The capacitor plague was a common problem in recent years, causing failures in all brands of electronics, including brands usually known for higher quality components. The problem occurs in electrolytic capacitors (the little ‘cans’ on circuit boards) produced using the wrong electrolyte. The improper electrolyte degrades over time, causing the capacitors to bulge and even rupture. As far as I can tell, this blight was caused because circuit manufacturers trying to save a few cents per board. They did this by buying capacitors that were made using a stolen electrolyte formula that was missing key ingredients. Some of the faulty capacitors were counterfeits of name brands, others were less reputable off-brands. Many of the problems didn’t become apparent until after the one-year warranty period. Some manufacturers slightly extended their warranty for this problem. But the extended warranties were not long enough to catch all the faulty components, as seen in the iMac G5. Even with the short warranties, the counterfeit components cost manufacturers $100 million to repair as of the middle of 2006, when the problem was still ongoing.

Since I’ve seen the capacitor plague before, it was immediately obvious after dissecting the monitor. The capacitors on the power supply board were clearly bulging, though they weren’t leaking goop as the caps in the iMac were. After spending some time browsing the Digi-Key catalog to choose parts, I ordered the highest quality available replacement components. Capacitors are much more expensive when you are ordering one or two of each instead of 2500 or 10000 of each, but the total was still only $3.77.

Samsung 225BW power supply

Once I had the components, it only took a few minutes with a desoldering iron to remove the blighted capacitors, then a few more minutes to install the new caps. I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the power supply’s layout and printing, which made the repair unusually easy. After the easiest repair I’ve done in a long time, I popped the monitor back together, and it worked better than I remembered it working. I guess the plagued capacitors were causing problems before I realised they were.

Bulging capacitors. Note the pressure-relief scores beginning to open.

After removing the bad capacitors, I measured their values. They all have a similar error, averaging 62% less than their nominal value.

Monitor Details

Samsung SyncMaster 22.5 inch LCD
Model: 225BW
Type Number: DP22WS

Sources

• Leaking Capacitors Muck up Motherboards
• Bogus!

First, Ben Popper of Betabeat realized that he had been using the term hack incorrectly, and mostly fixed his usage in his article “Hacked to Death: A Brief History of Tech’s Most Two-Sided Term”.

Second, David Goldman of CNN demonstrates the common incorrect usage in his article “The cyber Mafia has already hacked you”. Showing their ignorance, CNN even includes the incorrect usage in the headline.

As I have been telling people for years, the proper usage of the word hack is an important shibboleth separating those with competence in computers and technology from posers. Remember, hacking is not the same as cracking, phreaking, or any of their script kiddie relatives.

Since no hacking was involved in the scandal, it would be more proper to call it “The News of the World voicemail scandal”, or “The latest News Corp scandal”. Since this hasn’t been common, it is clear that these are hack reporters and their stories should be treated with greater than usual skepticism. This is unfortunate, since these reports came from usually reliable sources such as The New York Times, ProPublica, McClatchy, and NPR. Heck, on NPR there have even been a number of non-Murdoch related stories where hack has been abused. Remember, misusing the word hack is one of the signs that someone doesn’t have basic competence in technology. This is also a good time to mention Steven Levy’s book Hackers. If you don’t understand the definition of hack, you should read this book.

BibTex:

@book{levy,
  title={Hackers: heroes of the computer revolution},
  author={Steven Levy},
  isbn={9780385312103},
  url={http://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/books/hackers},
  year={1984},
}

While I’m at it, here’s an article posted today that uses hacking correctly.

Unfortunately, I just realized that one of the sites that I host was using lots of target="_blank" tags. This particular site uses a CMS with TinyMCE for editing. TinyMCE allows the user to choose the target for a link, and a large portion of the links had this turned on. The choice of target wasn’t consistant, so it was probably a case of the user randomly choosing an option. So I decided to remove the option.

I searched the source, and found where the target was being added. I also looked online for on official setting to remove this feature, but didn’t find one. I don’t know the canonical way to do this, but deleting a few lines from two files works well.

From tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/link.htm delete the lines:

<tr>
	<td><label id="targetlistlabel" for="targetlist">{#advanced_dlg.link_target}</label></td>
	<td><select id="target_list" name="target_list"></select></td>
</tr>

From tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/js/link.js delete the lines that include target_list.

The only problem I see is that these changes will have to be repeated every time you update the software. I suppose I could write a sed script to do this, but the TinyMCE code could change, and there has to be a cleaner official way get rid of the target.

