A BIG 'Thank You' Is In Order

Recently, there has been a large spike in the traffic to one of my MIPS Assembly language pages. I soon discovered that the University of Massachusetts College of Engineering had linked to my page via one of their internal sites.

Humbly, I say "Thank You!!" to the University of Massachusetts for this honor.

I'd also like to say "Thank You" to ALL my readership for checking out what is published here.

Hopefully I have been able to help somebody in their work or otherwise contribute something worthwhile to their lives. That is one of the two main goals of this blog: to showcase my own activities and interests, and to share knowledge with others.

I haven't posted much here lately due to some extenuating family issues as well as a heavy work load at school. That said, please check back periodically, as I will get more material up here as time and circumstances allow.

Ballistic Chronometer - Revision 1.5

A colleague brought it to my attention that there were a couple errors on the schematic I posted for the Poor Man's Ballistic Chronometer. The revised version is shown here.

I have also updated the schematic on the original post and wish to offer my sincere apologies to anyone who might have downloaded this circuit and attempted to build it.

The original post is located here: http://inkarlslab.blogspot.com/2012/01/poor-mans-ballistic-chronometer-part-1.html

The Pareto Rule: Its Profound Effect on Your Personal Finances

It's a given that this economy has been brutal on most people other than the top 10% income bracket. The popular press is filled with articles about managing money, where to invest your money, and how to save a bit here and there. Read any magazine or go online and you will find articles detailing how to use coupons to save on groceries, what time of year retailers tend to mark certain items down, how to cut your fuel consumption 10%, etc. While there's nothing wrong with saving gas - in fact there's much RIGHT with saving fuel - if you are paying $50/week on fuel, do you really think 10% (that's $5) saved will really get you out of the hole economically? REALLY? Especially when you consider an average 2-bedroom apartment rents for an average of $700 -$900/month in much of the U.S. Especially when food may cost a family of three $500/month? And your cable bill is likely another $100/month. Electric and gas - throw another $150/month average "on the grill". If you own a home in many areas you are likely paying thousands per year in county property taxes. I haven't even mentioned the chunk state and Federal income taxes take out.

Way back in the early 1900s, Vilfredo Pareto observed that 20% of the people in Italy at the time owned 80% of the land. In the late 1940s Dr. Joseph M. Juran applied this same idea to create a general rule that 20% of something accounts for 80% of the effects. This principle applies in many areas of life and commerce. Here are a few examples:
1) How many times have you observed in school that it's always the same one or two bad kids that cause most of the classroom disruptions?
2) It's well known by many police officers that a small subset of known criminals do most of the crimes in a given area.
3) At an electronic company I worked for several years, most of the failures and RMA returns we got were attributable to one or two problems. Granted, we got a few other types of complaints as well, but fully 85% were caused by one or two components we had lots of problems with. Once we got those two problem areas fixed, our warranty return rate went waaay down!
4) Typically, between 2 and 3 of a household's 8 or 10 expense categories account for 80% of its expenditures.

You may be saying "Gee, Karl. That's all well and good, but what does this have to do with paying my bills?"

Plenty!
The same "Pareto Principle" also applies to household and even business finances. Re-read #4 above and try an experiment:
Sit down and write out ALL your monthly expenditures, listed from largest to least. Right away you will see that out of the 8 or 10 things you listed, between 2 - 4 categories are where you spend most of your net income. For most of us, rent or mortgage occupies the number 1 slot. Food and/or car payments follow next, utilities, cable, and so on. A Pareto graph shows this in startling, visual clarity. A Pareto graph is similar to any other bar graph except the items are shown in descending order of their value - with the largest one being on the far left-hand side of the chart. This gives a quick visual idea of which few items are doing the most damage, as it were.

See the hypothetical chart above. You can see that "1" and "2" - whatever they are - amount to 81% of the expenses, while the rest of the stuff only amounts to 19% of the total. For many people rent and food, or rent and car payments, are their numbers "1" and "2". So if you CAN get into a cheaper rent situation, or put the wife to work saving on groceries with coupons, you can QUICKLY save MANY dollars per month. An hour a week spent couponing can indeed produce dramatic results! *(For those of you who noticed, YES, the "cumulative amount" line is missing on my example chart - but it is easily enough to calculate how close to the critical 80% line the cumulative total of the largest two or three items is. Simply add the first 2 or three itmes, then divide that figure by the grand total of everything. That will give you the fractional percentage of total expenditures those items make up.)


