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I just recently saw the ABC 20/20 segment Aged Tires: A Driving Hazard? about how old tires could fail, even if they have not been used. After the segment I checked the tires on my Jeep because it had been a while since I purchased new tires.  Sure enough, my tires are nearly six years old.  They were only 10 weeks old when purchased so that is not a problem, but the tread wear on them is still fine so I was not going to replace them until some time next year.  My yearly mileage is fairly low so tire age could be more of an issue for me.  Also, I checked my full size spare and confirmed that it is nearly nine years old, just like my 2000 Jeep Cherokee.  A couple of years ago I had two tires replaced due to vandalism so they are ok, but I’m more concerned about the nearly six year old tires.

I recommend that you check your own tires to make sure you are not rolling on old rubber.  You can determine the manufacture date by looking at the DOT code.  The full DOT code may only be on one side of the tire and is a noticeable raised stamped area.  You might have to crawl under the car to check them as I did.

I will be replacing my tires sooner rather than later and taking one of the newer tires and switching out the full size spare.  We are planning a family camping trip later this summer and I’m going to attempt to squeeze all five of us plus the dog into the Jeep so I don’t want to take chances with my family.

Child car safety seats have expiration dates on them for around six years so it makes sense to me that tires should have expiration dates as well.  If we are concerned that a child safety seat could fail in an accident due to old age and plastic deterioration, I would think that we would want to do what we can to prevent the accident in the first place. The trouble right now with setting expiration dates is that there is no industry consensus on when a tire should not be used.  Some tire manufacturers claim each tire should be evaluated on a case by case basis.  I understand that situations can be different, but the same goes for child safety seats, but they still have dates on them.  As more testing is performed I expect to see expiration dates added to tires.  Hopefully it will be done soon to mitigate further avoidable tire failures and fatal accidents.

Thinking of trading in you vehicle for a more fuel efficient one?  Wondering which one to trade or what to get?  You might want to get some details on how to compare fuel efficiency ratings because it is not as clear as it seems.  It turns out that gas savings is significantly higher going from 10 MPG to 20 MPG than going from 25 MPG to 50 MPG.  Logic would seem otherwise but read the following website for the details on why.

Help with Calculating Gallons Per 10,000 Miles (GPM)

This page contains materials that will help those interested in the MPG illusion (Larrick & Soll, Science, June 20, 2008) calculate gallons of gas used for different distances driven. It is regularly updated with new content. Please see this page for more information about the original research and additional materials. Here is a link to the original article (subscription needed) and its supporting online material at Science (no subscription needed).

I posted the following on my personal blog at work which is restricted. Posting here since it seems to have sparked some interest.

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I want virtualization ON the desktop. This is not about the common view of desktop virtualization where the desktop experience is presented to end users and the process is run on a server platform in a data center. I’m talking about real virtualization on my physical desktop machine. I normally run several virtual machines for different tasks using VMware Workstation. In doing so, I need a host OS to run Workstation and that OS needs to be patched and virus protected. Each VM must be launched from that host OS so I’m forced to always consume resources for that host OS. Each VM must also be patched and virus protected. So in order to run a VM for a task, I must have two instances of an OS running and two instances of virus protection running. This works and is a wonderful solution to some problems, however it is very wasteful of system resources.

• I want my laptop to boot directly into a hypervisor and be able to choose what VMs I want to launch.
• I want virus protection to run in a privileged and specialized VM with access to the hypervisor (think VMsafe) and protect all my VMs, at the same time, with one instance.
• I don’t want to be bound by a host OS that must always be running in order to access other VMs.
• I want to get memory savings across VMs if they happen to be running the same OS (duplicate memory pages).
• I want to be able to move an entire application from one VM to another, with all its settings, as easily as I could in the DOS days of copying a folder.
• I want the hypervisor shipped on my laptop.
• I want application virtualization to be the norm in how applications are delivered/packaged.
• I want my PC upgrade experience to be simply migrating my VM from one computer to another. At system boot, new hardware features would be available.
• I want to have a single instance of an OS on my laptop (one place that needs patching) and I want to be able to launch multiple sessions off that instance where different applications can be streamed down to.

In thinking of current desktop virtualization solutions, the virtual desktop is not mobile in the sense it cannot be run off-line. Now think about having a hypervisor on a laptop and being able to sync a copy of a VM that is running on the data center to the local disk on the laptop and allow the user to go into ‘off-line’ mode where changes are stored locally (think snapshot delta file). Then when they reconnect, the changes are synced back to the VDI (think deleting a snapshot).

Think about having a hypervisor on the desktop and being able to plug in a USB key with a VM on it and boot it up without installing any software and not requiring any host OS.

