The Cruft Of My Brain

As a fan of flavorful beer I often find myself facing stares of revulsion when I’m enjoying a nice glass of Guinness. What few people realize is that “dark” isn’t supposed to mean harsh, bitter or high in alcohol content. Found this great article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/dining/reviews/28wine.html

All you doubters should read it! You know who you are!

I’ve gotten a look at a powerpoint with the technical details now. Nothing too earth shattering. More of a natural progression of capabilities and performance.

I’m such a geek. The one cool new feature is that they have finally put in a USB console port. Actually mini USB. I’m not sure of the wisdom of using that over the already present regular USB ports, but that’s ok. I can’t find anything about how that’s going to work. I expect you’ll have to install a driver for USB to COM on windows just like you do with the USB to Serial dongles but this should be Cisco provided.

How cool would it be if there’s a hidden driver for that in Windows 7 already.

Now all we need is a wireless USB KVM and you could manage a whole data center of routers without running more cables. Better have some good security on that!

Just stumbled across this post describing why Wave is such a big deal. I think he does an excellent job of describing it, including his follow up post. The idea behind the protocol really is liberating and solves a number of problems. Read it!

Reading about Google Wave today as I wait impatiently for my invite. It better come.

I was reading the latest (I think) developer blog update and near the end is this gem:

“We’re also working on larger changes like providing anonymous read-only access to embedded waves — so anyone in the world will be able to see content of published waves.”

I know this was a “want” for me…but wow…

Once this gets enabled you’ll have a forum software killer.

Build a widget that shows “followers” and Twitter is dead. After all, that’s a large part of Twitter’s success. Showing how big your….follower group is is very important.

Facebook features are just a hop skip and a jump away. You can be sure there will be many developers working on that.

Pretty exciting stuff!

Hoping for a Google Wave invite today. The possibilities for Wave look intriguing, not because of what it’s launching with but rather because of what it’s built on. The core is essentially XMPP from what I’ve been reading, with a healthy dose of HTML5 on top and some other magic happening. Google is framing this as an all in one communications platform. The “modern email”. It needs to get voice support in a hurry. Whether they roll in GTalk or just straight up XMPP voice and video doesn’t really matter. But it needs to be in there.

Desktop sharing needs to be in there. If that happens, GoToMeeting and LogMeIn should really start sweating.

Picasa web albums need to be fully integrated. I’ve seen some references to Picasa being connected but it looks like it might just be the app. That’s a good start but not the whole thing.

I’m also very curious about public vs private waves. Is it possible to have a wave that anyone can have read access to but only some have write? Put that in and you go a long way towards killing forums and maybe even Twitter.

Possibilities…

There’s been a lot of noise lately about AT&T and Apple and Google not playing nice together. The latest is AT&T carrying on about Google Voice blocking rural numbers because their costs are so much higher. Ok, that’s kind of crappy, but it’s just a red herring. AT&T is making a fuss over this because they also see the real potential. What happens when Google Voice links up with the Google Talk service. I’ve been thinking about this for a while and wondering why GTalk wasn’t a supported endpoint for GVoice yet. I thought it might be technical but now I have my doubts.

At this point GVoice still relies on the telco’s to provide the actual phone service. If GTalk becomes an endpoint then there’s a much stronger argument for Google being a “carrier” instead of just an “internet service”. That brings all of the issues of access, fees and taxes along with it. Would Google have to start collecting a USF and other similar fees for every GTalk user, even pure IM users, on the basis they “could” use the voice component? Pricey! As far as I know, every other bridge to the PSTN (SIP gateways mostly) has to pay the fees and support universal access.

I think that’s the shot across the bow from AT&T and it’s something Google’s been aware of for a while. And it upsets me greatly.

The world is headed in the direction of more XMPP and SIP, not less. AT&T sees this and probably sees Google as the biggest target to slow this adoption down. AT&T is using the admittedly noble idea of universal communication access to beat down it’s competitor. The FCC should instead be looking at how to address issues like the USF in a world of online focused communications. The trend for land line terminations is only going to increase to the point where only poor people have landlines, subsidized by the USF. Where will those fees come from when everyone is online focused? This isn’t a new thing and it’s obviously been one of the top issues for the FCC.

Perhaps the USF should be added to (more) data lines. Or the Fed Gov can just take it from us with other taxes. They seem to be pretty good at that already.

Most of all, it’s shameful that AT&T is using USF and universal access as a hammer to beat on it’s competitor. Hey AT&T, how about being more competitive and innovative instead? I won’t hold my breath.

Ever since I bought into Unraid and started adding hard drives I’ve been thinking about what the perfect case would be. I’m using the NORCO RPC-450 4U Rackmount Server Case which has the benefit of being pretty inexpensive but only holding 10 drives without adding some drive cages.

Norco also has the much more expensive
NORCO RPC-4020 4U Rackmount Server Case
but this has some cooling problems because of the orientation of the HDD SATA plug circuit boards.

Anyway, there are various other options but they are all too expensive or poorly designed. Paying a premium for drive carriers for something that really should almost never be removed seems absurd to me. I had thought about placing drives vertically so you could run the cooling down the length of them and the cabling would easily stay out of the way. If it’s on rails it would be a simple thing to slide it out to get to the top for drive removal. And then via TUAW comes the Backblaze Pod. Clouds parted, angels sang. It was like someone was reading my mind! And they actually put the details up! 45 hard drives in 4U…wow! Cut one row out, make it more shallow and you have the perfect Unraid setup.

The only problem is that the SATA multipliers are a custom design. Well, so is the case but that could be built. The SATA multipliers are key to making this work and they would have to be sourced from somewhere.

Zoneminder, argh. I’m not sure how much time I’ve put into getting Zoneminder to work but it’s a lot. There’s just something about it that confounds me, whether it’s because of the underlying OS or hardware problems…Zoneminder seems to be the typical open source linux app. Very capable, ugly as sin and exceedingly difficult to get working right, unless you are the geek “they” designed it for.

So, I’ve decided to punt. At some point getting something done becomes more important than playing and learning. I bought my PV149 card from BlueCherry some time ago and I check back in with them from time to time. They’ve long had a reference to Blue Iris as a Windows alternative. I’m trying it out and so far it couldn’t be easier to use. I’m a little concerned that it doesn’t handle load as well and is banging on the server pretty hard, but it seems to be getting by ok.

I’ll report back once I’ve played with the motion detection and the alerting system.

Looking for a cheap and reliable way of doing packet capture remotely. I found this reference to using PFSense and it looks like a pretty slick idea. I was quite happy with PFSense when I was using it as a firewall so this idea looks like a winner. I’ll post back if I try it out.

I can’t say I blame them. I’m sure there are some very qualified programmers at Arc that are proud of their product. My experience was less than stellar.

So, here’s what I’ll offer. It seems there might be a new version out. I’ll try a demo copy on a fresh WinXP install if they will provide it to me. I’m not going to drop the $1000+ they ask for this software (there’s another criticism) to see if times have changed. If one of the recent Arc commenters want’s to hook me up with a demo copy though, I’ll test it. I have a clean CCME I can point it at for testing as well.

I’ll post my results, good or bad. If the new version really is so much better I’ll happily post a comment to the original blog entry that seems to have climbed onto the first page at Google. (I’m guessing that’s why this is getting noticed)

So, what do you say Arc? Leave me a comment!