badcheese.com

Twitter mentions of Whitney vs Grammy following Whitney Houston's death

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:00:00 MST

whitney vs grammy

Subscribe here for more twitter trend charts as they happen!

Whitney Houston passes away 24 hours before the Grammy Awards.

Twitter mentions during SuperBowl XLVI

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:00:00 MST

Subscribe here for more twitter trend charts as they happen!

superbowl vs safety - Brady scores a safety against himself

superbowl vs commercials - how people were impacted by the commercials

superbowl vs madonna - Madonna headlined during halftime

superbowl vs budweiser

Chevy

Doritos

GoDaddy

Madonna vs Beckham - for the ladies ...

Giants vs Patriots

Using the PHP SDK for AWS to launch an instance

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 00:00:00 MST

I needed something quick and dirty in php to launch an instance in AWS. Here is what I came up with. Feel free to tweak to your own needs.

We use tags for the machine name, deployment and machine type, so you may have to do a little editing to fit your AWS usage.

Twitter mentions during the 2012 State Of The Union Address

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:00:00 MST

I charted the ‘sotu’ versus other term tweets from the twitter spritzer feed during the state of the union address from last night:

Subscribe here for more twitter trend charts as they happen!

jobs

education

energy

immigration

trade

Using the PHP SDK for AWS to dump all instance info

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 00:00:00 MST

I needed something quick and dirty in php to dump out every instance that we had in all of the regions in AWS using PHP, so I whipped this up real quick:

We use tags for the machine name, deployment and machine type, so you may have to do a little editing to fit your AWS usage.

Sopa vs Pipa tweets

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:00:00 MST

I charted the last 24 hours of ‘sopa’ and ‘pipa’ tweets from the twitter spritzer feed:

Subscribe here for more twitter trend charts as they happen!

Tracking the death of ...

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 00:00:00 MST

Here, I'll try to track all of the lame-ass "death of ..." predictions, like the death of the home phone, the death of ipv4, the death of myspace, ... :)

IPv4: predicted death: Jan 1, 2011

source

Yesterday, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA, part of ICANN), allocated two blocks of 16.8 million IPv4 addresses to the RIPE NCC and another two blocks to ARIN. The RIPE NCC and ARIN are the Regional Internet Registries that give out IP addresses in greater Europe and North America, respectively. This brings the global pool of still available “/8” address blocks that IANA maintains from 11 down to 7.

PC Era: predicted death: June, 2012

source

Shipments of smartphones, tablets and other app-enabled devices will overtake PC shipments in the next 18 months, an event that may signify the end of the PC-centric era, market research firm IDC said.

VGA connector: dead by 2015

source

Intel and AMD expect that analog display outputs such as Video Graphics Array (VGA) and the low voltage differential signaling technology (LVDS) panel interface would no longer be supported in their product lines by 2015.

The titanic will literally be gone in 2040

source

A newly discovered microbe dubbed Halomonas titanicae is chewing its way through the wreck of the Titanic and leaving little behind except a fine dust, researchers report in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology. ‘In 1995, I was predicting that Titanic had another 30 years,’ said Henrietta Mann, a civil engineering adjunct professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. ‘It’s deteriorating much faster than that now.

Personal and Professional Accomplishments that I'm Particularly Proud Of

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 00:00:00 MST

This is a page that will document some of my personal and professional accomplishments.

Pronto's LIVE SEARCH display

Using OpenSceneGraph, this display showed the live searches from Pronto.com and the pronto logo spun in 3D. The client app was written in C++ and connected to a server that I wrote in perl using P.O.E. that parsed the live apache logs and spit out each search on the site as it happened. Later, I added a globe with lat/lon showing where the user was located using GeoIP tech before it was readily available.

Pic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/scumola/3185985349/

Pronto's datacenter in Virginia

I took my wife and two young kids to Virginia for 6 weeks during a datacenter build-out. It went from an empty datacenter to 200 machines all networked, VPN’d, load-balanced and in working order. This is a picture of the datacenter after 3 weeks of build-out. I did most of the work except for a little cabling help from the NOC staff.