Update: I ended up searching the entire database to remove all the target tags. The site with the target problem uses MySQL, so I just ran this command through MySQL:

UPDATE table_name SET column_name = REPLACE(column_name, 'target=\"_blank\"', '')

Caveat: I will occasionally use target="_top" on some links because there are still some sites that try to surround another site with ads.

Note: If you think you need to open a new window, I have a hint for that on my Cheat Sheet.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

It is typically misattributed to Albert Einstein, but is probably from Rita Mae Brown.

The quote is often true, but is misleading. Sometimes you do the same thing several times and get different results. For example, in the lab I did my thesis research in, there are two experiments that I have run multiple times, producing different results from different runs. According to the available measurements the experiments were identical. That doesn’t mean I couldn’t detect differences with better resources (eg doi:10.1038/nnano.2006.95), but as far as I can tell, they were the same.

Another common case is using computers running Windows. Trying the same thing several times when it didn’t work the first may be insanity, but it is necessary. One problem last week is a good example: I helped get a Sony VAIO laptop working with a Mustek A3 scanner. The software would seem to install properly, but the scanner would give an error message. The scanner worked first try on a ThinkPad running Windows 7, but wouldn’t run on the VAIO with XP, even after updating and cleaning the system. Before returning the computer and scanner, I decided to do one more thing: I plugged the scanner into a different USB port and ran Mustek installer then the Microsoft Scanner and Camera Wizard. It worked. I plugged it into the third USB port and repeated the process. It worked. I tried the first port again. The scanner still worked. Repeating the installation steps had fixed the problem. It can be convincingly argued that using an OS where performing the same steps multiple times leads to different results is insanity, but that isn’t the point of the quote.

Not that there aren’t many times when Brown’s quote is accurate. If you want examples of trying the same thing over and over expecting different results, when everyone knows what will happen, just read the newspaper.

Since most notebook computers and many desktops now include webcams, it’s nice to see that some now have lens caps built in. Although, this still leaves the problem of the internal microphone; and we still need to get everyone to stop adding gratuitous cameras to computers and cell phones. When I want to use a camera, I’ll use a good one, not an integrated toy that wastes space and battery life in another tool. If I could replace my MacBook with one without iSight, I would.

I may as well mention that the webcam can be used for security; for example Wakelog Pictures. But something like this should only be used if you have a good reason. In general, the proliferation of integrated cameras is a bad idea, but at least we haven’t reached the CCTV big brother problem that England has a reputation for.

A related category of sites that is often showing up high in search results are sites abusing AJAX to create a popup window that covers the content, but since the content is on the page, it still shows up in searches. Unfortunately some of these sites rank high in Google searches. But I’d never consider actually paying to login. If I really want the info, I could just look at the source, or (locally) hack the code to disable the popup, but why waste time with that? It would be better to have these sites not show up in the first few pages of results.

It will be impressive if someone manages to come up with an algorithm that solves this problem without hiding legitimate sites. One problem to solve is to find the earliest post that all the others link to, and make it rank well in the search results. This can be hard, because sites often plagiarize without citing sources. Getting around this would require a fair amount of processing power. For all the link sites and scraper sites that just copy the text, checking a simple hash of the first paragraph would be a good start toward eliminating the cruft. This is a bit too simple to work well and or for long. Simply pulling part of a paragraph would defeat a hash. Another way to defeat it would be to replace a few words with synonyms, which is easy to automate. One way to deal with this is to use a thesaurus based index instead of indexing individual words. This would have the advantage of lowering the number of words that must be indexed. Based on some search results, I suspect Google already does this.

This would be an interesting problem to work on, but it isn’t one that I’ll ever get around to. I hope this post will help encourage someone else to work on it. So please, write a search engine that can show the earliest sources and has the option to not include ad sites! Until someone does, I’m using the partial solution of adding some of the worst offenders to the exclude list of a Google custom search.

Notes:

1. The founding principle of the World Wide Web: anyone from from anywhere can post anything useful to be freely shared. Paywalls and sites that exist to show ads are clearly against this principle.
2. Scraping content means writing a program to automatically copy parts of someone else’s site. It has legitimate uses, but is often abused.
3. I originally wrote this post in September 2009. It is still hard for educated people to find a decent job.

Postscript (2010-11-30): The NYTimes posted a story that is a good example of why search engines that are more spam-proof are needed.

