Open desktop mechanic cat /dev/random | strings | grep "For being ignorant to whom it goes I writ at random, very doubtfully"

2 PCs/day stolen in Racine schools, why not try Sun Ray?

I saw this in my hometown newspaper the other day:

RACINE — Eleven computers were stolen from two 
Racine Unified elementary schools Monday night, 
bringing the total to nearly 70 computers 
taken from schools in a recent rash of burglaries.

Sad, school has only been in session a month and already 68 computers (enough for two or three classrooms) are gone. The Racine school system is already facing budget shortfalls and declining tax revenue in light of the recession (which always hits Racine at least 4 years before Wall street notices.) The unfortunate thing about this and similar Federally funded educational computers systems is that Federal funds seem to focus on hardware and completely ignore software, systems integration and training. Educational PCs tend to be underutilized for a couple of years and just when teachers begin to understand how to integrate them into their curriculum, some local politician will push an agenda "IF only we used PC instead of Mac, Windows 98 instead of Windows 95, Apple IIe, Apple instead of Atari... then Johnny would be able to read!" I've heard of brand new computers sit in boxes for two years, becoming completely obsolete before they are ever used. It's very likely that the excellent Apple audio/video capabilities which made these computers so attractive to thieves weren't even being used in the classroom, it's my understanding that most of these computers were purchased under a grant for the purposes of exam administration! Sun Rays would have been ideal for this prupose. Sun Rays have a much longer "shelf-life" than a typical P.C. The first ones made in the late 1990s would be able to administer exams just as well as the brand new ones. Upgrades would be system-wide and nearly instantaneous. Bad or stolen hardware could be swapped out by the teacher and ready to use in less than 5 minutes. The fact that Sun Rays are useless without a server should make them less likely to be stolen (with the caveat that Racine thieves tend to be extremely stupid, the last item stolen from me there was the back wheel of a rusty 35-year-old Schwinn bicycle.)

When an Apple Computer or Wintel PC is stolen, the data usually goes with the hardware (unlike Sun Ray which retains no data!) So be on the lookout for "like new" iMacs, iBooks and eMacs containing files, student names or other references to Racine Unified's standardized test system.

Posted at 12:26PM Oct 13, 2008 by Brian Nitz in Children  |  Comments[0]

Edison bulbs banned in E.U., why not ban PCs too?

It looks like Ireland along with the rest of the European Union will soon ban the sale of most traditional incandescent light bulbs. I've been using Compact Florescent (CF) bulbs where possible since the early 1990s but I have mixed feelings about government's one-size-fits all energy micromanagement. I don't think the fact that my neighbor uses CFs to illuminate his garden gnomes, eves and driveway 24/7 makes him environmentally greener than the doctor, dentist, mechanic or person with visual difficulties (e.g. cataracts...) who chooses incandescents for applications where they excel.

Mini screw mount CF bulbs only became available in Ireland about 1 year ago. Most stores here still only carry the bayonet CF bulbs. I haven't yet found any dimmer capable CFs in Ireland. We did find 9 watt CF bulbs which fit in the 240V/40W GU10 halogen sockets but I find that a combination of 40W halogen and 1.6W LED bulbs is more effective for some applications because both halogens and LEDs focus the light better than CFs do (. The "soft focus" of CFs actually worked to their advantage in our kitchen where they eliminated harsh shadows thrown by the spotlight bulbs but they still work best when paired 2CFs for ambient light and one incandescent for directional task light (cooker, table and counter.)

The CFs also flicker more are bluer and take much longer to reach full brightness. The (very difficult to find) Edison screw CF bulbs which fit our bathroom fixture only operate in that cool, damp environment for a few weeks before burning out. Fortunately, Ireland's new light bulb law requires merchants to take back duds. The average lifespan of brand name CF bulbs seems nowhere near what it was in the 1990s.

I can almost understand why governments are trying to force us to use CFs. CFs are functionally equivalent to incandescent for MOST applications while using 1/5th to 1/3rd the wattage. But if we can overlook edge cases, why stop with light bulbs? Sun Rays are functionally equivalent to desktop PCs for MOST applications while using only 1/40th the electrical power. Replacing PCs with Sun Rays would saves between 8 and 13 times as much as moving from incandescents to CFs. So why not ban desktop PCs?

