What did the Army do after the WaPo covered serious issues with facilities at some of the long term care facilities at Walter Reed Army Medical Center? Here’s what:

Soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s Medical Hold Unit say they have been told they will wake up at 6 a.m. every morning and have their rooms ready for inspection at 7 a.m., and that they must not speak to the media.

“Some soldiers believe this is a form of punishment for the trouble soldiers caused by talking to the media,” one Medical Hold Unit soldier said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

It is unusual for soldiers to have daily inspections after Basic Training.

This is only a small bit of the change. NavyTimes details all of the other changes, including reassignments for platoon sergeants, some sergeants being relieved of duty, and killing media projects planned for the facility. After all, it’s the soldiers, sergeants, and media’s fault.

Ah, the Bush administration. I so can’t wait until you’re history.

(found via Atrios)

Over at Rogue Ameoba’s blog, they’re talking about their decision process for selecting their current web hosts. While I don’t run a software company, I was happy to see that they also use Pair.com. I’ve been with Pair since around 1999, all because I saw one of their engineers on several of the mailing lists I was on. I figured anyone that employed someone smart and reasonable (a rare combination in online mailing lists) had to be a good company.

Of course, they’re right. Pair does charge a bit of a premium, but their stuff is almost always up. We’ve had a few blips here at FatMixx recently, but they’ve all been short and the after hours support has been quick and responsive. I have some exposure to keeping a big datacenter up and running and it’s not easy. Pair does a good job.

Unfortunately, Pair also doesn’t quite do what I need for some of my upcoming projects. Their specialty is managed hosting where the user doesn’t have root or admin access. It’s not ideal for folks writing Java code or custom daemons. It pains me to look for another host because if Pair offered VPS hosting, I’d be right there.

If you’ve done any serious development with server side Java, you become intimately familiar with the behavior of the JVM’s Garbage Collector. I’ve spent countless hours testing JVM configuration under load and it’s not fun. The biggest, most common problem is garbage collector pauses. Basically, for those of you that aren’t Java programmers, the Java Virtual Machine manages all of the memory being used by a Java program. When it tries to clean up objects your program isn’t using, it will stop your app from running while the collector does it’s thing. There are ways to limit it, and there are interesting solutions like Azul to reduce the pauses, but it’s a common problem.

I was floored when I read this, though:

We have several clients running 20 - 30 GB JVMs. Only consistent problem I hear is not stability but GC pauses of “minutes.”

I’ve typically run services will single-digit GB heaps and we’ve seen seconds (which we consider unacceptable). I don’t want to imagine our users’ reactions if we ever had pauses of minutes…

From the new Wikipedia competitor, Conservapedia’s entry for Orwell’s 1984:

1984 was a book by George Orwell. 1984 describes an alternate history in which Oceania (Australia) is at war with Eurasia. It is a utopian book because it talks about a place where everyone is watched over by Big Brother, who makes sure people are doing what they are supposed to.

The protagonist is Winston Smith. Thre is something about rats at the end, but it is confusing. The end is probably supposed to be ambigous.

Um, utopian? Ignore the awful spelling, the nearly useless second paragraph (sentence?), and just focus on the fact that the entry completely and totally missed the freaking point of the book!

And they claim that liberals have bias and are polarizing. Conservatives are the ones that see themselves as part of an ideological struggle… they’re the ones that start things simply to push an ideological point of view. This fake Wikipedia is an embarrassment. The irony is that 1984 is a book that conservatives could squeeze out a narrative for their worldview as Big Brother is supposed to be a socialist government run amok. It’s really hard to understand how anyone could miss this, considering that the party is called Ingsoc (English Socialism for those that don’t get Newspeak).

Contrast this to the useful Wikipedia entry that, among providing more insight, at least properly identifies the book as a dystopia.

(found via Atrios and Alicublog, both of which point to even funnier entries)

This is easily the best explanation of what “Web 2.0″ is meant to describe…

That’s impressive. The video has been going around for a while but I hadn’t watched it until today.

The Republicans can have you, Joe. Go for it!

Senate Democrats, please do whatever it takes to force the Bush administration to draw down troops before 2008. Damn the political consequences. This war is so mismanaged that it’s time to do something drastic. At the very least, repealing the AUMF and replacing it with something sane would go a long way toward getting Congress back involved in war oversight. It would also eliminate the most commonly cited justification for Bush’s expansive eavesdropping and intelligence power grabs. Thank goodness some Democratic Senators are putting policy above election tactics. Republicans, take note.

This weekend I finally decided to pick up the SlingBox after struggling with the lack of a TV in my home office. I’ve been in there a lot lately, working late and have been going nuts without the background noise of TV. I’ve ended up buying silly movies from iTunes. I’ve also gone through my DVD collection several times over. I think I just need background noise after growing up in a house that was never quiet.

So, why the Slingbox? I have a house that’s just about 90 years old. That means no cable in most rooms and no phone jacks. As it is, we have an Ethernet cable running across the floor upstairs to connect my office into the router in the other room. The idea of running a coax cable across the floor isn’t appealing. And yes, we’ve thought about having the house wired. That’s coming, but not for now.

