Wikipedia work

I'm considering putting in some work on Wikipedia on the history of my home town. Still at the considering phase, but I'll link any entries I put up.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

Santa Barbara, seen from the end of Stearns Wharf. 12/20/2009

Taken from West Camino Cielo overlooking Santa Barbara. 12/19/2009

Taken from West Camino Cielo overlooking Goleta. 12/19/2009

Done with my finals for the semester

I'm done with my finals at SBCC for the semester. Looking back, I would say that classes on Exchange Server should be taken by themselves. I would also say that PowerShell and ActiveDirectory knowledge should be considered a prerequisite for studying Exchange Server. Don't get me wrong, I learned a lot, but it was a challenging class.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

If at all possible, take some time today to reflect on what you have to be thankful for in this world.

Day before Thanksgiving, beautiful day for a walk through the nearby park.

Petroleum depletion and biofuels

First of all, let's get something straight: the world is running out of petroleum. Yes, there is some being produced by natural processes, but, no, that doesn't compensate for what is being used. What makes me suspect that we are going to run out sooner than people like? Things like this article. If you didn't read the preceding link, let me sum it up for you: it seems the International Energy Agency was pressured by the United States government to adjust the reports of oil production and reserves to make it look like there was more oil available than was actually available. And the accuracy of oil reserves accounting needs to be scrutinized, like this report on Kuwait's reserves concludes. The Air Force is planning ahead, and the rest of the world should be, too.

Of course, there is the problem that petroleum replacements rely heavily on other fossil fuels, which are also in finite supply. As fossil fuels start being used as petroleum replacements, their scarcity will increase. This will mean that not only transportation costs, but everything that relies on fossil fuels will be more expensive: including what we eat. A lot of the food the world consumes depends on cheap and readily available fossil fuel products. We as a species have gotten into some bad habits by using things like fertilizer (largely made from natural gas) to compensate for farming techniques that are degrading our topsoil. Thus, biofuels are problematic: the crops used (corn in North America being a prime example) are already using fossil fuel inputs in their production and producing fuel from them means diverting them from the food supply, producing fuels in this way exacerbates fuel scarcity, further degrades the environment and drives up food costs.

This is why I am happy to read that there are ways to make biodiesel that are quite renewable, although the scale and convenience will never equal that of petroleum. The answer in the long term is to become more energy efficient, plan ahead and work on repairing the damage that has already been done to the environment. None of this is impossible, even replenishing the topsoil can be done.

Want 50Mbps Internet in your town? Threaten to roll out your own - Ars Technica

Ummm, here's a little free advice to America's telecommunications companies: spend less money on John McCain and more money on upgrading your capabilities, and you won't look as bad. Simply put, our broadband Internet access is not the best in the world, and won't be until the broadband providers start getting serious about improving service.

Want 50Mbps Internet in your town? Threaten to roll out your own - Ars Technica

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Building with trees

I found a neat article in the New York Times about building with unmilled trees. It's another great example of building with less waste and more appreciation for the local ecology. The builder featured in the article forms structural arches with whole trees, and incorporates passive solar heating in his designs. This is a welcome alternative to a lot of what is seen in suburbia. Which is not to say that his particular designs will work everywhere, but that his design is formed by the local environment.

Designing residences based on the local environment is fairly common throughout history, but not in a lot of suburbia. I think part of the problem with a lot of suburban sprawl isn't simply the amount of land it covers, or the bland aesthetic uniformity (the "cookie-cutter" look) that it conveys, but also that the design of many of the houses doesn't vary much from Southern California to New England. The problem with that? Those are two different climatic regions, and one design of structure will not suit both of them. I realize that it is simpler (cheaper) for building firms to have one basic design of structure to build, but that isn't always going to be in the best interest of the person living in that structure in the long run. I also realize that there are local and state building codes that require certain features to be included or removed, but the designs are still often being created by architects who may never have been to the location in question. Finally, I realize that there are exceptions, and I applaud the architects who design housing with the specifics of the local environment in mind.