Posted at 10:58PM Oct 12, 2008 by Brian Nitz in Environment  |  Comments[8]

Nwam hangs OpenSolaris login after network reloc?

Problem:I haven't yet found or logged this as a bug, but I noticed when I'm transitioning from a laptop on the hard wired network to the same laptop on my home Wifi network, the login hangs. [Read More]

Posted at 05:13PM Oct 01, 2008 by Brian Nitz in opensolaris-howto  | 

DON´T PANIC!

DON´T PANIC! Ireland seems to have come up with a more reasonable alternative to the Paulson/Bush plan to revamp the entire U.S. economy which was engineered last weekend, defying sound advice from hundreds of respected economists. Ireland´s plan is to insure up to about $700 billion for two years in order to slow things down and let some sanity return to the markets. The Irish plan also passes some of the costs of this insurance to the industry which profited most from selling dodgy debt.

This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself... FDR 1932.

Posted at 10:59PM Sep 30, 2008 by Brian Nitz in Politics  | 

Does anyone think Wall Street welfare is a good idea?

While discussing the U.S. government's relatively harmless economic meddling (Cheese subsidies) during the Reagan/GHW Bush years, a friend suggested that the government should buy computer chips and bury them in order to prop up the falling domestic chip market. Since then, inexpensive imported chips led to the personal PC market, the cell phone market, the video game market, the associated software markets and the internet economy. None of this might have happened if the government had imposed tariffs or burned chips in order to prop up that part of the economy. A few years later, this Bush administration tried and failed to meddle with WTO-defying steel tariffs which theoretically might have saved a handful of steelworker jobs while irritating the US's staunchest allies and endangering hundreds of thousands of domestic auto industry jobs.

Posted at 11:31PM Sep 24, 2008 by Brian Nitz in Politics  |  Comments[3]

What lies beyond the archaic 8 char FAT filesystem limit?

I took my family out to the Donegal this weekend. By coincidence my Pentax digital camera "rolled over" from IMGP9999.PEF to IMGP0001.PEF just before I took this picture:

So now I must move all new files to a new folder or change the names before I rsync to my photo backup space to avoid overwriting old files. Whoever decided 10,000 photos was a sufficient limit for a digital SLR never had kids or lived in such a beautiful country. I'm still amazed at how many modern standards (e.g. ISO-9660, DCIM, DICOM) still bow to the 8.3 limitations of Microsoft's old FAT filesystem. As far as I know, DOS and RT-11 were the only popular operating systems made after 1970 with such a SHRTFLNM.LMT. Solaris, AmigaDOS, VMS, Gem, Geos, even the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 filenames exceeded this limit! Yes, it's possible to work around this limit with CLVRABRV.NMS or DIRECTRY STRUCTRS, but it seems that of all of the Digital camera manufacturers, only Casio, HP and Kodak have reasonably long term naming conventions, but none of them is as forward thinking as ZFS would allow them to be.

We really enjoyed our stay at the friendly family run Ocean Spray Bed and Breakfast on Muckross head, just east of the Slieve League cliffs in Donegal. The fact that there were no nearby restaurants or other late season tourists contributed to that "edge of the earth" feel of Donegal.

Posted at 02:43PM Sep 24, 2008 by Brian Nitz in Future  |  Comments[3]

Learning the scientific method through video games

Wired just published this article about a UW 'game academic'¹ who noticed that game players were using the scientific method to figure out the best game play strategy. In the late 1990s while trying to drag my nephew away from his video games, I noticed the same thing. This is how I 'blogged' it in 1998:

Scientific Method (As applied to a video game)

Kitesurfing Bull Island Dublin

A couple of weekends ago we saw more than 20 kites and kitesurfers packed onto a stretch of beach on Bull island, a short distance north of Sun Ireland. I don't know how they avoid getting their kites tangled. Twenty years of windsurfing has biased me towards what seems a gentler, safer, easier sport, especially with the big old floaty boards and the Aquaglide Multisport inflatable sailboat windsurfer I picked up last summer:

The sail is tiny and it isn't terribly fast, but we get plenty of wind here and it goes upwind about as well as a small catamaran. I like that it folds down into something the size of a golf bag that I can carry home.

