antipaucity

CentOS 6 was released today. So far, I am not impressed.

I run a *lot* of virtual machines. So I thought I’d give the netinstall edition a try with the “minimal” install option: when the installer reboots at the end, there is no valid boot image on the drive and starting-up fails.

So I switched to the DVD installer. First problem: CentOS comes on 2 DVDs – RHEL 6 (and 6.1) come on one each.

The minimal install profile does not configure any network, or any useful packages – it is truly minimal. So, while the system will boot once the DVD has finished installing, it is pretty much not usable.

Afetr the smoothness I’ve experienced with RHEL 6.1, I think I’m going to need to evaluate other long-term releases instead of CentOS, unless they get their act together – fast. It’s been 7 MONTHS since RHEL 6 came out. CentOS historically only lagged a few weeks behind. This is ridiculous.

Shame, too – always like that you could “upgrade” a CentOS box to RHEL by adding an RHN license.

I’ve been hearing about a new company called LightSquared a lot recently. Both arstechnica and alarm:clock have both had interesting articles on the company in the last week.

The goal of LS is to create from scratch a nationwide 4G wireless network – and funder Philip Falcone thinks they can do it for about $15B. That’s a pretty impressive number, in my book, especially when compared to how much AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint have spent over the last decades building-out their networks.

The ars article points-out that the GPS industry is upset that LS is using a similar spectrum to the one used by the global position satellite system, and are worried it will make GPS receivers act poorly by overpowering the satellite signal.

Personally, I think that if your devices are built so poorly that a non-identical signal can interfere with their functionality, you have an issue on your hands – not on the hands of the folks with the similar signal. Also, LightSquared could take it upon themselves to be a private, terrestrial location service – either by repeating signals from the GPS constellation, or by adding location data to the signal they are broadcasting (40 000 towers with multiple antennae per tower ought to be able to send some useful data over the air along with everything else being carried).

Moving back to the future of the business, it looks like a very exciting time in the telecom industry in the US – like we may finally get some “real” competition to the Big Three already operating. If AT&T’s T-Mobile acquisition goes through, cell phone and wireless broadband competition would be hurt – so I’m thrilled that groups like LightSquared are coming out to play, too.

As a sidebar: Tarus, you should get in front of Philip – they’re going to need some serious monitoring

Zynga is getting ready to IPO.

They’re the group that does “Farmville” and other games on facebook. The problem with their planned $1B IPO, though, is that they rely completely on facebook’s continued existence to make any of their earnings.

Last year their profits were in the neighborhood of $400M. That’s a lot of dough. But when facebook declines, or folks quit playing games on it, what will happen to the company?

Seems like a LOT of investors could get taken big time on this one – if they hold onto the stock the way you’re “supposed to” – as an investment, and not a short-term gamble.

As with many others, I suppose, I have various email address come and go: perhaps via job changes, or graduating/changing schools, deciding to sell a domain, or any of a host of other reasons.

There’s a problem with that, though: when those changes happen, sometimes access to other digital resources becomes…difficult. For example, I have an old (now unused) merchant credit account that I opened about 7 years ago. For reasons I cannot now recall, I linked that account’s digital updates to my school email address. Problem: I graduated school Dec of 06, and my account ceased to exist sometime after that.

Woops.

And the password reset goes to that email address.

Double woops.

So the question now becomes – how do you ensure that when you switch email addresses, you don’t lose anything “important”?

It’s a problem I have yet to solve – any thoughts?

About 14 years ago, good friends of the family bought an old farm house with some outbuildings in rural Schoharie County in NY (outside Middleburgh, in a locale called “Hunter’s Land”).

One of the first things they wanted to do with the house was to re-engineer the heating, which included properly insulating the house, and then adding a back-to-back fireplace and stove nook in the living room, backed to the kitchen (the nook was designed to look like it had once been a fireplace). Jeff holds a PhD in Chemical Engineering, and works full-time with fluid dynamics for a government contractor. So when he deep-dove into fireplace fundamentals, fluid flow mechanics, and heat transfer, all of us who knew him well knew he’d come out with the best available design for heating his new home.

The design Jeff eventually settled on was a modernized Rumford fireplace (Count Rumford was quite the experimenter). One of the major differences between a Rumford design and that of a “traditional” fireplace is the smoke chamber is reversed – ie, the slope goes from front-to-back, and not back-to-front (see diagram, provided by McNear).

comparison diagram of Rumford and traditional fireplaces

The primary advantages to this reversal are: reduced/eliminated smoke discharge into the room (especially at low-flow heating circumstances), and simplified construction (no corbeling of the back wall). Other improvements in the design are broader radiatory angles for heat dispersion, and reduced fuel consumption.

Fortunately for Jeff and his wife, his brother-in-law was a mason, so costs could be reduced for installing the chimney and fireplaces to just that of labor and materials: still an expense, but lower than hiring it done outside the family.

Also fortunately for them, they had a ready supply of friends to help tear-out the non-load-bearing wall separating the kitchen and living room, cut a hole in the floor, pour a foundation for the structure, and build-out the subhearth.

During that period, I was going weekly to their house where Jeff and I would spend most of the evening geeking-out: I was in high school, and Jeff was teaching me how to program in C++ (well, ok: he taught me how to program in C using C++ keywords, and then I taught him object-orientation). His day job involved utilizing both commercial and in-house finite element analysis tools (utilizing a [then relatively] new equation solver: GMRES), and he used the time with me to try-out ideas he might want to incorporate at work – just in a new/easier-to-use language than that which he employed from 9-5 (his work centered around Fortran). (As a sidebar, we both learned an enormous amount during those days – good times [even ultimately leading to the Story of Mr G {the second version of the story}]). Back to the story.

