My review of Square / SquareUp

So, some while ago, I downloaded a copy of the Square payment application for my android phone. For those unfamiliar with it, it's a small credit card payment app for your Apple or Android smart phone.  Home page is here: https://squareup.com/.   I should note that Intuit also has a competing product.

The basics of it is that you set up an account with Square, you link it to a bank account, and you accept payments via your phone.  They send you a little card reader plugin that is supposed to plug into your smart phone's microphone/headset jack, but you can also manually enter a credit card number, which is fortunate.

With the default account, they charge a small per transaction fee, I think 2.75%.  Less than traditional credit cards, but they limit how much per week you can process.

I generally like it - my only complaint is that I've never gotten the funky card reader to operate, and have always had to manually key in the credit card numbers.  I've tried this with 3 different card reader widgets (two from Square, and one I bought at Radio Shack), and on three different android devices: my HTC Evo 4G, my wife's HTC Evo Slide, and a hacked Nook Color tablet running CyanogenMod.   This is doubly a bummer, 'cause Square charges you an extra 1/4% on manually entered card numbers.

Nonetheless, give it a try.  It's a nifty tool.

-- Pat

A short rant about Fedora:

Sorry Fedora, you've lost me. 

I've been a linux devotee since around '93 or so, my first install was the SLS linux distro from a stack 'o floppies downloaded painfully via modem.  I've been a professional sysadmin specializing mostly in linux (with some other unix flavors) for about a decade and a half now.

Ergo, I've gotten very familiar with lots of different linux setups.

Unfortunately, though, fedora is moving sharply away from what I considered to be one of the best features of linux and unix like os's overall: discoverability.

Don't know where something is configured?  A "grep -R" or "find . -type f | xargs grep" has a very high likelyhood of finding it.  Once you get a hit, then you have some context you can use in a "man -k" or google search.  Voila, one more configuration issue solved.

Unfortunately, with the sharp turn toward opaque tools (journal, systemd, network-manager) fedora is breaking away from this, and sadly the rest of linux land appears to be following. 

I always rather despised having to use special tools to find errors in windows (event viewer), now I have to do the same in fedora (journalWhateverTheHeckItsNamed).  I hate not having the system config and startup in a an obvious, known, transparent and readable location (what, /etc/rc.d/init.d/ is empty?!  Blargh, I hate having to find, and then try to read XML.)  Whups -- I need to do something slightly out of the 'standard' laptop network setup, like a static IP and a bridge for a VM setup, uh, where do I configure that again?  Oh, my system moved and needs to be renamed, uh, where is that at?

Sure change is good, yadda yadda.   Transparency, though, is better.

-- Pat

p.s. and da** solaris for doing the same, but earlier and worse.  Can't even edit /etc/nsswitch.conf on sol 11 anymore ...

My Keepon - disappointing

Just this weekend my daughter purchased a My Keepon robot from the local outlet of toys r us. I have to say, I'm kind of disappointed. My expectations were set by two different videos of a Keepon robot dancing to Spoon's "I turn my camera on" and "Don't you Evah".

Compared to the Keepon robot in those videos, the toy my daughter purchased is unfortunately lame. Specifically, it'll only dance for perhaps 10-15 seconds before stopping for up to 10 seconds to reset itself. It's dancing is also notably less smooth and expressive compared to the videos.

Unfortunately, there also doesn't appear to be any capability for future software upgrades or other improvements. In short, it's not yet worth the money.

