Good news! Southwest Airlines offers wifi on my flight! Only $5 introductory price! I have to try this out!
The service is “designed by Yahoo!”
It is kind of really really slow to make connections.
Wait . . . WTF is this?!!
Yup. Southwest Airlines wifi does HTTP session hijacking to inject content in to your web pages.
This is a perfect illustration of the need for net neutrality: your Internet Service Provider should not interfere with your ability to surf web pages. This would be comparable to your phone company interrupting your telephone calls with commercials. Outrageous! Wrong! Bad!!
(On Mei’s computer there are actual ads in the blue bar on top, but my AdBlock plugin filters those.)
It gets worse from there. On the “designed by Yahoo!” experience you can surf on over to Yahoo! just fine. But I’m a Google man. Here’s what Google looks like:
Work-around #1: On sites that support them, use HTTPS URLs. Those are encrypted, so they can’t be hijacked. So, where http://www.google.com/ fails, https://www.google.com/ gets through!
But my little WordPress blog lacks fancy-pants HTTPS. And the session hijacking breaks my ability to post.
Work-around #2: If you have a remote shell account, a simple ssh -D 8080 will set up a SOCKS proxy, and you can tell your web browser to use SOCKS proxy localhost:8080 . . . now you are routing through an encrypted connection: no hijacking!
Update: they charge is $5/segment, so $10 if your plane stops in Las Vegas, and you get to type your credit card number a second time. Though, on the second segment, Google loads okay, but I still had to route through the proxy because the magic header was blocking WordPress’ media interface.
The Gogo Wireless on Virgin America always worked way better than this, and Google covers the cost over the holidays. And as far as I know: no session hijacking!
I saw this float across my Google Reader yesterday, thanks to Tom Limoncelli. If you are a sysadmin in an environment fixing to do more virtualization, it is well worth a skim:
NOTE: this isn’t an anti-virtualization rant, more of a “things to watch out for” briefing.
Some of my take-aways:
Sure we’ll have fewer physical servers, but the number of deployed systems will grow more quickly. As that grows so too will our systems management burden.
As the system count grows faster, we may hit capacity chokepoints on internal infrastructure like monitoring, trending, log analysis, DHCP or DNS faster than previously assumed.
Troubleshooting becomes more complex: is your slow disk access an application, OS, or hardware issue becomes also a potential host OS, networking/SAN or filer issue as well.
Regarding troubleshooting: we may add another team to the mix (to manage virtualization) while trouble-shooting has an increased probability of requiring cooperation across multiple teams to pin down. Increased importance on our ability to cooperate across teams.
Change management impacts: small changes against a larger number of systems sharing architecture snowball even more. One can add something to the base image that increases disk use by 1% for any one system, but multiply that across all your systems and you have a big new load on your filer. (1,000 butterflies flapping their wings.)
Reduced fault isolation: as we have greater ability to inadvertently magnify increased load and swamp network and storage infrastructure, we have a greater ability to impact the performance of unrelated systems which share that infrastructure.
The article also cautions against relying on vendor-provided GUIs because they don’t scale as well as a good management and automation framework.
Ah, the other thing noteworthy there is the ACM Queue magazine is now including articles on systems administration. (I subscribed to the system administration feed.)
A wiki feature I would like to see: when a node has not been edited for a certain period of time, it sends a message to the author and contributors, to review the node for relevance, and update or delete the node, if appropriate. The period of time should be configurable, and the feature should be able to CC the message in to the local request management system.
The check should be repeated on multiples of the period of time. For example, if you want to review your nodes once per year, the first year comes, the author reviews the node, sees no need to make any changes, then another year passes, you get a reminder to take another looksee . . .
This would be useful especially for an operations environment, to ensure that the shared knowledge hasn’t gone too stale, keeping the wiki resource relevant. I sincerely hope this feature already exists in a few systems!
Potentially nifty: a text-to-speech utility that writes its output to an audio device, which you could set as your system’s sound input. This way you could have “conversations” in your headphones via VoIP or Skype without having to make disruptive noises or emitting sensitive information in a shared environment like an open office or a library.
Hrmmm.
sudo apt-get install epos
sudo /etc/init.d/epos start
say "this does not work"
sudo apt-get remove epos
sudo apt-get install espeak
espeak "hello there"
But it appears there is no good way on Linux, anyway, to tell a command to dump its audio output to the microphone. Bah.
Wednesday, November 3
I got my sutures out the other day. I’ve still got the band-aid on my chin, cleaning and re-dressing twice a day, until the skin is no longer broken. Doc said I’d be shaving regular next week.
