Thursday September 01, 2005

librac is dead, long live librac

In Solaris Express build 23 you will discover that librac no longer exists. Why? Because it is an old crufty attempt to allow a single threaded application to asynchronously issue multiple RPC requests. It was an attempt to allow some old SunOS 4.x era Netwise (a company bought by Microsoft who shutdown its RPC products) to be ported to Solaris 2.0.

The general market for ONC RPC based applications has been in steady decline. Replaced first by alternative RPC's such as DCE/RPC, then higher level distributed objects using things like Corba, and more recently JINI and remote Java objects. Also as of Solaris 2.3, full fledged support for multi-threaded RPCs further removed the need for librac.

So what was the harm of just leaving it alone? The bulk of the code is a duplicate of the regular RPC library in libnsl. Over the years there have been a number of bugs fixed in one but not the other, the maintainence cost was overwhelming any benefit.

So what do I do if I depended on it? The simplest solution is to grab a copy from an old OpenSolaris release and support it yourself. Nothing has changed to prevent it from working. A better solution is to just convert your code to be multi-threaded and issue each request in a different thread and wait for a reply. This is exactly what is done in the kernel RPC.

Did we warn you? Yes. Although the man pages did not use the more common term Obsolete, it used an alternative phrasing "use of this interface is disparaged." This is a bit of an odd phrasing, usually you disparage a thing, not its use, but the intent is the same, don't go there.

Tuesday August 23, 2005

Excellent Spin

It is almost amazing how good politicians are at spinning the new and speeches they give. In today's news, in reference to the Cindy Sheehan protests, President Bush is quoted as saying "I've met with a lot of families, she doesn't represent the view of a lot of families I have met with." But if you pay attention to the various public events or town halls that the does attend, they are almost exclusively filled with pro-Bush supporters.

In fact, during the 2004 campaign people wearing anti-Bush T-shirts were denied admission, thrown out, or arrested. In fairness, the Kerry camp was also not welcoming, but not nearly as heavy handed.

Another great example of spin is to tie two important but not necessarily related things together. From the speech to the VFW in Utah:
"We will finish the task that they gave their lives for. We will honor their sacrifice by staying on the offensive against the terrorists."
It is very difficult for anyone to put together a rational reason not to honor the soldiers that have lost their lives in the US armed forces. As much as you may disagree with the policy, the troops in the trenches are willingly putting their lives on the line without regard to that policy. That is admirable! But the false implication is that if you don't support the policy, you are not honoring the fallen. Their honor comes from what they have already done, not from what the future policy will be. It is completely logical to oppose staying in Iraq and to also honor the troops.

The point is that politicians, and political parties, are spinning things so heavily to support their positions that the logical flaws are now blatant. Personally, I believe leaving Iraq now will cause more harm than good, and that has nothing to do with the arguments for or against invading Iraq in the first place. You break it, you buy it.

( Aug 23 2005, 05:58:12 PM CDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

Wednesday August 10, 2005

Treo 650 DUN

I have been having troubles with using Bluetooth DUN between my Treo 650 and my Apple Powerbook 12" running MacOS X. For a good description of how to configure it check out this thread on TreoCentral or vocaro's excellent summary. It mostly worked just fine, but every 5-60 minutes the laptop would get an RFCOMM error and drop the connection. Trying to immediately re-connect would fail with the same error. But if I turned off Bluetooth on the Treo and then immediately turned it back on again it would come back. Very annoying, but it mostly worked.

On my last trip I started to get very annoyed. Searching places like TreoCentral, would find that most people used DUN without any problems (assuming their carrier's version supported it), but a few would have problems similar to mine, but with no real fix available. So I started googling and just happened to stumble into PhilMUG's website and saw this passing configuration notes about the System Preference->Network->Location->Bluetooth->PPP without explanation:

    Click PPP Options.
    - set all boxes as unchecked

and

    Select Bluetooth Modem
    - Select Treo 650 Globe GPRS as the modem. 
    - leave both Enable error connection and compression in modem and
       Wait for dial tone before dialing options unchecked.

I looked in my laptop's Network Preferences and I did have some of those boxes checked. I cleared them and so far have spend 4-6 hours connected using DUN without any RFCOMM errors. I have not gone through and systematically tried each of them separately to see which are the culprits, but I suspect it may be the "Enable error correction..." and/or "Use TCP header compression." My weak theory is that the Bluetooth link has bit errors that the correction or compression cannot deal with resulting in an error. Without checks the junk goes through but is dropped by the TCP/IP stack.

