Monday, March 31, 2008
Outlook Rules & ActiveSync Deadlock
It appears that running Outlook rules at the same time as Activesync is synchronizing Outlook/Exchange to your Microsoft SmartPhone causes a deadlock. (Or, at least, a screen that says "25 minutes remaining" for half an hour.)
Cozumel Resorts
I feel obliged to post this, sharing info and all that.
Just had a great spring break vacation in Cozumel. My first, or maybe second, in a warm place.
Stayed at Melia Cozumel Resort, north end, west coast. Pleasant, all inclusive.
Nice swimming off Melia beach, although many rocks to stub feet on. 1 lobster, 1 crab, under said rocks.
Nicest aspect of the Melia, for me, was that it was next to the El Cozumeleno resort. A pier or jetty in front of the El Cozumeleno created a sheltered area of clear water with great snorkeling, whereas the water in front of the Melia was cloudy, caused by small surf on beach.
Net: if you like beach, Melia is fine. If you like snorkeling, El Cozumeleno better. But the short distance between the two resorts makes it almsot moot - just a few houses.
A similar note for people who, like me, like snorkeling and SCUBA: the Hotel Park Royal, at the south end of the island, is right across the street from the Aqua World dive outfit.
Just had a great spring break vacation in Cozumel. My first, or maybe second, in a warm place.
Stayed at Melia Cozumel Resort, north end, west coast. Pleasant, all inclusive.
Nice swimming off Melia beach, although many rocks to stub feet on. 1 lobster, 1 crab, under said rocks.
Nicest aspect of the Melia, for me, was that it was next to the El Cozumeleno resort. A pier or jetty in front of the El Cozumeleno created a sheltered area of clear water with great snorkeling, whereas the water in front of the Melia was cloudy, caused by small surf on beach.
Net: if you like beach, Melia is fine. If you like snorkeling, El Cozumeleno better. But the short distance between the two resorts makes it almsot moot - just a few houses.
A similar note for people who, like me, like snorkeling and SCUBA: the Hotel Park Royal, at the south end of the island, is right across the street from the Aqua World dive outfit.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Ruby Lee of HP did NOT inspire my work on P6 SIMD / MMX
Minor annoyance.
I was clicking around Ruby Lee's website, looking for graduate students to hire for a summer internship, when I saw this:
(1) This could be interpreted as saying that Ruby Lee takes credit for inventing SIMD instruction sets, leading to _I_n_t_e_l_ implementing MMX. Or (2) that she was one of many pioneers in that field.
Statement (2) is probably true.
Statement (1) is false. I was there, at the start of MMX, and earlier, when we were calling it P6 SIMD. I have several personal claims to fame in this regards: (a) I am responsible for MMX being 64 bits rather than 32 bits; (b) I am responsible for MMX being placed in the floating point register file, as a way to get around OS context switch issues; (c) I was told to destroy the slides for P6 SIMD, after P6 decided not to do it, but instead I sent the data to Israel, which helped kick off MMX; (d) after the i750 video chip was cancelled, driving back in a car with Bob Dreyer, we decided that we had to do something like P6 SIMD or MMX, because the special video chip was gone. This led to the FP register state. (e) I handed out pieces of swiss cheese at the wrapup dinner for MMX, protesting the irregularity of the ISA. I should have had those pieces of cheese bronzed.
With 100% certainty, I can say that I was never aware of anything Ruby Lee or HP were doing during the development of MMX.
HP was so far out of my field of vision that I don't know when HP shipped multimedia. I vaguely remember email from Konrad Lai about it about a year before MMX shipped - as P6 was being wrapped up (without MMX), as P55C was locked and loaded(with MMX), and as P6C (with MMX) was ready to follow P6 swiftly out the door.
Why were we later, when I suspect that we actually started first? Mainly, the usual: the company is a big slow dinosaur (although capable of reacting really quickly when under threat).
