re going to let me give away the router or if they’re just going to stop writing emails to remind me that I “made a promise”.

The guy (A.S.) obviously is either a native English speaker or very close to it, and I still have no idea what he’s talking about. It’s totally unreal.

So, I’ll just leave the router on for a while and see what happens.

- - - - - - -

Update 2008-06-07, that is more than a month later: no “further email” has arrived. What a strange organization.

The requirements on the network we need for telesurgery are pretty horrific and no current network, as far as I know, is designed to fulfill any such requirements. The network needs to be absolutely secure, and by that I mean it needs to be very resistant to breakage, to delays, and that it must ensure data integrity at all times. It also needs to protect privacy, of course, but that’s almost an after-thought.

For us security people, the telemedicine networks is a new challenge and one I think we should spend more effort specifying and creating. For instance, we need to find a way to ensure the following characteristics:

Max latency

For instance, we know that turnaround delays above a hundred milliseconds or so make telesurgery very difficult and dangerous.

Redundancy and resilience

Obviously, we don’t want the network to go AWOL during an operation. And if it does, we need to fail safe. Both the surgical instruments and the procedure as such need to fail in a safe manner.

Integrity

The data integrity is of utmost importance. When we want a 3 mm incision, we don’t want that to turn into 3 meters by accident.

Authentication

We want to make sure only the right surgeon is on the line.

Discussion

The above is just a few issues I could think of right off the bat. Internet protocol, for instance, is well suited to the resilience requirement, but its lack of guaranteed time of delivery is a problem. I do think we need a separate network that has the desired functionality and characteristics, and that may in part be based on current protocols and infrastructure. I do think, however, that the problem hasn’t yet been attacked on a holistic level. I’m also sure that the current Internet structure will not suffice to carry telemedicine applications. In other words, it’s time we looked over these requirements and started coming up with real solutions, else the next step in the evolution of medicine will not get started.

The letter is a response to another letter to the editor from “LS” and goes like this:

“I’ve been a pilot all my professional life, largely with SAS. The last five years I flew long distance with Boeing 767 and Airbus 340 to, among other places, Thailand. LS’s statement that a trip to Thailand corresponds to a release of two tons of carbon dioxide per passenger is an exaggeration of colossal magnitude!

“An A340 weights maximum 260 tons when it departs from Copenhagen and has 261 passengers, 11 crew. That means 272 persons on board.

“Releasing two tons of carbon dioxide per person would come to 544 tons. The fuel load is about 100 tons, of which six tons remain after landing in Bangkok.

“To ensure that the discussion on environmental impact remains credible, such absurd statements as those of LS must be avoided.”

Now, I must admit that such incredibly unscientific remarks from a professional airline pilot scares me more than a little bit. I never saw a response to the above letter to the editor, so I assume a lot of readers swallowed it whole.

With the numbers above, two tons of carbon dioxide per passenger is entirely possible. If you don’t see how, go back to your high school chemistry, or ask any high school kid, and they’ll tell you how this works out.

To be entirely fair, the number comes to almost 1.3 tons per passenger so LS exaggerated a bit, but I think the pilot who wrote the letter thought it came to 94 tons divided by 272, that is 0.35 tons per passenger. It sure looks like that from his letter.

And, no, I’m not going to publish the pilot’s name, even though he signed his letter to the editor in full. He ought to be ashamed of himself.

PS: this isn’t an april fools joke either.

It’s the only way out and it would put them ahead of Linux and OSX again. I’m sure they’re working on it. They’d be crazy not to.

PS: not an april fools joke, I mean it.