urwhatu

Parks Commission Comes Weak

Lawyers and greed win over common sense (as if it has anything to do with Chinese/Japanese -- it's about whether or not the operator has historically, regularly, and consistently cheapened our city through his actions) when city officials are involved. If you're lucky enough to build a beautiful monument to leave as a present to your favorite city, make sure to set up a foundation with specific rules to avoid this kind of tragedy. Would that the Coit tower concession were also being contested...

Technorati Tags: San Francisco

Personal DSLAMS as a cheap broadband solution?

I've never owned or operated a DSLAM before, but is there any reason why you couldn't get two of them, two phonelines, and two DSL modems to achieve a 6Mbps backhaul for the price of two phonelines and about $3k worth of equipment? Ebay has a few that are about $1000...

update: you can't buy lines that are direct from point to point.

Ashley, maestro of telecoms and more, says:

Check out the dry pair concept, if you haven't already per your update. Basically it's what you wanted: a point to point pair of cables w/ no dial tone. Alarm companies used to use them all the time to have a direct line to monitor you house with. Cringely wrote about it back in 2001:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010823.html

and google says more, of course:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22dry+pair%22

Bottom line, I think you're right, unless you know some one the telcos don't like you to roll your own.

Technorati Tags: Networking

Quote of the Day, Greg Linden

Greg Linden serves up a winner:

Fear started to set in. Fresh out of school, I didn't know much, but I had heard others warn of being crushed under the steaming turd ball of project bloat. And this was starting to smell of steaming turd ball.

Read more about the early days of Amazon.

Technorati Tags: Programming

Restoring the SF Japanese Tea Garden

In retrospect, it should have been obvious that the ugly, cramped, cheap shops you see at Coit Tower and the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park were operated by the same guy. He's making millions peddling useless knickknacks that cheapen our city's best attractions. The San Francisco chronicle outs him in this article.

If the Recreation and Parks Department has the courage to follow through (PLEASE!), I might actually be encouraged to go back (we went once and never went again because it was so made so touristy and "low"). It need not be Carol Murata (though her history in Japantown makes her an obvious choice), but please make it someone who understands and appreciates Japanese culture.

Technorati Tags: Japanese Culture, San Francisco

Developer programs: The difference between Apple and Sun

At Apple, you can sign up for the developer's program trivially. For an individual, it's about $500 and you get two big things: prerelease software and hardware discounts. The hardware discounts are significant, about 25%, which more than makes up for the cost of the membership. In addition, they don't try to shaft you -- witness the recent upgrade for their Intel transition hardware.

OK, now enter Sun. They also have a developer program, but it offers access only to software. Do you want to release your application on an UltraSparc? Good luck. Want to optimize for the T1? Dream on.

So maybe it's a more involved thing, e.g., the Sun Partner Advantage program for ISV's. Trying to figure out whether or not you're eligible is not so transparent (at Apple, everyone with $500 qualifies -- btw, why the heck does this matter? Why wouldn't you want all comers developing on your hardware?). It's a corporate thing I guess. This looks like it might be useful to help figure out how to get access to some dev hardware - except I have to know what pricelist categories A, B, E, H, and P are. I guess Jonathan Schwartz's ode to the software stack doesn't quite translate like it does over at Apple.

So, right now, there's discussion about what to do about ISV/partnering somewhere off in a corner of the company. It is not clear whether or not we're going to do anything with that and we're going to wait-n-see on Niagara...we bought a cheap sparc box through the online store because the other process was so cumbersome. I was so excited by Niagara a while ago, but now I'm just tired.

Technorati Tags: Programming, Sun

error C2143: syntax error : missing ';' before 'type'

When programming in Visual Studio, if you happen to run across this error while trying to compile C code, one thing to check on is whether or not you're declaring your local variables inline.  For whatever reason, Visual Studio hates this and issues a syntax error for the next line of code.  One that's of no use whatsoever in helping to figure out what to do.

So, for example, if you have a function like:

int foo(int x)
{
    assert(x != 0);
    int y = 4/x;
    return y;
}

You would need to rewrite your code like this:

int foo(int x)
{
    int y;
    assert(x != 0);
    y = x/4;
    return y;
}

Strange but true.  I suspect there's an option somewhere to turn off the strictness of the compiler, but I haven't found it.

Phil Smoot on Megaservices

A really, really good read about services comprised of many thousands of boxes. If you're building your first, this advice is worth a lot in terms of saved aggravation and wasted time/resources. I'd also add that you (a) shouldn't underestimate how much hardware (especially disks) that comes from the factory is just plain broken, (b) should spend more time rather than less designing your network, and (c) what he said about automation -- and make sure it embraces/anticipates failure: hardware, software, and human (help the hamfisted help themselves).

Technorati Tags: Software Architecture

mds and LAServer taking 100% of CPU

If you're running Mac OS X 10.4 and you're seeing the processes mds and LAServer taking all of your CPU, it's probably because you're putting a lot of new data onto your disk somehow. Spotlight is indexing -- LAServer is the language analysis server, mds is, I think, the "metadata server". More grokkage if you man mdcheckschema, mdfind, mdutil, or mdimport.

If you don't want the new files indexed, go to System Preferences, Spotlight, and add the folder(s) that you don't want indexed in the Privacy tab. The UI there is a little sketchy in that it adds the file asynchronously -- good from a UI responsiveness perspective, but the final implementation leaves you wondering whether or not the folder actually got added.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Spotlight

BayLISA talk video...

The kind folks at BayLISA  posted a bunch of videos from the December 15th meeting.  I most enjoyed Steve Hand's Xen presentation (for sheer wizardry) and Ben Rockwood's OpenSolaris presentation (for his raw geek enthusiasm that reminded me of days long past when I coo'd over things like the release of the Mac IIci).  There are also some notably missing videos about DragonFly BSD  ("I saved 20 nanoseconds per context switch, hear me roar!", "Sorry, we haven't worked out the NUMA parts of the OS because we can't afford anything except the cheapest AMD X2 processor" -- dude, someone's got to get this guy a quad processor rig) and Luke Kanies' project Puppet, an alternative to cfengine.  Oh, and there's me.

Camp Sysadmin's Almost Full...

Camp Sysadmin. Is it sys admin or sysadmin?

Technorati Tags: Splunk