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This is one small (but quite interesting) story in the growth of the net: Bypassing the Phone Company (via David Isenberg).
The company, Skybeam sells broadband services to businesses and individuals. The idea of bypassing the phone companies by using relatively inexpensive COTS microwave technology is a growing force, one the vendors who assume some sort of queen status are going to need to deal with. If there is any way at all to get around the tolls, someone will find a way.
But I found something else interesting there too...
Changing the network infrastructure from bridged to routed and adding bandwidth limit queues increased the capacity of the access points from about 20 customers per radio to 80 customers per radio. Limiting peer-to-peer and other undesirable traffic cleaned up the networks further and we were able to deliver better service to business customers.
Providers shouldn't really be allowed to make value judgments on IP traffic.
In this particular case they can do so (Skybeam's current customers are most likely long term clients and businesses with very specific [and limited] needs). In the long term they'll need to come to terms with customers who want everything. If the customers don't get what they want, they'll eventually route around Skybeam somehow and then Skybeam will be just like... the phone companies.
There seem to be at least a couple of basic rules here:
If you watch football, then you know there are a few truths about beer advertising.
There hasn't been any direct competition in years (it could be many years). This fall Miller has launched a set of advertisements aimed directly at football watching audiences and their primary competition in the light beer market, Budweiser.
The result was at least different. A series of ads featuring football referee's throwing flags, blowing whistles and making up inane penalties related to the targeted individuals (it does sound a bit like football, doesn't it?) eventually requiring replacement of the 'offensive' Bud Light with Miller Lite.
The first one I saw made me laugh out loud. The others were humorous but the cat was out of the bag, so to speak.
Over the recent weekend, Anheuser Busch fired back with a parody that was just as good as the original Miller ad. It starts with a pack of referee's throwing and blowing; and winds up in a sideline conversation. And then the people who had their beer switched start yelling, the ref's start running and eventually wind up in a Cops style arrest situation.
Not the height of our civilization to be sure, but it was funny.
What I'm hoping is that with the battle joined, we'll see a bunch of this sort of one-upmanship through the rest of the season. The usual litany of mind numbing ads for beer and cars and whatever else they're pushing needs a bit of a shake up long before we hit Super Bowl.
When doing home based science experiments that involve candles, don't use the trick birthday candles that practically refuse to go out.
Empowering a youngster to go away and start a new life is hard, even if it's the right thing. Perhaps it's hardest with the first (not that I have any experience). I guess I'm just hopeful.
We're here on Thanksgiving and I'm thankful that our immediate family is home for at least one more time. My inner realist knows that it won't last; obligations of many kinds will eventually intrude. That is, after all, what makes reunions so special. I'm still the same fellow who dragged my wife off to the west coast where we had no family because it seemed like the right thing. I expect our children to exercise their rights of independence and find their own comfort spots, where ever that might lead.
Adam got home yesterday and we were all be together for the first time since August. Such a short time in the long term view of things and as a parent, too long to go without just wrapping them up in your arms and telling them that you love them (or just thanking providence that they're still breathing). Then again, my nuclear family managed to take 34 years to get all of us together again for Thanksgiving. My aunts took things in their own hands in '99 and summoned us to Palm Springs. Strange as it is, that was the first Thanksgiving I'd spent with both my mom and sister since I'd graduated from high school and gone on my way. It was a weird and wonderful holiday.
Dinner tonight was a hoot and Jon summed it up best (the wisdom of the young!) by declaring his favorite part to be "the jokes". We ate and we laughed, and the laughter was best.
This time around I'm struck by some new feelings and wistful thoughts inspired by Brock Meeks. Most of Backwater on Bright Ave. is about life, with some wonderful stuff inspired by being a serial dad who shows his warts and is comfortable in his own skin. In I Kill My Kids Every Day, he once again puts before us the idea how short life is, but asks us to apply it to our children, which turns the whole idea of living for today on its head.
It's a wonderful perspective, one I wanted to pass along.
I'd heard a few weeks back that Brian Wilson had finally released Smile, the album art piece he'd begun as a follow up to Pet Sounds before things fell apart.
I'm still not sure what to make of it, but NPR is airing a two hour show from Carnegie Hall this Friday if you're interested. The reviews I've read have been all over the place (good and bad) so I'll be listening. If he's managed to capture a bit of the magic of Pet Sounds without feeling forced, I'll probably buy it.
