Greg In The Desert

Ford is eliminating 41,000 UAW workers. The package according to Reuters is a lot.

Ford workers have until late January to accept the offer, which includes payouts of up to $70,000 cash for newer hires to $60,000 cash for veterans already eligible for retirement.

That’s $2,870,000,000 total compensation based on a simple calculation of 41,000 times $70,000. Nearly 3 billion dollars. I sometimes don’t understand how companies save money laying off but I suppose that they were going to pay at least this much in salaries in a year year anwyay.

Remodeling For Geeks points out the problems with faucets in the southwest. Although he is in Arizona, New Mexico has the same problem. The water is hard: It has a high level of dissolved minerals and everything that the water runs through eventually gets coated with the minerals (mostly calcium). The water has high levels of minerals because of the ground it comes from.

These minerals act like abrasives on seals and the moving parts of faucets, so they leak. They all leak. I don’t care what the ads or salesman tell you, sooner or later your faucets will leak. So when you are spending money on a faucet you should make sure that repair kits are available. Really. If the place you are buying it from does not have repair kits in the same section as the faucets, run away! Unlike a lot of products, faucet manufacturers have pretty explcit instructions for repair. Plus faucets are not like electric outlets where the only decisions are amperage and color. They are different and do not share parts.

Google is mowing their large areas of vegetation with goats. This is a great idea, something I may investigate when I get the grass growing in the back yard.

At our Mountain View headquarters, we have some fields that we need to mow occasionally to clear weeds and brush to reduce fire hazard. This spring we decided to take a low-carbon approach: Instead of using noisy mowers that run on gasoline and pollute the air, we’ve rented some goats from California Grazing to do the job for us (we’re not “kidding”). A herder brings about 200 goats and they spend roughly a week with us at Google, eating the grass and fertilizing at the same time. The goats are herded with the help of Jen, a border collie. It costs us about the same as mowing, and goats are a lot cuter to watch than lawn mowers.

Check out this picture of the President’s land line phone from the White House’s blog entry “A Call With Senator Specter“. That’s a lot of buttons. I can barely operate the land line phone I have at work, I wonder if this is any easier.

In case you haven’t noticed, there’s been a few changes and other screwey things happening on this site. On 9 March 2009 I received a email from my then hosting provider MacHighway.

Unfortunately, we’ve needed to suspend your blog, greginthedesert.net. Your site is regularly using between 30 – 99% of the CPU on that server. It appears that your site is getting around 161k hits per month. The good news is that Technorati estimates that a blog getting 100k his a month is worth $75k/year. The bad news is that it’s far exceeds the fair use policy of our shared hosting environment. Your sites’ needs have outgrown what a shared hosting provider can offer.

Additionally, your site calls on a tremendous amount of resources with all of the dynamic information that the site needs to load in order just to display the front page. This is exacerbating the problem and should definitely be trimmed down.

I totally understand how this was a problem and I can see how I made it worse with some of the stuff I was using to generate my blog since I have been experimenting with plug-in’s and templates. I replied to the support ticket and said I had a number of ideas on how to reduce the CPU usage of my blog and that I wasn’t coming close to my bandwidth or disk usage quotas. They were having none of it and said move my blog elsewhere.

It also would have been nice if they could have given me some heads up about the excessive CPU usage. I guess they didn’t want me as their customer. It’s too bad since the few other issues I had with MacHighway were well taken care of.

I started to look for a non-shared hosting provider. Dedicated hosting is expensive, the cheapest I found was nearly $100 a month. Even though the MacHighway support guy suggested my blog should be worth $75,000, I make tens of dollars a year on advertising, not hundreds. There is no way I can afford dedicated hosting. Also, the 161,000 hits a month I get are only translating to about 9,000 real people a month. I also can only see where 58K hits a month are coming from including robots, image leachers, etc.

After a searching around for a few days including local services providers I ended up going with another shared hosting provider: Dream Host. In fact, there’s a number of things I like about them but that’s a blog post for another day.

MacHighway temporarily enabled my blog so I could export my data. I copied all the Wordpress directories to my hard drive, exported the database and exported a WXR file. Just in case the database dump failed to import.

