Wednesday, May 16, 2018
Sunday, August 13, 2017
So much has happened.
I forgot about this blog. My first post since 2014! So much has happened in that amount of time.
Saturday, June 7, 2014
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Building my first Twitter application
...while listening to NPR streaming to my AirPlay speakers with the HAM radio tuned to 146.520 in the background. Yes, I'm a geek. Was there ever any question?
Saturday, September 18, 2010
I'm not a hunter
That said, I do support the so-called "right" of people to hunt. I prefer if someone goes out of their way to kill an animal there be a use for the decedent. Even if you shoot, say, deer for sport perhaps the meat could be harvested for, say, a local food bank? I know that's not easy, even food banks and soup kitchens, ones operated under by license, have strict rules and laws regarding the source of the product they are giving away in most cases.
Hunting just isn't for me. Granted I do enjoy a good hunting story, particularly that of Colonel John Henry Patterson, the man who killed two maneless male lions in Tsavo, Kenya because the lions were making mincemeat out of his railroad bridge building crew. Patterson later wrote a book called, aptly, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo and a "based somewhat on a true story" movie was produced in the 90's called The Ghost and the Darkness. Enough about the history. Besides tracking and killing the two male tigers who were eating his crew Patterson's account of his time in Kenya also included many stories about hunting in general. In fact he killed, and this is from memory so don't quote me, a species of antelope unknown to science that was named for him as the discoverer. The most entertaining story of hunting was a failed hunt and I believe it involved either a water buffalo or rhino, whatever it was it was something big. Patterson shot the beast with a fairly low powered rifle and the bullet failed to penetrate the skin of the beast. What it did succeed in doing was piss the giant off in a big way and it charged Patterson who took defense by lying down in the tall grass. After the beast had passed Patterson, in his own words, decided to shoot again "against his better judgement". This turned the pissed-off-o-meter of the animal to eleven, so to speak, but Patterson survived the encounter.
What's the point of all this? Well a lady from Massachusetts on a gator hunt in South Carolina shot and stunned a 1,025 pound american alligator this week which she then killed with a knife between the skull and spinal column. But why? Is she going to eat a 1,025 pound gator? I don't think so.
I'll say this: I'm deathly afraid of alligators. Crocodiles too. I don't like them and we have alligators in North Carolina. In fact I've seen a few, very far out East in the state, mostly along Highway 64 close to Manns Harbor just past the accurately named Alligator River. An alligator is one animal I'd kill without second thought if I believed my pets or myself to be in danger but I don't think I'd want to go kill a 100+ year old alligator "just for the hell of it".
Still, somehow, I support the ability for someone to choose to do so. It's just not for me nor for is freezing my ass off turkey or deer hunting in the fall or winter months. If you want to, more power to you, I guess.
Hunting just isn't for me. Granted I do enjoy a good hunting story, particularly that of Colonel John Henry Patterson, the man who killed two maneless male lions in Tsavo, Kenya because the lions were making mincemeat out of his railroad bridge building crew. Patterson later wrote a book called, aptly, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo and a "based somewhat on a true story" movie was produced in the 90's called The Ghost and the Darkness. Enough about the history. Besides tracking and killing the two male tigers who were eating his crew Patterson's account of his time in Kenya also included many stories about hunting in general. In fact he killed, and this is from memory so don't quote me, a species of antelope unknown to science that was named for him as the discoverer. The most entertaining story of hunting was a failed hunt and I believe it involved either a water buffalo or rhino, whatever it was it was something big. Patterson shot the beast with a fairly low powered rifle and the bullet failed to penetrate the skin of the beast. What it did succeed in doing was piss the giant off in a big way and it charged Patterson who took defense by lying down in the tall grass. After the beast had passed Patterson, in his own words, decided to shoot again "against his better judgement". This turned the pissed-off-o-meter of the animal to eleven, so to speak, but Patterson survived the encounter.
What's the point of all this? Well a lady from Massachusetts on a gator hunt in South Carolina shot and stunned a 1,025 pound american alligator this week which she then killed with a knife between the skull and spinal column. But why? Is she going to eat a 1,025 pound gator? I don't think so.
I'll say this: I'm deathly afraid of alligators. Crocodiles too. I don't like them and we have alligators in North Carolina. In fact I've seen a few, very far out East in the state, mostly along Highway 64 close to Manns Harbor just past the accurately named Alligator River. An alligator is one animal I'd kill without second thought if I believed my pets or myself to be in danger but I don't think I'd want to go kill a 100+ year old alligator "just for the hell of it".