-- Pat

Allen PIttman Martial Arts Seminar

Martial Arts Seminar

(Flyer in PDF format)

with

Allen Pittman

Friday, Mar 11

through

Sunday, Mar 13

Featuring instruction in holistic health and martial arts training, both Eastern and Western

See Mr. Pittman's biography at: http://www.apittman.com/ptt/index.html

Hosted At:

MankatoMartialArts.com - 201 North Victory Dr, Mankato - (507) 386-7400

Friday	Saturday	Sunday
8:00-9:00 – Yoga for Physical Conditioning	8:00-9:00 – Yoga / Meditation open session	8:00-12:00 – Principles of Internal Arts (limited*)
Private Lessons (limited*)	10:00-12:00 – Introduction to Internal Martial Arts
	1:30-5:30 – Principles of Internal Arts (limited*)	1:30-5:30 – Principles of Internal Arts (limited*)
5:30-6:30 – Celtic Wrestling

(*) indicates limited attendance, contact Kyro Lantsberger for availability

FEES: $50 / 1 session ; $75 / 2 sessions ; $100 / 3 or more sessions

Private Lessons: $96 / hour

Contact: Kyro Lantsberger, kyro_lantsberger@yahoo.com 507-456-3697

Electronics triumph !

Last Sunday, I woke to find our house had no internet. This was puzzling, since we still had our landline phone service, and both our phone and internet come through the same fiber DSL router, provided by our fantastic locally owned community phone company.

Some dismayed investigation later determined that the issue was that our ninja cats had successfully bypassed the protective cover I'd devised for our router, and cat pee had dribbled into the actual router and fried at least one component.

Of course, while this is going on I get paged for a modestly significant VMWare outage for work, in which about a dozen virtual servers were effected; and before all this happened my lovely spouse got a call that her church's regular piano player was sick, and could she come and play; so I had all the kids and planned to take them to church with me; but one of the cars wouldn't start in the cold due to an old battery; and, well, you get the picture.

Yah, it was a pretty cruddy Sunday.

So, after getting back from fixing the issues at work later that night, and thoroughly but carefully cleaning the router's circuit board (with clean water, a old, soft toothbrush, just a tad of gentle, unscented dish soap, and more clean water), and drying it, I examined the board closely under a magnifying glass. I soon found this chip, which I had cleaned quite a bit of crud off of, with several of it's leads burned through:

New chip - top view	New chip - bottom view

The soldering job, my first surface mount work, turned out to not be nearly as scary as I feared (thanks to members of my local linux and hardware lug for great advice), other than the small size and considerable eye strain, even using a stand mounted magnifying glass.

I went back downstairs, plugged it in, and to my great joy, it worked!

Total cost, about $25.

I'd not at all mind doing a similar job again, the only thing I'd prefer to do differently is to have a better lighting and magnifying setup. Perhaps a large, stand mounted, self lit magnifying glass, or maybe some good work lights and one of those jeweler's loupes which can attach to a pair of glasses.

Anyway, all told, success! Much money saved, a yet more cat proof DSL router providing me service as I type this post, and a happy Pat. :-)

I just finished teaching an 9 week winter community ed taiji class that was perhaps the best community ed group I've taught. It was small, only 6 people, but no one dropped out, unlike almost every other class I've taught.

By 6 weeks, the entire group had picked up the whole first section of the Yang long form. By 7 weeks, they felt confident enough that they asked me to stop verbally coaching through the form. Additionally, by the end of class they all looked reasonably good doing it. So, the last two weeks, I was also able to spend time introducing and playing with taiji sword and bagua circle walking.

This class was a real pleasure to teach. I managed to grab a short video of us tonight at http://qik.com/video/5558201. Although the camera angle could have been better, nonetheless I congratulate them on a job well done!

-- Pat

I just had an unpleasant realization, due in part to a similar comment from Bob Nix. (Gee thanks Bob, even though you feel the same, way to share. :-S ).

Due to recent team reorg pulling linux into the windows group, nearly everything I've done in the past 5 years is now completely irrelevant. For me it's a real bummer 'cause I've either solely implemented, been the driver for, or worked on nearly every major process, standard, cross platform project or initiative in my prior team, as well as all of the linux specific infrastructure.

Now, almost none of what I did will matter or be used by the windows team - for the simple reason that it's 40 people's worth of stuff to my 1, and in a team that big common standards outweigh nearly everything else short of outright technical impossibility. Also since I've leaving the old unix team, everything I'm leaving there will bitrot and be irrelevant to them in 1-2 years, too.

I'm really rather bummed.