There is a great advantage to adapting to the local environment: less effort (a.k.a. energy, a.k.a. money) is required to keep things comfortable (or at least habitable) for the people living there. Take a look at the Passivhaus that originated in Germany for an idea of a more technology-intensive (though still energy-efficient) approach.

WINE works well... maybe too well.

It would seem that WINE (which lets you run some Windows software under Linux) actually works well enough to let some malware (in this case, a false antivirus utility) try to infect your Linux system. Of course, it doesn't get very far, as there are major differences between Windows and Linux "under the hood" as it were.

There are three basic points made as to why Linux is safer than Windows when it comes to malware:
1. It's not Windows, and since the majority of malware out there is designed to run on a Windows platform, it simply won't work on a Linux platform (even though it may "get its foot in the door" through WINE.)
2. There are many different distributions of Linux, and malware would need to be targeted at a specific distribution. (I think this may be overly optimistic... I can certainly imagine a polymorphic virus that adapts depending on which distribution it finds itself inhabiting.)
3. Linux users tend to be more computer-savvy than most Windows users, who tend to click on anything that pops up. (I am inclined to agree with this assessment based on my own personal experience providing technical support - though there will always be exceptions.)

The main article is a blog post Does Wine Make Linux Too Loose and features a link to the original post describing the experience, I Can Haz Virus.

Unrelated to the security topic, the LinuxInsider article also mentions the problems some people are having upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 (also known as Karmic Koala). Full disclosure: I use Ubuntu 9.10 and did not encounter any of those problems.

MetLife blimp over Goleta, California

Blimp over Goleta, 1:12pm, 11/3/2009

New Internet Traffic Study

The gist of this study (by Arbor Networks, the University of Michigan and Merit Network) is that Internet traffic has been shifting from moderately fast connections with a relatively large number of servers to fast connections with a relatively small number of servers. This has apparently been driven by (among other things) the rising amount of video being watched. So, if this seems like a problem, blame YouTube.

Some thoughts I had after reading this:

• Some of this may be accounted for by the movement of Internet-facing servers to server farms, away from on-site servers. Which makes sense: having a popular Web server on your company's WAN connection is inviting a sort of inadvertent, non-malicious DDoS attack.
• Fewer systems representing the majority of the traffic on the Internet means fewer points of failure. Which means these "Hyper Giants" (the term used in the study summary) had best keep the systems and planning for their security, disaster recovery and redundancy up to snuff. Take a look at Telecom Risk and Security Part 2 – The Carrier Hotel SuperNode | Virtualization Journal or Verizon router glitch slams parts of U.S. to get an idea of what can go wrong with too few points of failure.
• Having applications on the Web is convenient, but it also means that people outside of your organization now have direct influence over your ability to use those applications. This might be something like Google suffering an Gmail outage or a backhoe operator digging in the wrong spot.

Here's the link to the Arbor Networks report:

Two-Year Study of Global Internet Traffic Will Be Presented At NANOG47 | Arbor Networks

Here's a PC World article on the same subject:

Unknown 'Superpower' Hosts Dominate Internet Traffic, Study Says - Business Center - PC World

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Army Mechanic's Garage Tinkering Yields 18-Foot Mecha Exoskeleton | Popular Science

I have nothing much to add, except that I have wanted one of these for a long time. The inventor and builder, Carlos Owens, has more details on his web site at http://neogentronyx.com/.

Army Mechanic's Garage Tinkering Yields 18-Foot Mecha Exoskeleton | Popular Science
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Miller-McCune Article | Pentagon, Others Start Ramping Up For Climate Change | Miller-McCune Online Magazine

If you don't know about Miller-McCune, you might try giving them a read. They are quite research-oriented for a news magazine, and do a pretty good job of objective reporting with in-depth articles. Here is a link to one that caught my interest.

Politics Articles | Pentagon, Others Start Ramping Up For Climate Change | Miller-McCune Online Magazine

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That the military would be interested in what is happening (or likely going to happen) to terrain around the world is not surprising to me, nor should it be to anyone who has read The Art of War.

Satellite Launch

Drove up to see the satellite launch at Vandenberg Air Force Base on 10/8/2009. I believe it was a Motorola satellite on a Boeing rocket. Yes, I need to get a better camera, but this phone camera is better than my last one.