Fred Pollack was the manager who encouraged me to work on P6 SIMD. If Fred knew about HP's work, maybe HP deserves credit. However, Ruby's NSF bio says she worked on it 1992-1996 - P6 SIMD may actually have started earlier than HP's work on SIMD multimedia.
I personally credit the i750 video processor guys for the SIMD instruction set architecture. All I did was show how to integrate it into a general purpose out-of-order processor. And protest the stupid restrictions that were placed on it - we should have had all combinations of {8,16,32,64} {unsigned saturation, saturation, no saturation} {+,-,*,<<,>>}, etc. as well as less regular combinations such as unsigned+signed giving unsigned, unsigned+signed giving signed.
---
This isn't intended to be a criticism of Ruby. Puffery is to be expected in university brag letters, etc.
I was clicking around Ruby Lee's website, looking for graduate students to hire for a summer internship, when I saw this:
- But that's not to mention a third innovation that Lee brought to the industry. She also led the way in creating a set of multimedia instructions that build directly into the core native language of the computer the ability to handle multimedia of all types -- images, voice, animation. _I_n_t_e_l_ later adopted the idea, which consumers saw when the company began advertising that its chips had multimedia-accelerating "MMX" technology. Now essentially all computers use the technique, allowing multimedia to be an everyday part of computing.
(1) This could be interpreted as saying that Ruby Lee takes credit for inventing SIMD instruction sets, leading to _I_n_t_e_l_ implementing MMX. Or (2) that she was one of many pioneers in that field.
Statement (2) is probably true.
Statement (1) is false. I was there, at the start of MMX, and earlier, when we were calling it P6 SIMD. I have several personal claims to fame in this regards: (a) I am responsible for MMX being 64 bits rather than 32 bits; (b) I am responsible for MMX being placed in the floating point register file, as a way to get around OS context switch issues; (c) I was told to destroy the slides for P6 SIMD, after P6 decided not to do it, but instead I sent the data to Israel, which helped kick off MMX; (d) after the i750 video chip was cancelled, driving back in a car with Bob Dreyer, we decided that we had to do something like P6 SIMD or MMX, because the special video chip was gone. This led to the FP register state. (e) I handed out pieces of swiss cheese at the wrapup dinner for MMX, protesting the irregularity of the ISA. I should have had those pieces of cheese bronzed.
With 100% certainty, I can say that I was never aware of anything Ruby Lee or HP were doing during the development of MMX.
HP was so far out of my field of vision that I don't know when HP shipped multimedia. I vaguely remember email from Konrad Lai about it about a year before MMX shipped - as P6 was being wrapped up (without MMX), as P55C was locked and loaded(with MMX), and as P6C (with MMX) was ready to follow P6 swiftly out the door.
Why were we later, when I suspect that we actually started first? Mainly, the usual: the company is a big slow dinosaur (although capable of reacting really quickly when under threat).
Fred Pollack was the manager who encouraged me to work on P6 SIMD. If Fred knew about HP's work, maybe HP deserves credit. However, Ruby's NSF bio says she worked on it 1992-1996 - P6 SIMD may actually have started earlier than HP's work on SIMD multimedia.
I personally credit the i750 video processor guys for the SIMD instruction set architecture. All I did was show how to integrate it into a general purpose out-of-order processor. And protest the stupid restrictions that were placed on it - we should have had all combinations of {8,16,32,64} {unsigned saturation, saturation, no saturation} {+,-,*,<<,>>}, etc. as well as less regular combinations such as unsigned+signed giving unsigned, unsigned+signed giving signed.
---
This isn't intended to be a criticism of Ruby. Puffery is to be expected in university brag letters, etc.
Am I paranoid, or do I just have a REALLY slow PC at work?
For quite some time now I have been complaining about the slowness of my laptop PC at work - especially when compared to similar computers I use outside work.
The slowness often manifests itself when I power up from standby, hibernate, or completely off.
I often blame the slowness on virus scanners, etc.