Still, somehow, I support the ability for someone to choose to do so. It's just not for me nor for is freezing my ass off turkey or deer hunting in the fall or winter months. If you want to, more power to you, I guess.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Today's post is a song
..and not one I wrote, sorry to say.
Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above,
Don't fence me in.
Let me ride through the wide open country that I love,
Don't fence me in.
Let me be by myself in the evenin' breeze,
And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees,
Send me off forever but I ask you please,
Don't fence me in.
Just turn me loose, let me straddle my old saddle
Underneath the western skies.
On my Cayuse, let me wander over yonder
Till I see the mountains rise.
I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences
And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses
And I can't look at hovels and I can't stand fences
Don't fence me in.
Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above,
Don't fence me in.
Let me ride through the wide open country that I love,
Don't fence me in.
Let me be by myself in the evenin' breeze,
And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees,
Send me off forever but I ask you please,
Don't fence me in.
Just turn me loose, let me straddle my old saddle
Underneath the western skies.
On my Cayuse, let me wander over yonder
Till I see the mountains rise.
I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences
And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses
And I can't look at hovels and I can't stand fences
Don't fence me in.
Monday, April 12, 2010
Stuck in the mud
I need to be doing more with my life but I just can't seem to get around to doing just that. I love photography but I rarely take photos. I love to travel but I rarely go anywhere. I love to write but can't seem to push a noun and a verb together when I have the time. The solution seems to be grab the camera, go somewhere and write some kind of photo/travel journal or book but it's more difficult than you might imagine, at least it is for me.
Perhaps I'm depressed. My most favorite place in the world (within a reasonable distance mind you) is the North Carolina Outer Banks, in particular the unincorporated town of Rodanthe. Rodanthe, and the Outer Banks in a larger sense, is the location where I've taken what I believe to be my best photographs. The photo I've linked above is one I took last year in the town of Rodanthe, for the record. Trouble is Rodanthe is becoming the vacation spot for my ex-wife and her new boyfriend and this area of the Outer Banks is small, far too tiny to not expect chance encounters to occur. It's not that I don't think we can happily all co-exist i town, that's not what I'm implying at all but I do think having me so close would cause some discomfort for them and I'm all about living and let live.
So what to do? I think it's time for me to find a new place to hang out on the weekends. The NC Outer Banks is four hours (plus another 30 minutes most trips) to the East. If I take out a map and draw a four hour driving circle over Durham, NC I bet I could locate a few interesting places to visit and photograph. The only question is what to drive. Sure, my Chevrolet Valdez will get me there, no question about that but hotels each and every weekend are going to get expensive. One possible solution is to purchase another RV for travel. Being single, and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future and perhaps forever, I don't require a large RV and deals on fully converted RV vans can be found if you're willing to look hard enough.
I've found two vans with potential, one here in the greater Raleigh area and another down in Florida. I'm leaning towards the Florida van but, quite frankly, I'm worried about the mold that could have potentially accumulated in a RV van that lives outside in the Orlando, FL area. This is a real concern and potentially costly to fix if the elements have managed to get a foothold inside. But that's neither her nor there as it's a bridge I must cross later.
I'll keep everyone posted.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Of IPv6 and proxies: squid vs socks
I stumbled upon something interesting today, it should have been obvious but still I found it to be quite a surprise. First, a bit of background. I have a friend that lives on the coast almost four hours away. For years I've administered her simple network remotely mainly via the single open port to the Internet (ssh). All device on the network, aside from the PCs she insists to use, could be managed via ssh or http. For the http hosts I've kept a Squid http proxy running and I'd connect to those devices via a ssh tunnel using port forwarding and for years this setup was "good enough". Plus it gave me a remote host on the Internet were I could redirect my http traffic should I be so inclined. There are drawbacks to this setup, first and foremost my DNS queries would be resolved on my local network and the http traffic would travel over the tunnel thus bypassing any http proxies, but the evidence of my trespass was still evident in the DNS queries. Granted this wasn't a problem as I was never going places I really shouldn't have been in the first place so it wasn't ever a concern.
