Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

SxSW starts this weekend in Austin. This is my fifth year and these are my helpful tips for the novice.
Introduce Yourself – People are at SXSW because they want to meet people and see new things. Strangely, many of the blogger types that go are introverted types that are a bit shy. Do yourself a favor and say “Hello, I’m So-and-so” to that person you are sitting next to. (Don’t say So-and-so, use your name…) I guarantee that they will be happy to talk to you.
ABC – Always Be Charging – If you bring a laptop, you need to be charging it every single chance you get. No battery lasts long enough. Try to sit near an oulet in the session rooms. Share power outlets with others.
Personal cards – Make up business cards with your name, email, and website info on them to hand out. Bring your regular business cards if you want, but what people really want is a card that ties you to your online persona so they can find you after SxSW.
Session Info – When you arrive on Friday go to the Convention Center and pick up your badge. They will give you a large canvas bag of swag. You don’t want to haul this around, so you need to figure a way to drop this off at your hotel before a long night of partying. In the bag are two crucial items. First is the program which has detailed session descriptions. Second is a small pocket card with the session schedule on it. You want these to be in your daily walk around bag, not in your hotel room.
Shiner Bock – Shiner Bock is a local Texas beer that you find everywhere. Often referred to as simply ‘Shiner’.
Fray Cafe – Go to the Fray Cafe on Sunday night. It’s one of the best things about SxSW.
Stay Warm – It can get cold and rain in Austin this time of year. Bring a good jacket or coat.
Sharpeners – There are no pencil sharpeners at SXSW. People think writing on a pad of paper with a wooden pencil is a bit strange.
The Backchannel – Be aware that there is a backchannel of real-time IRC discussion going on. Probably on irc.freenode.net, probably on #sxsw. The trick is to not make the backchannel into the front channel for you. It can distract you from listening to the speaker/session that you paid to see…
Secure connections – Wifi traffic is in the clear and people are sniffing packets all the time. Arrange for secure email, FTP, and if possible, secure browsing while at SXSW. It’s unlikely that a malicious hacker is gunna do bad things, but it’s best to be prepared.
Street Signs – For some reason, downtown Austin has few street signs. Get a map and study it before venturing out.
Food – Eat food. Austin has a great bar scene. You will be drinking. Don‘t drink on an empty stomach.
Texas BBQ – IMHO, Texas BBQ pales in comparison to BBQ in other areas like Kansas City and Carolina. That chopped beef sandwich stuff just doesn’t cut it, but people will want to eat it for lunch.
Say Hello to Me – I would love to meet Loyal Cruft Readers. On Friday night I will be at Break Bread with Brad drinking beer and smoking cigars. Email me or IM at pusateri AT gmail.com and I promise to respond.
Any questions?

Several people in the Blogosphere have commented on Cisco’s decision to buy Tribe.net and can’t seem to see why Cisco did this. These people don’t work inside the Corporsphere.
The Corporsphere is the groupthink and reasoning that goes on within much of the technology departments within Corporate America. Just as the Blogosphere pertains to the ideas and rationale floating around the blogging community, the Corporsphere exists to reflect the ideas and concepts inside the systems of The Man.
Besides being a fantastic husband, father, and blogger, I also go to work. I work deep in the heart of Corporate America helping provide technology to co-workers. Overall, I like it, but you do have to simply accept some of the surreal thinking that goes on.
If you’re in the Corporsphere, the Cisco acquistion makes perfect sense. You may not buy Tribe.net software from Cisco, but it doesn’t seem crazy.
Let me explain.
In the regular world, people tend to make their purchasing decisions based on functionality, price, and sometimes brand reputation. People want the best product for the best price.
Inside the Corporsphere an entirely new set of rules apply.
There are things called Strategic Sourcing and Enterprise Standards and Risk Management that lurk like corrupt judges wandering into town messing with the local sheriff/IT manager.
Here’s how it works. Let’s say you want to put some weblogs into your company. You chose a best-of-breed solution made by a small company that runs on LAMP.
Strategic Sourcing says, “Have we done business with them before? Can Microsoft, HP, Dell, EMC, or anyone else we have long term purchasing agreements do the same thing? Will they pay $1,500 to join Ariba, our spend management provider?”
Enterprise Standards says, “Why Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP? Isn’t there a solution that works on .Net with SQL Server or Oracle with IIS? Do they meet our identity management standards? What is the value proposition of this solution over Sharepoint?”
Risk Management say, “Do they have $3+ million in liability insurance? Can we see their financial records to ensure long term stability? Are they Sarbanes-Oxley approved? What’s their overall compliance profile?”
At this point most IT managers are willing to install pretty much anything to get something done and stop the inquisition.
I haven’t even mentioned other corporate boogeymen like Strategic Alliances, Diversity, Enterprise Learning, and Enterprise Resource Planning. Like the Nazgul, they roam the lands looking for naive technology managers to suck the life out of.
Back to Cisco.
Cisco is a tech company that is deeply embedded in every Fortune 1000 company. In the Corporsphere, Cisco is a safe choice. No one asks a single question if you want to buy a Cisco product. Cisco’s got most corporations wired for the basics; email, web, and maybe even VOIP. But to grow, Cisco has to drive even more traffic inside corporations. 100Mb/s won’t keep the orders rolling in. They need to be installing Gigabit Ethernet, Content Distribution Networking, Packet Acceleration, and a host of other new products.
The issue is finding something to fill up the pipes inside of companies. Recently, they bought Scientific Atlanta, a company that does serious digital video, powering cable companies systems that pump gigabytes of video around.
Business people say, “I want an internal Myspace!” and the IT managers try to figure out what to buy. Sure there’s plenty of choices from small startups but rather than face the gauntlet, the beaten-down IT manager looks on the Preferred Supplier list and sees that Microsoft has Sharepoint, Intel has SuiteTwo, and now Cisco’s going to have Tribe. Cisco sees the social software needs of the Corporsphere.
In the corporsphere, a mediocre solution that you can implement is better than a great solution that you can’t get approved. So many make the choice to take the easy path and buy the system that is ‘close enough’ to what’s needed. Why worry if KickApps or Ning are going to be around next year, when you can just buy a solution from Cisco or Microsoft?
Cisco knows this and sees a key to their continued growth is convincing the Corporsphere that putting social software in the Enterprise is important. It doesn’t hurt that it drives all sorts of network traffic, including popular videos and photos.
The Cisco sales people are good. They will take you to lunch, listen to your problems, and even give you free stuff. If they can provide an internal Myspace to Fortune 1000 companies, they will find many customers, because in the Corporsphere, the best is the enemy of the good.
Small disclaimer: I use humor and hyperbole to make my points here. Believe it or not, there are rational reasons for the Corporate Entities I describe above. Some good friends of mine ride with the Nazgul. Supporting 50,000 people with technology is no simple task. Rules and methods are needed to avoid chaos. The rules inside the Corporsphere aren’t wrong, they are just different and often puzzling to those on the outside.

