Category: Technology

My friend and sometimes co-blogger Brad points me to this page, about a Wikipedia search engine, that finds out who’s editing.  It’s a really neat idea, and interesting to read through, but overall I don’t like what the consequences of it will be.   Chances are the people making these edits from various companies are in no way authorized by that company’s leadership to make those kinds of changes to the Wiki.   What this is going to do is cause companies to either block access to this valuable resource, or severely restrict internet usage, at the detriment to their employees ability to find information.

Corporate leaders tend to be very risk averse, think little of their employees, and hate bad publicity.  They will respond to this kind of bad publicity in predictable ways, and it’ll be all our loss.

I seem to have a faulty battery backup unit on my FiOS system that’s causing the outage.  When I came home the light was on at the junction box outside that indicated the power was out and battery was low.  I go check the AC line, and it’s feeding power to the BBU just fine.  Fortunately, unplugging the battery convinced it that it had a bad battery, but everything else was fine.  We’re back up for now.  Verizon will be out tomorrow to replace the faulty BBU.

I think I might need to get Verizon out here to troubleshoot some link problems with the copper portion of my FiOS connection that runs into the house.  It seems that I’m having difficulty keeping the network link to the fiber hub up.  This is the second time I’ve seen it cut out during the day with a dead link.   Both on hot days… hmm.

This temporary outage was brought to you by Faulty Ethernet Cable. We’re not happy with this sponsor, and won’t be inviting him back again. I’m guessing it was borderline, and my switching the cables out last night pushed it over the edge.

I put a new firewall/wireless router on my home network.   The default Verizon ActionTEC has flaky wireless, so I switched to a Netgear box.  The firewall features on the Netgear box aren’t quite as good, but it’ll do for now.  At some point, I might play with OpenWrt on a Linksys WRT.   Linksys WRTs by default kind of suck, because they like to time out TCP connections while you’re using them, and there’s no way to disable this “feature”, but if I can run a Linux based firewall/wireless router on one, I’d have total control, and it would do anything I wanted it to.

Visitors to the blog might have noticed a slight interruption in service for the ten seconds it took to switch over to the new system.  It’s easy when it’s just a simple home network.

I won’t say I’ll never get an iPhone, but when it comes to Apple, I’m not an early adopter.  Why?  Because they stick it to you on price if you adopt early.  Even if you’re a late adopter, they’ll charge you a pretty sizeable chunk of change.  Plus, I kind of like my phone to be, well, a phone.  I use my phone to make calls.  I’m not sure I really want my phone to have a camera, play video, or play MP3s.   When I want to play MP3s, I’ll use the iPod.  If I want to take a picture, I’ll whip out my Nikon digital camera.

Now, I know there are more than a few haters out there, but I think I at least have some company in the world of Apple.  I’m a computer professional by day, so I’ve used a lot of different types of laptops, and I can say that they pretty much all have their problems, Macs included.   I still wouldn’t really use anything else, because I can’t stand using Windows for 10 minutes before I want to use whatever machine its running on as target practice.

Linux, which I used for years as a desktop, makes a great server, and reasonably good workstation, but it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of user interface design, and tends to borrow the best and worst features of all the other systems out there.   I stopped using Linux on the desktop because every time I bought a new peripheral, I’d have to have to spend 20 minutes to figure out how to make it work with Linux.   Linux will actually work with most things these days, an they are getting pretty good at the plug and play thing for common devices, but when things don’t work, you better know what you’re doing.   On the Mac, things just work, and since I get paid to make things work by day, I don’t exactly feel like doing it when I come home at night.

I may not buy an iPhone, but I do think Apple makes genuinely good products overall.  It’s not just marketing hype.  Having to deal with Windows on a daily basis professionally, I wouldn’t even think of using it for my personal life.  I was long of the opinoin that NeXTStep was one of the best operating systems ever engineered, but had the misfortune of running on underpowered and overpriced hardware.  Apple hardware is still overpriced, but it’s worth it to me not to have to deal with the aggravation of Windows.  I can understand why someone may not feel it’s worth the price tag; even I wince at the price of Apple’s hardware, but you can have my MacBook when you pry it from my cold dead hands ;)

I’m thinking about changing my blog host setup.   Currently, I host the front end of the blog on my Linux workstation, and host the back end on my MythTV DVR system.   Since I’ve gotten the MacBook Pro, I’m finding I never use the Linux workstation anymore, so all it’s doing is consuming power hosting a blog front end.   I could get a single server to act both as my DVR and blog host, and anything else I might want it to do.  If I’m going to consolidate both machines, I’ll probably get a new case, and a few larger hard disks so I can make a RAID5 array, to guard against data loss in the event of drive failure.  I might as well make it a dual core box as well.  I’ve not noticed either machine having a hard time with blog traffic.  The only time I noticed it was in the middle of an Instalaunch.

The real question is whether I want to shell out 500 or so bucks when it’ll take a while to recover that in energy savings.

I’ve been spending my time at work migrating over to a new file server. The old Windows 2000 file server was getting rather long in the tooth. Microsoft wanted to charge more than two grand for a Windows 2003 Server and CALs for the whole company, so I said “Piss on that!” and decided to convert it to a Linux server using Samba. I plan to move all the company’s print functions over to Samba in the next few days. My ultimate goal is to have Windows only used as Active Directory domain controllers and for Exchange. I would ideally like to get rid of Exchange too, but I’m not selling management on the idea, and they seem to have no issue forking over 8 grand to Microsoft when I could for over 1.5 grand and get Zimbra to do the same job under Linux.

Of course, this new file server is just a stop gap. The big plan for the following year involves consolidating our Andrew File System under samba, and to move most of the simulation data (which is into the terabytes) to a new distributed cluster file system written by one of my coworkers.

Clayton Cramer points out this site on problems with temperature sensors that are being used to measures global warming.  It would seem to be lending some credence to the urban heat island theory of global warming.  I found it to be pretty amusing though.  I should qualify this with two things.

1. It’s just anecdotal evidence
2. I’m far from an expert on weather instrumentation and how to properly place it, so I don’t know if the things pointed out are really problems.

But it sure is pretty funny, and does show that this is definitely a government operation.  Go give it a read.

Kim and Tam are amused by the Cult of Apple. It’s all rather amusing to me since I was a part of the cult before it was cool. Started in 1992 with a Mac IIsi and System 7. I had used the Classic Mac with System 5 and System 6, but never owned one. System 7 was considerably better than Windows 3.1. I was more functional and sure crashed a lot less. Windows 95 wouldn’t come out for another few years, and even when it did, it sucked too.

Apple lagged behind for a while with System 8 and 9, at least in terms of essential features like protected memory and preemptive multi-tasking. Apple caught up when it bought NeXT and reengineered NeXTStep to be MacOS X, which is a truly wonderfully engineered operating system.

I was a Linux user from the dark days of System 8 and 9 up until recently, when I purchased the MacBook Pro. Trendy or not, they are still putting out the best desktop operating system on the market today. It’s really just NeXTStep with better eye candy and a more Macintosh-like look and feel, but NeXTStep was way ahead of it’s time years ago, and I think has come of age rather nicely as MacOS X.

So don’t buy a Mac because it’s trendy. Buy it because it’s a legitimately excellent product. I spent 10 minutes using a laptop with Vista on it before I wanted to throw it out a window. Even Linux is less obnoxious as a desktop operating system than Windows is becoming.