The old command I used to use to connect to my Squid proxy was: http greg@myserver.remotenetwork.com -8080:127.0.0.1:8080. After the tunnel was set up I'd go into Firefox and set up the proxies under Network Settings to use 127.0.0.1 as the proxy IP address and 8080 as the remote host.
Flash forward to last week. The remote ssh host in question is an iMac desktop and during a recent trip I upgraded the iMac to Snow Leopard. This caused a few applications to seize, most notably Squidman, my old trusty http proxy. I left the beach without installing a new Snow Leopard friendly proxy. Whoops. I just wrote it down on the to-do list next time I needed a salt air fix, and being a business at the beach this is certainly what we can define as the "slow time" of the year and I wouldn't likely have a need to connect to any http hosts between trips in the first place.
It's true that I am an old network dog but I occasionally learn a new (old) trick and I did that this week. A discussion started over e-mail about proxies and what-not someone suggested using a SOCKS proxy which would do two things: resolve DNS on the ssh host, not the local network and redirect http/https traffic (among other cool things). I tried it out using the following command:
ssh greg@myserver.remotenetwork.com -D 8888
From there I set *ONLY* the Socks proxy in my Firefox network settings to 127.0.0.1 and port 8888 and, as if magic with no configuration of extra software on the iMac my http requests were redirected over my tunnel just like when I used to use Squid. Cool!
But here's where things got interesting. Because my DNS queries were also being redirected I could resolve addresses for IPv6 hosts, such as ipv6.google.com and m0n0.ch. Cooler yet was even though my machine was on an IPv4 only network I could reach IPv6 webpages via http. This was very cool indeed. Had I thought about this prior to today it should have been obvious this would have worked but it still surprised me and I'm happy to have the IPv6 connectivity and I just think it's cool that I can tunnel requests for IPv6 hosts when my laptop is on a network that only supports IPv4.
Give it a shot, it works pretty well.
The old command I used to use to connect to my Squid proxy was: http greg@myserver.remotenetwork.com -8080:127.0.0.1:8080. After the tunnel was set up I'd go into Firefox and set up the proxies under Network Settings to use 127.0.0.1 as the proxy IP address and 8080 as the remote host.
Flash forward to last week. The remote ssh host in question is an iMac desktop and during a recent trip I upgraded the iMac to Snow Leopard. This caused a few applications to seize, most notably Squidman, my old trusty http proxy. I left the beach without installing a new Snow Leopard friendly proxy. Whoops. I just wrote it down on the to-do list next time I needed a salt air fix, and being a business at the beach this is certainly what we can define as the "slow time" of the year and I wouldn't likely have a need to connect to any http hosts between trips in the first place.
It's true that I am an old network dog but I occasionally learn a new (old) trick and I did that this week. A discussion started over e-mail about proxies and what-not someone suggested using a SOCKS proxy which would do two things: resolve DNS on the ssh host, not the local network and redirect http/https traffic (among other cool things). I tried it out using the following command:
ssh greg@myserver.remotenetwork.com -D 8888
From there I set *ONLY* the Socks proxy in my Firefox network settings to 127.0.0.1 and port 8888 and, as if magic with no configuration of extra software on the iMac my http requests were redirected over my tunnel just like when I used to use Squid. Cool!
But here's where things got interesting. Because my DNS queries were also being redirected I could resolve addresses for IPv6 hosts, such as ipv6.google.com and m0n0.ch. Cooler yet was even though my machine was on an IPv4 only network I could reach IPv6 webpages via http. This was very cool indeed. Had I thought about this prior to today it should have been obvious this would have worked but it still surprised me and I'm happy to have the IPv6 connectivity and I just think it's cool that I can tunnel requests for IPv6 hosts when my laptop is on a network that only supports IPv4.
Give it a shot, it works pretty well.
Friday, January 1, 2010
Outer Banks indeed
I'm back on the Outer Banks once again and I'm loving it. I've been here for a few days and I'll be leaving tomorrow most likely. I love it out here. Great place. Greater people. Yes, the winter in Rodanthe is kind of "dead" with the population of year-round residents plummeting to near zero and only a handful of businesses open, one of which is the local gas station. Still there are few places on the globe I'd rather be during my down time.
