Misc

Don’t know if you’ve heard about this or not yet but there were multiple fibre cuts in at least two disparate geographic locations which cut off communications to 3 or 4 communities (Gilroy, Morgan Hill, San Martin and areas of South San Jose. The 2 sets of fibre cuts were, according to news reports, underground and at least 40 miles apart. Manhole covers were removed and the perpetrators went underground and precisely cut the proper cables to sever communications. Wireless, Internet and wireline phones were out of commission and so were police, fire, 911, hospitals, etc. Local ham radio operators are linking the communities and have been doing so since about 3AM (word is that the cuts occurred around 2AM this morning. Here are links to a couple of local news stations’ stories: CBS 5 and KTVU.

I ran Internet Operations for a few years back during the boom and this type of action requires some really specialized knowledge. And the surgical precision is downright amazing. I mean, it’s easy to knock down a pole or even go underground and wreak havoc but that’s not the impression I got from the news reports — the implication is they didn’t just go down and do tons of damage but they selected the locations, the cables and coordinated their activities to occur pretty much at the same time. To me this says it’s not just a prank. Maybe it was done to send a message?

Update, April 10: Some good links with more information on this:

PCWorld
eWeek
SFGate

There were 4 locations, 2 in San Carlos and 2 in San Jose. The two in San Jose (one at Monterey Highway between Blossom Hill and Chynoweth and the other near the old IBM (now Hitachi) plant on Cottle Road and Hayes) amounted to 4 cuts, 1 cable held 360 fibers and at each of the other 3 the cable held 48 fibers. In one report it said there were 14 cuts in one location but the SFGate piece says there were 4 cuts in each location.

Also, the two areas were hit about 2 hours apart, South San Jose first and San Carlos later.

Well, after that post on January 12 discussing the relative merits of low power PC versus a NAS, Fry’s put the 2TB model of the Buffalo Linkstation Quad on sale for $529 and I bought it. I’ve been running it for a little over 3 weeks and am really pleased with it. If the Quad would’ve cost $600 or more, I would’ve bought the QNAP TS-409 Pro Turbo and outfitted it with a couple of hard drives but for $529 I didn’t even think about it.

Pros:
1) Price.
2) Support forums.
3) Web access from outside your firewall.
4) The UI is the usual Buffalo NAS UI, enhanced for the additional RAID levels and the additional web access capabilities.
5) SSH server is still there and can be started if you pay attention to the howtos over at the Buffalo forums at NAS Central.
6) With a little sleuthing you can figure out how to submit cron jobs to do you backups to another Linkstation as opposed to using the web UI.

Cons:
1) Slower CPU (but still very capable in my opinion).
2) Media player isn’t that cool.
3) No access via iPhone/G1!
4) Not as great a selection of pre-loaded apps available as on the QNAP.
5) Disks aren’t hot-plug (but does anyone really need this?
6) Can’t upgrade RAID levels nondestructively like the QNAP.

So, on the whole, I’m pleased I bought it.

I haven’t been leaving my servers powered on for a while, now. Not having them available led me to purchase a Buffalo Linkstation Pro a while back. I’m really quite happy with Buffalo’s implementation — with just a little work on my part, I can SSH into the device and set up some additional services that aren’t already available. But, it comes with a print server, which gives me access to my USB printer over the network. But I’m still not able to run SqueezeCenter for my media. Yes, I could hack at my Linkstation some more and get it to run there but it doesn’t address any backup issues — sure, I can recreate the library by re-ripping all of my CDs but who wants to spend a couple of weeks doing that?

So, I’ve been considering purchasing or building a RAID NAS. QNAP has some really nice arrays that come equipped with MySQL, phpMyAdmin, NFS, DLNA and a number of other nice facilities but are pretty pricey ($300 for a 2-disk TS-209 II, $400 for a 4-disk TS-409 Pro Turbo and nearly $600 for a 5-disk TS-509 Pro, all without disks). They’re professional quality RAID devices, though, and come with excellent support … and SqueezeCenter should drop right onto them without a hitch.

But, I’m considering going a completely different route. The fit-PC Slim takes a different approach. It’s a small, low-power PC with wireless and USB on which you can run Linux or XP. So, I’m thinking I could buy one of those (for around $250, diskless), install my own 2.5″ ATA disk ($100, if I don’t like any of the ones I have laying around), install Linux, plug in a USB drive (another $100 if I don’t like what I already have) and, instead of RAID, run a cron job to rsync my precious filesystems.

Whatcha think?

(Yeah, Chad, I know, I really need to get comments fixed, don’t I? 🙂

Lots has happened since my last entry. Back in the middle of 2008, my company was bought by a rather large company and we are all employed by them. We made out well, financially, but some of the terms are a bit onerous. However, we have jobs and we can mostly continue doing the things we enjoy for a living.

On the technology front, I’ve all but abandoned Windows Mobile. Yeah, just when it’s starting to stabilize and get some really good apps, this early adopter is jumping ship. I bought a Nokia N95 and T-Mobile’s G1 (aka HTC Dream). The Nokia is an absolutely amazing convergence device, containing 2 cameras, a back 5 megapixel camera with excellent optics and a front 640×480 camera capable of video conferencing and live video streaming. Python is available for it and can run its own web server, serving content over the web-at-large. It’s a mature platform, running the Symbian operating system (which is in the process of being Open Sourced).