But I wonder: could my laptop be occupied by a rootkit?
Note that I don't say "malware such as a rootkit". Possibly it could be a rootkit placed by bad guys.
But possibly also it could be a rootkit or other monitoring software placed by my employer's IT Security people. This comes to mind because of patent applications 20070083739 Processor with branch predictor and 20070083735 Hierarchical processor, invented by me, assigned to and prepared by Centaurus Data LLC and related companies.
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=11&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=glew.IN.&OS=IN/glew&RS=IN/glew
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=12&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=glew.IN.&OS=IN/glew&RS=IN/glew
Am I paranoid? Or do I just have a really slow system? And are virus scanners and other cruft really wasting as much time on other people's conputers as they seem to be on mine?
The slowness often manifests itself when I power up from standby, hibernate, or completely off.
I often blame the slowness on virus scanners, etc.
But I wonder: could my laptop be occupied by a rootkit?
Note that I don't say "malware such as a rootkit". Possibly it could be a rootkit placed by bad guys.
But possibly also it could be a rootkit or other monitoring software placed by my employer's IT Security people. This comes to mind because of patent applications 20070083739 Processor with branch predictor and 20070083735 Hierarchical processor, invented by me, assigned to and prepared by Centaurus Data LLC and related companies.
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=11&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=glew.IN.&OS=IN/glew&RS=IN/glew
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=12&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=glew.IN.&OS=IN/glew&RS=IN/glew
Am I paranoid? Or do I just have a really slow system? And are virus scanners and other cruft really wasting as much time on other people's conputers as they seem to be on mine?
Thursday, March 20, 2008
SmartPhone blog disappears?
I was about to post about how happy I am with my new SmartPhone - and, indeed, I am very happy. It does everything I bought it for:
Evetually my post evaporated. So much for it being saved automatically.
So, not everything is hunk dory. But I am still happier with my SmartPhone, my AT&T Tilt (HTC 8925) than I am with any laptop or tablet PC I have bought or used recently.
- phone
- synchronze with my calendar, so I don't have to use my PC to figure out what meeting I ned to go to.
- Slow PC. Bad virusscanner
- E.g. my SmartPhone beeps me awake at 6am, I roll over, and look at whether I have a 7am, 8m, 9am, or whatever meeting. I.e. my SmartPhone has made it safe to sleep in?
- pen input with Transcriber
- wifi web browsing a bonus
Evetually my post evaporated. So much for it being saved automatically.
So, not everything is hunk dory. But I am still happier with my SmartPhone, my AT&T Tilt (HTC 8925) than I am with any laptop or tablet PC I have bought or used recently.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
More Toshiba TabletPC woes
Monday, sitting at my desk, programing with Rajeev, I powered on my Toshiba. Hallelujah!!! The beeping problem occurred - Rajeev is my witness. Now I have two witnesses, my wife and Rajeev.
I even managed to video the password dialog box behavior: as if a key were stuck. Select all, empty, and it keeps being pressed. (Unfortunately, I just disabled the phone that has the video recorded - now I'm not sure how to transfer the video. Ah, maybe I can switch SIM cards.)
The beeping was at a low frequency - say 2 per second. When I opened windows, such as the password dialog box, the frequency increased - say 4 per second. (These estimates are approximate and relative, not accurate and absolute.)
After beeping for 5 minutes or so - during which I video'ed the effect, and clicked around - eventually it stopped all on its own.
Prior to this episode, the TabletPC had been connected to power but idle and/or in standby for perhaps 4 hours. This is frequently the case: I rarely have the problem when I boot fresh or power on. (Rarely - but I have had it in these circumstances.)
Possible new observation: the problems always start recurring after plugging in to my Toshiba doc. However, once started, they persist, intermittently, even though using my non-dock power supply.
So far NWCS Toshiba support has replaced my keyboard, fan, and motherboard. What's left? Power supply - the frequency shifting according to activity level of PC suggests this could be a problem.