One of the weird arguments bouncing around to this day is the status of Pet Sounds as a great rock album. It's odd to me because it's so full of stuff that had never been used before. Just using a favorite (Caroline No), we've got isolated hollow drums (along with other distinct percussion instruments), some distinctive horn use in the middle, early xylophone and then the whole final dog barking and train sequence. It was unique for its day, quite popular at the time and continues to be ripped off in various ways today. Was it rock? Perhaps not, but the influence was significant.
If the Ram's were considered the greatest show on turf during their run from 1999 to 2001, then what can be said about this years Colts?
| Thu 9/9 | at New England | L | 24 - 27 |
| Sun 9/19 | at Tennessee | W | 31 - 17 |
| Sun 9/26 | Green Bay | W | 45 - 31 |
| Sun 10/3 | at Jacksonville | W | 24 - 17 |
| Sun 10/10 | Oakland | W | 35 - 14 |
| Sun 10/24 | Jacksonville | L | 24 - 27 |
| Sun 10/31 | at Kansas City | L | 35 - 45 |
| Mon 11/8 | Minnesota | W | 31 - 28 |
| Sun 11/14 | Houston | W | 49 - 14 |
| Sun 11/21 | at Chicago | W | 41 - 10 |
The number of points they are putting up on a weekly basis is quite amazing.
Sean Gallagher was responsible for a series of interesting articles this week about Java application servers that I read while catching up on things today (there were more but that'll do).
What's missing in the series is an external perspective. While hinting around about potential doom and gloom for vendors who sell app servers, he didn't actually talk to the vendors. More importantly, there wasn't any attempt to talk to real world users of any stripe.
Application servers (of all flavors) are a large part of an enabling platform for everything from business applications to web services to pure web applications. I'd argue that too few use the rest of stack (the world is not just Java, there's typically a great unix layer sitting there too). To go along with the large number of applications comes an even more eclectic bunch of organizations and individuals. There is no 'one size fits all' characterization that can be applied.
In The Geronimo Effect and Will Geronimo Stick a Fork in Java? it seems to be argued that Geronimo will cause a sea change of sorts in the market. Maybe, but I wouldn't count on it happening anytime soon. A major shift (the major shift?) was already brought about by the JBoss folks when they proved a significant level of interest and involvement in an open source application server (standards and Sun's bless be damned).
Geronimo is going to be a good thing for all who appreciate choices and diversity. It was probably a requirement for the Apache folks to add a J2EE app server given their strong Java support.
At the same time, open source doesn't appear to have significantly impacted the fortunes of Sun, IBM and perhaps even BEA. Many organizations want products that work out of the box (and some want them to run on Windows), have binders full of documentation and army's of internal and external support structures.
Sun bundles Sun ONE with practically everything, has an interesting licensing model and doesn't seem to want anything more from the product than to help push Java technology. IBM has done some wonderful things to tie Websphere into Eclipse and make it a brain dead simple and a very compelling marketing message, they're in this for long haul and don't appear ready to go anywhere. BEA Systems is a whole lot harder to peg, but they helped push the whole idea of application servers to the mainstream and remain a fertile source for ideas; it would be a shame to see them go away.
What's really bizarre about the articles is the apparent concept that change is bad, especially when the source is Marc Fleury's cant on licensing: On the Issue of Business Friendliness.
I like JBoss a lot, and pushed to make the move away from closed systems like WebLogic (not all groups played along). I love being able to develop, deploy and run on any Java enabled platform, fix bugs in any part of the application stack and control my world as needed. That doesn't make me blind. While ranting about the short comings and changes in the Axis API's, there is no discussion about numerous zigs and zags on the JBoss platform. We're talking about major changes (often with significant developer impact) in every single major version change. Hey, that's just technology if you're a JBoss customer but a mean perversion of BSD licensing if IBM does it. Please... grow up.
I wish the JBoss group well, as they walk an interesting line between a traditional OSS and being a service oriented corporation. I do think someone needs to stuff a handkerchief in Fluery's mouth and pay more attention to service organizations like Jabber, Inc. and MySQL AB.
I forgot to mention my most recent Atlanta experience. I tried out MARTA for the first time this week and it's not bad at all. If it goes near where you need to go, it's on a par with the Bay Area BART.