Thursday, November 4
Nice: I got the WordPress for Android App working thanks to Dan at Automattic pointing out I had an SVN-corrupted xmlrpc.php file.
Annoying: No idea how I can possibly type < or > with this nice-but-crippled G2 keyboard.
I made it up to San Bruno today, aboard Caltrain. Today is the first time I took my bike on Caltrain and it really wasn’t as bad as a colleague made it sound. The yellow tags are impossible to find though, so I made a couple labels to stick on my bike indicating what stations I ride between. In San Bruno, I stopped at the curb where I face-planted last week. Nothing special about it. I got to the office way faster than I have by walking. Probably 20 minutes compressed to 5 or not more than 10. The only unpleasant part is crossing El Camino. The crossing I chose had a crosswalk on only one side, so I had to cross against traffic to get rolling across the street.
Friday, November 5
Well, I finally have a new watch band . . . my old one broke such that it would no longer attach to my wrist, but I could dangle it off my belt. Now I have to get used to looking at my wrist again.
Monday, November 8
Some days I just feel blue. Like a dark cloud is over my heart. Not unlike overcast weather. Fortunately I often have the self-awareness to understand that, whether or not I know its origin, this is likely just a passing cloud, and the best way to weather it is to just take life on as a normal day, perhaps with an added dash of industriousness to stave off the natural slothitude that a funk brings on.
I was just reading in The New Yorker about different ways that salaries are determined. I identified with having accepted the “authority ranking” or feudal model earlier in my career, when what I valued most was the opportunity to work, to serve and build and learn. Back when I still kind of hoped that wages were fair, that bosses valued the contribution of their employees. Back in 1999 this even seemed true: the startup I was working for noticed that I was kicking butt, and ramped my salary up by 20% after my first six months on the job, and again after a year . . . everything was noble and virtuous.
But nobility and virtue don’t often last. Recessions hit, money dries up, eager young employees burn themselves out and haven’t a clue what to do about it. Layoffs come . . . a decade later I have left for greener pastures as many times as I have been layed off. Welcome to the “market pricing” model of economic interaction.
I find some difficulty feeling passionate about being a market priced, employment-at-will agent. Just as sex feels better with someone you love than when you’re getting paid for it, so too does work. Fortunately, the current gig offers competetive compensation, likely stability, and the chance to relate to coworkers over several years. I guess that is as close to “married” one can get in our industry . . . and yet of course I keep my eye out for new opportunities.
And I frequently worry about getting too comfortable, getting a little flabby in the skill set because there is plenty of work I would have to do at a startup that is off-my-plate at a large company. Better attain depth where I needn’t worry over breadth, eh?
Thursday, November 11
I had a meeting today that I haven’t been looking forward to. Basically, I have spent most of my career at smaller companies, where I tend to have a lot more say over how we do things, and where the simple, obvious, light-weight solution will tend to carry the day. But at a large company, there are enough competing interests that the way we do things is often not up to me, and is far more complex and open to error (in my view) than how I would go about doing it.
Note an editorial bias, right? Of course I have a high opinion of my own way of solving a problem. Doesn’t mean my approach is the right one . . .
So, at the end of this meeting, I got McCoy in my head. “I’m just a simple country Doctor.” Well, I’m just a small-shop sysadmin, serving on a corporate flagship. I don’t really understand or approve of everything that is going on, but that isn’t my problem. I focus on getting my own job done and I am happy to give Captain Kirk a piece of my mind, but at the end of the day the Captain gets what the Captain asked for.
Wednesday, November 17
From today’s work log:
Scout around a bit as to the advantages of managing system configuration
files in git. Git’s strength appears to be strong branch and merge
capabilities, working offline from the central repository, and the
capacity for fine-grained commits. Disadvantage is a steeper learning
curve. Anyway, we could potentially allow staff to grab a local branch
make several changes, review changes and reject those that proved
infeasible, then submit changes back to the central repository. Later,
a change management team could review differences between the central
repository and the stage / production repositories, then selectively
merge changes to the more stable environments in an appropriate manner.
I had lunch with Mei today at a Chinese place on Castro St in Mountain View. At the next table I overheard some guys talking about the size of the Oort Cloud if Earth were the size of a grain of sand . . . hard-core nerdy lunch conversation. I recounted that when I got off the light rail the other day I heard one guy explaining to another guy the theory behind anti-matter reactions that power the warp propulsion system in Star Trek. When you live here you live in the pulsing underbelly heart of nerd-dom. I kind of like it.