See the links below for examples and how to use a spreadsheet to create your own Pareto graphs.

http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/cause-analysis-tools/overview/pareto.html

http://www.vertex42.com/ExcelTemplates/pareto-chart.html

The Upshot of All This:
Basically, before you worry too much about saving $5 on a $50 weekly gasoline fill-up, consider dealing realistically with the bigger stuff FIRST. Granted, you might be stuck in a mortgage. Or leaving your apartment for another might not be feasible due to work or school ties. But likely there ARE other large, but somewhat negotiable bills that can be pared down with minimal effort that would save tens of dollars per month, if not more. I found it totally mind boggling during my teen years how my mother would scream about the cost of a roll of paper towels, while Dad drove 80 - 100 miles round trip to work every day. Between wear and tear, depreciation, and gasoline, driving that car ALONE was eating HUNDREDS of dollars per week!! We could have bought LOTS of paper towels - and other things - on the money saved if we moved closer to Dad's work or if he even got other employment closer to home. The family was hemorrhaging hundreds of dollars EVERY MONTH just in Dad's work expenses while Mom worried about $2/week in paper towels. Incredible. That's a bit like worrying about a scratch on the coffee table after a tornado just tore the roof off the house.

I'm in NO WAY saying "go out and waste gas, paper towels, or anything else"! What I AM saying is this society has got people buffaloed into worrying about a few pennies when it's often costing MORE to live "normally" than one makes working. Many parents and the schools have failed totally in teaching folks the realities of personal finance and earning a living in America. The media also strives to keep you focused on minutiae - they want you "on the string" working slavishly, watching their programming, and handing your hard-earned money to their advertisers.

A quick word about driving a car:
You can also do a Pareto analysis within any category of your expenses, too.

A good place to start is your car. You may or may not make payments, you have depreciation, you'll make repairs if you keep it long enough, you may pay taxes on it, ... These expenses can be Pareto-charted, too.

I have run the math, figuring PER MILE - guess what: Even as pricy as gasoline has been, fuel is the LEAST of my car related expenses when figured per mile. Maintenance (tires, batteries, tune-ups, belts, hoses, ...) followed by monthly insurance bills are what I'm really paying out for. "Per mile" figures prominently in how the car leasing companies figure their economics; and it's quite valid for households too.

People don't shell out weekly for a timing belt or a fuel innjector cleaning, so they forget to figure it into what they are really spending to drive.

SOPA, PIPA, and Citizens' Need For A "Backup" Internet

Well, it looks like we have dodged a bullet - for now.

News sources reported yesterday that our illustrious Congress critters have backed off on ramming through legislation that could have shut down many websites - possibly including this blog. President Obama has also backed away from his original position, saying he won't be signing any SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) or PIPA (Protect IP Act) legislation right away. No doubt he doesn't want to make any more adverse waves, given this is an election year and the outcry these bills have caused.

These bills were put forth ostensibly to stop piracy of movies, music, and other intellectual property. As one who has created my share of copyrighted property, I fully understand and sympathise with ANYONE wanting theirs protected. But what these pieces of legislation would do is basically allow an individual or company to sue you and have your website shut down if you as much as linked to a suspicious site. If a reader's comment published on your blog contains a link to suspicious material, that alone could prove sufficient cause to have your entire site shut down. This, BEFORE you even get a chance to argue your case in court!

ALL of this could happen WITHOUT due process, folks. This basically renders null and void the idea of "innocent until proven guilty" - one of THE founding principles America was based on.

Laws such as this could put sites like blogger, you-tube, ... out of business because the legal risk they would incur by hosting the millions of videos and blogs would be overwhelming. Imagine the undertaking it would be for blogger to check EVERY blog out on their system for possible copyright violations.

As someone said a while back, "SOPA and PIPA are basically the legal equivalent of burning down your house because you found a couple roaches in the kitchen." There are better ways of handling the problem.

An Opening For Repressive Governments
Regularly we read about how China, Egypt, and other repressive regimes curtail their citizens' access to information online. Thus far, the Constitution and other legal protections have kept this from happening here in America. We have seen how easily the USA Patriot Act was pushed through Congress with nary a whimper after the 9/11/2001 attacks. Bear in mind that the Republicans soundly defeated similar legislation - calling it "Draconian" - when Bill Clinton proposed it just a few years earlier. The USA Patriot Act opened the door for, among many other things, the gross violations of our dignity we suffer for the privilege of boarding an airliner nowadays.

It is likewise quite conceivable that SOPA and PIPA could start us on a slippery slope whereby the US government and/or others could also more readily clamp down on the flow of information when "inconvenient truths" on ANY subject threaten to surface.

The Common Citizen's Workaround - Or Digital "Jungle Telegraph"
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Common citizens should have ALTERNATIVE ways of communicating, exchanging news and information, as well as storing and accessing needed web content should there be any kind of censorship or shutdown of the Internet. Just as Amateur (HAM) radio allows communications when the regular infrastructure is down, a "mesh" network could quickly serve as the modern, information-age equivalent to "ham" or CB radio in an emergency. The software to do this is available online for FREE right now. All you need is the software and a wi-fi enabled laptop or desktop PC. Any desktop PC can be made wi-fi capable with an inexpensively purchased USB dongle.

