26 Miles

Dual Processor vs Dual Core

// March 28th, 2006 // No Comments » // Technology

As I’ve had this question put to me a few times, I found this article to be a good resource comparing the two.

Read more at Puget Systems.

Aggie Basketball Is Back!

// March 20th, 2006 // No Comments » // Life

The Texas A&M mens basketball team capped a stellar year with their first trip to the NCAA tournament since 1987. They beat Syracuse in the first round and earned their first trip to the second round in 26 years only to fall to LSU after a long 3-pointer with 3.9 seconds left elevated LSU over the Aggies with a 58-57 victory.

The Aggie football team has fallen on hard times of late, so it’s pretty nice having something to cheer about again and watch on TV, even if we do have to submit to a photo of us wearing LSU garb on our next trip to Lafayette to vist family. It was worth it after a season of thrills, the pinnacle of which was the buzzer-beater win over the highly-ranked University of Texas on March 1st.

Congatulations to the Aggie basketball team and Coach Gillispie on an amazing year to remember.

Baseball’s Dirty Little Secret

// March 8th, 2006 // 1 Comment » // Life

The latest revelation – if it can be so called at this point – regarding Barry Bonds’ use of steroids for the past 8 years, should be another bellwether event heralding the end of steroid abuse in professional sports, and further marginalize the fakers and phonies. But it won’t. I know better.

It’s been said that fans fall into two camps regarding steroid use in professional sports – those who are disgusted by it and yearn for it to be expunged altogether; and those who see it somehow as a natural outgrowth of modern competitive sports and the only way athletes can keep a competitive advantage with other cheaters is to cheat themselves.

I can’t see how anyone but the most jaded can argue the latter position. Banned substances need to be eliminated from professional sports, period. Having glimpsed firsthand the rigor of the USADA testing of Olympic hopefuls, there’s no good reason those same standards can’t be applied to professional sports, none.

Olympic hopefuls are tested randomly, and often. The list of banned substances is very broad and often includes the most effective medicines for treating common injuries and diseases (i.e. high blood pressure, muscle strains, heart conditions), which are regularly prescribed for non-athletes. The punishment for cheating is typically severe — being banned from the sport for extended periods of time, hefty fines, and stripping of past awards.

Pete Rose has been vilified for betting on baseball and banned from entry into the hall of fame. It’s arguable that although the culture of major league baseball didn’t exactly discourage steroid use until recently, juicers of any era enjoy no moral advantage over Pete Rose, and every statistic they hold should have an asterisk beside it.

If we’re going to give a de-facto nod-and-wink to the juicers, then let the pre-steroid era stand apart from the current one. If we praise their achievement, let’s also recognize the artificiality of it.

My family lives for baseball. My kids love going to the games, even though it’s a 94-mile drive roundtrip to our teams’ stadium. My wife and I have a certain winter-melancholy that comes not only from the grey skies, but from the absence of baseball in our lives between November and April. If there’s a game on, the TV is tuned to it for seven solid months. We love this game.

Some will argue that sports figures aren’t role models. This is disingenuous at best. They only have to look at their own role models to know that peppered among perhaps their parents, relatives, friends, and civic or church leaders were, I bet, more than a few professional athletes.

My hope, however naive, is that the people whose actions chart the course of professional sports see with the clarity of a child the need to set high standards for both athletic and personal achievement, and in the process create an environment that produces role models worth emulating.

Secure Your Firefox Passwords

// March 7th, 2006 // No Comments » // Technology

Most people probably don’t realize that when they elect to have Firefox remember passwords they enter for restricted-access websites, by default those passwords are stored in plaintext and available to anyone with physical access to the user account and system.

To view them, simply go to Tools->Options (Edit->Preferences on Linux/Mac). Select the Privacy Tab. Expand the Saved Passwords section. Then choose “View Saved Passwords”. Then “Show Passwords”… and there they are.

The solution to this is to do what most people never do – set a “Master Password” in Firefox.

You can do this by going to Tools->Options (Edit->Preferences on Linux/Mac). Select the Privacy Tab. Expand the Saved Passwords section. Then choose “Set Master Password” and follow the directions to set the Master Password.

After this, once per browser session, when navigating to a restricted-access site for which you’ve saved a password in Firefox, you’ll be prompted for the “Master Password”. Entering it successfully will pre-populate the saved password information into the form on the page.

Read more at Digg.

Web Video For Dummies

// March 2nd, 2006 // 1 Comment » // Technology

This looks cool. YouTube is a free service where you can upload digital videos, have them automatically converted to Flash format, and hosted for free.

The key feature to me is that they automatically convert your videos to the broadly-adopted Flash format. This saves time since now you won’t have to render out multiple versions of videos for your diverse audience, requires building no Flash expertise, and virtually guarantees your intended audience can actually view your videos without downloading new codecs or players. Plus it’s free!

Google Video, and a host of other companies offer a similar service, but from what I can tell, only YouTube.com has the auto-convert-to-Flash feature.

Read more at YouTube.com.