Pic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/scumola/3185990541/

I built a data service that would send live searches to the huge display in the IAC lobby's 'globe' display

This was built on my live search display above, but they didn’t want a live stream, so I collected 24 hours of info and sent it at midnight. This is a picture of the R&D version of the display when I went to meet with the guy who wrote the software in NYC:

Pic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/scumola/3189791137/ Pic in the lobby: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wellohorld/2040537613/

National Center for Atmospheric Research ATEC project c-tux experimental cluster

This was the first cluster that I built to prove the concept of a HPC Linux cluster for doing high-resolution weather forecasts that would eventually replace our aging SGI hardware. This was in the year 2000 before Linux clusters were mainstream.

Pic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/scumola/3185904905/

UPS debugger

Many years ago when I was a C/C++ programmer, I used to use a really nice debugger called UPS. It started out being written for solaris, but was ported to Linux. It fell by the wayside over the years and recently, I rediscovered it. The original maintainer is not keeping it up-to-date, but another guy named Tom Hughes is still writing patches for it and keeping it up-to-date on redhat-based systems. I’m providing builds below based on his patches.

The debugger’s webpage: http://ups.sourceforge.net/

It even had a song written about it ( http://ups.sourceforge.net/main.html#song … yes, a song about a debugger ) but the song has been lost to the ages, I’m afraid.

The debugger should work on most modern redhat-based OSes that use the dwarf2 debugging symbols.

NOTE: The debugger doesn’t work under Ubuntu due to glibc differences. Sorry.

Here are my RPMs for Fedora 13 - it should install cleanly on CentOS and RedHat as well.

http://badcheese.com/~steve/ups-3.38-0.10.beta2.fc13.i686.rpm

http://badcheese.com/~steve/ups-3.38-0.10.beta2.fc13.x86_64.rpm

Steve's LastSearch greasemonkey plugins

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/31639

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/64039

These greasemonkey plugins will remember the last page that you clicked on after doing a google search, so if you want to go back to an old search from a couple of days ago or whatever, your old page that you left off at will appear at the top of a similar google search for the same terms.

Steve's synth-y music stuff

I’ve got a Roland JD-990 synthesizer and Reason 6.0 that I’m experimenting with. If you’d like to hear my random creations and even participate/contribute, here are the links to the repositories:

http://soundcloud.com/audiosausage/

JD-990 Rosegarden Instrument File

If you own a JD-990 and you use Rosegarden under Linux, you’ll want this file:

Roland-JD-990.rgd Version 1.0

Steve's Web Crawler project

I’ve written 3 web crawlers.

One written in C that crawls as fast as possible, ignores robots.txt and can max-out any internet pipe.

https://github.com/scumola/crawler-fast

One written in Perl that focuses on one domain and is respectful of robots.txt and respectful of bandwidth.
One hybrid that uses a combintion of Perl and C code to crawl any domain. the C crawler is used to pull pages, but Perl is used to sort through domains and urls and organize the seed lists for the crawler.
Other utils: C programs to speed up regex operations to pull domains from url lists and a utility to convert a list of urls from relative to absolute. Some day I’ll release most or all of this code.

URL shortener

unbig.me a url shortener that pops up a javascript window prior to the redirected url with custom content in it. I wrote the backend storage and redirection service. My friend Troy wrote the interface and fancy javascript stuff.

Flash Search Engine

SWFind.com (closed now, but the tools and API are still around)

Steve's Original Linux Cluster for running NCAR's MM5 weather model HOWTO (circa 1999)

http://badcheese.com/~steve/clustertux.html

Contact steve

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 00:00:00 MST

Primary email

steve@badcheese.com

Secondary email

bigwebb@gmail.com

Yahoo IM: scumola
Google IM: bigwebb@gmail.com
AOL IM: SteveHolly051802
Skype: scumola

Virtualized all of my servers

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 00:00:00 MST

So the other day, I decided to virtualize all of my servers. I installed ESXi server on one of my old DELL 2850 servers left over from 2007-ish with 4 cores, 4GB of ram and 600GB of RAIDed harddrive space. I was able to shut down two real servers and move most of my real (ageing) hardware to the VMware server. I like the ability to spin up a new machine and not have to worry about resources (most virt resources are ‘free’) or compatibility. I spin up a new VM for one chore, then I manage to piggyback some more functions on it because it’s not being used heavily. I’ve got 6 or 7 VMs now running on a 4-core machine and since only a couple of them are used at one time, they get almost all of the resources of the hardware when I need them.