How it works:
With a mesh network, a person's PC, laptop, or even a smart phone becomes a network repeater. Let's say I want to communicate with someone several blocks, or even miles away. I'd send out a signal, which would be picked up by the nearest computer or phone running the appropriate software. That device would then forward that to another one farther away, and so-on, until the message reached its destination. The more devices you get involved the more robust the network becomes. If you have several nodes in a neighborhood and one or two are lost, the signal still can go elsewhere and eventually get where it is going. Since unlike the regular Internet, there are MULTIPLE WAYS for an individual PC to connect, these networks are quite reliable. You are NO LONGER dependent on just your DSL or cable connection to get out. And neither is anyone else running a wi-fi mesh setup. And of course ANY of these devices could be running a server or host a shared directory for sharing files. Short of a major EMP incident (which would destroy most electronic hardware anyway), such a network would be very hard to completely jam or take down. The phones and PCs involved would still retain their originally intended functionality - this software runs quietly in the background.

Scalability: A mesh network can be as small as a few PCs in an apartment building or it could quite conceivably span an entire city. Licensed ham radio operators routinely transmit computer data over their radios - this is called "packet radio". Imagine the possibilities that open when you combine packet radio with mesh networks.

For more information I have included the following links:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/world/12internet.html?_r=1

http://fabfi.fablab.af/

http://code.google.com/p/fabfi/

http://code.google.com/p/fabfi/wiki/HowToMake

http://inkarlslab.blogspot.com/2011/10/more-internet-censorship-on-way-in-good.html

http://inkarlslab.blogspot.com/2011/06/wanna-beat-internet-censorship-build.html

Running Windows in Virtual Box On A LINUX System

Virtual Box is an application that allows you to run an operating system within another operating system. Virtual box allows you to create one or more virtual machines within a Windows, LINUX, Mac, or Solaris host. With Virtual Box, you are actually running the "guest" operating system within an encapsulated environment. It behaves just as it would if it were installed natively on the hardware. The title of this blog is "Running Windows in Virtual Box On a LINUX System", but you can also run LINUX in Virtual Box on a Windows System.

Some viable uses:
You may be asking "Why do this?" Good question - and one well worth a couple paragraphs.

Running a "Virtual Machine" is an excellent way of testing new software, new releases of operating systems, or performing software quality assurance WITHOUT having to dedicate hardware to a single operating system. You get to keep whatever native environment you are comfortable with while you test or run an application in another environment. If you have a copy of Mac-OS running in a virtual machine, you can see what your web pages look like in a Mac browser without having to own an actual Mac PC.

If you have Windows software that will not work in Wine or Crossover Office, you can simply install Windows within Virtual Box on your LINUX system. The Windows operating system and software simply become as one more application running in LINUX.

A Slick Way Of Trying LINUX Without Commitment
If you would like to "install" LINUX but don't want to re-partition your computer or remove Windows just yet, why not run it within Virtual Box on your existing Windows system? If you don't like Ubuntu, for example, just delete it within Virtual Box and no harm done. You could have several virtual LINUX machines installed so you can compare distros and see how each one would run if it were running "native". Running LINUX in a virtual machine context such as this avoids the need for creating separate partitions for Windows and LINUX. If you decide to keep Windows and NOT use LINUX at all, you have NOT created any changes that can't be undone with a few simple mouse clicks. Pretty cool, huh?

My experiment
A week or so ago, I decided it would be fun to try running Windows VISTA in Virtual Box on a Mint 11 LINUX system.

Using Mint's package manager, I downloaded and installed Virtual Box. When you start virtual box from the menu, a "wizard" will guide you through the steps of selecting what operating system you want to use and how much disk space you want to allocate to that. From there, you will select the install media (DVD, CDROM, network drive, ...) on which the disk image for your selected operating system resides and then proceed to install it within Virtual Box.

The dialog screens are pretty much self-explanatory and I had VISTA installed in about 45 minutes. That is about typical for an install on my hardware, so using a virtualized environment didn't slow down the process any. Once I had VISTA installed, I started Virtual Box and selected 'VISTA' from the list of installed systems. See screen shot below.


















A new window containing the Windows VISTA login screen opened on my Mint 11 LINUX desktop. See the screen shot at the top of this post.

The photo below shows the Windows VISTA desktop within a Window in Mint 11 LINUX.




















Later on I might try the reverse: Installing LINUX within Virtual Box on a native Windows system.

You can learn more and/or download Virtual Box from https://www.virtualbox.org/