But it's the new year so let's talk about that. First, goodbye and good riddance to 2009. This year saw the unraveling of my 13 year marriage and forthcoming divorce and I can't be happier that this year is going to be behind me for good. Kelly and I remain close friends and that's the single bright spot in that whole debacle. But it's not something I want to ever go through again. Oh, and there was also a banking meltdown, massive layoffs across multiple industries, the death's of my friend's parents (both in a car accident at the same time).. there was much to hate about 2009 and I do despise that year with a true passion.
2010, I hope, is a better year. It's starting rather well, I have to admit. I'm back at the beach and I brought in the new year with my good friends Jeanette and Pauly, both local residents. Pauly's family has a long fishing history in Wanchese, NC, well all over the Eastern US actually. I was going to stay in a local rental unit, a small but comfortable one, but a problem surfaced on the way down at Kelly's condo so I stayed here to sort things out so she didn't have to come down. That's what I call a win-win for each of us! Kelly's condo is much more comfortable, roomy and it has all the comforts of home. You also can't beat the view. It's fantastic.
I'll get back to work in a couple days and I feel invigorated. I'm ready for the challenge and I'm looking forward to getting back in school once again. I'm also thinking about moving next year. The company offered me a position in Philadelphia and I was very tempted after visiting the historic city but I think I'll stay here, in North Carolina. Friends also offered to rent me a place in Maryland but I don't know if I could make that work, professionally at least. I'll probably stay in or around Durham and I'd like to get a small house where I can once again share my down time with a dog. I miss my dogs terribly and I think they miss me too.
Well that's it for 2009 and the into to 2010. I can't believe this year is here! 2010! Holy cow. Life is flying by me and I've been a numb zombie for nearly the past year. I think it's time to return to the land of the living.
But it's the new year so let's talk about that. First, goodbye and good riddance to 2009. This year saw the unraveling of my 13 year marriage and forthcoming divorce and I can't be happier that this year is going to be behind me for good. Kelly and I remain close friends and that's the single bright spot in that whole debacle. But it's not something I want to ever go through again. Oh, and there was also a banking meltdown, massive layoffs across multiple industries, the death's of my friend's parents (both in a car accident at the same time).. there was much to hate about 2009 and I do despise that year with a true passion.
2010, I hope, is a better year. It's starting rather well, I have to admit. I'm back at the beach and I brought in the new year with my good friends Jeanette and Pauly, both local residents. Pauly's family has a long fishing history in Wanchese, NC, well all over the Eastern US actually. I was going to stay in a local rental unit, a small but comfortable one, but a problem surfaced on the way down at Kelly's condo so I stayed here to sort things out so she didn't have to come down. That's what I call a win-win for each of us! Kelly's condo is much more comfortable, roomy and it has all the comforts of home. You also can't beat the view. It's fantastic.
I'll get back to work in a couple days and I feel invigorated. I'm ready for the challenge and I'm looking forward to getting back in school once again. I'm also thinking about moving next year. The company offered me a position in Philadelphia and I was very tempted after visiting the historic city but I think I'll stay here, in North Carolina. Friends also offered to rent me a place in Maryland but I don't know if I could make that work, professionally at least. I'll probably stay in or around Durham and I'd like to get a small house where I can once again share my down time with a dog. I miss my dogs terribly and I think they miss me too.
Well that's it for 2009 and the into to 2010. I can't believe this year is here! 2010! Holy cow. Life is flying by me and I've been a numb zombie for nearly the past year. I think it's time to return to the land of the living.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Friday, December 4, 2009
I knew I recognized that address range...
Google's new public DNS server is up and running and I'm pretty excited about it and their adherence to DNS standards. The network addresses, 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 were bothering me, though. Where had I seen these before? A quick whois shows the following:
Level 3 Communications, Inc. LVLT-ORG-8-8 (NET-8-0-0-0-1)
8.0.0.0 - 8.255.255.255
Google Incorporated LVLT-GOOGL-1-8-8-8 (NET-8-8-8-0-1)
8.8.8.0 - 8.8.8.255
Yup. Level 3. I've set up many a BGP neighbor with them in the past and that's where I saw the 8.0.0.0 range in the past. It's cool that Google snagged 8.8.8.0/24 from Level 3, well not "snagged", but you know what I mean.
Now, the big question that matters only to me: what about IPv6 connectivity for public Google DNS?