Starting to really like a VM-based infrastructure…

Shaving frequency for men

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 00:00:00 MDT

Teen years: Because they can (but not too often)
Twenties: Just enough so their employer doesn't think that they're a slacker
Thirties: Just enough so their wife doesn't think that they're a slacker
Fourties: Every day after when your 3-year-old daughter tells you, "don't kiss me Daddy, your face is too scratchy!"

Fedora / Redhat / CentOS are falling behind Ubuntu

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 00:00:00 MDT

CentOS 6.0 was just released and it’s seriously lacking many nice features that Ubuntu has had for more than a year. Also, I believe that Ubuntu has been making the better design decisions as far as what to include and focus on for the next releases with linux.

When I worked at beatport.com, I worked alongside of a fedora developer/contributer who was worried about building packages and providing the latest/greatest for the new technologies that were coming out for linux and making sure that they build for fedora. However, when things went wrong, he didn’t really care, as long as the package built under fedora.

Disclaimer: I don’t know any Ubuntu maintainers, but I get the feel that the Ubuntu people are a much more tight-knit group of guys/gals that really put some planning and thought into the technologies that are included with the distro, while the redhat/fedora guys are just struggling with getting things to work.

Ubuntu feels like a cleaner, much more finely crafted distribution than fedora does to me. Just my gut feeling. NOTE: I don’t really like Ubuntu taking X out of the 11.x distro, but to be honest, I’ve only used the server-version of 11.04 and have not spent much time with the desktop version of 11.x - it could be really nice, I don’t know.

Twitter tweets per day

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 00:00:00 MDT

Twitter tweets per day chart

I'm returning my Acer Iconia A500 Android Honeycomb tablet

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 00:00:00 MDT

I picked up an Acer Iconia A500 Android tablet that runs honeycomb (3.0) on Thursday and after using it for a few days, I'm going to return it. Here are my reasons why:

It's large, heavy and unwieldy. There is almost no good position to hold the thing in that is comfortable to use. Even flat on a table is not the greatest position to use it. In my lap is not good and on my 'knee' (like you see in the ads) doesn't' really work well either.
It's $450.
The apps on it are really nice, but not nice enough to justify the expense and form-factor.
I was hoping that I could write an app for it, but after looking into the Android SDK, the C/C++ NDK (the standard SDK is java-only) only has access to OpenGL, and no fancy/schmancy GUI stuff, so seems kind of limited, plus I don't see myself having enough free-time to do any development in the near future.
The kids fight over using it to play games and watch movies. I doubt that I'd actually get to use it very much.

Don't get me wrong, I think that the tablet concept and market is very good. The tablet plays movies very well, Android is really coming into it's own now. Battery life on the tablet is 10 hours of heavy use. The technology is good, I just don't think that personally, I have a need/use for a tablet at this time.

Gnip food is YUMMY!

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 00:00:00 MDT

Follow @breakfastatgnip on twitter to see what I get for free breakfast at http://gnip.com every weekday morning!

Allowed to compete with Pronto! Finally!

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 00:00:00 MDT

Ok. Today marks my one-year anniversary of being laid off from Pronto. On my last day, they told me that I couldn’t compete with Pronto or its sister companies for one year. Today is that day. Time to start writing code!

Drobo will support > 2TB drives

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 00:00:00 MST

Drobo is coming out with a firmware patch to support > 2TB drives! Woohoo! The FAQ entry is here: http://support.datarobotics.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/506/session/L3NpZC9xUVNrRlNuaw%3D%3D/sno/0

Right on Drobo!

python backtraces are so f'ing cryptic!

