This note is a quickie on getting minicom to talk to a standard Cisco device.
After installing Minicom on Debian through
apt-get install minicom
Configure Minicom with
minicom -s
In serial port setup, more than likely the device needs to be changed from /dev/ttyS1 to
/dev/ttyS0. Bps should be 9600 8N1, and hardware flow control should be turned off.
Save the settings as dfl (default), and 'Exit from Minicom', else the modem initialization stuff
will take over.
Severance Pay - Video of a BMDS 24 Hours To Curtain Production
In 2009, Bermuda Musical and Dramatic Society presented 24 Hours to Curtain: six writers start at 8pm Friday night, are given an opening line, a closing line, and a prop. Their job is to write a 10 minute play, and have it finished by 8am Saturday morning, when the directors and actors come in to learn their lines, block the stage, rehearse, and are ready to put the production on at 8pm Saturday night. This is Severance Pay, one of the plays written over night and presented the next day. And I had just received a Panasonic HVX200A. This is one of my first attempts at video. The first couple of minutes scroll some dialog as I missed the opening.
Singer / Song Writer Steven Kerr was in Bermuda during January 2011 to
perform and record some songs with local musicians. I grabbed a camera
and we spent a day shooting video for his song Million Lights. Basically,
it is a travelogue of a few interesting spots in Bermuda.
During an upgrade cycle of my desktop computer, when I was prompted to reboot,
the computer would not reboot. It seems something corrupted the booting portion of the drive.
Yes, I know I'm supposed to back stuff up before performing changes, but in this case I didn't.
So... I needed to find a way to recover information off of a raid 10 drive array. I had two sets of two mirrored drives in a striped configuration: Raid 10.
As they were controlled by an Adaptec controllor card, I thought Adaptec might help. They were
unable to offer direct assistance, but they did suggest that the sofware offered by
Runtime Software would be of use.
I used Runtime Software's tools to examine my drives, and used their paid service to determine the drive configuration.
The response back from their paid service indicated that my drives were beyond recovery. Perhaps
the settings I used were incorrect for the data capture their software provided to their 'human
examiners'. But I would have thought they'd have an idea of what would be correct.
After receiving that bit of bad news, I decided to try data recovery myself. I licensed their
tools and gave it a try. Long story short, I was able to recover everything I needed.
The following video shows the steps I used to recover data from a drive
array controlled with an Adaptec AH2910SA Drive controller controlling four drives in a Raid 10
configuration.
When I saw this page, I had to take a break. This is a true hack. In the best sense of the
word.
Sitting in a walled garden, and only pings get out? Try this on for size:
ICMPTX (IP-over-ICMP).
By setting up a server side and a client side, someone has found a way to tunnel
IP traffic over ICMP packets, that is, when all is blocked, there is still a way out. Wow.
C++ IDE's for Linux: Eclipse, Code::Blocks, KDevelop
For my C++ code on a Linux platform, I started out by using the Eclipse/CDT editing environment. It offers
things like:
multiple tiled windows for editing
has wizards for setting up projects for libraries and for applications
built in debugging environment
live macro expansion (very handy for dealing with multi level boost::preprocessor expansions)
basic forms of code completion
by jumping through hoops, one can get Subversion integration
Recently, the hoops I needed to jump through with Eclipse started creating pain. Subversion integration
started generating errors when I upgraded the Java Runtime Environment. I also noticed that build times
on projects were slower than I would like. This was measurable in seconds, nothing earth shattering, but
adds up over time.
I then started to look at Code::Blocks 10. It's beneftis were:
reasonably fast interface, but can only view one file at a time in a simple tabbed interface
good build times
easy project creation
It's biggest draw back is that it uses a tabbed interface with no ability, (at least for what I could find), to
have multiple panes looking at different files simultaneously. Big show stopper there.