I finally bit the bullet and bought the guts for my desktop to upgrade my gaming experience. The box from Newegg arrived today.

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 6400
Video card: XFX NVidia 7950 GT (silent!!)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-965P-S3
RAM: OCZ Platinum Series 2GB DDR2 6400
Michele and I are off for the weekend to Vegas for some fun, so I won’t put it together until next week some time.
Comments from other gamers?

Michele mentioned that she saw ‘double caffeine’ coffee at the local 7-Eleven. Of course, I had to give this a try.
Loyal Cruft Readers know my interest level in strange coffee flavors at 7-Eleven is longstanding. This is so important to 7-Eleven, there’s a formal press release.

Sure enough, for those that can’t get enough caffeine in regular coffee, the option to double up has arrived. ‘Natural ingredients’? What exactly could that mean?

7 Eleven has added ginseng, guarana, and yerba maté. Wow, that’s some stimulation.

A typical cup of coffee is around 125 milligrams of caffeine, so a cup of Fusion Energy Coffee is likely to be around 250 milligrams. To put that in caffeine perspective, a tablet of No-Dose is 200 mg, a can of Red Bull is 80 mg, and a can of Mountain Dew is 55 mg. If you drink Starbucks Coffee, this is nothing. A small 12 oz cup of Starbuck Coffee is 276 mg. All info from the handy Energy Fiend site.
Of course the guarana, ginseng and yerba maté all add in a bit of energy. Seems to me that these herbal stimulants affect everyone a bit differently. Some people get a big boost from them, others not much. My best guess is that heavy caffeine users have their nervous systems so amped up, that they don’t notice much of the more subtle herbal stimulant effect.

Most importantly, how did it taste?
Fusion Energy Coffee tastes almost exactly like the regular ‘Executive Blend’ coffee. Just a hint of bitterness, similar to as if the pot had been cooking for a while before I got to it. Not bad at all. I’m a sucker for the American style drip coffee you find in diners and convenience stores.
Did I feel any extra burst of energy from the coffee? Nope. I drink about a half cup of coffee in the morning and sometimes a cup in the afternoons, so I’m not hardcore like some people I know. Running my Saturday errands sipping the coffee didn’t seem to make much of a difference.
I await 7-Eleven’s next coffee innovation.

Upon walking into a Blockbuster store today, this is what I saw:

Playstation 3 systems are now plentiful, not reaching reserve prices on Ebay, and garnering nowhere near the demand of the Wii.
So let’s be clear, Xbox 360 sold more consoles since the fall of 2006 than Wii and PS3 combined. Currently, over 1 million Wii have been sold and they are still in high demand with none on shelves and still commanding premium pricing on ebay. Over 600,000 PS3 systems have been sold, but they are now languishing on the shelves, apearing to have tapped out the market place in around four months, with systems now reaching the secondary sellers like Blockbuster video.
Tell me again how Sony will “dominate the market” if people don’t appear to want to buy their consoles. The PS3 has nice graphics, but nothing else makes it better than a Xbox 360 or a Wii. We have all three at work, and no one ever plays the PS3.