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 00:00:00 MST

I got this when running a script for ganeti-webmgr that is supposed to insert some initial data into a blank database. Can anyone even begin to tell me what the hell the problem is here? :(

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./manage.py", line 31, in ?
    execute_manager(settings)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/django/core/management/__init__.py", line 438, in execute_manager
    utility.execute()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/django/core/management/__init__.py", line 379, in execute
    self.fetch_command(subcommand).run_from_argv(self.argv)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/django/core/management/__init__.py", line 261, in fetch_command
    klass = load_command_class(app_name, subcommand)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/django/core/management/__init__.py", line 67, in load_command_class
    module = import_module('%s.management.commands.%s' % (app_name, name))
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/django/utils/importlib.py", line 35, in import_module
    __import__(name)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/south/management/commands/__init__.py", line 10, in ?
    import django.template.loaders.app_directories
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/django/template/loaders/app_directories.py", line 21, in ?
    mod = import_module(app)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/django/utils/importlib.py", line 35, in import_module
    __import__(name)
  File "/var/lib/django/ganeti-webmgr/object_permissions/__init__.py", line 1, in ?
    from object_permissions.registration import *
  File "/var/lib/django/ganeti-webmgr/object_permissions/registration.py", line 565
    model = obj.__class__ if instance else obj
                           ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

My review of the Amazon Kindle 3

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 00:00:00 MST

I am a gadget guy at heart. I’ve got tons of cool gadgets, but I’m not made of money. I buy my gadgets on ebay or craigslist in the hopes to get a good piece of technology for a low price. I was considering a tablet device (iPad: $600, Samsung Galaxy Tab: $400, or an e-reader: $various). After weighing all of the options (I have an android phone already which gives me all things android (email, browser, …) and a google TV which gives the kids the ability to watch youtube and netflix on the TV), so I was searching for a device that can offer a different experience for me.

My eyes have been watering for about 3 years. It started when I was working at Pronto. I thought that it was eye strain from sitting in front of a computer for 9+ hours a day, but it turns out that it was a combination of many things. Lack of sleep, computer eye strain, cell phone eye strain and driving in the car with the heating or A/C on, while the sun shines in my eyes. All-in-all, it was a lot of light shining in my eyes (sun, phone, computer, …). My eyes were getting bombarded almost all of the waking hours of my life.

I started to research the e-ink technology. E-ink is mainly just little balls floating in a liquid that are painted black on one side and white on the other side. They’re magnetically charged and roll one way or another depending on the way they’re charged. The e-ink ‘page’ doesn’t require any power once the page has been changed, so the battery life is very nice.

Before I bought, I downloaded the free kindle app for Android and the PC and started reading books that way. I downloaded some free books and got used to reading a book on a ‘device’ instead of the old paper way. It was nice, but not great. I figured that I needed the e-ink format to ease my eyes.

I bit the bullet about 2 weeks ago and bought a kindle 3 after comparing the sony, nook and kindle (sorry John - the old CEO of Pronto.com, John Foley, is the COO of the electronics division of Barnes and Noble (the nook)). I seriously considered the nook, but ended up going with the kindle because of a few things: 1.) the ‘free first chapter’ policy that Amazon has. 2.) I’ve never had a bad transaction with Amazon - ever! 3.) many other friends of mine had kindles and recommended them without reservation. 4.) sales people at Barnes and Noble couldn’t answer hardly any of my questions about the nook - they’re not really trained all that well or they don’t care about it. 5.) the newspaper and magazine selection for the Kindle was better than the nook selection.

I got the kindle and immediately, I loved it. The battery life for the wi-fi version is about 3 weeks with ‘average’ use. 4 weeks if used gingerly, 2 weeks if you download stuff daily and read > 2 hours a day. I download daily and read about 1-2 hours a day most days.

Instapaper! If I’m at work and someone forwards me a long article that I don’t have time to read at work, I can use instapaper to send it to my kindle for reading later. It sends 20 articles at a time and does a great job (and it’s free). Reading internet articles on the kindle has already saved my eyes. I can tell a difference already.