Thursday, November 18
My bicycle lights came in from Amazon.com and I tried them out yesterday on the ride to the light rail. (Between the weather and a recent injury I’m usually reluctant to ride all the way to work.) The front light was somewhat occluded by the basket so last night I moved it to a helmet mount, which required some careful trimming of a cross-member atop the helmet so the thing would fit, but nothing likely to compromise structural integrity.
Yesterday I also received my replacement G2. I got it up and running and it went and updated itself. It made a big todo about “wifi calling” which . . . uses minutes? Really? REALLY?! So, I’ll provide the bandwidth and you’ll charge me . . . but it also quietly enabled Tethering, via USB and WiFi. I’m using it now. I heard a rumor that T-Mobile was fixing to charge an extra fee for tethering. Hopefully though at the moment they’re content to charge customers to make telephone calls via their home wifi networks.
(Oh yeah, and I’m on the light rail at the moment, though updating a blog is hardly much of a test of tethering.)
I wish I wish that carriers would simply figure out a monetary equivalence between bandwidth and minutes, then just let me pay a transparent rate for what I use. Eventually I guess someone will drop the shenanigans and attract customers like me. As it is I’m miffed that I pay more per month for a calling plan I rarely use than I do for the data surcharge, which as far as I am concerned is the primary point of carrying around a location-aware pocket computer.
Telephone calls? Not my thing.
Later, I was looking at Google’s announcement regarding improved navigation UI. The improved transit overview is nice, but then I happened to request the bike route between work and home, and now that Google has caught on that the Bay Trail North of Moffett is open, it suggests that at the first choice, despite it taking ten minutes longer than more direct options. Anyway, it is nice to know now that my bicycle commute is 11.6 miles in 56 minutes. (I think it takes me a bit longer as I usually take a little break along the way.)
Saturday, November 20
Learned some basic git, and used it for updating the web site.
Installation to more-current-version of git:
sudo yum install gettext-devel expat-devel curl-devel zlib-devel openssl-devel
git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
cd git
make
make install
The big thing being it is trivial to create branches and switch among them in your working directory. So, you can start working on some feature, put it on the shelf, work on a different feature, and basically submit only the changes you feel are baked back to the main line.
I honestly believe that Google really does intend to not-be-evil. And though I know they screw up and have to deal with some grey areas, I put a lot of trust in Google with my personal data. Trust I wouldn’t put in Microsoft or Facebook.
Anyway, my faith in Google was recently re-affirmed when I fired up Google Chrome on a new box and was presented with this dialog:
If you’re not being evil, you make it trivial for users to switch to a different search engine. If you’re making an effort to really do right by the user, you ask them which search engine they prefer, rather than just defaulting them to your own.
In case you have ever wondered what I think of Google’s Blogger:
Seriously, Blogger has all the glitz and glamor of Geocities: it is the Internet’s tacky trailer park where people end up because they figure Google (or, in the old days, Yahoo!) must know something about managing blogs, but in reality it is just a neglected, wayward, red-headed stepchild from a former acquisition that one night that Larry Page got drunk after the company ski trip and woke up in Reno . . .
I like to think they have gotten better over the years, but right now it looks like the way they handle errors is that they have replaced a vague, general error message with a series of codes, and if you feel really enterprising you may eventually learn that there’s a form somewhere where you can paste in details regarding the error code you encountered in to a Google spreadsheet. But no, linking the error display to the part where you describe how you provoked the error . . . that would be too obvious . . .
If Facebook built Gmail, only you could see your Inbox.
Six months later, your friends could see your Inbox.
Six months later, friends of your friends could read your Inbox.
Six months later, the Internet could read your Inbox.
Because, although you don’t know it, you really want to share yourself with the world.
Of course, each time the defaults change, you would be able to reconfigure the defaults, but you would have to find the new and improved settings pages and learn how they work.
I still fondly recall the nice rubber keyboard of my Sidekick 2. So nice, I was reluctant to “upgrade” to a G1, which has a nice enough keyboard. A few months back I got to spend some time with a Nexus One, which was really nice . . . but I just could not adjust to the on-screen keyboard. The on-screen keyboard has gotten very good for inputting addresses and short messages, but if you’re a compulsive typer like me you need an excellent physical keyboard.