The G1 runs Android, a Linux-based operating system and is an amazing feat. The camera is nothing special but the rest of the features and capabilities are very good, if you’re an early adopter and a Linux fan. There are quite a few apps available for it, from a simple bubble level to a web server to barcode/price comparison apps, to Shazam (hold the microphone up to a playing song and it tries to identify it). There are RSS readers, social networking clients, GPS apps, weather apps, stock tickers, pretty much the expected complement of apps. And there are even a few Exchange clients available for it, too — while GMail is nice, I miss the rest of the features of an Exchange server. Maybe I just need to get used to Google’s features but, I have to say, I use a LOT of the features of my Outlook Calendar, Contacts and Tasks and I haven’t been able to adjust my usage to accomodate Google’s shortfalls/differences. Some of this may be due to the lack of a full-features import client — I use categories extensively which are brought over as notes, not labels andmany of my contacts’ details include birthday, anniversary and assistant information which I’ve come to rely on (reminders for these popping up on my phone and my Exchange client). While I’ve looked for other import clients, I haven’t yet mounted an exhaustive search but that’s on my to-do list — something that Google doesn’t yet support, either 🙂

I’m also all but abandoning Microsoft products on anything but my personal laptop. I’ve searched around and all of the services I provide on my home computers/servers can be done with Linux servers. I also intend to migrate from Microsoft Office to either Open Office — I don’t generally demand a lot of my word processor, spreadsheet nor presentation program and have found that Open Office handles my modest needs quite well. I have only just started my migration and it may take the better part of a year to get completely converted but it’s underway.

That’s a brief rundown on what I’ve been up to. Now that things have settled down in my “real life”, I hope to be able to post more frequently — I’ve got LOTS of new toys and experiences to share!

Unless you follow me on Twitter, you probably haven’t heard a lot from me so I thought I’d take a few minutes and bring you current.

• I purchased a Panasonic KX-TG9343T cordless phone. It’s a DECT 6.0 phone and supports the Open GAP standard (see the DECT Wikipedia reference) which should mean that it can operate as a handset in ANY DECT phone system.
• I’m looking into the snom m3 wireless VoIP phone. I’m staying away from 802.11 phonesets for the time being as I’ve heard they can be quite flakey and quirky. But it should be possible for my Panasonic handset to be an extension on the snom. We’ll see when I get around to purchasing the snom.
• I’m looking into new mobile phones, the Nokia N96 being my current favorite non-Windows Mobile phone. For Windows Mobile, the new HTC Touch Diamond is looking really sweet and fast but the MWg Atom Life Windows Mobile 6 Edition is also looking really nice and quite a bit cheaper. No GPS on the MWg Atom Life, whereas both the N96 and the Touch Diamond have one.
• My old border router died. Fortunately, I bought an Airlink101 AR680W 300N Wireless Router a while back so I had new hardware on-hand. It took a few hours to configure it but it’s working like a charm.
• I’ve tried about a dozen new betas and invitation-only sites to the point that I’m pretty much social-networked out. My favorite remains Twitter with FriendFeed running a close second.
• Twitterfeed is a good supporting site for Twitter in that it gets an abbreviated form of new blog entries that I create into Twitter.
• I’ve pretty much switched over to Digsby as my universal IM client. It allows me to login to the same service with multiple usernames and also allows me to login to my Twitter account and post new tweets.
• I’m running the Firefox 3 Portable App beta and am REALLY happy with it!
• And, to close before I completely bore you to death, I picked up Airlink101’s newest Wireless Night Vision Network Camera and installed it. Sweet! Support full-motion video and “snapshots” by going to http://your-ip/cgi/jpg/image.cgi.

Sorry, no, I haven’t fixed comments yet. Yes, I plan to upgrade to a more current version of Movable Type.

Yesterday I inxtalled CentOS on once of my laptops alongside WinXP. No big deal, it was a simple procedure, I just overlaid my old Fedora installation with it. But, as it was going on, I realized that I could no longer call to mind exactly how I would get myself out of any one of a hundred jams I could get myself into should something go wrong. Me, an avid techhound! What the heck happened to me? I work in the tech sector and have for years, I read all the blogs and do my best to stay current with trends and new technologies. So, I began looking at what I read on a daily basis. I looked through the RSS feeds and the folks I follow on Twitter … and that’s where I stopped. I’m reading so much, I don’t have time to DO anymore!

So, what do I cut out? Well, that’s another problem. I’m reading product reviews written by people who don’t really USE the product they’re reviewing. They give it a quick once-over and call it a review and seem to be in such a big hurry to get the review out that they don’t do anything useful with it nor give give me any real useful information about it (you know who you are). And I’m reading more from people who produce the technological equivalent of celebrity gossip. You know what I mean — they go to lunch with the technological glitterati and get email from insiders about upcoming “big things” and then dribble it out over the course of a day (and you know who you are). Does that help me in any way? No, not really, it just serves to distract me from the technological heart of things.

What did I conclude from this? It comes in two parts. I wish they were profound but they’re not. They’re not even new … far from it! Ready? Here they are:

1) I need to be take more responsibility for what I read. I must weed out the useful from the not-useful. Lots of things catch my interest but will it help me?

2) The industry is generally directed by the loudest mouths, not necessarily the most knowledgeable.

That’s all. Rant over.