To deal with this, and also to get ESPN and live sports into my office, I started looking into IPTV solutions. There was the open source route with MythTV, but that would require another box with a computer’s power supply. There’s enough power getting drawn by devices in the TV room already. Then there’s Sony’s LocationFree. Their devices don’t have a tuner and need a set-top box to control. I don’t really want to interfere with whatever Heidi might want to watch in the other room, so that was a non-starter. On the other hand, Sony has a PSP player and I own a PSP. On the other hand, the Slingbox has a version that has a coax in and has an analog tuner built in, so that’s the one I ended up going with, especially after reading reviews.

So far, it’s been great. The viewer is a bit of a CPU hog (probably because the stream is encrypted) and the box runs very hot, but those are my biggest complaints. Setup was a breeze, installation was painless, and I had TV on my computer within 15 minutes of opening the box. That includes wiring it all up (granted, I’m pretty good around my AV gear).

I wondered a while back whether it would run on a G4 Mac. While it takes up 50% CPU on my dual core Intel-based Mac, Heidi’s 1.25Ghz eMac kept skipping and pausing trying to play the video. Again, the encryption was probably to blame. On my iMac, I can program, run Eclipse, do whatever with minimal impact on the video.

If you look closely at the screenshot of the player, you’ll see what it looks like in it’s smallest mode. It’s tight. Click one button and a remote control pops up where you can punch in any channel. Quick channel buttons are included right at the bottom, and clicking the little inverted triangle to the right exposes more presets. The most important feature, though, is the “Always on Top” option, something that too many players forget (I’m looking at you, iTunes!).

You also may notice the bit rate on the bottom right of the picture. Yes, that’s 6 Megabits, really. I don’t think I’ve ever had that much sustained bandwidth flowing across my home network. Good thing I’m upgrading to Gigabit at home right now. (OK, Gigabit won’t improve anything, but it sounds good, doesn’t it? Don’t tell my wife…).

The one feature I haven’t had a chance to test is the remote viewing. Slingbox apparently allows me to watch TV across the Internet, even on some mobile devices. I had some trouble with getting this set up with my router (some UPnP issues for the geeks) so no joy yet. Seems like these network apps are still problematic, and it’s not just limited to the Slingbox. The key feature, not obvious unless you’re a techy, is that the player and the box are adjusting the bit rate dynamically based on connection quality. That feature alone enables Internet viewing of this video. It’s pretty much a must have for a consumer device.

Overall, after the first few days of actual use I’m really happy with the purchase. I recommend the device if you’re looking for TV over your home network.

A small side note: I’m out of network ports in my living room. Basically, I have 4 ports on the router. One goes to my office (where there’s another 5 port switch), one goes to Heidi’s office, and the Tivo and XBox360 take up the other ports. I’ve had to disconnect the PS2 (no major loss). So, right now the Slingbox is plugged into the switch in my office with another cable running across the floor. Needless to say, the 8-port GigE switch is on the way from Amazon.

Two years ago, I was introduced to Sxip and the work around Identity 2.0. The key standard involved in all of this is OpenID. Here’s a quick recap of OpenID:

OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity.

OpenID starts with the concept that anyone can identify themselves on the Internet the same way websites do-with a URI (also called a URL or web address). Since URIs are at the very core of Web architecture, they provide a solid foundation for user-centric identity.

…

To login to an OpenID-enabled website (even one you’ve never been to before), just type your OpenID URI. The website will then redirect you to your OpenID Provider to login using whatever credentials it requires.

OpenID has been in the news lately with two separate announcements from major companies. Both Microsoft and AOL are committing to support OpenID. Microsoft has simply announced support. AOL has gone a bit further and enabled OpenID URIs for every one of their users. That’s a big, big deal. I don’t know anyone without an AIM login.

Just a couple of notes. The most important takeaway to me is that it’s now even easier to start a company. I’m building a new site right now at home and having to write a new registration system from scratch absolutely sucks. I don’t know why we all do it over and over again, but we all do. It’s a waste of time and only takes away from building the great product.

The other interesting thing is that the companies that went this way are the two companies who really have pushed single-sign-on in the past. I would’ve expected the first major company to move this way to be a more tech-saavy, personalization focused company like Yahoo or Amazon. I just didn’t expect a big company like AOL to do something so, well, technically savvy. Of course, after buying WIN and getting Jason Calacanis, even for that short while, they did a ton of smart, savvy things. So maybe they’re more nimble than I thought.

On a slightly different note, I noticed that Sxip has killed sxore and is focusing on Sxipper instead. I think this idea is better and will be trying out the plugin. The idea is a variation of something I thought would be better than the completely web-based approach.

I’m hoping that OpenID providers like Sxipper or MyOpenId or even AOL or Microsoft catch on so that one day I might be able to just build a web site without reinventing the register-login-recover-password loop that seems to be a universal requirement.

My mother has recently joined Obama’s campaign in Nevada. Obama recently spoke in Las Vegas and my sister and her boyfriend were interviewed on the news. I thought it was kind of cool, so I just wanted to share.