The wonders of the Wii never cease.
I’ve known for a while about the Wii’s ability to show pictures off of a SD memory card, but only recently learned that you can play videos on the Wii directly as well.
Software made by Red Kawa can convert most video into the Wii format. The software is Windows only.
The Wii will play back Motion JPEG (MJPEG) video. Motion JPEG is an older video format and doesn’t utilize advanced compression algorithms. As a result, if you convert from an AVI or MPEG4 video, the resulting video will likely be much larger. For example a 174 MB Xvid file converted into a 667 MB MJPEG. That’s almost a 400% increase in size.
The operation of Red Kawa Wii Video Converter is very simple, literally one click. Then move the new file onto a SD memory card.

On the front of a Wii is the SD slot. Simply put the card in the slot and go to the Photo Channel. You’ll see the video(s) there and can play them.

The quality is OK, but not great. It’s nowhere as good as a MPEG file. Motion JPEG is inherently blocky, but does not break up at all in high motion scenes. It’s certainly good enough to watch.

The Wii lets you use all the fun Photo Channel tools, so you can draw on the moving video, pixelate it, or even do the puzzle from the moving video.
There’s no great reason to convert your video to Wii format, but if you download something you’d like to watch on your TV easily, this may be the answer. No media servers, DVDs, or other more complicated methods. Personally I think it’s great and sent Red Kawa (the same guy behind Videora) a $10 donation.

There are chores to do around Cruft Manor, one of the dirtest is cleaning out the spa. The spa died several years ago and for safety reasons, it is covered with a large plywood cover to prevent accidents.
After a few rains and nights of damp weather, the spa fills partially and becomes a haven for all sorts of ‘icky’ life. This morning I recieved the order from the top that today was a spa cleaning day. As a veteran of many battles with the spa water and it’s denizens, I was prepared. I lifted the cover and the earwigs, crickets, pillbugs, spider, and other went scurrying.
I lowered a sump pump into the water and fired it up. Next, I used the hose to wash things down and help dilute the dirty water so the pump could push it up the hose into the garden. Soon, all that was left was for the sump pump to do it’s work, so I went inside to goof off.
After a short while, I returned to check on the progress and saw this:

Yes, a lizard!
Obviously, the smart lizard found the insect haven and was getting fat on the buffet I had provided. Somehow it had fallen into the water and could not climb out of the spa.

At once, I called to the girls to take a look. They came outside and instantly the Lizard Rescue Service of South Pasadena formed and sprung into action.
At first I wasn’t sure if it was a land lizard or some sort of slamander due to it’s extremely long tail. After it set in the sun for a bit, it’s skin dried up as it soaked up solar energy, and I was sure it was a simple lizard. It sure has one long tail though, doesn’t it?

We placed the lizard into a styrofoam box and headed from the backyard to the nearby garden that borders on grass right-of-way near our house. Our thinking was that the garden and the right-of-way are not mowed and there is plenty of bugs of all sorts. Hopefully the lizard would agree. But lizards can’t talk, so we will never know.

Once the box was on the ground, the lizard just sat there, staring at me, not getting out of the box. I reached in and carried the lizard out of the box. I didn’t want to simply dump the already traumatized reptile.

Soon, the lizard was resting in the shade, getting used to it’s new surroundings. The work of the Lizard Rescue Service of South Pasadena was done.

Last month was Science Fair month and I helped Zoe show the electrolysis of water. For those of that never studied, electrolysis is the use of electricity to break down molecules in liquid form into their component atoms. In this case, we are breaking done water into the component elements of oxygen and hydrogen.
The circuit is fairly simple to build.

I used two 9 volt batteries in series to create an 18V drop. I bought a few 9V battery clips and soldered them to hookup wire. I then carefully wrapped the wire around one of sharpened pencils. The graphite in a pencil makes an excellent electrode.

The solder won’t really attach to the graphite well, so the wire needs to wrap around a bit and the solder acts as a cap. The electrical tape provides tension, keeping the connection.

The other end of pencil should be sharpened to expose as much graphite as possible.

When you have a tall glass of water ready, attached the battiers.

You’ll see the bubbles start to form immediately. The side with more bubbles is the hydrogen side. Remember that there are two hydrogen atoms for each atom of oxygen in water.

Seeing the gas appear out of water is impressive to people.

Water itself is a poor conductor of electricity. We added a bit of salt into the water. Salt water is a much better conductor of water, so the reaction is much more prominent.

Remember that salt is sodium chloride, chorilde being chorline. When the electrolysis occurs in salt water, the salt molecules are also split, freeing up the chorline atoms to make, you guessed it, chorline gas.
So when you smell salt water during electrolysis, it smells exactly like swimming pool water.
Here’s a short video to show exactly how much gas is produced from my setup: