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August 31, 2007
Microwulf - The World's Cheapest Supercomputer
The world's cheapest supercomputer, built by a Calvin College CS professor Joel Adams and student Tim Brom is very interesting. They built an 8 core Beowulf cluster using four motherboards and a gigabit network switch for less than $2500. The resulting machine has a price/performance ratio of $100/Gigaflop. That's just plain fun.
I think there ought to be a yearly competition of this sort for students. Who can build the fastest supercomputer for $2500?
Update: here's Joel Adams' website
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August 30, 2007
Spook Country
I just finished Spook Country, William Gibson's latest novel. The book is a mystery, set in a world that could be today or the near future. Geolocative art is bigger than you might find to be the case today, but that's about it. I liked Pattern Recognition quite a bit, but I think Spook Country is head and shoulders above it as a story.
Gibson's writing is what I enjoy the most. It's rare that I read a book that I find myself going back and rereading sentences or paragraphs just to savor the language. Gibson's sentences can be dense and he doesn't hit you over the head with his plot devices, but it's just excellent writing. Here are a few examples. From page 9:
The old man reminded Tito or those ghost-signs, fading high on the windowless sides of blackened buildings, spelling out the names of products made meaningless by time.
And here's one from page 208:
Earlier the track had passed near streets of tiny row houses, in neighborhoods where poverty seemed to have been as efficient as the neutron bomb was said to be. Streets as denuded of population as their windows were of glass. The houses themselves seemed to belong less to another time than to another country; Belfast perhaps, after some sectarian biological attack. The shells of Japanese cars in the streets, belly down on bare rims.
This was one of those books that you're sorry to see end because you know it's going to be a while before you read prose this good again.
Amazon has a video and Gibson's original book proposal on their site. Very fun.
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Cabinet Level Blogging
The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Mike Leavitt (my former boss), has a blog. He's writing it himself and, so far, doing a good job of keeping it up with interesting posts. Recently he's been blogging his travel to Africa. The blog is done using Typepad.
He's getting lots of comments, as you can image, which must be gratifying. I haven't noticed much reaction in the blogosphere, however. Cabinet-level officials aren't known for transparency, so I am grateful for this kind of leadership. If more government leaders wrote blogs--without filters--we'd have a better sense of them and why they make the decisions they do.
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August 29, 2007
Talking Research with Rick Rashid
This week's technometria podcast is a discussion with Rick Rashid. Not only is he the head of Microsoft Research, but he's also the guy who started it.
Microsoft Research is dedicated to conducting both basic and applied research in computer science and software engineering. The company also collaborates openly with colleges and universities worldwide to broadly advance the field of computer science. We discuss both Microsoft Research, as well as the general status of technology research.
Rick first talks about his background and what led him to become involved in the formation of Microsoft Research. He discusses the general topic of research and its place in innovation. We also talk about the research differences between Microsoft and Google and the controversial issue of software patents.
I'm a China junkie and couldn't resist the opportunity to talk to Rick about Micorsoft's work in China. He gets into the country's educational differences and how Microsoft has become an important resource for students there.
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Dancing with Mavericks
Blogger and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is going to be on Dancing with the Stars. Heh. I've never watched it, but I might have to check out Mark gliding across the dance floor.
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August 28, 2007
User Centric Reputation Slides
Today I gave a talk at AOL in Virginia about reputation. I also had a chance to talk to a small working group on reputation and to the Architecture Council. The discussions were very good and gave me some food for thought.
I came away more convinced than ever that what we need to build are reputation systems that bring more cues about people and their actions to bear, in a way that allows the user to control the privacy issues, and with as much emergent behavior as possible to avoid overt configuration. Such a system should reward people for participation so that they see real value for the loss of privacy that any effective reputation system requires.
Society extracts a price for bad behavior that is usually based on property--relatively seldom do people lose freedom (or their life). The loss of property is an effective deterrent to bad behavior and conversely the promise of increased property value is an incentive to good behavior. In fact, so much so that property and the rights associated with it are a key focus of the law.
In most online communities there is little of value--even the identifiers are cheap and disposable. Virtual worlds like those in World of Warcraft and Second Life are the exception. Where there is no property, it's difficult to create reciprocity and there is an attendant loss of social good. If we want the online world to become less like the wild west, we need to make it more costly to misbehave. That principle is at the heart of reputation systems.
The sldes from my presentation (PDF) are available online as is the current version of the bibliography my class used in their study of reputation. If you use a Mac, BibDesk is a great tool for viewing and manipulating the bibtex file.
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Zune Phone
This add for the Zune phone wasn't as funny as I'd hoped it would be, but it did make me chuckle a few times.
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August 25, 2007
Debugging a New PC Build
It's been years since I built a PC and there's plenty that's changed, so since my lab needed a new PC, I decided to buy some components and out one together. I did it at home so my kids could help. Unfortunately, it hasn't had such a happy ending--I can't get it to boot. Through a series of experiments, I've decided it's either the motherboard or the CPU, but I can't decide which.
I'm using a ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard and a AMD Athlon 4200 CPU. I don't have anything in the motherboard right now except the CPU, the RAM, and a cheap video card. On occasion I can get the thing to come up to the point where it displays the splash screen with an invitation to push TAB to see the POST results or DEL to enter SETUP. I've even gotten it past that to the POST results (nothing interesting) once.
My theory going into today was that the CPU was overheating and shutting down, so I reseated the heatsink on it several times (cleaning it thoroughly and applying thermal compound). That hasn't seemed to do anything. The CPU heatsink never gets hot--so it's shutting down before much heat gets transfered to the sink
At this point, I believe either the CPU or the motherboard is bad, but without a spare one of one or the other, that's hard to do. Does anyone have any ideas besides RMAing them both?
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August 23, 2007
An Accidental Simula User
Luca Cardelli is one of the big guns in programming language theory--consistently producing interesting and important results over several decades. His paper (with Peter Wagner) "On Understanding Types, Data Abstraction, and Polymorphism" which I read as a graduate student deeply influenced me. Cardelli is now at Microsoft Research. He has recent slides (from ECOOP 2007) about his journey into the theory of objects called An Accidental Simula User that are a good read for anyone interested in object-oriented programming. Here's the abstract:
It was a simple choice, really, on an IBM 370 in the 70's, between APL, Fortran, Lisp 1.5, PL/1, COBOL, and Simula'67. Nothing could come close to Simula's combination of strong typing, garbage collection, and proper string processing. Separate compilation (prefix classes) and coroutines were nice bonuses. And then there were these . . . ``objects´´ but, well, nothing is perfect. Hot topics in those days were the freshly invented denotational semantics (which Simula didn't have), formal type systems (which objects didn't have), and abstract data types (which seemed to have confusingly little to do with classes). Still, Simula was the obvious choice to get something done comfortably because, after all, it was an improved Algol. It even had the functional programming feature of call-by-name by default. So, it became my first favorite language, for every reason other than it being object-oriented. The story I am going to tell is the very, very slow realization that Simula was the embodiment of a radically different philosophy of programming, and the gradual and difficult efforts to reconcile that philosophy with the formal methods that were being developed for procedural and functional programming. Along the way, domain theory helped rather unexpectedly, at least for a while. Type theory had to be recast for the task at hand. Landin's lambda-reductionism had to be partially abandoned. Always, there seemed to be a deep fundamental mismatch between objects and procedures, well described by Reynolds, that made any unification impossibly complicated. But in the end, both object-oriented and procedural programming have benefited from the clash of cultures. And the story is far from over yet, as witnessed by the still blooming area of program verification for both procedural and object-oriented languages.
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Cooking With IEEE
I get feedback from IT Conversations listeners all the time--usually one persons strongly held beliefs contradict another's. For example, it's not uncommon for people to say that they love or hate the fact that IT Conversations shows aren't just about IT. Some people, for example, hate Biotech Nation and others love it.
So it is with IEEE Spectrum Radio. While many love the slightly geeky, but usually off-topic (from the IT perspective) shows of IEEE, some find them not to their liking. That's sure to be the case with the series of shows on cooking.
The first show in that series is an interview with Kevin Weeks, a programmer turned professional chef. While it sounds like it might not hold much promise for the geek looking to spend some time with a nice podcast, I found it to be very interesting. I like to cook and like any engineer who cooks, I'm fascinated by the chemical ad mechanical processes that underlie cooking. That's at the heart of this show.
So, keep sending the feedback. If nothing else, it gives me a good idea what you care about and helps me tune the selection. I'm also interested in finding ways to let you pick just those shows from IT Conversations that interest you. Our recommendation engine is supposed to help--I'd be interested in knowing what your experience with it is. I'm also working on better tags so that--at least for broad categories--you can find a feed that more closely matches what you want to listen to.
One suggestion: if you are very picky about what you download, take a minute to build a personal queue and keep it filled with just the shows you like. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for your queue and never get another show you don't like!
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CTO Breakfast Report for August 2007
At this morning's CTO breakfast we talked about:
- Working from home--both from the standpoint of employees and employers. The experiences were all over the map--positive and negative.
- My experience converting physical machines to virtual machines.
- Booting DOS to recover old data and play old games.
- iPhone and Syncing--the group consensus was that syncing needs to be faster and happen over Bluetooth. I got the impression that slow syncing was more of a problem for Windows users than Mac users. Whether this is because of higher expectations because of positive experiences with ActiveSync or real slowness, I'm not sure.
- Comcast's tiered service offerings. Customers running torrents beware!
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August 22, 2007
iPhone Copy and Paste
No, copy and paste isn't one of the new features in today's iPhone update, it's just a concept video from lonelysandwich. This is a pretty good way to show how it would work--much more effective that text could ever be. I love the voice-over on the iPhone man. Nice.
iPhone Copy and Paste from lonelysandwich and Vimeo.
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August 21, 2007
Security at the South Jordan Library
If you visit the library in South Jordan Utah, you'll be pleased to find that there's free wi-fi. You might be less pleased to know that they've blocked the ports for IPSEC--making it impossible to use a VPN based on that protocol. The library's answer to queries about this is that "enabling IPSEC would lead to security problems. A hacker who knows what their doing could open up security liabilities for the library." This information from the librarian at the desk--who gets that question often enough to know the answer.
Of course this ignores the security vulnerabilities that you avail yourself to without a VPN. What boggles the mind is that this implies that the wi-fi is somehow behind their firewall or something.
Can anyone elucidate how having IPSEC ports open on a properly set up public wi-fi network that's isolated from the internal network of the library exposes them to security problems?
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Is There Anything Good About Men?
This provocatively entitled paper by Roy Baumeister, Eppes Eminent Professor of Psychology & Head of Social Psychology Area at Florida State University, is very interesting. A refreshing look at alternative interpretations of data on gender in human relations and how it can be explained. If you don't want to read the full paper, here's a summary from the NY Times.
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Social Graphs and Identity Systems
I just posted about social networking and identity at BTL. This represents some of my views on Brad Fitzpatrick's paper on the social graph problem as well as Dave Winer's podcast on the subject. Both Brad's paper and Dave's podcast (not just the summary) are worth paying attention to.
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CTO Breakfast on Thursday
Just a reminder that the CTO Breakfast will be this Thursday (Aug 23) from 8:00 until 10:00 in the Novell Cafeteria (Building G, Provo Campus) . As usual, all are welcome.
We'll have our usual technology roundtable, so come prepared with topics to discuss, questions for the group, and things you find interesting.
Here are future dates:
- Sep 27 (Thursday)
- Oct 30 (Tuesday)
- Nov 29 (Thursday)
- No CTO Breakfast in Dec
- Jan 24 (Thursday)
Please mark these dates in your calendar. You can also subscribe to the Google calendar or just use this iCalendar link.
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August 20, 2007
P2V: How To Make a Physical Linux Box Into a Virtual Machine
Over the last four days, I've been exploring how to convert physical Linux boxes into virtual machines. VMWare has a tool for doing P2V conversions, as they're called, but as far as I can tell it only works for Windows physical machines and for converting various flavors of virtual machines into others.
I've had a Linux machine that I've used in my CS462 (Large Distributed Systems) class for years. The Linux distro has been updated over the years, but the box is an old 266MHz Pentium with 512Mb of RAM. Overall, it's done surprisingly well--a testament to the small footprint of Linux. Still, I decided it was time for an upgrade.
Why Go Virtual
In an effort to simplify my life, I'm trying to cut down on the number of physical boxes I administer, so I decided I wanted the new version of my class server to be running on a virtual machine. This offers several advantages:
- Fewer physical boxes to manage
- Easier to move to faster hardware when needed
- Less noise and heat
I could have just rebuilt the whole machine from scratch on a new virtual machine, but that takes a lot of time and the old build isn't that out of date (one year) and works fine. So, I set out to discover how to transfer a physical machine to a virtual machine. The instructions below give a few details specific to VMWare and OS X, but if you happen to use Parallels (or Windows), the vast majority of what I did is applicable and where it's not, figuring it out isn't hard. I've tried to leave clues and I'm open to questions.
Note: I've used this same process to transfer a VMWare virtual image to run on Parallels. The are probably easier ways, but this technique works fine for that purpose as well--it doesn't matter if the source machine is physical or virtual.
The Process
The first step is to make an image of the source machine. I recommend g4l, Ghost for Linux. There are some detailed instructions on g4l available, but the basics are:
- Download the g4l bootable ISO and put it on a CD.
- Boot it on the source machine.
- Select the latest version from the resulting menu and start it up (you have to type g4l at the prompt).
- Select raw transfered over network and configure the IP address and the username/password for the FTP server you want the image transfered to.
- Give the new image a name.
- Select "backup" and sit back and watch it work.
Note that if you have more than one hard drive on the source machine, you'll have to do each separately. I found that separately imaging each partition on each drive worked best. One tip: there are three compression options. Lzop works, in this application, nearly as GZip or BZip but with much less CPU load. Compression helps not only with storing the images, but also with transfering them around on the 'Net, so you'll probably want some kind of compression.
The next step is to create a virtual machine and put the images on it's drive(s). Create a virtual machine in VMWare as you normally would, selecting the right options for the source OS. When you get to the screen that asks "Startup virtual machine and load OS" (or something like that), uncheck the box and you should be able to change the machine options.
The first thing you need to do with the new VM is create the right number and size of hard drives--and partitions on those drives--to match the partition images you're going to restore.
For transfering single image machines to VMWare, just using the default drive, appropriately sized, worked fine. For more than one drive image, however, I found that making the drive type (SCSI/IDE) match the type on the source was easiest thing to do. Note that VMWare won't let you make the main drive an IDE drive by default. You can always delete it and create a new drive that's an IDE drive if you need to.
The second thing you need to do with the new VM is set the machine to boot from the CD ROM since we've got to start up g4l on the target machine.
On VMWare, you can enter the BIOS by pressing F2 while the virtual machine is loading. This isn't as easy as it sounds since it starts quick. Once you're there, however, it's a pretty standard BIOS setup and changing the boot order is straight forward. On Parallels this is easier since the boot order is an option you can change in the VM's settings.
If you're creating partitions on the drives, you'll need to boot from a ISO image for the appropriate Linux distro and create the partitions using the partition wiazrd, parted, or some other tool--whatever you'd normally do.
Next boot the VM from the g4l ISO image on your computer or the physical CD you made. If you have trouble, be sure the virtual CDROM is connected and powered on when the virtual machine is started. Start g4l and configure it the same way you did before, but this time, you'll select "restore" from the options. g4l should start putting the images from the source machine onto the target. If you have more than one hard drive or partition image, you'll have to restore each to a separate drive or partition--as appropriate--on the virtual machine.
When doing a raw transfer, I you need make the drives the same size as the machine you're moving the image from (I've found that larger works OK, but smaller doesn't). If the drives aren't big enough to support the entire image, you'll get "short reads" and not everything will be transfered. Note that you won't get much complaint from g4l.
The virtual drives should theoretically only take as much space as they need, but it turns out that since you're doing a raw transfer, you'll fill them up with "space." This is one of those instances where copying a sparse data structure results in one that isn't. This results in awfully large disks--make sure you've got plenty of scratch disk space for this operation. More on large disks later.
Repairing and Booting the New Machine
 Linux panics if the init RAM disk is not updated (click to enlarge) |
Once the images are copied, you have to make them usable. If you just try to boot from them, you'll likely see something like the screenshot shown on the right: a short message followed by a kernel panic. Before you can use the new machine, you have to do a little repair work on the old images.
- Get an emergency boot CD ISO for your flavor of Linux and boot the new virtual machine from it. Often you can just boot from the installation image and then enter a rescue mode. For example for Redhat, you can type "linux rescue" at the boot prompt and get into recovery mode.
- It will search for Linux partitions and should find any you've restored to the machine. You'll have the option to mount these. Do so.
- Now, use the chroot command to change the root of the file system to the root partition. Mount any of the other partitions that you need (e.g. /boot).
- Run kudzu to find any new devices and get rid of old ones.
- Use mkinitrd to
create a new init RAM disk. This command should work:
/sbin/mkinitrd -v -f /boot/initrd-2.2.12-20.img 2.2.12-20
Of course, you'll have to substitute the right initrd name (look in /boot) and use the right version (look in /lib/modules).
If you get an error message about not being able to find the right modules, be sure that the last argument to mkinitrd matches what you see in /lib/modules exactly.
Now, you should be able to boot the machine. With any luck, it should work.
Disk Size Issues
When you restore the image, your new sparse disk will grow to the size of the image, even if the image is only partially full of real data. For example, my Linux box had a 6Gb drive (I told you it was ancient) that contained the root partition and a 100 Gb drive that I'd partitioned into two pieces: one 40Gb partition mounted as /home and a 60Gb partition mounted as /web. After restoring the images for these three partitions, I ended up with a 6Gb and a 107Gb files representing the virtual disks. This despite the fact that only 8Gb of the 107Gb actually contained any data.
Clearly, you don't want 107Gb files hanging around if they can be smaller. One option is to do a file copy rather than an image. This would work fine for the /home and /web partitions in my case, but wouldn't have worked for the root partition--I wanted an image for that. If you've just got one big partition, then you can't use the file transfer option and still have exactly the same machine.
Fortunately there's a relatively painless way of reducing the size of the disk to just what's needed (thanks to Christian Mohn for the technique).
The first step is to zero out all the free space on each partition of the drive you want to shrink. This, in effect, marks the free space. You can do that easily with this command:
cat /dev/zero > zero.fill;sync;sleep 1;sync;rm -f zero.fill
After this runs, you'll get an error that says "cat: write error: No space left on device". That's normal--you just filled the drive with one BIG file full of zeros, made sure it was flushed to the disk, and then deleted it.
Next you can use the VMWare supplied disk management tool to do the actual shrinking. For VMWare Workstation Manager, you use vmware-vdiskmanager, but the version of this program that ships with Fusion doesn't support the shrink option. Note that this, and other support programs, are in
/Library/Application Support/VMware\ Fusion/
on OS X.
Fortunately, in OS X at least, there's another program, called diskTool in
/Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/MacOS/
that does support the shrink option (-k1). Running this command
diskTool -k 1 Luwak-IDE_0-1.vmdk
on my large disk reduced it from 107Gb to 8Gb!
A few notes: Apparently you have to perform the shrink option on the disks for a machine before any snapshots have been taken. Also, be sure to run the zero fill operation in each partition on the disk. The shrinking option takes a little time, but it's well worth it. I haven't tried this in Parallels, but I suspect the disk compaction option would work. If someone tries it, let me know.
Conclusion
So, after a lot of experimentation, some playing around, and a lot of long operations on large files, I have a virtual machine that's a fairly accurate reproduction of the physical machine that it came from. I'll be testing it over the next few days to make sure it's usable.
On reflection, I needn't have been so faithful to the structure on the physical machine. I could have created the right number of partitions on one drive rather than creating multiple drives. After all, the new drive can be as big as I like. Maybe I'll do that next and see how things go...
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August 15, 2007
Facebook for the iPhone
Facebook announced a version for the iPhone. The formatting and content of the site is rearranged to create a more pleasing iPhone experience. I just logged on from my iPhone and found it far superior to navigating the tradition Facebook site from the iPhone.
Of course, there's not really an "iPhone version" since the iPhone version will work on anything with a browser. It's not as nice on a full sized browser as the traditional formatting, but it would probably be nicer on, say, Opera on your Razr (someone let me know, please).
Earlier, Netvibes introduced an iPhone version of it's site as well. Looking for an RSS reader for the iPhone, Netvibes might do the trick. I'd like to know what you think of it.
This brings up an interesting point. The iPhone isn't likely to become a dominant player in the HUGE cell phone market, but I do believe that it will create significant pressure on other cell manufacturers to smarten up their smart-phone offerings. One of the key things there is a larger screen.
As more phones with larger screens become the norm, special versions of popular sites are likely to become more common. I don't think we'll need an iPhone, Treo, and Blackbetter versions. But I do think that Web site designers will need to start generating sites, and CSS, that are more flexible for devices with different screen sizes and aspect rations.
Update: Watch Scoble and Gillmor talk about Facebook for the iPhone.
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We're Planing on Beefing that Up
I'm listening to Jon Udell's interview of Mike Hudak about the video sharing service blip.tv. The interview is great--good quality sound and excellent discussion. There's some interesting riffs on design, sharing, economies of plenty, and even origami.
What caught my attention, however, was a comment Mike says. At one point, talking about how tagging can happen in a distributed way, he says something like "We've got some basic identity in the system. At some point we plan on beefing that up to deal with comment spam, etc."
I'm not dogging on Mike, because I may be misinterpreting this comment, but this idea, that you can put in a simple identity system and then beef it up later, it a common one.
There's a few problems with it. First, unless you plan very carefully up front, adding better identity infrastructure to a system can be daunting. Second, even if you plan well, you'll probably never get to it. Identity is one of those things that never looks like it will return the investment on a case-by-case basis, but in total can return significant additional opportunity. Thus, you never get over the hump and see the return.
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When Recommendations Go Wrong
I just logged onto Netflix to add some shows to my kid's queue. The first recommendation was "The Princess Diaries (Fullscreen)." I'm always curious why Netflix (or Amazon, etc.) is recommending something. The reason left me shaking my head: "Because you enjoyed: The Princess Diaries (Widescreen)." Huh? I enjoyed seeing the whole movie so much--I'd love to see it with the sides cut off!
Netflix apparently views the fullscrren and widescreen versions as two different titles instead of a single title with different options. Weird.
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August 13, 2007
A Metadata Interface for Spreadsheets
Mike Farmer asks why spreadsheets (including Apple's new Numbers) don't include ways of getting at data.
Now that we have an easy way to assemble our data and make it look great we need a way to get at our favorite data. Imagine for a second, that on the left side of Numbers there is an option for getting your data from a Data Warehouse, Web Site, Web 2.0 interface (i.e. RSS, WebService, etc), or XML & CSV files. Now imagine that you click on one of those and you get a Metadata explorer that shows user friendly views of your data. Now you simply choose the fields that you want, how you want it assembled, then poof!, the data is dropped into a table in your spreadsheet. Implement some eye candy such as Apple's "skim" feature to browse sample data, etc and you have an extremely powerful BI tool.From Meanwhile, back at the farm...: In case missed it, Apple enters the BI Industry
Referenced Mon Aug 13 2007 06:52:54 GMT-0600 (MDT)
Great question. KnowNow has had a plugin for Excel that allows this. (I did a review for InfoWorld last year). Even so, the average user isn't going to install KnowNow's product--this sort of thing could easily be built in.
Google's spreadsheet has some of this (although not complete data feeds). You can use =GoogleLookup to find out all kinds of things from Google--and as it changes online, it will update in the spreadsheet. For example, =GoogleLookup("Paraguay"; "internet users") will return the number of Internet users in Paraguay. There's also GoogleFinance for financial data (e.g. current stock price). Why can't I do that from Excel or Numbers?
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OLPC Pictures
Scott Barlow took some pictures of the laptop from the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project. It's small that I thought. I love the color though.
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August 11, 2007
Riding the ULCER Century
 (click to enlarge) |
One of the things I've wanted to do for a long time is ride a century. Today was my day. Every year, the Bonneville Bicycling and Touring Club sponsors the Utah Lake Century Epic Ride or ULCER that goes 111 miles around Utah Lake (a large fresh water lake south of the Great Salt Lake). This year was the 23rd annual running of the event. The ride started and ended at Thanksgiving Point in Lehi and went south on the east side of the lake and north on the west (clockwise).
I took pictures while I rode and was posting them to Flickr and Facebook. Not sure if anyone besides my family was following along, but it was fun anyway.
The hardest part of the ride was between miles 50 and 68. We were on the west side of West Mountain, the wind was blowing against us and we were riding uphill. Plus I really wanted lunch (which was at mile 68). I just threw in with some other riders in a pace line and we made it.
In contrast, the west side of the lake was mostly downhill and the wind was at our backs. The sky was blue and I was happy. The best part was crossing the finish line with my family cheering me on.
Here are some relevant stats from my ride:
- Distance: 111 miles
- Time (moving): 6 hours 20 minutes (17.4 MPH average)
- Total time: 8 hours 15 minutes
- Calories expended: 5920
I'm tired, but feeling good.
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August 10, 2007
Whoa! Facebook Returning Free PHP Code...
I just clicked on the photos application in Facebook and got back some PHP code. I won't publish it here, for obvious reasons, but this is the header:
<?php
/* --------------------------------------------------------
My Photos - html/photos.php
---
Author: Jared S. Morgenstern
Creation Date: 7/7/06
Overview: Dispatcher page for code encapsulation.
-------------------------------------------------------- */
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Using Twitter in Emergencies
And speaking of Twitter, from David Stephenson, a story of how the LA Fire Dept. is using Twitter and other Web 2.0 technologies as part of their disaster recovery and preparedness efforts. In addition, the LAFD is using Twitter just to keep citizens informed of what they're doing:
"But the most popular effort has been the Twitter account, which now has about 190 followers who can receive Twitter updates from a mobile device. For example, a Twitter will report that a structural fire is being battled by 30 firefighters, or that a car accident has occurred. It reads like a dispatch log of sorts from the calls the department receives and answers.
"'The idea for us is that not everyone who is in need of information in times of distress will be sitting in front of a computer,' Humphrey said."From Boy, did I underestimate Twitter's value in a disaster! at Stephenson blogs on homeland security 2.0 et al.
Referenced Fri Aug 10 2007 18:37:13 GMT-0600 (MDT)
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Platform Strategies that Work
I've been following Gnomedex via Twitter--a bunch of people I follow are there. Dave Winer just said, regarding Mahalo:
When someone gets up and gives a speech about a platform, my mind gets engaged about ways I can have fun or make money.
There's none of that with Mahalo. It's about Jason and his investors making money. Why should I care about that?
It's like the iPhone. Very limited opportunities for us to be creative.From Here's what bothers me about Mahalo (Scripting News)
Referenced Fri Aug 10 2007 18:28:11 GMT-0600 (MDT)
Dave is making an excellent point here--maybe the most important point for anyone thinking they're making a platform play: it's not a platform if it's a walled garden. The fewer walls and barriers--the more ways to have fun and make money--the more accepted you'll be.
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August 9, 2007
A First Look at Numbers
I just published a first look review of Numbers, Apple's new spreadsheet, at Between the Lines. This is a cool product that points to some changes Excel has long needed. I'm not what you would call a spreadsheet power user, but I do use them a fair bit. I'm going to be using Numbers.
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Encrypting Your Email Address
Via a Wired story on protecting yourself from spam, I found Jim Tucek's Email Protector, a Javascript that let's you embed a mailto: link to your email address on your Web page without actually revealing the email address except to people who run the Javascript. The theory is that email address harvesters don't run Javascript.
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August 8, 2007
My Mail Is Offline
I haven't received any email all day, so if you've sent me something and are waiting for a response, I probably won't get your email for a while. Seems that windley.com is the subject of a distributed, dictionary email attack--that is a spam botnet is hitting my email server with every email address they can generate from the dictionary in hopes of getting a few through. The effect is an effective denial of service for my email server. The services on the server have been turned off awaiting the zombies to find somewhere else to play.
In the meantime, not getting any email all day kind of feels like a vacation!
Update: You can use my contact form to send messages to me.
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SearchStatus for Alexa and PageRank
 Firefox with
SearchStatus installed (click to enlarge) |
If you've installed toolbars to let you see the Google PageRank and Alexa ranking of the sites you visit, you might like this Firefox extension called SearchStatus. SearchStatus shows the current PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete rank (I'd never heard of it) in your status bar, or almost anywhere else you like. The attached screen shot shows the SearchStatus installation on Firefox on my Mac.
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August 7, 2007
Talking to Drew Major on Technometria
I just posted an interview Scott and I did with Drew Major, one of the founders of Novell and someone who's doing some very interesting things with video. Talking with Drew is really interesting because he has a long history in technology and isn't satisfied with how things are. He's willing to code to make things scale.
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eVoting Reports Continue Negative News
I just put some pointers at Between the Lines to three new reports on the security problems inherent in eVoting systems.
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Paul Graham on Stuff
Paul Graham has an excellent essay on stuff. Have we reached the point where most things are so cheap, we no longer need them?
A historical change has taken place, and I've now realized it. Stuff used to be valuable, and now it's not. In industrialized countries the same thing happened with food in the middle of the twentieth century. As food got cheaper (or we got richer; they're indistinguishable), eating too much started to be a bigger danger than eating too little. We've now reached that point with stuff. For most people, rich or poor, stuff has become a burden.From Stuff
Referenced Tue Aug 07 2007 08:40:34 GMT-0600 (MDT)
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August 6, 2007
Building an Adapter for the iPhone Jack
As you know, if you have an iPhone, the headphone jack is recessed. This was apparently done for esthetic reasons: pulling it out would have resulted in a big bulge--not something Steve Jobs would approve of.
I happen to have some accessories that don't work with the iPhone because of this little design decision. There are adapters, but they are bulky, stiff, ugly, and expensive. So, I decided to make my own. The results were OK--not perfect.
Here's what you need:
- A pair of earbuds with a plug that fits into the recessed socket. I had an old pair from an iPod that worked perfectly.
- A soldering iron (and the skill to use it without inhaling toxic fumes or burning yourself) along with the usual soldering stuff (like solder, for example).
- An in-line 1/8 inch phono jack. I got part number 274-274 from Radio Shack. I'm not wild about this jack since it's bulkier than I wanted.
- A length of 1/8 inch I.D. shrink-fit tubing. I use this as a strain reliever since the one in the Radio Shack jack is a little too big.
Here's all the parts on my workbench:
The first thing to do is cut the plug and about 8 inches of wire off the sacrificial earbuds:
Strip an inch of insulation from the end of the wire. I used a razor blade to gently cut the insulation and remove it. You'll see four wires: red (R), green (G), red/green stripped (RG), and copper, like so:
Put a 1.5 inch length of the shrink-fit tubing and the plug casing on the wire before you solder the jack in place. It won't fit otherwise.
The red/green stripped wire is the common. Solder that to the jack housing. There's a nifty little hole you can feed the wire through. Note that there's no need to strip the wires--in fact you can't. Just solder them in place.
Next solder the red wire to the silver tab and the green wire to the bronze colored tab.
Push the shrink-fit tubing under the crimp on the jack and shrink it. Then crimp the tabs on the jack housing around the tubing. This is also a good time to trim the excess wire.
The final step is to push the housing up and screw it onto the jack. All done!
The wires on the iPod earbuds aren't easy to solder. I had to keep playing with them to get a good connection. Testing them will tell you how good your solder joints are. The unit is also bulkier then I'd like--the Radio Shack plug is the culprit. I'm looking for a smaller, more svelte phono plug. Still for the cost of $3, I've got an adapter that works fine. Not bad.
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Fake Steve is Outted
If you haven't heard, a reporter (Brad Stone) from the NY Times outted Fake Steve. It was a fun ride.
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August 3, 2007
IT Conversations Top Ten Shows for July 2007
Here's the top ten shows on IT Conversations (by downloads) for July 2007:
- Scott Berkun - Technometria: The Myths of Innovation (Rating: 3.45)
How do you know whether a hot technology will succeed or fail? Or where the next big idea will come from? The best answers come not from the popular myths we tell about innovation, but instead from time-tested truths that explain how we've made it this far. In The Myths of Innovation, author Scott Berkun takes a careful look at innovation history, including the software and Internet Age, to reveal how ideas truly become successful innovations-truths that people can apply to today's challenges. He joins Phil, Scott, and Ben to discuss his new book and his career.
- Simon Phipps - Technometria: Open Source Without Borders (No rating yet)
Open source continues to grow as a viable alternative for enterprises and Sun Microsystems is a leading proponent of its use. Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer for the company, joins Phil, Scott, and Ben to discuss Sun's activities. Simon first reviews his somewhat unusual job title, talking about how he came into the work. He assesses how open source is growing worldwide and how important it is to nuture these new markets.
- Dr. Moira Gunn - BioTech Nation (No rating yet)
On this special edition of BioTech Nation, Tech Nation host Dr. Moira Gunn reads a chapter from her new book "Welcome to BioTech Nation." Listen to how BioTech Nation got started, her experiences along the way, and how she plunged into the international biotech scene.
- Lisa See - Tech Nation (No rating yet)
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Lisa See. They look at a book that is 350 years old, the subject of much academic interest as well as the subject of her latest novel "Peony in Love."
- Fabrizio Capobianco - Mobile Open Source and Sync in an iPhone Era (No rating yet)
Mobile phone shipment volumes are so huge that Microsoft and Apple aspire to capture only a fraction of the total market. Carriers and handset makers haven't made interoperability of mobile devices' address books or calendars a high priority. Funambol is a company and an open source community dedicated to making further mobile device interoperability progress. Will it be enough to overcome the walled gardens of the mobile device industry? Will the era of the iPhone bring further progress?
- Scott Lemon, Dave Fletcher - Technometria (Rating: 3.55)
Instead of a single subject, this week Phil and Scott are joined by Dave Fletcher of the State of Utah, to discuss a wide range of current tech issues. Scott first reviews his experiences trying out Ning, a platform that allows users to build their own social network. The group also discusses such topics as social networking in government, class divisions on social networking sites, and Phil experiences with the iPhone, including the Friday first day event.
- Ken Banks - Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators (No rating yet)
In this conversation Jon Udell and Ken Banks explore the economics of cellphone use in Africa, the communication patterns that automated text messaging can support, and the challenge of building an application that supports an aging population of hand-me-down phones.
- Sasha Abramsky - Tech Nation (Rating: 4.67)
Together with Sasha Abramsky, senior fellow at the New York based Demos Foundation, Dr. Moira Gunn takes a look at the state of American prisons. There has been a lot of effort put into developing new technology in this arena, so how do penitentiaries in the US stack up against those in the rest of the world?
- Rob Gifford - Tech Nation (No rating yet)
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with NPR's former China Correspondent, Rob Gifford, about his experiences of crossing China by highway. They discuss the signs of the embrace of science and technology there, and how to use a Chinese keyboard.
- Timo Hannay - Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators (Rating: 4.10)
As director of web publishing for Nature Publishing Group, Timo Hannay is applying web 2.0 principles to the realm of science. His projects include: Connotea, a social bookmarking service for scientists; Nature Network, a social network for scientists; and Nature Precedings, a site where researchers can share and discuss work prior to publication.
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One Stop Business Registration
I just finished setting up an LLC using Utah's One Stop Business Registration. This is an event-style eGovernment service that we first envisioned when I was CIO. It's been in operation for a while, but this was my first opportunity to use it. I was impressed. The application takes all of the various interactions you'd have with the State to create a business and streamlines it into one, easy to follow workflow.
The only criticism I had, and it's minor one, is that the application asked if I wanted to add any additional articles to the Articles of Incorporation, without giving me an opportunity to see what the application has placed there as part of the boilerplate. A lawyer would probably have a feel for that, but I didn't. I wanted to compare what it had put in with some of the Articles I have from other LLCs.
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August 2, 2007
Utah's Move to More Centralized IT
Government Technology has a story about Utah's move to a more centralized IT organization. No big surprises, but it tells the story and concludes that the move has been surprisingly smooth. Steve FLetcher has done a good job in the transition (as have his many lieutenants who helped greatly and don't get mentioned much in the article).
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Doc Searls Has Two New Homes
Doc's taking an apartment in the greater Boston to complement his second year as a Berkman Fellow. He's also moving into a new home online. Wow, one move of that magnitude would bring lesser men to their knees. I'm impressed.
Bonus link: to get Google's juices flowing: Doc Searls.
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Green Pixel Plague on Apple Displays
Doug Kaye has been bitten by the green pixel problem. He blames the display, but I don't think it is that simple. Here's why.
I too have been troubled by this problem since I got a 30 inch display. Over that time, however, I've had 4 different Powerbooks or MacBook Pros and they've exhibited different behaviors. One would give me the green pixels every time, all the time. No amount of rebooting or reconnecting the display would fix it. With two, I never saw the problem--not once. With the MacBook Pro I'm using now, I see the problem occasionally, but disconnecting and reconnecting the video cord has always made the problem go away.
I also have two 30 inch displays--one at home and one and work and they behave consistently on the different laptops. So, I suspect that it's more complicated than a problem with the display. I think it's an interaction between the video card and display. I think, for example, that my new Macbook Pro (LED display) has a different video card that my previous two Macbook Pros. Even so, the fact that Apple has failed to acknowledge or fix the problem is disheartening.
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August 1, 2007
Open Source: Locked Into Uncertainty
I was browsing the ZDNet blogs this morning and saw this ad:
This caught my eye and I clicked through. The ad takes you to case studies from Microsoft, including one showcasing the State of Illinois' email consolidation project. Utah did something similar back in 2002. Believe me, it's not an easy job.
As you'd expect since it was a Microsoft case study, Illinois chose to consolidate an Exchange/Active Directory solution--they had different agencies using Exchange, GroupWise, and Notes. We were luckier--almost everyone was usin GroupWise and Novell directory--although there were lots of servers with out of date versions that had to be updated before we could install a meta-directory.
I wouldn't fault any CIO for choosing Exchange. It's the dominant email platform at this point and clearly the safe choice. What I do find a little interesting is that Illinois officials would go out of their way to help Microsoft create an anti-open source propaganda video. The two stars are Paul Campbell, Director of CMS (Central Management Services) and Tony Daniels, the agency's Deputy Director. At one point, Daniels says:
"People say that open source doesn't lock you into any one company, but when you think about it, it locks you into uncertainty."
Daniels also says something about not having time for "science projects." Did Microsoft write the script? Sadly, probably not. That's probably what he really believes. When I became CIO for Utah, I found a culture that was ignorant and, in some cases, scared of open source. That's probably not just true of state government, but any old-line business.
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Shutting Down Dell
Now that Apple's market cap is twice that of Dell's ($127.8B vs $63.6B), there's on