I was telling some friends yesterday that whenever I meet new people who are interacting with me socially, I always think of this xkcd cartoon:

(Makes meeting girls at bars difficult).

(Now if only I had an apatosaurus [on which] to ride…)

I’m among the huge (and growing) number of people who really like to take things apart or to further investigate hidden options just to know how things work. (One might call this characteristic “intellectual curiosity” aka the “break shit open and put it back together again” syndrome).

The other day, I discovered the service menu on my one year old Samsung LCD television. It was glorious: gone are the terms “color”, “brightness”, and “tint” for controlling how the picture looks. In are the terms “LVDS_TX_Bit”, “Nor_Roffset”, and “SVP-PX”, which clearly are more powerful simply because they are unintelligible. “I will attract sexy women with a better picture using advanced settings!”, I exclaimed!¹

Among the new menu items is “Calibration”. I figured, “Sure! Calibration is a good thing! I want my TV to be calibrated!” and clicked it. Over the next few minutes, my television scanned various hues in an attempt to find the right color palate for my viewing pleasure.

But then everything was tinted way red. I mean, even grays were showing up reddish. It was bad. So bad that using the normal “tint” and “color” parameters couldn’t fix it. The default factory reset yielded no ground to my new tint overlords. The service menu factory reset did not do any justice either. It was bad.

Then I read on the Samsung TV FAQ on the Service Menu the following:

Calibration: STAY OUT. DO NOT TOUCH. You have been warned, this is designed to be run in the factory or onsite with specialized hardware outputting specific images. You can ruin your set if you use this.

Damn. Truer words may never have been written.

Various people around the internet say that getting a professional calibrator is the only real way out of that, which can cost around $300, about half or more of the value of the equipment. Then I read that all Samsung does is feed a pattern from a signal generator (which both makes sense and can’t actually be accurate since we’re talking about a digital HDMI input), which means that a layperson should be able reproduce the calibration image.

But what is the image? Color tones? Grayscale? Boxes? A random internet meme?

I tried color tones first for no reason other than they seem common enough for television calibration. Colors returned closer to normal, but still wrong.

Some other guy on the internet² says that a Samsung support guy told him that they use a checkerboard pattern. So, I used a checkerboard pattern and restarted calibration: colors are (more or less) back to normal. There is some ambiguity because I can’t really compare the before and after, and I feel like blacks were blacker before.

But, at least Jessica Alba looks human-like now.

My advice? Don’t mess with the service menu unless you actually know what you’re doing, regardless of level of intellectual curiosity³.

1. Well, I didn’t actually say or think that. In reality, I knew that watching old episodes of Battlestar Galactica alone might look better. [↩]
2. who should obviously be trusted [↩]
3. That said, you can get to it on Samsung TVs by pressing “Mute”, 1, 8, 2, “Power”, one after the other. Caveat emptor. [↩]

Since the holiday season is upon us, all of us at DreamHost would like to wish everyone on the internets a very happy Thanksgiving. Well, you know, so long as you live in a country that gets to celebrate it. Otherwise, we hope your Thursday is really nice.

via Dreamhost Blog.

Saw this on Freshmeat today:

About: [some open source project] is a real-time collaboration (RTC) server. It uses the only widely adopted open protocol for instant messaging, XMPP (also called Jabber). [some open source project] is incredibly easy to setup and administer, but offers rock-solid security and performance. Changes [in the new version]: A security flaw allowed authentication to be bypassed, allowing arbitrary code execution. This was fixed. JDBC and JID optimizations were done.

(Emphasis mine).

Wait, really? rock-solid security != arbitrary code execution, last time I checked.

Old school 311.

When I was an undergrad, I should have worked here:

the Machine Shop at Columbia University’s Physics Department.

There have been sporadic reports that Google Reader does not display content sometimes. For me, this is chronic, but I haven’t isolated the cause yet. There is a work around that I haven’t seen discussed: the page displays properly with the sidebar expanded. When the page renders empty, there is not a lot of hint that it can be expanded.

Here is how Reader renders initially for me:

Hovering over the left edge of the page reveals the sidebar expansion tab:

And expanding the sidebar immediately reveals the content of the page:

I haven’t dug into Firebug to see why this is the case yet, but it should be fixable with a Stylish or Greasemonkey script, I’d imagine.

Update: Mihai from the Google Reader team provides this work around in the comments: “The ‘blank screen’ problem seems to be caused by a negative page zoom value (while the screen is blank, you can try going to to the View menu, and in the Zoom submenu choose Reset).” Thanks Mihai!

Wait, what?

This week, I purchased a new computer:

Shuttle SG33 Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz 2 x 1GB DDR2 DIMMs Cheapo ATI Radeon X1650 ( 2 x DVI-D) 2 x Acer x243w 24″ LCDs (yes, that’s 2!)

(I already had cheap hard disks, a gorgeous mouse, and a nice keyboard; though, I envision I’ll be bringing the love of my life home from work more often).

I purchased all of the parts from newegg, as they were offering some good specials for pretty much all the components, including free shipping for the monitors, which arrived the next day.

Assembling and getting the machine running was mostly without issue. The only complaint I have about the hardware is that the graphics card fan is extremely loud, something I will have to remedy in the coming weeks. Since I’m not a hardcore gamer anyway, I tried just unplugging the fan, but the card temporarily died a few minutes later. It does run extremely hot. That’s what you get when you skimp on an important component and don’t consult slientpcreview.com beforehand.

I’ve found UNetbootin to be an invaluable tool despite the horrible name. I ran out of CD-Rs a long time ago and don’t care to buy any more. UNetbootin has saved a considerable amount of time by transferring an iso+bootloader onto a hard drive. Highly recommended.

Getting X to deal with spanning across two monitors was a bit of a pain: the ATI Catalyst Control Center is broken and segfaults before the configuration is written out to disk but after the settings are applied to the driver. It took some poking around to realize that after setting the monitors up properly in Catalyst, then running the vanilla screen resolution manager, then blindly clicking “Apply”, the settings become static.

I also had an issue where the max_cpu_freq for all four cores was static at 1.6 GHz and Intel Speed Step (EIST) did not work. This was resolved by upgrading the bios to the latest version, which is annoying when not running Windows and not owning a floppy drive. I got around this by following these instructions on creating a bootable USB disk with FreeDOS. Admittedly, that is kind of a roundabout way of installing DOS to a disk (requiring installing a DOS emulator), but it works, where the other methods were far more complicated and had mixed results.

Now that I have a sweet rig and some more time (the latter due to life events), I hope to hammer out code more often. I have an idea to write a version of rup that has the same features as fping, or at least times out in a reasonable period.

And, now that Ubuntu Ibex is out, I need to try getting my PS3 running Linux again. Sadly, it still doesn’t support WPA at the moment, meaning I need to get/fetch from home a really long ethernet cable.

Update: Despite this new rig, I’m still kind of jealous of NYCR.

Steven Bellovin, computer security professor at Columbia, posted an interesting recount of his observations on being a poll worker.