After getting my domain redirected to the new servers at DreamHost and Wordpress installed, I attempted to import the database. The raw sql file is 230MB and compressed it’s 22MB, far more than the 7MB limit that the phpmyadmin allows. I had to become familiar with the command line to do the import. After contacting DreamHost support because a few things weren’t properly configured on my account I attempted to try the command line import sequence. The import failed on line two, where the sql file’s phpmyadmin version was 2.11.9.4 and DreamHost’s version is 2.11.9.3. I commented that line out and tried the import again, next fail was at line 7.

I contacted DreamHost support to see what they would say about the situation. They tried importing and found several lines which failed. The support person suggested that I continue to comment out lines which fail. I thought that was a bad idea since many of those line look like important parts of the database creation process and I didn’t know how long this editing-upload-fail-repeat process would continue.

Database import wasn’t going to work. I started working on importing the WXR file. My import file was 10.6 MB, bigger than than the 7MB limit imposed by wordpress for import files. I compressed it, which I read elsewhere could overcome the import size limitation. Even though it brought the file under 7MB, it could not get it to sucessfully import. I had two results with the importing of the WXR file, sometime the site would just hang sometime it would give me a 408 page.

I went through and removed the 14,000 plus but that didn’t change the results. I broke the WXR file into several small files and was able to have successful imports. I went through a process of having one half of the cut up file succeeded importing and the other half fail. It has become clear that there is some part at the beginning of the WXR that is corrupt or some other problem that is confusing the import process.

There are still abut 400 posts left to import, but the majority of the important ones are there and I will continue to go through the process of breaking up the remainder of the WXR file until I find the problem entry. Although I learned a lot about Wordpress and phpmyadmin and SQL databases, I’m looking forward to getting this whole ordeal behind me and return to blogging.

Europe will have the same model of a US car but it often has a different styling. The European version of these vehicles usually look much better. The European Ford Ranger is one such vehicles that looks better than it’s American counterpart. It has 4 doors and a “WildTrak” design package that looks a lot more like the Honda Ridgeline.

This would be the truck I would buy from Ford today, if it had an electric or hybrid power plant. Assuming it was cheaper than the Ridgeline.

Via jalopnik.

This story from New Mexico is getting a lot of attention on the internets. Here’s the original source.

She said the image appeared during a home construction mishap. Quintana said her husband was putting a special texture on the wall. The spray bottle he was using broke twice, which meant the texture couldn’t be wiped off fast enough. This is how it dried.

I have read about many people on the Smarthome and CocoonTech message boards have a lot of their Insteon devices failing. Some people have had a high failure failure rate. I’ve been following these discussion closely because I have yet to have any failures. Until a few months ago.

My first device to fail was a Switchlink V2 that was controlling the bathroom light. The device simply failed to turn on the lights nor would the LED bar light up. If I pressed the reset button and held it down, it would light one of the LEDs. According the the Smarthome message boards, this is a common failure mode.

Despite the inconvience of having to replace the switch (in a room that has no natural light), I have to admit that Smarthome has been very generous with replacments since these switches are probably out of warranty. On the other hand, these are all early first generation type switches, which are showing design issues. So they should be replacing them.

The other switch that has died is a LampLinc V2, it simply doesn’t operate nor does the set button have any effect. I expect that Smarthome will replace it without question.

Wow, a lot of work went into this.

Mona Lisa, the mysterious woman immortalized in Leonardo da Vinci’s 16th century masterpiece, had just given birth to her second son when she sat for the painting, a French art expert said on Tuesday.The discovery was made by a team of Canadian scientists who used special infrared and three-dimensional technology to peer through hitherto impenetrable paint layers on the work, which now sits in the Louvre museum in Paris.

I’m finally hauling off a bunch of crap thats accumulated while remodeling. Most of this has been setting in a trailer in the back yard for a year or more. There’s a lot less here than I thought, but it’s good to get it out.

Some of this might have been perfectly good stuff to use for something else. Most of it requires disassembly to get to the good parts. I’d rather just get rid of it than try to store it out in the back yard. I tried recycling as many 2×4’s that I could and I’ve got a good pile of them that I’ve removed the nails from. I tried to do my part to keep stuff out of the landfill.