I know some of this can be done today with current solutions, and some of it is planned. With Intel planning quad-core processors for laptops, virtualization ON the desktop is going to become more interesting. Vendors are working to solve what they see as today’s computing problems, I just hope they don’t forget about the mobile desktop experience.

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One of the internal comments suggested Moka5 as a possible option. I looked at their BareMetal product and I’m interested. Let me know if you of any other products that can fit the bill as described above.

In doing data manipulations, an important step is to make sure the source data is valid. I’m trying to clean house a little so in a way, I’m hoping to have more garbage out than in.  It reminds me of a line from Seinfeld when Heather and I went to see him in a live performance. He said something to the effect that everything we buy is trash.  We buy it and are happy about it and love it, but eventually it will become trash and we’ll throw it away. Just think of all that old computer gear that might be in your closet that is not worth anything, even for a donation, that you will eventually just throw away.

So, the next time you buy something, make sure that your source data is valid and hopefully your “garbage out” will not be too close to your “garbage in”.

I use Gmail and I don’t empty my Spam folder. I had a habit of emptying it on a regular basis, but I found that there was really no reason to do that. I’ve not had any false positives (that I know of) so I don’t look at anything in there anymore. I also wanted to see how much spam I get in a month so I just let it pile up in the spam folder, Gmail deletes spam messages after (about) thirty days. Late last year it was hovering around 1200 with a spike when the Internet was hit with a massive botnet. As of today it has dropped below 500. I’m not don’t know of any major work over the last month or so to take down botnets, but I’m sure we will continue to see a decline since the ‘Spam King’ was recently indicted and arrested. I’m happy either way since that will mean the Internet in general will be just a bit faster since the majority of email traffic.

Enjoy your cleaner mail client!

globeandmail.com: British, U.S. kids worst off in industrial world, UN says
British and U.S. children are the worst off in the industrialized world, according to a UN report Wednesday that ranked the well-being of youngsters in 21 wealthy countries.

What’s wrong with this picture?  The hazards of misplaced priorities.

Since in America the perception of a problem is what decides the merit of a problem, it is appropriate that just changing the perception will cause the problem to go away. The whole global warming mess can all be cleared up, at least in the eyes of Americans, by simply converting to the metric system of measurement. The mass confusion the American people will experience will cloud the issues at hand and the perception of the problem will be changed, hence, it will go away.

65 MPH = 104.6 K/H
Americans will be thrilled about being able to travel at faster speeds. “Woohoo!! Look how fast were goin’ y’all! I’m doin’ over a hundred.”

20 MPG = 8.5 K/L
The car industry will be excited about the lower emissions standards (since 8 is lower than 20) and the economy will boom. The whole reason higher fuel economy standards are being balked at is because it’s going to hurt the national economy. We must preserve the economy at all costs. The national economy is a delicate balance that should not be ‘tinkered’ with. Oh but it is ok to pump the upper atmosphere with smoke-like particles to block the sun and reverse global warming.

120 F = 48.9 C
Hey, it’s not that hot. It’s not even fifty degrees!

24 feet = 7.3152 meters
Sea level rise will really not be that bad. “Oh yeah, they were saying like 24 feet or something. Shooot. Now they’re telling us it’s only going to be 7 meaters. That’s nothin’”

So, in doing America’s part to take action against the causes of global warming, the current administration should work feverishly to bring metrification to the good people of America and solve Global Warming once and for all. ONCE AND FOR ALL!

/sarcasm
I’m ashamed of the policies and politics in America. We are one of the few countries to not ratify the Kyoto Protocol and one of the few contries left to not use the metric system. Is there a connection? Yes, it all comes back to our precious economy.

I’ve been doing some research into online backup services and I think I’ve found the one I’ll stick with for a while, mozy.com. The link I provide here is a referrer link. If you sign up through this link we BOTH will get an extra 256MB worth of quota. Good for those that are on a budget but 2GB is free and it’s only $4.95 for unlimited. Yeah, that’s right, unlimited. Although I don’t know how effective it would be to back up your entire music movie collection over your upload link, might take a while.

I tried out datadepositbox.com (DDB) and onlinebackupsolutions.com (OBS) but neither of them really did what I wanted. DDB was nice because it would scan for changes and upload them as they happened, but that would sometimes result in many more versions of a file than necessary and it just hit the hard drive too much. OBS would just fail if you didn’t have the PC on during the backup time and if you shutdown while it was going you were also out of luck. Mozy will run automatic backups every two hours when your computer is idle, like at lunch, and can be interrupted at any point and will pick right back up where it left off. DDB had a bandwidth throttling feature so it would not tie up your uplink while you were using the computer, however it didn’t really work worth anything. Mozy’s throttle feature works great much like a limiter on bittorrent software or some FTP programs.