Level 3 Communications, Inc. LVLT-ORG-8-8 (NET-8-0-0-0-1)
8.0.0.0 - 8.255.255.255
Google Incorporated LVLT-GOOGL-1-8-8-8 (NET-8-8-8-0-1)
8.8.8.0 - 8.8.8.255
Yup. Level 3. I've set up many a BGP neighbor with them in the past and that's where I saw the 8.0.0.0 range in the past. It's cool that Google snagged 8.8.8.0/24 from Level 3, well not "snagged", but you know what I mean.
Now, the big question that matters only to me: what about IPv6 connectivity for public Google DNS?
Thursday, December 3, 2009
hum.....
So, I installed my Soekris Net-4801 m0n0wall and my RR speed tests have decreased dramatically:
Bandwidth is determined by the cable modem, not the firewall. So.. why would I have been getting close to 20 meg down before and now "just" 5-6? I had long suspected that something was wrong with my cable modem and that's why I was getting such astonishing download speeds and perhaps that's all been fixed.
More testing is needed.
Bandwidth is determined by the cable modem, not the firewall. So.. why would I have been getting close to 20 meg down before and now "just" 5-6? I had long suspected that something was wrong with my cable modem and that's why I was getting such astonishing download speeds and perhaps that's all been fixed.
More testing is needed.
Monday, November 30, 2009
True story.
I met a girl this weekend who has a Ph.D. in Statistics**. What are the chances of that? I suppose I should have asked.
** And for those following along with my life drama at home, no, it was not "that" kind of meet. She's married.
** And for those following along with my life drama at home, no, it was not "that" kind of meet. She's married.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Confused
I wanted to learn more about Asterisk and VoIP in general so I installed Azktoria on a Soekris Net-4801. I'm so confused. I'm trying to set up a SIP client on my laptop to connect to the PBX but I'm not having much luck yet. I'll keep tinkering. This is going to be fun. Oh, and co-worker and friend Heath gave me and older Cisco IP phone but I've got to apply the SIP image to get that working.
Next I'd like to get a proper network up and running with my registered domain name that I'm not doing much with.
Next I'd like to get a proper network up and running with my registered domain name that I'm not doing much with.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Goodbye Philadelphia!
You are a great city, rich in history and a fantastic place to spend a week of work or vacation. But, alas, it's time to leave and ahead of me is a long drive. Takeoff in t minus 1:45.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Thoughs on 2001: A Space Odyssey
2001 is one of my favorite movies. What Kubrick managed to create, in terms of special effects, all the way back in 1968 was simply amazing. Watch the movie and think about the lack of CGI and how good the space scenes look when compared to Star Wars, a movie released almost a full decade later.
The production part where I wish I could have been a fly on the way was where the opera singers must have been gathered to record the "monolith scenes". I can just picture the singers being handed the music and thinking "are you serious? This is just fifteen pages of the letter 'e'." Must have been funny and I wish I could have seen that but having not yet been born it would have made logistics rather difficult.
The production part where I wish I could have been a fly on the way was where the opera singers must have been gathered to record the "monolith scenes". I can just picture the singers being handed the music and thinking "are you serious? This is just fifteen pages of the letter 'e'." Must have been funny and I wish I could have seen that but having not yet been born it would have made logistics rather difficult.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
it was about this time.. on a dark and stormy day
I think the year was 1993 and it was around this time of year. It was bitterly cold outside, that much I do remember, but then again I was a youngster back then and cold affected me in greater ways than it does today. I was working at then Glaxo, a pharmaceutical company, in RTP, North Carolina and I had just be introduced to a old-school operating system called UNIX.
Personal computers back then were running DOS with Windows 3.1 on top. It's hard to remember back in the day that the Microsoft GUI ran on top of a separate operating system, and no necessarily one made by Microsoft. IBM, DR and a host of other companies had their own versions of DOS and a computer could be running any kind of DOS. IBM had a little thing called OS/2 2.0 but in 1993 OS/2 was, shall we say, rough around the edges? It ran circles around DOS/Windows, that much was totally clear, but it lacked a bit of polish that would come later in OS/2 3.0 and later Warp. But that is future speak back in '93.
At a large company you might find some Macs in the marketing department, perhaps elsewhere. In the data center you might find a VAX, probably for the R&D side of the house. Perhaps an IBM mainframe was around too. But lurking back there was UNIX. Perhaps it was just a mail server or something else, or maybe you had some mid-range UNIX systems even big ones the size of, oh, I don't know, a full-sized Ford van? Sun Microsystems was a player back then and so was HP, IBM, Silicon Graphics, and many others that made their own versions of UNIX. UNIX was created at Bell Labs in 1969 and it gained a foothold that it has yet to lose today.