Installing the fireplace was a fairly straight-forward process: once the wall and floor were down and cut (and the support beams for the house re-supported on the fringe of the subhearth and the middles cut out, the fireplace was laid-up “normally”. Thanks to pre-cast pieces from Superior Clay, installing the throat and smoke chamber was a cinch. Bringing the flue and chimney up through the roof was likewise a pretty quick process (the portion of the house the chimney went did not have a second storey), culminating in the first celebratory fire about a year after the whole process started (Jeff worked on it part-time during evenings and weekends, getting help as he could).

During that time, I learned a buttload about masonry, the densities of limestone and cast iron (the mantle and stove), re-engineering existing homes, temperature profiles of a fire, and fluid dynamics in action. Due my current occupation at the time, I had access to a host of thermocouple devices, some of which I checked-out and brought to Jeff’s house to profile the fireplace for where it was hottest, so that fires could be built (and a reflector plate installed) in the most efficient manner.

After a few years in Hunter’s Land, Jeff & co moved to a new domicile closer to his work (cutting his ~60 minutes each way commute by 80%). They again decided to add a Rumford fireplace to their home, but hired the entire project out for time purposes.

Since that time, I have been a proponent of fireplace heating, and of some level of self-reliance on fuel (and food) supplies (when possible).

Who knew a year-long hobby project would end up having such a long-term effect?

Given the chance, I’d LOVE to implement such a fireplace in my own home when we finally buy one.

There have been a variety of stories recently about MacDefender, and the recent [small] wave of malware attacks on Mac OS X systems.

For years, one of the most-touted features of the Mac was its [relative] immunity to malware: the number of viruses, trojans, etc for any edition of the Macintosh is remarkably small: with System 7, it was on the order of scores, not thousands as with DOS/Windows (at the time).

I do not run antivirus software on most of my machines (virtual and physical), because I take a variety of other precautions. The glib statement that Macs are immune to attacks is becoming, sadly, more-publicly-known to be false.

It is interesting to note, though, that this particular attack still relies on poor user understanding, rather than a flaw in the platform itself: it is still up to the user to install this bogus piece of crap, rather than it materializing automagically via a browser plugin, email attachment, etc.

Saw in a tweet from David Pogue that someone has finally implemented a DVR-for-radio. Only took three years for someone to build

I haven’t started playing with DAR.fm yet, but it looks pretty cool!

Years ago, my mom and I would routinely try to catch episodes of Square Foot Gardening (SFG) on PBS.

Hosted by Mel Bartholomew, a retired civil engineer, SFG was a program whose aim was to enable gardening by the masses in confined spaces (though, naturally, if can be implemented in larger settings as well). Mr Bartholomew’s aim was to take his years of experience as an engineer, and turn gardening on its head: too much focus was (and still is, though less prominently now) given to gardening as miniaturized farming, rather than as a practice in its own right. It also promoted organic gardening and growing years before the current organic marketing wave.

The basic premise of SFG is to plant cooperatively, intensively, rotatively, and sequentially (see the wikipedia, SFG.com, and SFG.org sites for even more information).

• Cooperatively: plant different types of flowers and vegetables together to reduce the likelihood for disease transmission, to ward-off predators, and to give a dynamic look to the garden.
• Intensively: carrots only needs a few cubic inches of good soil in which to grow – plant them 4×4 in a 1′x1′ square.
• Rotatively: once a given crop has finished, reuse the plot, but for a different plant type to not overly wear-out the soil.
• Sequentially: if you want to go with a more homogeneous garden, plant in a cyclic fashion to spread the harvest over a period of time throughout the year

Soil preparation takes a bit of practice, but once you have a garden going, continually supplying compost should become easier (take all garden waste and add it to the pile). The only ingredient you should need to buy on a semi-frequent basis is peat moss, and that only once every 2-3 years per box. Vermiculite refresh is needed less often – closer to every 4-5 years per box.

The program and book had enough of a lasting impact on me that I used it as the basis for a paper in college – Eating Off the Grid (full PDF^*` and appendix).

A second book referenced in the television series, CA$H from Square Foot Gardening (of which I also own a copy), goes into further detail of expanding the SFG approach into a source for local users to enjoy the fruits (and vegetables!) of your labors, in exchange for compensation. In particular, Mel highlights supplying local restaurants and/or farmer’s markets with your produce.

If you are interested in growing even some of your own food, I strongly recommend Square Foot Gardening as the place to start.

• Quality of writing: 4/5
• Accessibility: 5/5
• Understandability: 4/5
• Ease of implementation: 4/5
• Overall: 4.5/5

^{^_{Prices accurate as of Jan 2006}
*_{Yes – I know about the typo at the end of page 3 (“there” vs “their”) and on page 5 (“them” vs “the”)}
`_{See also PYOP review for information on windbreaks}}

I was in Provo UT this week for Moab Con 2011.

It was a great week – got to meet lots of interesting people, learn how different companies and institutions are using Adaptive’s Moab product, and see where the roadmap for the product should bring it over the next 1-2 years.

On 21 May
I am presenting at the
BGLUG meeting.

The topic will be Haiku.

I was an ardent BeOS fan/user for a while during their early Developer and Release days, and was among the saddest* to see them disappear as a company, and then even more saddened when Palm totally blew their chance to really run with the platform.

I’ll post the slides I use after the meeting.

^{*_{wrote that about 8 years ago}}