Note: The sky looks threatening in this photo and the next day a rare lightning storm and heavy rain flooded this part of Ireland, but this was about the nearest thing we had to summer in 2008.

Posted at 11:28PM Sep 09, 2008 by Brian Nitz in General  | 

Is Sun behind more than 1/2 of all corporate OpenSource contributions?

The EC's Study on the Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU is an interesting document. I was fortunate to attend a presentation by one of the authors at an OpenIreland event a couple of years ago. The above StarCalc graph uses corporate FOSS contribution numbers from this document. A picture is worth 1000 words, isn't it? This study was published in November 2006, the same month Java was GPL'd so I doubt the Java codebase was included in these calculations. The open sourcing of Solaris was also in early stages. Add these and the MySQL code and it wouldn't surprise me if more than 1/2 of the corporate contributed OpenSource code is from a division of Sun Microsystems. I know we can do better. But quite a few big FOSS consumers (e.g. those selling beautifully branded FreeBSD or web services) are notably absent from the top 10 corporate contributor list. What percentage of corporate FOSS contribution would quench some of the hottest alternate kernel fanboy flames? 60%, 75%? Is it sufficient to contribute to the whole software ecosystem Joe sixpack thinks of as "Linux" or do you have to commit directly to Linus's kernel? What does it take to be cool? Are we there yet?

Posted at 10:56PM Sep 09, 2008 by Brian Nitz in Open-Source  | 

#1 OpenSolaris bug: Microsoft Lock-in

Harry Lu pointed out that bug #1 in Ubuntu is:

"Microsoft has a majority market share in the new desktop PC marketplace. This is a bug, which Ubuntu is designed to fix."

Should I log a similar bug in defect.opensolaris.org?

[Read More]

Posted at 11:17AM Sep 06, 2008 by Brian Nitz in OpenSolaris  |  Comments[4]

Intercontinental demand load balancing (outsource your carbon footprint!)

While visiting family in Wisconsin last summer, I learned that a Sun Ray client attached to servers more than 3500 miles away performed at least as well as a client at my home 8 miles away and nearly as well as clients right in the Dublin office. So, I was able to use Irish wind energy while working in a coal powered corner of Wisconsin. I wondered if this technique could be formalized into demand side transcontinental IT energy load balancing GRID? I wrote up the idea and with Sun's help, it was published in the September issue of Research Disclosure. At a time when oil prices are soaring and some are predicting that up to 50% of electricity load might eventually be devoted to IT, I can think of quite a few possibilities for this kind of grid system:

• Efficient alternative to carbon tax and trade:Wisconsin and many other parts of the world is not suitable for solar, wind, tide, hydroelectric or geothermal energy. When carbon taxes are enacted, places such as these could be at a severe economic disadvantage compared to Nevada, California and other places where carbon neutral energy sources are abundant. Industries in these places have few alternatives. They could wait for superconducting electricity grids and buy energy from elsewhere, they could pay the carbon tax and buy credits from other states, they could send jobs and industry to where energy is cheap and clean, or they could use demand load balancing to keep jobs and outsource the energy demand.
• Failsafe UPS:When I worked in South Florida, we could almost set our watches by the daily summer thunderstorms. Sometimes it would knock our power out five times a day. Even if the power glitch lasted only one second, it took the DEC servers a half hour to reboot and certainly disrupted our work day. Ideally, our servers would have been hosted somewhere where electricity was more reliable. A small solar panel (~3500 Watts) on the roof would have been sufficient to power 150 Sun Ray clients and their monitors. The lack of servers in our office would have also made it easier for our HVAC system to cope with the Florida heat.
• Shifting peak demand: Our least efficient, most expensive and most polluting power plants usually come on line during periods of peak demand. I've heard that some utilities paid as much as $0.45/kWh for peak electricity transferred over the conventional "supply side" electricity grid. Ever since air conditioning became popular, Wisconsin electricity demand peaks during late afternoon on the hottest days of summer. By contrast, Florida power demand peaks during the coldest winter nights because thats the only time of year when simple but inefficient electric heating systems are necessary. While there may be some occasions when both Florida and Wisconsin are at peak demand, IT demand load grid balancing could transfer load between northern and southern hemispheres if necessary. Use Australian solar energy to power your data center during a cloudy Irish winter night. Use Irish wind to power your Australian data center during a windless day.
• Optimizing peak load across timezones:One of the reasons Dublin's Sun Ray servers seemed faster to me when I was working from Wisconsin is that by noon Wisconsin time, many of the local users in the Irish timezone would have gone home. If the global grid load balancing system were smart enough, it could predict when and where server resources would become available. As timezones approach the end of their workday, they would advertise that resources are becoming available for timezones to the west. This could help flatten the daily energy demand peaks and allow us to use more efficient power sources.