People have been talking up the benefits of using MARTA to get between the airport and our building in midtown Atlanta for some time now and I finally had a good reason to try it out. If you know what you're doing, it's convenient and quite easy. If not, you get to stumble around a bit.
Sadly, our corporate intranet has zero information on this (that may not be correct but if you can't find it, it doesn't exist). I spent about 10 minutes looking at things and guessing Saturday night and finally ended up calling a coworker from LAX on Sunday morning to learn that I was all wet (aka completely lost).
For starters, the station at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport is just west of the baggage area (toward the other ground transportation). Tokens are $1.25 $1.75 and there are token machines just inside the entrance area which accept denominations of $1, $5, $10 and $20 (both coming and going). I think they take coins, but my attempt at exact change lost me a quarter.
Coming from the airport (S7), you can use either line (right or left) and you'll want to get off at the Arts Center Station (N5). That's where things get interesting for the naive and geographically challenged. Had I known ahead of time which station I was going to, I'd have been much better prepared, but I didn't and I ended up being abused by the Peachtree proliferation. I walked out the wrong exit thinking I was on Peachtree, saw lots of buildings that I recognized off in the distance and nothing else and became quite confused. Worse, I couldn't get back in without paying for another token.
If you come visiting our offices in Pasadena, you might become dizzy dealing with our Madre, Sierra Madre and Sierra Madre Villa street confusion. It's a real problem for people on occasion. However, it doesn't hold a candle to the insanity of Peachtree in Atlanta. Even the folks who live in Atlanta acknowledge that there are far too many streets named Peachtree, often very close to one another.
Anyway, back to the Arts Center Station.
What you want to do is to go up two levels and exit toward the Arts Center (toward Lombardy Way). From there, head left (north) to 16th street, and right (east) which runs out to Peachtree Street NE. Go left, walk about a block and you're there. If you screw up and depart on the second level, you'll find yourself outside on Peachtree (West Peachtree Street NW) on the opposite side of where you want to be. Turn right (north), go to 17th and hang a right. Cross Peachtree and you are there. The last thing you want to do is what I did, turn left (heading south). You'll get there (assuming you pick the right direction on 15th [or worse, 14th]) but it's the really long way around.
If you hit 13th street or Peachtree Circle, call a cab, you are officially lost.
Going back to the airport via MARTA was simple and even with lots of mid morning (shortly after 9 AM) riders, took less than 30 minutes.
Update: Thanks to Frank Steele, I've corrected the pricing information.
For our anniversary last week I wanted to do something different for dinner.
I looked around for places we'd never been to around Conejo and Simi Valley, found a few and started looking for reviews. In the end, I chose Café Provençal, a very small French restaurant in the same strip mall with Rhineland Deli (one of our two very good German deli's in town) on the southeast corner of Thousand Oaks Boulevard and Conejo School Road.
In retrospect, it was a terrific choice.
The attention from owner Serge Bonnet was remarkable, but was not unusual from what I observed over the course of a couple hours (unless you are a long time customer, and then you get more).
Sarah's not a big red wine lover, although she will usually have a glass (maybe more) of Merlot. We both decided to have beef, so I was wrestling with which Merlot to try. Serge recommended the Raymond Reserve Merlot (2001), which was quite good and Sarah wound up drinking more of it than I.
We ordered Terrine Maison (pork and chicken pâté) and by recommendation, Spring Rolls for appetizers. The pâté had a very interesting flavor but the Spring Rolls very definitely caught my attention. Oh my, I loved the taste. The delicate vegetables mixed with a wonderful sweet and spicy sauce! Sarah thought it a bit too hot, so beware if you don't love a bit of heat.
The onion soup was everything I expected and more. The aroma was the first thing I experienced (I looked down and caught a full breath of it) which was terrific. It's been a while since I've had an onion soup that rich. Really good stuff.
For dinner, we'd each chosen the Filet Mignon and decided that we'd each try one of the sauces and share a little bit. I had the Forestière (a mushroom sauce) and Sarah had the Roquefort. Unfortunately, they were both great and when we go again (and we will), I'll be just as conflicted.
The topper on the evening was learning that another couple was there (also for the first time) to celebrate their 21st. They sent us each a glass of champagne which was such a thoughtful gesture, I wish I had the opportunity to repay it in some way.
It was a wonderful dinner. Serge Bonnet has created something very interesting at Café Provençal. It's a lot like Marcello's, another local restaurant with a tiny foot print, great food and dedicated ownership.