Light Peak: Fiber Optics for Computer Peripherals

I found this article in the New York Times. It's an interesting development from Intel called Light Peak, and I'm curious to see if it takes off. This technology would provide a very fast data connection for computer peripherals and other electronic devices. One area that might benefit from this would be servers with massive external storage. Here are the pros and cons I can think of right offhand.

Pros:

• Much faster than the current standard for computer peripheral connections, USB 2.0, which is capable of 480 Mbps (megabits per second), as opposed to Light Peak, which is presently capable of 10Gbps (gigabits per second, which translates to 10,000 megabits per second in this case - it's FAST). Also faster than FireWire (400 or 800 Mbps), which I know some systems, like my adorable MacBook, have from the get-go, but still isn't a standard the way USB has become.
• Minimizes electronic interference because optical connections can't really act as antennas for electromagnetic signals.
• Reduces the risk of damage from electrostatic discharge or power spikes by preventing grounding across the peripheral connection. This risk can't be completely eliminated, because the power connection for the peripheral will likely be on the same circuit as the rest of the computer system, and will thus provide a potential path for electrical mayhem. Speaking of power supplies, that leads me to...

Cons:

• As of yet, scientists have not found a way to send electrical power over fiber optic lines (in fact, the lack of the ability to do so is one of the major benefits of fiber optics when linking structures with different ground potentials.) So, you can't power your peripherals using fiber optics, which is one of the very handy things that USB does. What this means is that you will need a separate power adapter for any device connected to a computer via fiber optics.
• Like most other standards, a certain critical mass of users would need to start using this technology for it to become worth supporting. Existing workstations and servers could be retrofitted with it fairly simply, but laptops would be unlikely to be easily retrofitted (since PCMCIA is beginning to vanish from them.) It would take a major manufacturer deciding to take a gamble on the technology and start installing it on all of the new computers it builds for a good chance at success. But that has happened before, when Apple went to all-USB peripherals on the original iMac.

I know I put a lot of hyperlinks in this post, but I'm trying out the features of Blogger here, and I also believe that hypertext is most valuable when it is readily available.

Bits: Shuttling PC Data at the Speed of Light

By By Brooke Crothers

Published: October 5, 2009

A new technology from Intel called Light Peak could increase data transmission speeds inside a PC by a factor of 20 and eliminate the need for most of the device connectors found on today's machines.

Google Wave preview

There is a certain degree of hype involved in any new technology announcement, but Google Wave is definitely an interesting development. Basically, this is an online communication/conferencing/collaboration system built on what Google promises to be open software standards. This is apparently not just a standalone product, but also a way for third-party developers to create compatible applications to work with and within Google Wave (think about how TwitPic works with Twitter, for a basic analogy.) I was especially interested in the concurrency features (allowing multiple users to simultaneously work on a single document without getting in each others way, for instance) as well as the Robot (for automation) and gadget (for application integration) functionality. Also, I had not fully appreciated the gap in performance between the JavaScript engine used by Internet Explorer as opposed to the faster JavaScript engines used by Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

Here's the link to the article on Ars Technica:

Turning the tide: a hands-on look at Google's Wave

Friedman's speculation on "The New Sputnik"

I don't always agree with Friedman, but I think he has a point here. Maybe GM should start thinking about building small-scale wind turbines to help charge the Volt? Switching to electric vehicles isn't going to be a magic conversion: the scale of battery recycling and electric power production will have to increase. Unfortunately, most American companies (as well as the various levels of government) seem VERY reluctant to put any money into upgrading their infrastructure, let alone keeping it maintained.

From the New York Times:

OP-ED COLUMNIST

The New Sputnik

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: September 27, 2009

China is embarking on a new, parallel path of clean power deployment and innovation. It is the Sputnik of our day. Unfortunately, we’re still not racing.

Let us see how well this SMS updating works. And then back to Exchange Server 2007 studying.

Starting off

Well, I don't have much to put here at the moment, but that's largely because I need to study for my Exchange Server 2007 test tomorrow. I can report that I did have a great lunch at the Beachside Restaurant in Goleta today. You really can't beat the location and view there.