Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, I’ve got a machine colocated with CalPop, who offer 10 megabits and 4U for $99/month – $88/month if you prepay for six months.

I’m really wishing I’d chosen a slightly better ISP. Today, they announced that I’m being renumbered and relocated to a different building – today – with no warning. Renumbering means I have to update DNS for all my domains, including name server bindings. The bit that really gets me is the *no warning*. Who doesn’t know that they’re going to have to relocate servers even a day in advance?

So, those of you considering using CalPop for your colocation needs (hint, hint, google) – beware, you might find yourself renumbering with no warning. Or possibly worse – I’m idly worrying about whether they’re renumbering because they couldn’t pay their XO bill.

In the past two weeks I have replaced disks in five separate machines – one twice, because the first disk died after only 8 hours of use. These machines are not all in the same room – or even area code. They were all put in service at different times. Two of them were not part of RAID arrays, and one of those actually involved measurable data loss, although we did have recent backups.

I’m a little apprehensive. Something’s up with the universe of stored data.

(Where all the men are smart, the women are good looking, and the computer equipment is above average)

Well, I haven’t had time to breathe lately, much less write journal entries. I’m trying to maintain my 50+ hour work week while also putting in two days a week of packing/moving, and it’s taking a bit of a toll on me. But I remain cautiously optimistic that I will have moved everything major by June 1st. Tomorrow we’re moving the computers (at least the server-type computers) to the new house.

My back keeps hurting intermittently, then stopping whenever I actually get to the point where I’m going to call my physical therapist. I’ve been trying to sneak in the stretching exercises during my normal stretch breaks..

I’ve been getting up very early lately.. usually ~8-9 AM. Very strange and different for me.

Hope everyone else is doing well. I will try to get back caught up with everyone once I have my weekends back.

In other news, does anyone have any preferred dates (mid-July to mid-August) for the housewarming party? I’d really like to see Brenda, Dan S., Chris M., Mei, Deadman,  Josh, Ryan, and any friends/SOs/whatnot they’d like to bring along therem but I know finding a day that all said people are available isn’t likely 😉 Also, if you place your order in advance, we’ll be sure to have your favorite beverages available.

As part of the move, many server addresses have changed or are changing. If you use me for web hosting, name service, email, or some other network-related service that you have partial control over (i.e. you own your own DNS), please contact me so we can do this change with a minimum of disruption (none, I hope). I already have a colocated server providing name service so it should be possible for you to have a seamless transition.

HOWEVER – I would like to request that those of you who are using me for name service and only have a couple of A records consider finding a cheap or free name service provider to use instead of me. As you all have noticed, I move networks a lot, and the administrative headache involved in getting in touch with all of you every time I renumber is beginning to get on my nerves. I love you all, but you’d be better off this way too 😉 I’m happy to continue hosting your web sites (and assume you’re bright enough to either use CNAMEs or update your IPs accordingly whenever I move).

By the way, if any of you are already doing this and suddenly can’t see your qm-hosted site, please note that qm’s address has changed. the new address is 208.70.77.153 (which you will see if you ping qm.sheer.us or qm.numbermining.net)

Thanks..

S.

I had a problem recently with a CentOS host that is DHCPing off a older Cisco switch that takes several seconds to do link negotation.

The problem was that Ubuntu would give up on DHCPing and take the ethernet interface down before the Cisco switch got around to negotiating the link.

Is there some easy way to put a DHCP timeout in interfaces? does anyone know?

For now, what I did was put the following in rc.local (yes, this really does work):

echo -n “Activating godawful hack to get ethernet up despite very slow Cisco POS switch…”
/sbin/ip -o link set dev eth0 up
sleep 25
echo “Done”
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup eth0

So, our landlady is selling our current house, and because I’m a complete and utter slob, we’ve decided to move rather than leave her with having to show the house with me living in it. 😉

We found a wonderful house in downtown long beach. This house features:

1) Lots more space than the current place.. about as much as the house in Seattle – which is good, because I’ve felt a little like I was inserted in the current house with a shoehorn. 😉

2) Older house – with nifty hardwood floors, stained glass windows, octagonal windows, bay windows, skylight, and other features found only in older houses. Tons of storage, handpainted dining room ceiling.. it’s a little on the dark side, but when I’ve retrofitted it with several thousand* watts of CF bulbs, I’m sure it’ll be quite nice. 😉

You all can look and see the pictures if you’re so inclined at http://kayti.peterbilt.sheer.us/photos/Public/2008/NewHouse/. These photos were taken by the real estate company and are both watermarked and lo-res, but they still give the general idea. Housewarming party TBD.

* = probably about 2. But several sounds more impressive.

Kayti has asked me to be her fiance and I have accepted. We still have a list of issues that we want to work through before we set the actual date. I think I have grown some since my last engagements and this will turn out to be a positive thing in our lives.