I even managed to video the password dialog box behavior: as if a key were stuck. Select all, empty, and it keeps being pressed. (Unfortunately, I just disabled the phone that has the video recorded - now I'm not sure how to transfer the video. Ah, maybe I can switch SIM cards.)
The beeping was at a low frequency - say 2 per second. When I opened windows, such as the password dialog box, the frequency increased - say 4 per second. (These estimates are approximate and relative, not accurate and absolute.)
After beeping for 5 minutes or so - during which I video'ed the effect, and clicked around - eventually it stopped all on its own.
Prior to this episode, the TabletPC had been connected to power but idle and/or in standby for perhaps 4 hours. This is frequently the case: I rarely have the problem when I boot fresh or power on. (Rarely - but I have had it in these circumstances.)
Possible new observation: the problems always start recurring after plugging in to my Toshiba doc. However, once started, they persist, intermittently, even though using my non-dock power supply.
So far NWCS Toshiba support has replaced my keyboard, fan, and motherboard. What's left? Power supply - the frequency shifting according to activity level of PC suggests this could be a problem.
Open Letter to AT&T about Pay-per-Use Charges
I recently purchased an AT&T Tilt, and am happy on this first day. I have requested a voice plan, but no data plan.
I am told that I should ensure that AT&T *not* provision the data plan, to prevent expensive pay per use fees. Apparently certain WM6 applications connect to the data wireless network by default. I have disabled such defaults as much as I know how to do, but I still wish to give AT&T this directive: I do NOT wish to use data, even as pay per use.
I *do* wish to use voice, according to my plan.
I *do* wish to use SMS text messaging.
But I do *not* want to use any data facility - no web browsing, no email access - using AT&T's data wireless network.
AT&T customer support assures me that there is no such pay-per-use data access; but other users tell me there is. I wish to make my desires 100% clear. I will protest such charges if they occur.
I am communicating this to AT&T every way I can imagine:
a) through AT&T's web page based "email"
b) by phone to AT&T customer representatives
c) by paper mail
I am blogging this at http://andyglew.blogspot.com/2008/03/open-letter-to-at-and-pay-per-use.html for reference.
I am also preserving this email on my blog because AT&T's &^&^#!!@!!@@ web based email can only accept 1000 characters. I editted out words to make it fit on AT&T's site, but am providing the full reference here. I suppose this is my new BKM for customer service sites that do not give you enough room to write a full question: fill in their webform, and provide a link to a website where they can see more details. I would not put detals such as account numbers on blogger; I wonder if a sufficiently secure mechanism could be created.
I am told that I should ensure that AT&T *not* provision the data plan, to prevent expensive pay per use fees. Apparently certain WM6 applications connect to the data wireless network by default. I have disabled such defaults as much as I know how to do, but I still wish to give AT&T this directive: I do NOT wish to use data, even as pay per use.
I *do* wish to use voice, according to my plan.
I *do* wish to use SMS text messaging.
But I do *not* want to use any data facility - no web browsing, no email access - using AT&T's data wireless network.
AT&T customer support assures me that there is no such pay-per-use data access; but other users tell me there is. I wish to make my desires 100% clear. I will protest such charges if they occur.
I am communicating this to AT&T every way I can imagine:
a) through AT&T's web page based "email"
b) by phone to AT&T customer representatives
c) by paper mail
I am blogging this at http://andyglew.blogspot.com/2008/03/open-letter-to-at-and-pay-per-use.html for reference.
I am also preserving this email on my blog because AT&T's &^&^#!!@!!@@ web based email can only accept 1000 characters. I editted out words to make it fit on AT&T's site, but am providing the full reference here. I suppose this is my new BKM for customer service sites that do not give you enough room to write a full question: fill in their webform, and provide a link to a website where they can see more details. I would not put detals such as account numbers on blogger; I wonder if a sufficiently secure mechanism could be created.
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