Books! Not all of my favorite books are available in the kindle format, but many are. > 80% of my favorites have a kindle version. I’m concentrating on reading some books that I woudln’t have normally read in paper form (I’m reading 20,000 leagues under the sea now).

Newspapers and Magazines! I downloaded a few one-time magazines and newspapers. They’re all very nicely converted and the newspapers don’t have any ads! What an awesome selling point! Love it.

Overall, I’d say that the Wi-Fi kindle is worth every one of your $139.

Simplicity is the core of a good infrastructure

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 00:00:00 MST

I’ve seen many infrastructures in my day. I work for a company with a very complicated infrastructure now. They’ve got a dev/stage/prod environment for every product (and they’ve got many of them). Trust is not a word spoken lightly here. There is no ‘trust’ for even sysadmins (I’ve been working here for 7 months now and still don’t have production sudo access). Developers constantly complain about not having the access that they need to do their jobs and there are multiple failures a week that can only be fixed by a small handful of people that know the (very complex) systems in place. Not only that, but in order to save work, they’ve used every cutting-edge piece of software that they can get their hands on (mainly to learn it so they can put it on their resume, I assume), but this causes more complexity that only a handful of people can manage. As a result of this the site uptime is (on a good month) 3 nines at best.

In my last position (pronto.com) I put together an infrastructure that any idiot could maintain. I used unmanaged switches behind a load-balancer/firewall and a few VPNs around to the different sites. It was simple. It had very little complexity, and a new sysadmin could take over in a very short time if I were to be hit by a bus. A single person could run the network and servers and if the documentation was lost, a new sysadmin could figure it out without much trouble.

Over time, I handed off my ownership of many of the Infrastructure components to other people in the operations group and of course, complexity took over. We ended up with a multi-tier network with bunches of VLANs and complexity that could only be understood with charts, documentation and a CCNA. Now the team is 4+ people and if something happens, people run around like chickens with their heads cut off not knowing what to do or who to contact when something goes wrong.

Complexity kills productivity. Security is inversely proportionate to usability. Keep it simple, stupid. These are all rules to live by in my book.

Downtimes: Beatport: not unlikely to have 1-2 hours downtime for the main site per month. Pronto: several 10-15 minute outages a year Pronto (under my supervision): a few seconds a month (mostly human error though, no mechanical failure)

Ok, rant over. :)

Riak rocks

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 00:00:00 MST

So, when I was working back at Pronto.com we had a scaling problem.

Product images (images of the products that we had crawled and indexed) were always growing and never pruned. We started out with a pair of Linux machines using reiserfs and apache with some tweaked syncing software that I wrote. This worked until we had a backlog of about 2M images per day that needed to be sync’ed and the sync service couldn’t keep up.

We bought a SUN 7410 “SAN” (not really a SAN, but we called it a SAN) due to a recommendation from the sysadmin for Gifts.com. It had 22TB of raw storage and used OpenSolaris and ZFS under the covers with 2x 100GB SSD’s for cache. Should be more than enough horsepower to serve-up some images, right, but alas, there became a time where the number of files in a directory started to choke ZFS. Yea, I know ZFS rocks and there is no better … well, under these circumstances (nothing could be cached - all of the caching was taken care of upstream of the storage engine). Alas, I was not around long enough to move the directory structure around like I had planned to fix the issue using the SAN.

So, just weeks before I was laid off, I put together the requirements for a system that would be the ‘next generation’ of the image storing/serving platform. A very capable engineer and friend of mine, Tony Cassandra, wrote it in Java. The features were: key/value, distributed, scalable, low-latency, HTTP interface, redundant, … He built a system that worked well and was very well designed and is currently in production today. There were a few problems with the system: any failed writes or writes to a single system were just logged and not actually handled automatically, so logging had to be monitored and then items had to be re-synced later, and consistency was just assumed.

Enter Riak.