I have some complaints about the iPhone

1) Nothing’s (easily) removable. Where’s my SD card slot? Where’s my easily removable battery so I can have several batteries for long trips away from power?

2) The headphone jack is a standard 3.5mm but it’s not a standard jack and requires a adapter. If you’re going to give it the same form factor as a regular headphone jack, why not also actually make it work as one?

3) The battery life – at least on the one I’m workoing on – leaves a lot to be desired. Part of this might be that I’m a long way from the cloest at&t cell tower, and it’s using a lot of power just checking in.

That said, the touch interface is absolutely brilliant and the LCD is gorgeous. It’s a neat product.. but it’s not perfect.

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day and he mentioned that Web 2.0 doesn’t really exactly exist.

I mean, yes, we can point to applications on the web and say these are clearly web 2.0 applications, but no one has (that I know of) laid down a concrete standard for what the dividing line between 2.0 and 1.0 is.

For that matter, web 1.0 didn’t exist either. We had several diverging standards of how http was to be rendered – to the point that in some cases web developers were forced to write seperate versions of HTML for seperate browsers. Web 1.0 exists only in retrospect.

What I’m sort of wondering, at this point, is where web 3.0 is going to be taking us. I would share what’s in my crystal ball, but I’d probably be (very) wrong. One of the interesting trends is the perpetual game of pushing CPU load off to the client – or the server. It seems possible that Google will release a desktop OS that turns all the computers in the world into one massively parallel computer, and you’ll never know if your spreadsheet is stored on your local hard drive or somewhere in another country. People who use skype already accept that they’re going to be relaying off their neighbors, and vice versa. It may be that web 3.0 will be the end of the server-client mentality and we’ll all be using one monster peer-to-peer system.

Or it might not. I can’t imagine which direction web 3.0 will go in, because I don’t know what radically new developments are just over the horizen. Most of the technology we’ve seen in the last ten years have been logical extensions of Moore’s law – but it seems like there are a lot of concepts that are completely unexplored, and there are a lot more people out there to explore them.

On a unrelated note, I still wonder when and if we will see hybrid analog-digital computers. I thought this would start with each computer having several registers of random noise, generated using some sort of very high quality white noise generator. I also keep thinking certain functions that are very expensive in CPU cycles are very easy with op-amps. Of course, it’s possible this is already being done inside GPUs – anyone know if GPUs have analog computers as part of them?

I also wonder if the science of analog pattern recognition or analog recognition assistance shouldn’t be bumped up a notch or three. We’ve gotten a little too obsessed with digital of late – not saying digital isn’t great, wonderful, the dog’s bark and the cat’s meow, but a hybrid digital/analog computer might be able to achieve things that neither a analog or a digital system could do alone.

I’ve been very strongly resisting buying a intel mac for a whole host of reasons – the biggest one being that almost everything I do with my mac is music-related and I have literally thousands of dollars of software that I’ve purchased that will all have to be upgraded. However, one of my clients has loaned me a MacBook Pro, and I think probably I will indeed want to buy one of these, and upgrade all said software. OSX 10.5 is just sooo much better than 10.2 – and a Core 2 Duo does rather beat the pants off a G4.

I will, of course, have to make sure there are drivers available for all the obscure music hardware that I cable up to the thing. Since all of it is 4+ years old, the odds don’t look too great.. on the other hand, MOTU still sells the MTP AV, so at least that probably will be good to go. I don’t know about the 896es…

The biggest difference I see is actually thermal – where my G4 gets rather toasty, this machine stays cool as a cucumber most of the time. Of course, part of that might be that the things I’m doing with this machine aren’t CPU-intensive, where applying realtime EQ to 12 channels of audio at once probably is. 😉

Other things that I really like about it include the integrated 802.11n, the gigabit ethernet port (which my PC laptop doesn’t have – I keep meaning to pick up a gigabit card for it but it’s that new weird standard instead of PCMCIA)

Speaking of that new weird standard, does anyone know of ANY expresscard bluetooth adapter? My PC laptop doesn’t have integrated bluetooth, and I hate dongles sticking out of the side because you can’t throw the machine in the laptop bag with them still attached 😉

I also get to try to figure out how to load up my laptop bag with *two* 17″ laptops. Or perhaps I’ll just get another, identical bag.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand – OSX seems to be turning into a mature operating system. I’ve been learning about Xcode and objectiveC – and I’m starting to wonder several things:

1) Is every language migrating towards being event-driven and data aware? 😉

2) Is there a objective-C compiler for windows?

3) How long will it take me to master this language, and will I be given that time?

I’ve written things on my mac, but they’ve always either been console or tk. The idea of actually writing mac gui apps scared me – I’m resistant to change – but apparently it shouldn’t have. The mac gui framework seems to be *extremely* well documented. And while ObjectiveC clearly isn’t C, it also clearly is understandable – though I need to find a really good document on delegation on objectiveC because it’s clear that it’s going to be important, but for some reason the first docs I read on it failed to make it completely clear to me