Wednesday Eve Landscape and Taxi Co.

Kingdon stretches legs and prepares to straddle the high horse

If there's two things in this world that I really don't like, and I'm pretty sure that I'm not alone here, these are them:

1. Losing money in a bar (especially at a pool table)
2. Watching people drive when it's clear that they've had too much to drink
   

Preventing these things can, in some cases, require foresight. However, as long as we've got cellular telephones at our disposal, it need not be this way!

The sign at the bar says "No Soliciting!" so I figured I'd better announce this publicly in some other place. If you find yourself in either of these situations, and you need someone to bail you out, call me up! I'm actually a pool shark in a landscaper's clothing.

Cheers,
Kingdon

Recipe for a Wireless ISP

Sorting through hardware that I have accumulated over the last many years, and it looks like I've got everything I would need to start a Community Wireless Network right here in my apartment complex. I've got a WDS network set up between my WRT54G and my Airport Express, and I've got a $50 D-Link DWL-730AP that I can use in client mode to connect to the network. The WRT54G is the most capable device of the three, working as a WDS base station, where the DWL-730AP behaves just like you would expect if it was called a Wireless Modem.

What does this mean? WDS means range extension; I can set up independent wireless base stations, some of which are connected to the Internet, where some are only free-standing power saps with antennas pointed in the right direction. Clients can choose to associate with any access point on the network. In theory at least, that should bring Internet access to all clients, even if only some base stations are directly connected to the Internet.

In reality I have only one wireless client to test with, and all of these devices are crammed into my apartment. The DWL-730AP has an interface that allows to select a specific access point by MAC address, but there's no way to test that this has any effect. I won't know if WDS has the desired effects without stationing the unwired base station somewhere far away, where the wired AP cannot be reached by clients. The WRT54G can be hooked up to a yagi, or Cantenna, which has the effect of producing a small cone of boosted signal, so it could still reach the distant access point even if nearby clients could not.

The interface on the DWL-730AP is not ideal for this sort of testing. If I had more time and unused hardware to spend on this (another laptop), I would hook up a FreeBSD or Linux machine and change my association from one access point to the next, to test network conditions on either side of the half-wired/half-unwired network. If the tests go smoothly, I can start whoring out my cable modem to my neighbors immediately. Score!

C'est Magnifique!

Yes, that's really a layered cake, made with three enormous loaves of meat, iced with mashed potatoes and ketchup.

Ingenious? Brilliant? Outrageous? Magnificent. A work of art. I am without words to describe. The whole nation of India had better be laughing; this is funny, even if ten cows had to die!

I got my dad a book by Bill O'Reilly instead. What in Sam Hell was I thinking?

Maybe next year Dad!

Job Hunt

There is so much crap on Craigs List! Develop an effective spam filter (Google, this means you) and you will be rich. Of course the legitimate companies out there can't find good help because all of the talented web developers are surfing Craigs List looking for work, so their postings all must look like spam too.

I think I've constructed a reasonable system to apply a human filter -- stacks of paper are one thing, but Google Reader combined with Delicious really helps with RSS feeds. Reminds me of a neural network with an extra hidden layer. There has got to be an AI application in here somewhere.

Network Detour

Taking a quick detour to work on multi-homed storage arrays as I think this might be quite handy, with applications from off-site backup, to decreasing access times for valuable data (like FreeBSD ISOs). I mean to duplicate the specialized functionality of the Andrew File System, without quite so much focus on coding and maintaining one unified file-system -- here I hope to demonstrate that Andrew goes too far, and he does so at his own peril.

In other words, we can fudge it without losing very much functionality ... we will lose customer-oriented attention to detail in service presentation. No longer will this have the appearance to random users of being a unified file-system. I was hoping to keep random users in the loop as much as possible, but at this point I've been struggling with some of these issues for so long that I'm going to throw up my hands and answer, "this is my storage cluster. ask for help if you need anything."

I'd rather administrate a distributed storage cluster than a team of researchers anyway! So for now I will endeavor to fill my terabytes with something of value, and to make it accessible through the regular channels, whatever those may turn out to be. Ubuntu Mirrors listings and FreeBSD as well are in the sixth layer delicious notes for the day. Will probably be a few days before I can work out the kinks in the scripting and data inventory process.

I think I'll add a website with links to the data and a nice writeup about this joint interest of Tuesday Studios, Venture Creations, and the Rochester Institute of Technology. Hopefully I can justify some of the money that I have spent, and maybe if I get lucky I can get my activities tacked onto somebody's budget without too much struggle.

Today I am pretty sure that either of these commands can be used reliably inside of a cron job to create a mirror:

$ rsync -vaz --delete [rsync url] [local directory]
$ lftp -c mirror [remote [local]]

There are mechanisms to reverse the direction of this operation; see man rsync or lftp -c help mirror for more details. As long as we are only mirroring things that are already public data, then this is all you need to duplicate the effects of the AFS feature of remotely replicating read-only cells.

Unfortunately today from where I stand, it looks like there will never be a means of simple public read/write access to such a large disk. There are too many copyright issues, this is risky business -- if we're not careful about access control, we might even create something of value that doesn't technically belong to anyone, and then where will we be? Oh yeah...

This sort of policy can be enforced through other means, like access control lists on the file-system itself, or some other restriction implemented through the protocol or the server. Next step for these gigantic public mirrors are to actually make them publicly accessible and start advertising through the usual channels.

I think that I will configure both anonymous FTP and HTTP access, but I suspect that I will change my mind and use HTTP only when I get lazy. What is the value of FTP? Hmm... a convenient interface, in fact if I configure one machine with access to all of the pieces-parts of the whole storage cluster, then this might start looking like a unified file space again.

It's probably worth keeping FTP around.

New Router, New PC

Got myself some new hardware to kickstart the revolution, and I'm setting it up this afternoon. Thanks again, RIT, for the fat pipes; this Windows Update procedure used to take me a day and a half. Thanks to your internets, it only takes a half day.

Basic Tuesday Studios services are still down as of the last router's most recent failure. The new router is in place and I'm performing a service inventory while I start forwarding ports. Notes go here:

1. DNS - hosted on hobo11 for now
2. SVN - hosted directly from hobo11, migrate to virtualized infrastructure
3. RDP/VNC - All of the machines on the local subnet should have their desktops shared by RDP or VNC. For now this is necessary, to curb the expense of a monitor at every machine and sidestep the impossible task of setting up 5 or 6 workstations in a single room. I need to invest in more lateral space.
4. OpenVPN - Now that we've got some workstations, it would be best if some of the freestanding nodes like Irie were connected virtually to the local office network, and had access to some of the services like printing, file sharing, and local DNS and WINS information.
5. tuesdaystudios.com Web Server and Apache Virtual Hosting - We have acquired some clients. Time to set up some kind of makeshift CRM database and get in contact with all of these people, to see what they want. Lets put up "Under Construction" pages for each of these people at least, and find an external service to start tracking the reliability of our servers.
6. mail.tuesdaystudios.com - Mail has been intermittent at best lately. This is due to DNS server outages which should be resolved with this new router at the office. Still, it would be best to set up a few remote hosts in places with reliable network connections, as slave DNS. We do have the resources for this.

These are reasonable goals up through #4 at least for tonight. Before I post again, I mean to take care of all of these issues. I expect I will wind up finishing with #2 around 8pm, and of course by finishing I mean hitting the virtualization wall. VMWare and Windows is a whole lot more difficult to administer properly across a network. Live notes are rolling as always on My Delicious Feed.

Data Retention Plan

You want a data retention plan? I'll give you a data retention plan. Open up your organization! Depend on free services! Put everything you own on the internet, and you will be just fine! Trust me ;-)

In related news, there's a new class of student companies joining us at Venture Creations, the business incubator sponsored by RIT, which houses Tuesday Studios and the server room! In reality I do have some servers of my own, and I have really put a lot of consideration into data retention over the last 8-10 years as I have watched my own precious data occasionally slip through the cracks when tossing an old computer to the curb. First step is to centralize your data and then give it to me... I'll take good care of it for you!

If that doesn't sound attractive to you, then my next recommendation is to give your data to Google. If you're worried about data mining, no, I'm sure it'll be MUCH safer with Google than in my own server rooms... the world's foremost experts in data mining? Nah, I really don't think they'd try anything too fishy.

Still, if that sounds too much like charity, or you like the idea of doing things in house, I am always happy to pay a visit and perform a consultation, or give a tour of my own server room. I could fill at least 1 hour's time talking about where I keep my data, and the measures that I employ to keep it safe.

In fact I will even go so far as to say, free consultation. Bear in mind this may be a limited time offer; I could get very busy tomorrow. You know, this is not a contract to work at no cost for the rest of my days.

I was going to start digging up information on those new companies at the incubator! Tune into my del.icio.us feed for the scoop, I'm going to see what Google already knows. Hopefully I'll meet some of these people soon and post again to tell you how cool their services are; I don't like to interrupt people when they're working, and everyone tends to look busy when I walk by their desks. I wonder if that's because my card says President?

Marketing Woes

This is bothering me, and so I figure I'd better blog about it. It seems like technical people (in particular the most brilliant ones) have a generally hard time relating with people, especially when it comes to anyone who works in marketing. I've seen this recur so many times that I think it's worth further analysis, in fact I would like to write a book on the topic! Any publishers interested? Sign me up! :)

Technical people spend a lot of time in front of a computer, doing in-depth research on complex systems. Conversely, I see marketing people, and I observe a strong affinity for personal contact and the 30 second message. Here at Tuesday Studios, I call myself the President of a Middleware company. What does that mean, practically speaking? I do my best to play both roles, without exploding or any similarly horrible fate!

What does this mean to you? Well, I'm the president of a company with really just one employee... so in truth I hope it means that we will be the best of friends, whoever you are, or may decide to be!