I then installed KDevelop 4. This environment, from initial inspection, appears to be much better. Things looking good
appear to be:
fast interface with tiled windows for viewing multiple files
Subversion is fully integrated from the 'get-go'
build times are quick
The learning curve is sharper/longer, but, from first blush, looks to be worth it. The basic requirement is
to learn how CMake works, as that is an integral part of the build process. The CMakeLists.txt file is part of the
IDE environment with some of it created automatically, and the special bits managed manually by the programmer.
On the initial look and feel, I think KDevelop will become my primary C++ code editing environment. I'm
hoping code completion works well, and that KDevelop deals with template stuff just as well.
Here's a handy way to think about it: Keep your age in fixed income. If you're 65 years old, at least 65% of your portfolio ought to be in fixed income.
Keeping money in mutual funds over the last few years has probably been a bad idea for individuals reaching retirement.
The better bet is to find income generating securities, for instance, stocks paying dividends. Even though the market value
may decrease, income is still derived from dividents payed by the company.
Another example might be short-duration, corporate bonds that are trading at a discount to par.
The iShares Corporate Bond Fund (HYG) yields about 9% for people who don't want to hold individual bonds.
There are some risks to corporate bonds, but provide one of the few good ways to get a reasonable amount of income.
In 1989, Richard W. ARms, Jr. wrote a book called The ARMS Index (TRIN).
In a nutshell, it makes use of various ratios of number of advancing and the number of
declining issues. In some cases, it can (or could) be used as a leading indicator of
equity market activity.
Oakshire Investment Research's Bourbon and Bayonets newsletter suggested that
this may now need to be take with a grain of salt:
It could well be that the 'Hindenberg Omen' is a helpful indicator for those who compute it on a regular basis, but for our part, there are problems associated with it that make it vulnerable to an excessive number of false positives.
It's the same issue, in fact, that plagues the once very valuable ARMS indicator, and some of the McLellan indicators, both of which are reliant on a daily reading of advancing and declining issues in the market.
The problem is this: these systems were designed to work by making a computation of all the market's common stocks, but today there are so many securities that are anything but common stocks that are dressed up and packaged as such . and they comprise an ever increasing number of the total issues trading on exchanges today. That includes bond and money market ETFs, Closed End Funds (CEFs), sector ETFs and preferred shares, not to mention all the reverse ETFs and other derivative products masquerading as common stock.
So to maintain some semblance of usefulness, the calculations will need to be refactored:
In short, both high/low numbers and advance/decline figures are not what they used to be. Certainly, for those who are able to strip out the superfluous aspects and compute the indicators on the basis of common stocks alone, there's something valuable to be had. Otherwise, we wouldn't trust the data as a stand alone indicator.
I have written several articles about Eclipse (the code editing UI) and it's
integration with subversion. This is an update of a few things to watch out for
with Eclipse, the Helios release. I do development on Linux as well as on Windows. In
this case my primary machine is a Windows machine running VMWare with several
guest Linux systems.
For the Linux systems with a GUI, I've used Cygwin to provide a mechanism of running the
Linux interfaces on my Windows interface. I have tried the VMWare Unity mechanism, but
on my multi-monitor system, it appears clunky and buggy.
When installing Cygwin, the key library to install is the 'xinit' library. This loads
all other necessary X11 libraries. Also include mintty in the Shells category for an
improved console experience.
As a side note for regular terminal operations in Cygwin, the following can be used with
mintty. Start 'ssh-agent mintty'.
mintty is explained at
http://code.google.com/p/mintty/.
Then use ssh-add to add a private key. The public key can be added to the ~/.ssh/authorized_key
files on the destination machines.
Anyway, for getting the GUI experience, use startxwin to start an xwindow terminal window.
Connect to the destination computer with 'ssh -l username -Y ipaddress'. At that point,
I run eclipse with '/usr/sbin/eclip[se/eclipse &'. The '&' forks the process and allows further
operations in the terminal window.
I've got ahead of myself here. To get eclipse installed, I downloaded the binaries from
eclipse.org, expanded them to a directory called eclipse. I then moved the directory to
/usr/sbin. Eclipse can then be started with '/usr/sbin/eclipse/eclipse'.