About 4 months after leaving Pronto, I was researching some erlang-based database engines (there are many of them out now, couchdb and others) and I came upon Riak by http://www.basho.com/ . It’s they exact system that Tony had built at Pronto to do image serving, however it wasn’t written in Java, and had some more interesting features (links, buckets, automatic eventual consistency, metadata, charset, encoding, adding a node increases performance (reduces latency), hooks directly into hadoop’s DFS and it’s written in Erlang which makes it F’ing Fast). Riak was inspired by Amazon’s Dynamo database engine (hmmm, could they be having similar problems to Pronto?) because Amazon’s relational DBs weren’t able to scale very well over a large number of machines.

Riak pushes multiple copies to its neighbors, so it tolerates multiple node failures. Reads and writes can be done to any node, searching the DB can be done by uploading a javascript snippet as a query, so perfect for a load-balanced and/or proxied environment.

I’m currently implementing Riak for a personal project of my own because I love key/value databases and I love having two databases (one local for development, and one remote for production) that sync over the Internet and are eventually consistent.

Mobile Lawsuits via graphviz

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 00:00:00 MDT

The job market is still very good

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 00:00:00 MDT

While I was shopping around for jobs in June/July of 2010, I had several interviews every week and landed a good job in under 30 days. Since then, I’ve been asked to interview with many really good companies without even seeking them out (they came to me, I didn’t seek them out). Some of them were: http://graphic.ly , http://oneriot.com , http://aws.amazon.com , http://level3.com , http://digitalglobe.com , http://oracle.com , http://www.hd.net , http://vmware.com and they continue to send me emails.

I’m not sure if I just stumbled on some secret mailing list or something, but even though my job search is over, people continue to contact me about positions.

The job market is not bad right now in my opinion. It’s very good.

The first company to build a TV box that will download any TV show that gets broadcast at the same time it comes out will win

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 MDT

Tivo encodes TV shows off the air onto a harddrive so you can watch it later. If someone were to build a TV box that would just stream the content as it’s broadcast, we could all get rid of our cable connections for good. We could get exactly the same service, but over the internet instead of over cable. We all just need an internet connection, a streaming DVR and a TV.

I predict that the first company to make deals with the broadcast companies to stream the same content that they’re broadcasting over cable to broadcast it over the internet in real-time will win the TV/cable box/DVR war.

I could do this. Just build a few dozen PCs, record and encode all channels in a streaming fashion. Chop the shows up according to the TV guide. Offer the shows as they’re being encoded for streaming over the internet (commercials and all). Sell the service for $9.99/mo and give half the profits to cable and networks. The cable companies wouldn’t go for it because they make most of their money from cable. (My Comcast bill is $50 for internet and $85 for cable - which is probably similar to most of you out there) But TV networks (the people who produce the content and should be paid for it) might be game since they have a way to monetize their content in the modern era compared to the old-school methods that they’re using now that will go away soon. The difficult part would be the handshaking and deal-making that would be necessary.

The need for “as fast as broadcast” is necessary - mainly for people who do the water-cooler talk the next day about their favorite shows. If they can’t get the show at the same time the rest of the world gets it (aka, bittorrent or the web-versions of the network shows that are released 24-72 hours after the initial broadcast), they’re left out of the water-cooler talk and might get the secret twist to their favorite show via gossip instead of seeing it on TV.

I'm working in a company that's building something again!