So, I keep my eye out for an Android device with an excellent physical keyboard, and naturally I do a little research on this HTC “T-Mobile myTouch 3G Slide” . . . the name is truly awful, but it sounds like the keyboard shows promise. (It sounds like the physically-similar HTC “Touch Pro2” has an excellent keyboard, but I don’t want to run Windows on a mobile phone.)
So, in case, like me, you have wondered if the keyboard is any good, here is what various online reviews have had to say:
Of course, the main reason to get the myTouch Slide is for the full QWERTY keyboard. There are a few negatives but, overall, it’s an excellent way to bang out messages on the go. The shape of the keys are just right and the feedback and “clickability” make it easy to write long e-mails wherever you are. Hitting the secondary function or Caps lock key will bring up a handy light above the keyboard and I always appreciate dedicated comma and period buttons. There’s also pretty good auto-correction software with the keyboard so you don’t have to worry about throwing in apostrophes. The sliding mechanism produces a satisfying sound and it feels like it will hold up over time.
On the downside, I found the Tab button and A a little too close together and this led to multiple frustrating typos. What’s even worse is that the top row doubles as the number keys. This happens on many keyboards but usually you’ll have the letters and numbers a different color or font size to help you quickly find what you’re looking for. The myTouch Slide has “T5” “Y6” “I8” and others the exact same color and size, which can take some time to get used to. None of these quibbles are deal breakers though, as I was quickly able to get up to speed with my typing.
(The keyboard has four rows instead of five, and the top row reads “Q1 W2 E3 R4 T5 Y6 U7 I8 O9 P0” which looks dumb and would take some getting used to. Alas, the Touch Pro2 has five rows, like all the keyboards I am used to.)
The keyboard is one of the best four-row designs we’ve used in recent memory (LG, seriously, take some pointers from this before you go releasing an Ally 2) with great feel, spacing, and clickiness — it’s readily apparent that HTC’s deep experience in making these kinds of keyboards is paying dividends. They’ve made room for all of the most important keys that you should be able to access without pressing Shift or Alt, notably the comma, period, and “@” symbol, plus you’ve got Home and Search keys and duplicated modifiers on the left and right sides. HTC aficionados will also be pleased to see that they’ve carried over the lit Shift and Alt symbols above the numeric row, which makes it super easy to see what character you’re about to press. It’s a nice touch.
Keyboards are a very personal thing, and personally I love Slide’s QWERTY. While not quite as luscious as the Touch Pro2 on which it’s based, mT3G Slide’s thumbboard has been a joy to use save for some minor issues I have with the labels on the keys. Buttons on the keyboard are offset and isolated and have decent travel and solid tactile feel – in other words, its the exact opposite of the Moto Droid‘s flat grid of near motionless buttons, which I can’t stand. If you just read that sentence and wrote off the rest of my review because you love, love, love Droid’s QWERTY, then you may well hate Slide’s keyboard. Like I said, QWERTYs are a highly personal matter.
From http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2010/06/10/review-t-mobile-mytouch-3g-slide/: “who is this for? It’s for folks who miss their Sidekick and want a keyboard for messaging. The MyTouch 3G Slide’s processor won’t win the blue ribbon at the County Fair, but it is an impressive bit of cellphone.”
My verdict? I would want to try it out in the store, but it sounds like the keyboard would probably be “good enough” for me. That said, I think I will continue to hold out on upgrading for the following reasons:
My current service plan is $55/mo+tax, but these days it seems extremely difficult to get “smart phone” service for under $70/mo.
The Slide’s display could be better, its processor could be faster.
I want that 5-row keyboard, or at least one less stupidly designed.
Given that it may be either a hassle or an impossibility to upgrade my phone without paying more money each month, an expensive “upgrade” had better be worth it. The Slide sounds like it would be good enough as a new phone–a better alternative to the G1–but it has a few too many compromises to justify the cost of upgrade.
On our trip to London I spent some time browsing the Science Museum, which holds many wonders. When I got upstairs I tingled inside at the sight of this beauty. Charles Babbage was a genius who designed a mechanical, base-10 computing device way before the modern computer era. His vision was never built: it was just too hard and expensive and plain old ahead of its time. Finally, in the 1980s, this computer was built based on Babbage’s old designs. A beautiful brass hand-cranked calculating machine! For a modern computer geek this is not unlike seeing a dinosaur brought to life.
Our current national information security policy basically amounts to every company hires their own militia to provide collective security against attacks, large and small. The major ISPs will cooperate with each other to filter out attacks when they can, but . . . it is basically “every man for himself”
And our own critical infrastructure, like the power grid and the military, is constantly being hacked by the Chinese, who have a standing Army of highly competitive, over-caffeinated nerds and a shortage of women. Guys who can’t get laid acquire a lot of energy that needs to be directed somewhere.