We will definitely be going back.
The best and worst WiFi hotels of 2004. [via Craig Burton]
Let's see here... yep, I've still got one. It's been quite a while since I've posted here and much has transpired.
We had our twenty first anniversary last Friday (we had a great dinner at a restaurant we'd never tried before — more on that later). I setup and then threw away a weblog for family discussions and I ended up staying up late on Saturday to install PHP to try out some of the message boards. I flew off to Atlanta early on Sunday morning (but did catch most of the second half of the Packer game in my hotel room; unfortunately an 'oops' muffed the recording at home so I don't have much to say there).
On Monday I gave a presentation for Garry Betty and then a bunch of us went off to the woods of Georgia where there was very little cell phone coverage (interestingly, newer phones functioned in some fashion while my four year old cell was completely useless) and 26.4k dialup (I just put a phone cord in my bag, I somehow thought I didn't need it in 2004 and was plainly wrong). Although fall is mostly over, the area just north of Helen (GA) was beautiful to see and I wish I'd brought my camera. On Wednesday afternoon when we returned I had a couple meetings to attend to and after dinner with a friend, I had nearly a thousand emails to chew through.
The flight back yesterday wasn't bad, although the LA traffic is what it is and Albert wound up having a significant fender bender. I feel a little guilty (still) but as Albert put it, shit happens.
I'm just about caught up on the most important items that came up while we were off in Deliverance country (as someone put it), although I'll end up doing some document reading this weekend to catch up on the rest.
One other thing, I'm looking for backup suggestions. I have been using SilverKeeper for a while now (backing up local directories to an external FireWire drive) and I really like it. But it took 2.5 hours to backup my 4G cvs directory last weekend (I noticed because I ended up staying up late). That's ridiculous, as there were only 37M worth of changed files. By comparison, a backup of my work directory just a little while ago took 4 minutes (82 files updated out of 23,033 in a 1.6G directory). I'm guessing that the large number of directories with hundreds of tiny files causes the problem (the updated changed 49,633 of 344,152 files). I may just be stuck, but if you have ideas please pass them along.
I was listening to Jazz on the KCLU tonight and after a song was played they said it was called "High Heel Sneakers". Huh? That really lost me, as there are two things I associate with the phrase.
It's pretty likely that everyone knows Tommy Tucker's 'High Heel Sneakers' if they hear it (try here and here). Somewhat less well known are the crazy lyrics from the 'Alice Bowie' part of Earache My Eye from Cheech & Chong's Wedding Album (a great track, but always #2 behind Basketball Jones on Los Cochinos).
It turns out that Doug Lawrence has released a CD called High Heel Sneakers with a purely instrumental version of the Tommy Tucker hit.
As for the musical finale on Earache My Eye (I have to find the rest, it's all about confrontation between parents and children), it's done like a period piece (base, voice, base, voice and so on) which could be Cooper or countless others until the end where it gets really crazy...
My momma talkin' to me tryin' to tell me how to live
But I don't listen to her 'cause my head is like a sieve
My daddy, he disowned me 'cause I wear my sister's clothes
He caught me in the bathroom with a pair of pantyhose
My basketball coach, he done kicked me off the team
For wearin' high-heel sneakers and actin' like a queen
------ lead guitar ------
The world's comin' to an end, I don't even care
As long as I can have a limo and my orange hair
And it don't bother me if people think I'm "funny"
'Cause I'm a big rock star and I'm makin' lots of money
money, money, money, money, money, money
Ahhh! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha...
I'm so bloody rich! Ha ha ha ha
I own apartment buildings and shopping centers! Ha ha ha ha
And I only know three chords! Ha ha ha ha
Where exactly does the idea that we should not allow 'cruel and unusual punishments' come from? Turns out that it's the Eighth Amendment - Further Guarantees in Criminal Cases .
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
That's all of it (all sixteen words). There's a lot of other discussion about those sixteen words though.
Why the sudden interest? Hit & Run linked to an essay by Vanderbilt Professor Joan Dayan which links the White House memos regarding prisoner interrogation methods (and subsequent behavior at Abu Ghraib) with a long term backslide in judicial support for Eighth Amendment protection.
The article is a valuable history and analyses of the amendment and even includes a few cases I actually remember, such as...