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 00:00:00 MDT

Woohoo! I’m working in a company that’s building something again! I loved working for Pronto.com in the early days. We had a feeling of comradery and we were all working together to build something really neat and new and we were throwing ideas around and implementing all of the cool stuff with visions of sugar plumbs in our heads. :) But as Pronto.com grew and became profitable (that’s the big kicker), things changed. When the company suddenly becomes profitable, the fast-paced, mass-development efforts come to a grinding halt. “Don’t change anything!” “Don’t take the site down, no matter what!” “Don’t do anything that will cause our revenues to drop in the slightest!” The company went from “building mode” to “maintenance mode”. More levels of management immediately were hired. The world as I had known it was gone. I’m now working at http://beatport.com – the iTunes of DJ and Dance music. The company is 5 years old, profitable and still building like crazy! They’ve got a bunch of 20-somethings and 30-somethings running almost every aspect of the company and I feel a little “old” amongst all of these guys being 42 years old. They develop using the ‘Agile’ development style by Rally (developed in Boulder) which just means that they have a bunch of short meetings to keep communication flowing and have very short development windows called ‘sprints’. The developers are mostly all in their 20s and they’re eager to use the latest, greatest software and tools available to get the job done. I’ve been working there for 5 weeks now and I’ve been ‘drinking from the fire hose’ trying to learn all of the new tools and methodologies that they use. I won’t mention any of the tools that they use – mainly because I believe that giving away the tools would sort of be like giving away their I.P. since they use these new tools everywhere. In short, the engineers at Beatport are really a thrill to work with. They’re young. They’re energetic. They put in the extra hours to get something to work if they need to. It’s all of the things that I miss about the “old” Pronto. They’ve got a great team spirit because they’re building something new all of the time. They have ambition, drive and direction. I hope that Beatport can continue at the same pace for many more years and not fall into stagnation like Pronto did. The engineering problems at Beatport are even larger and harder to solve than the engineering problems at Pronto. Beatport is global. The data bandwidth and storage requirements for Beatport are thousands of times larger than at Pronto. The sysadmin tools are much more capable than what I put together at Pronto when I was in ‘build mode’ for them. I am actually a little ashamed that I didn’t do a better job putting together sysadmin tools that are more like what Beatport uses during my time at Pronto. They don’t just use new technology, they push it to the limit. They work smarter, not harder and let the tools to the heavy-lifting. The procedures that I put in place at Pronto in the first couple of years were meant to be simple. Anyone could understand the network or the setup without a networking degree or without having to read more than a few sentences worth of documentation. The last 3 years at Pronto, the operations group put in place many other systems that introduced more complexity and needed more people to maintain. It wasn’t ‘better’ technology, it was just ‘more’ technology. The technology at Beatport is genuinely better. It’s smarter. It makes doing more work my more fewer people possible and actually simpler to do and maintain. Simpler and better is good. Very good. It’s actually very impressive. Anyway, it’s refreshing to be part of a company that is really doing things well again. They’re building. They’re doing things the right way and the people are really fun and exciting to work with. Going to work is fun again! :)

Gmail's POP3 server is broken - and they probably won't fix it anytime soon

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:00:00 MDT

So, here’s what I’m trying to do. I’d like to read my email from two machines. I will leave all of my email on gmail’s server and I’ll just track the emails that I’ve downloaded locally on each machine, so I guarantee that I have a copy on each client machine.

This shouldn’t be a problem using normal POP3 protocol, but gmail thinks that it’s smarter than everyone else and ‘fixes’ the broken (inefficient) protocol by just remembering which emails are downloaded - even if they’re not marked as ‘read’ on gmail’s web interface.

I download an email on one machine. The email comes over, and doesn’t get deleted or marked as ‘read’ on gmail’s web interface. I try to fetch it from my second machine and it says that there are no new emails. Even if I specify “download everything, I don’t care what it’s status is” gmail says, “no, you already grabbed a copy of all of your emails, I’m not sending you any more copies of it”. You can reset Big-G’s counter by resetting it for all of your emails in the POP3 settings, but this resets it across the board. I could download the whole shebang to my second machine, but any future messages will have the same “one copy only” problem.

I know why Google does this. They do it to save on bandwidth and to make pop3 faster. The way POP3 works is the client will ask for a list of ids on the server if the client wants all messages - Google doesn’t give all ids, it just gives un-fetched ids. This is not standards-compliant and should be fixed. They want to remove the possibility of someone using the “never delete anything” option, so when the client says “give me a list of all of the ids on the server”, it doesn’t do a full table-scan of the user’s spool every 30 seconds that a client checks in.

What google should do is to allow a limited id range - like the last 7 days worth or so. Keep all of the ids in a key/value pair, so a full table scan doesn’t have to be done, and the request will take an atomic amount of time. Either that, or implement the full POP3 protocol and optimize the I/O on their side to be more efficient.

