ctrl.altered.mind

Thanks to a wonderful deal on RAM on Newegg, I’ve been able to perform the final RAM upgrade on my li’l Mac Mini, bumping the machine up to its limit of 2GB. A couple of gigabytes of memory on the Mac mean much more than the equivalent in the Windows world, where a lot of juice is required in powering the operating system itself. This final upgrade would actually imply memory only, for I’m still considering a larger hard drive - although on second thought, external storage would be a much more cost-effective option.

In contrast to the first time that I hesitatingly pried open the Mac Mini shell to switch the first DIMM of memory about a year ago, the endeavor this time was much smoother and faster, taking me only about five minutes between power cycles. If you don’t already know, the Mac Mini sports a very compact and streamlined design with no external screws. The casing is held in place by internal plastic tabs, which need to be bent inward carefully along three edges with a thin tool (a putty knife is ideal), in order to be removed. If you’re looking for a more detailed tutorial for doing this yourself, check this out.

While a gigabyte of memory has been sufficient for running applications, the extra memory should come in very handy while running Windows on the Mac in BootCamp, or via virtualization in VmWare Fusion (which by the way, I recommended over Parallels).

I registered for a new Comcast High-Speed internet connection a few days ago, and the experience so far has been quite alright. Comcast has made some changes for the better, since I last dealt with them in order to get a connection at my last apartment. With a bandwidth offering of 6.0 Mbps (download) and 1.5Mbps (upload), the deal is not too shabby. The service also promises a new PowerBoost feature, that is supposed to add an extra kick to your bandwidth over a smaller initial data transaction - in order to provide faster completion times for frequent accesses such as uploading and downloading email attachments.

According to the Comcast User Agreement:

Comcast 6Mbps High-Speed Internet with PowerBoost provides a burst of download and upload speed above the customers provisioned download and upload speeds for the first 10 MB and 5 MB of a file respectively. It then reverts to your provisioned speed for the remainder of the download or upload. Many factors affect speeds. Actual speeds may vary and are not guaranteed.

Here are the bandwidth rates that I’m clocking, as recorded by a quick speed test on SpeedTest.net. Other speed test websites that use Flash or Java based tests, register much lower speeds, probably due to the fact that the PowerBoost feature does not kick in on plain HTTP transactions.

According to a slew of blog articles posted recently, Comcast has been observed throttling bandwidth for BitTorrent users. While this may be the ISP’s preferred way of deterring illegal file sharing, it does hurt legitimate avenues where the file sharing protocol is being applied (Linux distributions and content upgrades for online games come to mind). Selective throttling based on the nature of content goes against the very principles of the freedom of speech and neutrality, on which the Internet was formed.

The fact that Comcast sets up a MAC-address based cable modem connection, however, means that I will have to go through the laborious 1-800-COMCAST process once I need to swap Comcast’s rented cable modem with the one I just bought online. Here’s to hoping that does not turn out to be a chore.

According to the US Treasury Department, from 1776-2000, the first 224 years of U.S. history, 42 U.S. presidents borrowed a combined $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions, but in the past four years alone, the Bush administration borrowed $1.05 trillion.

While conservatives may still argue that previous lending has not been adjusted for inflation, the fact that President Bush has borrowed more than all previous 42 Presidents, combined, is difficult to refute. The financial report for the US Government is available online (pdf). Besides the eclipsing effects of the ongoing war, according to the financial report, the federal government’s fiscal exposures from social insurance pledges (which include Social Security and Medicare) alone totaled approximately $50 trillion as of September 30, 2006, an increase of about $4 trillion over September 30, 2005, and up from about $20 trillion as of September 30, 2000. This translates into a current burden of about $170,000 per American or approximately $440,000 per American household.

The US really needs to elect a fiscally conservative President. Related to this piece of information and going back to spending and debts incurred from the current war efforts, the Fox News interview with former President Bill Clinton on September 22, 2006, is an interesting one to assimilate (yes, I know, on Fox News).

I stumbled upon a video demonstration of PICO, a project that serves as a strong precursor to indicate the future of automaton interaction, based on the influence of computational/physical optimization.

PICO stands for Physical Intervention in Computational Optimization and is a project by James Patten, an MIT graduate whose biography describes him as a creator of interactive works in diverse media.

Objects placed on the Pico table, as demonstrated in the video, are controlled via software and electromagnetics, implying that client objects under control within the defined space are passive, but building an additional layer of intelligence into the objects themselves would provide an extra dimension of laws for the interaction amongst the objects in the given spatial dimensions.

While PICO provides an excellent automation framework for applications such as factory floor plan layouts and CNC toolpath optimization, it would be an interesting framework to apply towards social interaction for distributed robotics.

If you use the handy Google Notifier utility on the Mac, this is a setting you should definitely be configuring. The Notifier, by default, sends your Gmail password over the network in clear text while polling your Inbox for new messages. There is a hidden key setting that can be enabled, to force the Notifier to use the secure HTTPS protocol each time. Here’s how. If you have a bookmark for Gmail (or Google Mail as it’s called in Europe), make sure you update it to https://mail.google.com, if you want to ensure that the secure protocol is used each time.

According to the Mac OS X Hints weblog:

Pull down the Notifier menu (either Calendar or Gmail), hold down Command and Option, and click Preferences on the menu. You’ll see a hidden settings editor. Enter SecureAlways in the Key field (upper and lower case must be entered as shown) and 1 in the Value field, then click Set. Quit Notifier and start it up again. From now on, all connections with both Gmail & Gcal will be https. Thanks to this comment on the O’Reilly blogs for this trick!