Mozy is a quick download and simple install. It will suggest a bunch of stuff to back up and you can also specifically choose files or folders you want included. Quota is based on what you select to back up, not on what is stored. Some may say that is a rip because the store it compressed, however they also keep 30 days worth of revisions which don’t count toward quota. Also, if you unselect something, like music files, those files stay available for restore online for 30 days but don’t count toward your quota.

When I was going through the information on the website I really got a kick out of how they come across. Very laid back and in tune with what people are dealing with. In their suggested alternatives to Mozy they said, “Run a cron job of rsync, gzip and mcrypt piped over ssh to your friend’s server over his DSL line.” I laughed at that one because it is actually something I considered. The other alternatives are just as funny.

If you search the web for reviews on Mozy you might find some folks talking about the Terms saying you are opting into spam. This is no longer true and not in their terms. Also, in just about every blog I saw a post from someone touting idrive.com. They must be pushing their service to anyone interested in Mozy because their features are much the same but still in beta. Comments are off so I wont get their comment spam but I’ll go ahead and tell you that I’m not keen on their practices and would not recommend them.

I’d be happy if Mozy and Google hooked up and offered a service where my files would be backedup and synced to my PC as well as available through the Google services. Modifying them on Google and also have the latest copy on my PC would be nice. Plus having all the version control and peace of mind in backups.

Try them out and drop me a line to let me know your thoughts.

What You Get
* 2GB of free, secure storage (Or go Unlimited for $4.95/month!)
* Open/locked file support
* Block-level differential backup
* 128-bit SSL support (to secure your data during transport)
* 448-bit Blowfish encryption (to secure your data on our server)
* Continuous or scheduled backup options

I just tried out the Windows Vista Test Drive to see how it worked. It looks like they are running terminal server with a bunch of hosted Vista sessions. I picked the ‘lab’ for Previous Versions. This new feature supposedly will keep past versions of a file automatically so you go back if you delete a file or the file gets corrupted. This seemed like a cool feature a bit like what they offer when you use a W2K3 file server. I followed the steps as shown in the lab and this is what I experienced.

• The first time I clicked the Start button (the new flag in the corner), I immediately saw a blank screen with ‘No Connection’. I had to refresh the window and then I saw the desktop again.
• When I opened the file they directed me to, I was prompted to activate Office 2007. I would have thought they would have done this already or at least bypassed this. The activation failed over the internet so I canceled.
• I deleted all the text in the document then saved and closed it.
• I opened the ‘Restore Previous Versions’ dialog and it searched.
• “There are no previous versions”

Before this Test Drive I was really not impressed with Vista. I had no plans to upgrade to Vista when it was released or any point later. My feelings after the Test Drive really have not changed. It just proves to me that features are not going to work all the time as advertised. Oh, the term ‘it just works’ does not apply here. I know it might be some configuration problem somewhere that was not done correctly, but this is supposed to be a test drive to show off the features. Don’t think that I’m discrediting the entire OS based just on this experience. I’m discrediting the OS based on all my bad experiences with Vista. Your mileage may vary.

I ran into a situation where I had a large (12gb) vmdk file that only needed to be about 2gb.  There are no tools built into VMware Workstation for reducing vmdk size, although there is one for expanding (vmware-vdiskmanager).  Here are some simple steps I used to reduce the size of my vmdk using all open source tools.

1. Shut down the VM
2. Add a new Disk with the appropriate size and settings (flat or sparse).
3. Get the GParted LiveCD from here.
4. Set the VM CDROM to boot using this LiveCD.
5. In GParted, select the new drive and create a disk label. (Initializes disk)
6. Highlight the partition on the old drive and reduce the partition size to something smaller than the space available on the new drive.
7. Highlight the partition on the old drive and select Copy.
8. Highlight the new drive and select Paste.
9. Choose to expand the partition to the full available space of the new drive (if desired).
10. Ensure that you set the drive options on the new drive to Boot.
11. Shutdown the VM.
12. Remove the old drive from the VM configuration.
13. Remove the LiveCD mapping from the CDROM
14. Boot up the VM and test.

If all goes well you should have your OS running on the new smaller vmdk.  If everything looks good, you can delete the old vmdk file or leave it there in case you want to roll back.

I recommend using preallocated vmdk files that are allocated in 2GB files.  Being preallocated ensure optimal performance for the VM.  2GB files are easier to manage and defrag.  Once the vmdk files are created go ahead and run a defrag to make sure all your vmdk’s are contiguous.