UNIX was strange and foreign to me. There was an odd grapihcal interface called "X Windows" and a command line interface that was at first quite baffeling (though in starting to poke around the command line I could clearly see the influce of UNIX on DOS as serveral, if not many, of the commands were the same, though the guts of the OS couldn't be more different).
Back to that cold, blustery day. I had an application on a UNIX machine that was located in the R&D campus and I was on the commerical campus. We were connected by, at the time, blistering fast 100 megabit FDDI rings and the computers were plugged into shared 10 meg hugs. Laughable today, but fairly state of the art back then.
So, here I was. I needed to launch an application on a machine located on a differnet campus and I had resolved myself to get out in the cold, walk over, sit down in front of the other UNIX machine, and do the work that needed doing.
Not so fast! In walks one of the more senior UNIX gurus and he says "just set your display varialbe and bring the GUI app up on your desktop." I thought that was the craziest thing I'd ever heard. Launch an app on a remote machine and use the app on my local machine? I logged in (telnet back in those days) issued my 'setenv DISPLAY=my.ipaddress.blah' and proceeded to launch the app. A few seconds later there it appeared on my machine as if magic.
Had this been a slight-of-hand magic trick it would have been one of the best I have ever seen. I wondered then why and how could an "old" operating system have functionality that copycat desktop operation systems couldn't dream of. The root/superuser account was a neat trick too - keeping the operating system delicate parts away from the user so the user (or in the future, a virus) couldn't do accidental damage was pretty neat too.
Even today, using a XP machine (I don't have a Vista machine and probably never will.. work will likely skip Vista and go straight to 7), I wonder why things are so.. "primitive". I love my Mac, my personal computing platform outside of work, and there is far greater amount of spit and polish on the Mac OS compared to Windows, and in some ways Linux and UNIX. Yes, there are features of Linux and UNIX that I think are lacking in OS X but OS X is one heck of a tightly integrated OS. It's easy to use and the power is still there in the background in you want to use it. If you don't that's ok too. You can still do things with a Mac you can't do with a PC running Windows. The reverse is true I'm sure but I can't think of an example.
Still, UNIX is one heck of an operating system. It can run on little systems and it can scale to run on very large systems. Wonderful stuff. I hope UNIX never dies even though eventually I think Linux is going to totally take over that market space. When that day comes I'll smile a bit, afterall any time a community driven effort of any kind can reach such measured success is wonderful. But good, old UNIX will always be just that. Good stuff.
Personal computers back then were running DOS with Windows 3.1 on top. It's hard to remember back in the day that the Microsoft GUI ran on top of a separate operating system, and no necessarily one made by Microsoft. IBM, DR and a host of other companies had their own versions of DOS and a computer could be running any kind of DOS. IBM had a little thing called OS/2 2.0 but in 1993 OS/2 was, shall we say, rough around the edges? It ran circles around DOS/Windows, that much was totally clear, but it lacked a bit of polish that would come later in OS/2 3.0 and later Warp. But that is future speak back in '93.
At a large company you might find some Macs in the marketing department, perhaps elsewhere. In the data center you might find a VAX, probably for the R&D side of the house. Perhaps an IBM mainframe was around too. But lurking back there was UNIX. Perhaps it was just a mail server or something else, or maybe you had some mid-range UNIX systems even big ones the size of, oh, I don't know, a full-sized Ford van? Sun Microsystems was a player back then and so was HP, IBM, Silicon Graphics, and many others that made their own versions of UNIX. UNIX was created at Bell Labs in 1969 and it gained a foothold that it has yet to lose today.
UNIX was strange and foreign to me. There was an odd grapihcal interface called "X Windows" and a command line interface that was at first quite baffeling (though in starting to poke around the command line I could clearly see the influce of UNIX on DOS as serveral, if not many, of the commands were the same, though the guts of the OS couldn't be more different).
Back to that cold, blustery day. I had an application on a UNIX machine that was located in the R&D campus and I was on the commerical campus. We were connected by, at the time, blistering fast 100 megabit FDDI rings and the computers were plugged into shared 10 meg hugs. Laughable today, but fairly state of the art back then.