So far my DUN usage has been from the mundane hotel usage to gain 100+kbps over a dialup ISP (and the infamous 60+ minute charges), to web surfing in an RV parked in a field outside Sears Point Raceway! Not as fast as a WiFi hotspot, but it sure works in a lot more places. Now if wireless vendors could come up with cheaper data rates and better GPRS/EDGE coverage I would be really happy! ( Aug 10 2005, 08:57:12 PM CDT ) Permalink Comments [2]

Monday August 01, 2005

Where Have You Been?

Thanks to Michael Jordan for a reference to this cool web site. While my world travels are not too extensive, at least I have seen most of the United States!

create your own visited states map

Monday July 25, 2005

I Am Not The Drummer You Seek!

One of the small benefits of having a "plain" name is that it provides some amount of privacy through obscurity. Googling my name will bring you a long list of sites unrelated to me, mostly references to the basketball star from the San Antonio Spurs commonly called "The Admiral". After creating this blog I have risen through list and can now be found on the third page of Google results, previously you really needed to know something else about me to find me. So I have moved from total obscurity to partial obscurity.

The blogs.sun.com software has a fun feature that it allows you to see what sites are referring to your blog. Usually this contains just the few friends and colleagues that I interact with. Recently I noticed a large number of google referrals with my name and the word "cars". That was strange, so I went to google.com and entered the search. To my amazement my blog was the top hit! While I like cars and auto racing (NASCAR in particular), my depth of knowledge on the subject is far from unique or particularly valuable.

Then in looking at the other results, I remembered the rather obscure fun fact that the drummer from the band "The Cars" shares my name. Obscure because no one ever remembers the drummer in a band, even if they blow up on stage. So while I enjoyed the band's music, and in fact have their anthology (although what was with Panorama?), I can't do better than make noise with a drum set.

Tuesday July 19, 2005

NFSv4 ELSE Operation

A proposal for the IETF NFSv4 working group to extend  the COMPOUND VERIFY and NVERIFY operations to  allow for an ELSE clause.

Discussion on nfsv4@ietf.org

Tuesday April 19, 2005

Independent Judiciary

A quote from the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice:

I wonder if Tom DeLay and Bill Frist have considered this perspective in their recent rants about judges opposing their views?

In fairness, the quote is about how Putin is consolidating Russian power and the omitted text is:

"like the Duma (parliament lower house)"

Friday March 25, 2005

The Future is Now!

Looks like Viewsonic has made a major break through!

A true paradigm shift!

Tuesday March 22, 2005

Comments Inline?

There is a growing trend in e-mail threads to start a response with "Comments inline" then to do what they say and add comments inline.

What's the point?

Who would respond to an e-mail and not add comments? If the comments are not at the top then they will obviously be either inline or at the end!

So just skip the stating the obvious!

Thursday March 17, 2005

Portable Electronic Devices?

In the interest of safety, on most airlines flight attendants are saying:

"Please turn off all portable electronic devices"

So can I keep using my non-portable electronic devices?

If so, how did I get them on the airplane in the first place?

But isn't everything on an airplane, including the airplane, portable?

So why the distinction?

( Mar 17 2005, 04:15:32 PM CST ) Permalink Comments [1]

My new phone

I have recently purchased a new phone, a PalmOne Treo 650. While I have had PDAs and I have had phones, this is my first entry into the converged handset world.

I had a slow start getting it activated. I had purchased the unlocked GSM version directly from PalmOne (before the $100 price increase) and needed a SIM card. I battled through the Cingular/AT&T customer no-support having to deal with such discussions such as "You can't have that voice plan because it is a PDA not a phone!" to which I responded "But I can make phone calls with it!", which provoked "But its a PDA not a phone". Repeat for 5 minutes...

Eventually I got someone who knew what they were talking about and quickly got the order in and a promise that the SIM would be FedEx'd the next day.

A week later no SIM...

More calls and a further promise that it is on its way, must have gotten slowed down by the holiday.

A week later no SIM...

More calls just to discover that the order was cancelled. Why? "It just happens sometimes."

One last order and they finally get it right, I get my SIM, and I have voice and data access!

So next steps are the obvious ones of loading the phone with all my contacts and other data that was on my previous PDA. Along the way I am impressed by the integration and easy of use. The camera and screen are of decent quality, not that I have much desire to take or send low-res pictures with a phone.