So, this new initiative, to use a military analogy, amounts to giving the President an especially large white flag which can be deployed at a moment’s notice. “The Internet is under attack!? Quick, turn everything off and hide!!”
I mean, I thought I was all for Socialism and all, but this rapid surrender option isn’t the part of French national policy that I was hoping we would emulate . . .
How about instead of a “kill switch” we invested some time and energy and patriotism in to building a common defense strategy that analysed threats in real time and coordinated with the parties who manage our national networking infrastructure to deploy a rapid response to threats? Too obvious? Maybe oh maybe that is what they’re trying to do, but they have this “kill switch provision” in there that is making the whole effort look more retarded than it is.
I used to believe . . . that growing and growing up are analogous, that both are inevitable and uncontrollable processes. Now it seems to me that growing up is governed by the will, that one can choose to become an adult, but only at given moments. These moments come along fairly infrequently — during crises in relationships, for example, or when one has been given the chance to start afresh somewhere — and one can ignore or seize them.
Nick Hornby
I think that is a fair description. I think that for a long time I chose to be swept along with the current, without taking much responsibility for my destination. In the past few years I have gained a better understanding that the crises are “growing up” opportunities, and that I have successfully “grown up” from some of these experiences. Still, it is easy enough to be swept along and fail to learn lessons, and I have surely missed the opportunity to grow as much as I could have from some of these crises.
I also remember John Chambers, Cisco’s CEO, recounting advice he had received during the dot-com boom, that you really only have a great company after you have survived an existential threat. After you have had to “grow up” and see what hard decisions you make when it comes time to make those hard decisions. John recounted with a grim face the large number of layoffs that Cisco chose to make in order to survive the dot-com crash. Today, Cisco pays well, and hands out bonuses, but although it has billions in the bank, it is also religious about managing expenses, which can be frustrating at times. All the same, I prefer to work for a company that can sometimes feel frustratingly stingy, if it means my job is less likely to be axed in the next recession. I like to think that this “stinginess” is the mark of a “grown up” company which is keen to reduce the risk of future crisis.
There is a well-worn adage that those who set out upon a great enterprise would do well to count the cost. I am not sure that this is always true. I think that some of the very greatest enterprises in the world have been carried out successfully simply because the people who undertook them did not count the cost; I am much of the opinion that . . . the most instructive consideration for us is the cost of doing nothing.
Thomas Henry Huxley
The cost of doing nothing? Global Warming springs to mind. I have talked myself down from a lot of ideas because, for example, I have a better and better understanding of the costs of building a service on robust and scalable architecture. For the most part that is a good thing: great ideas should be able to wrestle down their opponents. But sometimes you just have to charge forward, and in the words of Buckminster Fuller, “dare to be naive.”
So, occasionally someone asks “well, what will we replace Facebook with?” We don’t really need to replace it right away, but there are some NYU kids who figure it would be a fun project to build a distributed social network where you get your own little “seed” site on a server somewhere, and you can connect with your friends, determining what you intend to share with whom. It sounds totally doable, though who knows if they’ll actually manage to execute and gain traction.
They asked the Internet for $10,000 via KickStarter. So far they have been pledged $174,915. $25 of that is mine. I guess they won’t fail for lack of interest or money. Go go underdogs! :)
Oh, and if you’ve been tempted to ditch Facebook, but didn’t want to be the only crazy dweeb out there, you can join just over 6,000 other folks planning to quit on May 31: http://www.quitfacebookday.com/
Of course, Google wouldn’t be spotting a trend for this search item if you didn’t have to use Google to figure out how to delete your Facebook account. CNN credits Danny Sullivan for noting this trend.
To a discussion as to preferred password manager solutions, I added the following:
I developed a simple algorithm I use to generate passwords using my brain. I have changed this algorithm a little a few times. At the most basic level, something like this would be you like to use the password “frog” . . . but then add the first two letters of the web site name: Yahoo -> frogya, Google -> froggo.
The benefits of this “password manager” are that as long as your brain functions appropriately, you will always have platform-independent access to your passwords. If any given password is compromised it is non-obvious to an attacker what your other passwords are.
The main drawback to this password manager is that different password policies are mutually exclusive: one site requires a special character, another site prohibits special characters.
I use a different algorithm for more complex passwords for important stuff like ssh keys and unix logins.