If anyone has suggestions or alternative ways of using energy, I'm open to comments. Or you might want to consider writing up the idea and submitting it for possible publication at Research Disclosure. This is a useful publication service which allows the free exchange of ideas, while discouraging patent trolls.

Posted at 12:32PM Aug 18, 2008 by Brian Nitz in Environment  |  Comments[0]

August 16, 2008 Lunar Eclipse from Malahide Ireland

We had about three minute long cloud break during Saturday's lunar eclipse. The photo shows the moon rising in partial earth shadow. Malahide's St. Sylvester church is in the foreground. Moments later the clouds closed in and the mosquitoes descended upon us. It was time to go home.

Posted at 12:16PM Aug 18, 2008 by Brian Nitz in  | 

The great Firewall of {IrishIIShosts}.ie

(UPDATE EDITED 12 August 2008): Thanks to a friend at work and our network service diagnostic personnel and someone on the outside with the keys to the Great firewall of {Irish_IIS_Hosts.ie} I appreciate the fact that I can now access IIS Irish government websites from within Sun and download all of those immigration, work permit and tax forms. Thank you!

Posted at 11:23PM Aug 11, 2008 by Brian Nitz in General  | 

Angry about your personal data being "lost" to criminals? Tell someone about Sun Ray!

Another day, another laptop stolen, another 106,000 personal bank account details release to a criminal via theft of a laptop. Sigh. The first time a businessman offered to enter credit my card details into his laptop in the parking lot of his company, I cringed and my wife (who was then a loan officer) sternly reminded him of the dangers of identity theft. A few years later I learned that the blood clinic where I donated lost records on an unencrypted laptop, and now an Irish government laptop containing thousands of personal records went missing. I'm beginning to lose my patience about the lack over government and business stewardship of personal details. It's even more frustrating working for Sun and knowing that if the SunRay/Gobi laptop or any of the Sun Ray clients in our office were ever stolen, the criminal would get nothing, zip, zero, nada.

Posted at 11:04PM Aug 11, 2008 by Brian Nitz in Sun  | 

Thanks to the organizers of GUADEC 2008!

Many thanks to the organizers, volunteers and Gnomers who helped make GUADEC 2008 possible! There were a few glitches (please open up SSL and VPN ports next time!), but overall it was a success. I also appreciate being able to present my talk on measuring the GNOME footprint. If I'd anticipated the interest, I would have gone into more detail regarding the extensive use of dtrace in this study, but John Rice covered that well in his talk. I'll try to post the details here as soon as possible. I also appreciate the fact that my friend Andrei, a Google Summer of Code student, is eager to use some of my techniques in his memory profile study. It was great to see my friends again and I look forward to seeing them again at a future GUADEC!

The attached photo is an QtpfsGUI tonemapping of a RAW image I took from the roof of our hotel one night. Istanbul is truly an amazing city and though this image doesn't exactly capture the experience of being there, I hope it captures something of the mood.

Posted at 12:16AM Jul 16, 2008 by Brian Nitz in Open-Source  |