Namaste

File Server Upgrades

Just purchased two 500GB drives and set them up in a spare server as a Local Area Network fileserver for the tuesday.local domain that I have running in my office at Venture Creations. I'm copying 300GB of data over from other servers as backups, before I start changing things around again I am nervous about doing that sort of thing. The last time I changed anything at all in my Windows network, (this is a VMWare Server upgrade from 1.0.1 to 1.0.3 to which I am referring, gone slightly awry) I wound up hosing my entire cluster!

Fortunately my developers have been on holiday and they didn't seem to notice the disturbance until a couple of days ago. Anyway I'm about to completely refactor the main VMWare Server cluster by reformatting the main server and stripping down to bare minimum services, then probably add another one or two servers to the virtualization cluster. Maybe I'll even have a go at configuring Xen on one of the Debian servers! This progression should happen in fairly short order if time and funding permits.

I'm now about 52GB through the backup process and this is going to take hours. I'm going to take a break from computers and do the dishes!

English Vocabulary Lesson #2

Lawyers make claims. Well, that's not all there is to it; they also substantiate them, and sometimes defend against them. A plaintiff and a defendant is not exactly the same as an ally and an enemy. In law (and thus in times of war) there must always be two or more parties. In business, and Microsoft will let you know if you just ask nicely, it's really much better for everyone involved if we're all allies. Still, don't let this fact stop you from making claims!

• substance - the stuff of which an object is composed: in schools of thought, the message, central meaning; in rhetorical analysis of software systems I will always insist that the kernel and process scheduler represent the substance of an operating system.
  
• substantial - having a firm basis in reality, and being therefore important, meaningful, or considerable; not imaginary.
  
• substantive - meaty, real, essential. substantive is a grammatical term whose meaning is lost on me. I would have to see some examples, duh, of what do you suppose an non-substantive looks like exactly?
  
• substitution - In theater, the method of understanding elements in the life of one's character by comparing them to elements in one's own life. In a psychologist's office or a business meeting, a defense mechanism, operating unconsciously, by which an unattainable or unacceptable goal, emotion, or object is replaced by one that is more attainable or acceptable.
  
• subsumption - A subsumption is a relation which specifies the relative generality of two concepts; incorporating something under a more general category. For instance: most graduate students are college graduates before becoming graduate students.
  

Recall from Lesson 1: Most cultures proscribe stealing. Some people equate piracy with theft. Some laws and practices place a value on things with no unique identity as an object. Calculus is required to quantify value in such a situation and logically explain this phenomenon.

The question of the day: what differentiates a graduate student from an undergraduate student? The answer, I hope, is all of these administrative theatrics and hazing rituals! I actually didn't wear the cap and gown, nor did I attend my own High School Prom.

More news tomorrow; still, for today the virtual server outage continues! Hard drives are on the way from New Egg, and I will contain my ecstasy at the latest interactions with Microsoft until I can properly explain my position. The instigation continues!

Facebook Work

Been contemplating lately what kind of groups and other manners of dancing that I should focus on involving myself with, centering around questions like who exactly is going to pay to fund my continued existence. This is not a question of depression, it's a matter of practicality!

The best way that I can think of to kick-start this process is to update my resume. I've been meaning for a long time to build a resume that allows central maintenance of both a printed and an online format. Second note here is that all of my previous resumes have been focused on providing a long list of technology keywords, and I'm not sure of the benefit of that anymore.

I have used a large number of programming languages and it is not helpful to enumerate them, as I will generally need to refresh myself with a book and some form of homework before I can successfully jump into another coding project. Also from my own perspective, I would rather work with a technology that is new to me than one that I have already struggled with before now, so a list of my own known technologies is almost a "bad seed" for any manager that might seek to hire me.

Also while it's helpful to know a lot of languages, usually programming takes place in one language so it could be quite helpful to regain fluency in at least one programming language before re-entering the software development job market. The neatest target language with the most interesting developer buzz ongoing today is PHP and the Facebook Platform API.

I think I'd better set up another server this evening and see for myself some of what can be done in PHP today. Facebook is an incredibly massive well-ordered database of information on groups and individuals, and I suspect the platform is especially ripe for data-driven applications! Lets get one started, or take a closer look at one of the applications that has already been developed.

Statistics

One interesting statistic that tells about the self-perception of illegitimacy in BitTorrent for sharing movies:

Average Speed:
Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee) 10 kB/s
Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino) 30 kB/s

What else can be inferred from this statistic is left as an exercise to the reader.

Gone Out of Town

Let me ask you, what fun is being out of town if you're still charged with the task of taking care of business while you're away? Isn't that the point of going out of town, to get away from taking care of business for a little while and do something else?

Learned to cook orange breaded catfish this week, and it's really quite delicious, especially with a bowl of rice and some light oil. I've got a nice Pyrex pan also that makes cleanup a non-issue. Observe the phenomenon under intense pressure from Chinese of a newborn clean sink at Kingdon's house!

... nope, I still haven't had kittens.