Now it is time to start really using the Treo for its capabilities. I initially setup in VersaMail (any relationship to the BofA VersaTeller?) application to read my personal RoadRunner POP mail account. Works great! Now to send a message, uh-oh, no relaying allowed. Some googling and reading about anti-SPAM features that virtually mandate mail servers to not relay mail that did not originate from or are not destined for their network. One interesting solution is to go to smtp.com which for a fee will be your SMTP mail server for a particular From: address. Their Family Plan is ideal for the low volume a PDA will generate. But the real solution is to just use one of the available, put poorly advertised, SMTP servers on your wireless carrier's network. In my case the old AT&T wireless network uses smtp.mymmode.com (the old smtp.attwireless.net is going away).

Now things are getting more interesting!

Next step is to figure out how to get e-mail from my sun.com account. Sun is currently running a pilot program to allow external access to e-mail through an "edge" server using all of the appropriate security tricks. However, as a true geek I want access to all the services I have from my laptop which means I need a VPN tunnel. According to PalmOne's web site, there are only two listed VPN for PalmOS providers, one does PPTP and the other IPSec. Sun of course uses Cisco 3000's and IPSec so the solution is movianVPN by Certicom. Unfortunately Certicom has got out of the retail sales of movianVPN so you must purchase it from an Irish supplier WorldNet21 Technology. A few Euros later and a trivial configuration, I am through the firewall accessing my e-mail at work!

Given the bulk of the e-mail I get at work, even after SPAM filtering, the included VersaMail was not up for the job. Its IMAP handler was very slow to determine changes on a large Inbox and it is also limited to only being able to store messages in the Treo's RAM and not in the optional SD card. So the next step up was to try out SnapperMail, a full featured e-mail client that works well and has a very good support forum over in Yahoo Groups. (ChatterEmail is another alternative.)

The last critical piece for a geek is to be able to SSH into a system. So I just grabbed PSSH for free, and my reading glasses, and I am in!

Now the only question is if this has made me more productive or just busier?

( Mar 17 2005, 01:34:47 PM CST ) Permalink Comments [3]

Sunday March 06, 2005

Network installation made easy

If you have ever tried to install Solaris on an x86/x64 system over a network, you may have found that it is not trivial to get the system to initially boot. As an engineer who has written a number of the parts of the initial bootstrapping code, I have personally found the directions on docs.sun.com difficult to follow, especially for PXE booting and the necessary DHCP parameters.

Your savior is JET! A wonderful toolkit to easily setup jumpstart installation on all platforms.

Saturday March 05, 2005

Reducing the Deficit

Claim

On a recent Charlie Rose (02/09/05), the speaker of the house Dennis Hastert stated that they were making progress in reducing the budget deficit. In the most recent year he claimed it was reduced by 20% and at this rate it would be no problem to meet George W. Bush's goal of halving the deficit in 5 years.

Data

According to the Congressional Budget Office's Historical Budget Data report the budget deficit in the last 2 years has been $378B in 2003 and $412B in 2004. Latest estimates by the CBO have the 2005 deficit at $394B, at best a 5% reduction.

Spin

Where did the claim come from? The Bush administration had projected that the 2004 deficit would come in at an amazing $521B. As with any economic forecasting this was based on assumptions of spending and economic growth, ones that turned out to be overly pessimistic. To make things even worse, the 50% reduction goal is also based on this excessive estimate, based on actual data the goal (if achieved) will only reduce the deficit by a third.

ABC Report

( Mar 05 2005, 11:21:14 PM CST ) Permalink Comments [2]

Thursday February 24, 2005

Its Called Carry On Luggage

As a frequent flyer I have noticed a disturbing trend in travelling, people are packing even bigger carry-on luggage.

Simple rule, if you can't actually carry it, it is not carry-on luggage!

( Feb 24 2005, 08:02:25 PM CST ) Permalink Comments [2]

Saturday February 19, 2005

Heh... Huh?

I know I am getting old, in instant messaging there is a growing trend to say "heh"... what's up with that?

The various web sites define it as:

a short laugh, exactly what it looks like
a courtesy laugh

So what's the point? At best its a meaningless message (phatic), at worst it shows disdain.

So why bother....

( Feb 19 2005, 11:16:36 AM CST ) Permalink Comments [9]