Today I found another example why my mistrust of embedded systems is justified. We have a gas convection oven with a fairly sophisticated electronic control. It has a processor that does a good job of keeping the temperature stable and that can do useful things like automatically turn the oven off when the cooking time is complete. After using the oven today, I hit the off button. The gas turned off, then the oven locked up. It was receiving power, and the LED panel was lit, but it was completely unresponsive. I had to use the circuit breaker to reboot the oven. I hope it is designed so that a failure causes the gas valve to close, but it may not.

The crashing oven is relevant to self-driving cars because they are both ubiquitous and potentially deadly systems controlled by embedded processors. If I can’t trust an oven, how much less should I trust a car?

Unfortunately, I would be completely unsurprised if we are eventually forced into self-driving cars. Besides the common unjustified technological optimism, there are the problems of well-meaning safety campaigners and of lawyers. Because the ideal driverless car is perfectly safe, as more cars begin to incorporate more bits of automated driving (eg automatic distance controls), it is likely that there will be campaigns and lawsuits to mandate these features. These will likely add up until we are forced into driverless cars.

While self-driving cars are an interesting research project with some beneficial uses, my experience in maintaining cars and in computer engineering makes me think they are a bad idea for general use. A better solution is to expand the rail system to lower the use of interstate highways, and to design cities where driving is less needed.

cd ~/Libary/PDF\ Services
ln -s ~/path/ "descriptive_alias"

You may have to create the directory ~/Libary/PDF Services. Some people recommend using the directory /Libary/PDF Services, but this is bad style unless you really want the change to be universal. Even if you are the only user on the computer, it is safer to use the Library folder under your user account.

When looking in the /Libary/PDF Services directory, I noticed that the contents are just Automator workflows. This means it is easy for non-programmers to customize the behavior. One option that I somehow hadn’t noticed before today is Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder.pdfworkflow. With online billing this is incredibly useful. I typically use the “Save PDF as” option, saving the PDF in this year’s receipts directory, with the date as a prefix. This makes receipts for monthly bills easy to find. I looked at “Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder” to see how easy it would be to alter to my preferred style. Instead of being an Automator workflow, this is actually a Python script and a few property lists. Great! Python is my favorite language. I copied the files to ~/Libary/PDF Services and edited them. The Python script is in a file named tool. This script is well written, making it easy to modify. Here are the basic changes:

• Because I want to use timestamps, I added import time after the other import statements.
• I changed the destDirectory to my preferred directory. The script already creates the destination directory if it doesn’t exist, so altering the directory by date is easy, I added destDirectory = os.path.join(destDirectory, time.strftime("%Y")) to automatically append the subdirectory for the year.
• The file uses the title of the webpage as the filename. To add the date as a prefix, add the line title = "%s-%s" % (time.strftime( "%Y%m%d"), title) to the build path section. You can easily customize the date format.
• I prefer lowercase filenames, so I added filename = filename.lower() to the safeFilename function.
• If a file with this name already exists, the script appends a number to the name. I prefer different character than the default, so I changed it.

The final step was to I update the property list files so that the PDF menu shows the name I gave the command, instead of the original name from Apple.

I now have an even quicker way to save my receipts. Because the program is automatically generating the filenames using my preferences, I don’t have to change the name every time, and can avoid some typos and incorrect dates.

One of the many modern ‘conveniences’ that actually take more time than they save is voicemail. Answering machines and voicemail are occasionally useful, but more often than not, someone just leaves a rambling message with details they end up repeating when you call them back. Fortunately, Caller ID has mostly eliminated the need for voicemail: if you need to leave a message, I probably need to return your call. Since visual voicemail hasn’t yet been universally adopted—and some people still leave voicemails—I sometimes have to check my voicemail account. This has allowed phone companies to waste tons of customer time by forcing us to listen to long instructions describing voicemail. There are no obvious ways to avoid this wasted time. Thanks to David Pogue, I learned the non-obvious way, “1 * #”. If you are leaving a voice mail, one of those will probably get you out of listening to the pointless 30 second message.

You can look in the voicemail help for your carrier to find the correct code for your own voicemail.

• T-Mobile: VoiceMail Shortcuts
• Verizon: Voice Mail Instructions; different instructions depending on your region
• AT&T: Voicemail Quickguide
• Sprint: gave up on search; different instructions by phone

Source: LIVEdigitally through Pogue’s Posts.