For version control, the Polaris subversion client is listed as a standard item
in the Collaboration items in the Eclipse New Software. After trying that, I wasn't very
pleased with the experience. It is not well integrated.
Instead, I removed the Polaris Subversive client and installed the Tigris.org
Subclipose Client.
The integration into Eclipse is much better. I used the SVNKit (Pure Java) connector
so as to obtain the svn+ssh://... tunnelling capability with a private key based login.
I've been accumulating a number of open browser windows, and need to get them closed.
The only way I can close them is to write about them. So here is a mish mash of things
I've collected.
The first collection looks at gold price manipulation. Many commentaters are saying
that gold is a safe investment for protection against today's faltering fiat money systems.
They are also saying that gold could reach highs of $1500, $2000, or even $7000.
Various conspiracy theories are indicating that JP MOrgan is acting on Government orders to
keep the price of Gold and Silver down. This could be one indication of why the price of
gold has been trading sideways for the last fews months in direct defiance of all the
money being thrown gold's way through direct investment, futures, and ETFs.
ZeroHedge has a
lateral reference to market manipulation via an article on the current Coco futures market sqeeze.
To profit from the market's manipulation of the gold market, some people have put together intraday average price
charts which show some interesting entry and exit times.
If gold is indeed going down, bullion bank's shorts could be cleared, and this could represent a buying opportunity
for gold. It is unclear how far the correction could go. But in any case, most places I read indicate that getting
into gold is a good thing. And to keep it for a while. Possibly a long while, as described by
Dylan Grice Discusses When To Take Profits On Gold: Hint - Not For A Long While.
Even while gold is undergoing some weakness, the
Wall St. Cheat Sheet
figures that it has considerable upwards strength. Once the manipulation is taken away, the price of gold could quickly get out of hand.
The government, any government, has an insatiable hunger for more and more money. On the US side of things,
there is talk of instituting a value added tax (VAT). Will it do any good?
According to an article written by David Ranson called
The Revenue Limits of Tax and Spend,
there appears to be a limit to how much tax a government can collect through it's various mechanisms.
Hauser's Law indicates that Federal tax receipts will always fall short of 20% of GDP. So...
if the government ever became efficient, they would use the opportunity to close out other departments where
taxes collected decrease.
The Canadian Government instituted their GST, which is a form of production pipeline tax. Both the
GST and VAT could be seen as a form of consumption tax. If you don't consume anything, you don't pay taxes. I
suppose that could be seen as the best of a bad situation.
Spending
As governments spend and spend like there is no tomorrow, they create larger and larger deficits. Deficits
can be covered by printing more and more money. Because there is no physical basis on which money resides,
it is called a fiat money. That is, governments can simply pay for things with money
it prints electronically out of thing air. Because gold
is a physical quantity, and can be traded, it's value should rise with the inflation of fiat money. But the
markets are appearing to be manipulated. Big Money is holding things back. By inflating away the value of fiat
money, governments have a slim chance of making good on the money they've spent. But with today's economy
as slow as it is, some are warning we could go into a deflationary phase. Governments don't like that, as
it makes it hard to cover their debts.
Keynesians would like to spend more and more to get out of the economic malaize currently existing. But that
just doesn't make sense anymore. The tipping point has probably been reached. It would appear that
even if there were to be a recovery, the recovery wouldn't be substantial enough to pay back even a small
percentage of what is owed.
Joshua Brown, writes as the
The Reformed Broker. He has a number
of interesting entries:
The Periodic Table of Finance Bloggers, which is a list
of blogs defined by categories such as Rocket Science, Rogues Gallery,
The Establishment, Stock Operators, Peanut Gallery, and Baby Buffets.
Econ Gangs of New York: "The factions that are shaping the economic dialog these days are becoming every bit as colorful and distinct as the proto-gangs that once ruled New York's notorious Five Points area. Their leaders, every bit as bellicose and recognizable."
Disclaimer: This site may include market analysis. All ideas, opinions, and/or
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