So, here I was. I needed to launch an application on a machine located on a differnet campus and I had resolved myself to get out in the cold, walk over, sit down in front of the other UNIX machine, and do the work that needed doing.
Not so fast! In walks one of the more senior UNIX gurus and he says "just set your display varialbe and bring the GUI app up on your desktop." I thought that was the craziest thing I'd ever heard. Launch an app on a remote machine and use the app on my local machine? I logged in (telnet back in those days) issued my 'setenv DISPLAY=my.ipaddress.blah' and proceeded to launch the app. A few seconds later there it appeared on my machine as if magic.
Had this been a slight-of-hand magic trick it would have been one of the best I have ever seen. I wondered then why and how could an "old" operating system have functionality that copycat desktop operation systems couldn't dream of. The root/superuser account was a neat trick too - keeping the operating system delicate parts away from the user so the user (or in the future, a virus) couldn't do accidental damage was pretty neat too.
Even today, using a XP machine (I don't have a Vista machine and probably never will.. work will likely skip Vista and go straight to 7), I wonder why things are so.. "primitive". I love my Mac, my personal computing platform outside of work, and there is far greater amount of spit and polish on the Mac OS compared to Windows, and in some ways Linux and UNIX. Yes, there are features of Linux and UNIX that I think are lacking in OS X but OS X is one heck of a tightly integrated OS. It's easy to use and the power is still there in the background in you want to use it. If you don't that's ok too. You can still do things with a Mac you can't do with a PC running Windows. The reverse is true I'm sure but I can't think of an example.
Still, UNIX is one heck of an operating system. It can run on little systems and it can scale to run on very large systems. Wonderful stuff. I hope UNIX never dies even though eventually I think Linux is going to totally take over that market space. When that day comes I'll smile a bit, afterall any time a community driven effort of any kind can reach such measured success is wonderful. But good, old UNIX will always be just that. Good stuff.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Thoughts on the AT&T Microcell
(that's not Kelly's microcell, it's just a hotlinked picture)
At my old house in Youngsville the cellular phone coverage was less than stellar (seemingly for all cell phone providers). AT&T seemed to perform slightly better than Verizon in the back reaches of Franklin County but that wasn't saying much. Kelly recently purchased an iPhone 3Gs and she loves the phone but the coverage was lacking as it always had been. If you stood perfectly still in the master bedroom you could reliably connect a call but isn't mobility the point of having a cell phone?
Enter the AT&T Microcell. Essentially a microcell is a 3G cell "tower" made by Cisco intended to be installed in AT&T customer homes. The microcell connects to your existing Internet connection and when connected your AT&T phone talks to the microcell which routes the traffic from G3 to IP (over your Internet connection) and sends the call across the Internet to an AT&T facility where it is processed in much the same way that "normal" cell connection is processed.
So, how does it work? Turns out pretty darn well. Kelly called to let me know she had picked up a microcell from the AT&T store. When she got home she connected the microcell to an existing Linksys switch located directly downstream from the firewall (in this case a Soekris Net4501 running M0nowall if anyone cares). The device flashed a couple lights and that was about it initially. The installation document said the next phase of the installation would take about 10 minutes and if all went well the device would be ready to use in about 90 minutes.
90 minutes later Kelly called, she had full 5 bars of 3g connectivity and the voice quality was crystal clear. But this was next to the microcell itself so a high quality connection was expected. Kelly then wandered around the house, yard, into the street, in fact all the way to the back fence all the time with at least four bars of 3g connectivity except for one isolated incident when she dropped down to two bars and her voice broke up, but only momentarily. She later went back to the same spot with no negative effect on voice quality.
In short, the microcell rocks! But I have many questions and I'm going to do have to do some troubleshooting in order to find out, and I hope to do this next week. First and foremost what devices are on the back end of the conversation? Is the data between the microcell and the backend device encrypted? Does the microcell support IPv6? Does a persistent connection exist between the microcell and AT&T back end equipment? It seems there would have to be. Otherwise in a true "dead zone" how would an incoming call connect and the phone ring? The microcell is behind a firewall (of course) so it's not like the AT&T back end devices could reach out and initiate a connection therefore a persistent connection must exist. Right?
So far, from the single test, what I can say is the microcell rocks. Even though I have superior connectivity at my place in Durham I may end up purchasing one for myself just to tinker and toy with the device, see what makes it tick, etc. I'll keep you all posted.
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