And in the most famous Eighth Amendment case, Furman v. Georgia (1972), the Supreme Court declared capital punishment cruel and unusual, and therefore unconstitutional. In Justice William Brennan's words, the system of capital punishment was "irrational and arbitrary," was "degrading to human dignity," and deprived the criminal of "human status." The Court voted 5-4 to strike down every capital punishment law in the United States.
After reading it all, the first comment on Cruel and Usual seems to make more sense; for some of the judges on today's court, the constitution does seem to be 'dead'. Using 18th century dictionaries to determine the meaning of the word 'punishment'? That it was Clarence Thomas who took that route is even more difficult to accept. Perhaps he should have looked under the word 'slave' while he was at it.
There's also an interesting section on slavery, the black codes and the debates about the 13th Amendment (diving into one amendment per day is more than enough I think) which contained...
As Charles Sumner warned, the locale for enslavement would move from the auction block to the courts of the United States.
No, I'm not done munchin' at all.
While the problem is quite real and worthy of serious discussion, the story about a prisoner released because of a faked FAX that Bruce Schneier wrote about in Hacking Faxes really had me laughing.
However, the phony letterhead and misspelling weren't the only clues that the fax was bogus. The time and date stamp at the top of the fax shows that the fax was sent Saturday at 11:16 p.m. from McDonald's on Missouri Street in West Memphis.
Despite the time of night, the discrepancies and the overall look of the fake fax, it was accepted. Shortly after it was received on Saturday, Wilson was released from jail.
Social hacking is always going to be a problem (and may often be the weakest link) in any secure system. In the interest of convenience, systems and/or procedures can often make these attacks easier. In this case, loose controls on official messages (judicial expediency is usually a good thing) to the central jail (forged release documents are not a new phenomenon) was a problem.
Here, it wasn't too hard to figure out what went wrong (low tech paper saves the day?)
In a world where a massive amount of messaging is happening, and billions of systems are interconnected in planned (and unplanned ways), tracking down the root cause is going to be a significant challenge.
I pulled into the Chevron on New LA Avenue in Moorpark this evening (about thirty minutes ago) and realized after a few seconds that there was a car sitting about 30 feet from one of the pumps whose entire front end was on fire.
I was trying to figure out what the trick was... is someone filming something? It was such a weird reaction, but my mind refused to accept the obvious. I can't explain it.
Once I'd figured out that yes, it really was on fire it became apparent that I didn't really need gas just then and being just about anywhere else was a really good idea.
Oakland is not a suburb of Los Angeles (we've been through this before). The best game you could think of to show here is Raiders at the Panthers? Sad.
Meanwhile, Fox has Philly at Pittsburg. Adios!
What's your definition of a perfect evening? We came awfully close tonight even with two of the kids missing (Stephen was at work and Adam won't be home from school until Thanksgiving).
We had no plans and I was just sitting here reading as it grew dark and then Sarah called from Oxnard. The bowling tournament they'd attended was finally over and Jon was really hungry. We discussed things and then decided that they'd eat down there and bring something back for me; Jon wasn't too hot on the idea but I didn't want to delay them by thirty minutes.
A few moments later, I got a call and was told that the wait at Olive Garden was more than thirty minutes... would I like to join them? I hate driving on the weekends, but what the heck, off I went. I got there a few minutes after six and we were seated just a few minutes later.
I don't know how or why, but every single part of the evening just worked; from letting Jon order a special drink, our positive mood, the great conversation, our wonderful service and on it went. Even coming home and deciding to watch The Empire Strikes Back was a good idea.
I wish I could bottle this and pull it out from time to time.
Does running MacOS X 10.3 on a 25MHz Centris 650, using PearPC count as crazy? [via Leonard]
I moved to a PowerPC based machine in the summer of '94 (a decade of PowerPC already... yeesh) and this Centris model was discontinued 11 years ago.
Yeah, that's sick.
I came this >< close to blowing fluid out my nose while reading the Drunken FAQ at Enjoy The Draft:
Beware the "No 18-to-25-Year-Old Left Behind Act."
Over the top? Yeah but not as weird as a lot of other paranoia inspired sites.
I don't care who is elected, unless there are major changes we're going to see discussions about mandatory service. The forced extensions can't go on forever. Even the poor kids are getting the idea that maybe the Army is not a good idea.
Proof that you can laugh, cringe and cry all at once. How long after an event like this does mans best friend remain in that lofty position?