Not really evil, but not great, Google.

Great VIM tools for developers and power users

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:00:00 MDT

I’ve discovered some really great VIM plugins that allow me to edit more efficiently using VIM. Conque - gives me a shell inside of my VI session, so no more flipping between windows for stuff. NERD tree gives me a file manager inside of VIM also, so flipping between files in VI and navigating around is really easy too. Links are:

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1658 http://code.google.com/p/conque/wiki/Usage

Setting up your git client for badcheese.com

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 00:00:00 MDT

If you have an account on badcheese.com and want to connect to my git repository, here are the instructions:

On your local machine:

mkdir ~/git-badcheese

cd ~/git-badcheese

git config –global user.name “Your Name Comes Here”

git config –global user.email you@yourdomain.example.com

git config –global color.diff auto

git config –global color.status auto

git config –global color.branch auto

git clone ssh://badcheese.com/git .

UPS debugger

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 00:00:00 MDT

The debugger’s webpage: http://ups.sourceforge.net/

It even had a song written about it ( http://ups.sourceforge.net/main.html#song … yes, a song about a debugger ) but the song has been lost to the ages, I’m afraid.

The debugger should work on most modern redhat-based OSes that use the dwarf2 debugging symbols.

NOTE: The debugger doesn’t work under Ubuntu due to glibc differences. Sorry.

Here are my RPMs for Fedora 13 - it should install cleanly on CentOS and RedHat as well.

http://badcheese.com/~steve/ups-3.38-0.10.beta2.fc13.i686.rpm http://badcheese.com/~steve/ups-3.38-0.10.beta2.fc13.x86_64.rpm

HP dv7t-4000 laptop review

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:00:00 MDT

Recently, I bought an HP dv7t-4000 laptop. I’ve had it for about a week now and I’d like to give my 7-day review of the product after using it for a while. I’ll start with the good and work down to the bad.

Wireless: (10/10) I can see more wireless accesspoints than I could even see in my home with a macbook pro.

CPU Power: (10/10) I upgraded to the i7 processor, so I’ve got a 4-core CPU with hyperthreadding (so 8 cores to the OS) in Windows and in Linux.

Memory: (10/10) Comes with 6GB ram. Has not been too little for me yet even with virtual machines running on it.

Screen: (10/10) Awesome 1600x900 screen. Very bright and clean-looking.

3D Graphics performance: (10/10) I opted for the ATI graphics card which performs nicely. I loaded up a couple of games and maxxed-out the graphics settings on them and I got a minimum of 15-20 fps, so I’m very satisfied with the graphics even though I don’t do a lot of gaming overall.

2D Graphics performance: (9/10) Pretty nice video playback. I can do full HD video on youtube and I only get an occasional choppiness. I’m guessing that the CPU is not even breathing hard doing the decompression. The graphics card is pretty capable, so the choppiness could be the network or flash or something else. Not really all that worried about video - it works and it’s nice enough.

Price: (8/10) The laptop retails for $1500, but I got it with an online coupon for around $1000.

Heat: (8/10) It runs a little hot. Not unusual for any laptop, but you could char your left leg a little if you put it on your lap cock-eyed or something for more than a few minutes. You could warm a soda in a very short while if you put down a soda near the vent. The vent is not hot-to-the-touch, but it definitely puts out some heat.

Audio: (7/10) The laptop sells itself as a gaming laptop, but the audio capture is sub-par and the speakers are just ok and the headphone audio is just about in-line with any other laptop (you really can’t mess up the headphone output too much). There are three audio input devices (webcam, microphone and HDMI) and three outputs (speakers, headphones and HDMI). I accidentally disabled the webcam microphone and for the life of me I couldn’t re-enable it even in the hardware manager - it was just gone. Re-installing the webcam software didn’t bring it back. I had to do a system restore (rollback) of Windows 7 back to 24 hours earlier for the OS to undo my stupid mistake of disabling the mic on the webcam. I was unable to find out how to capture audio using Propellerhead’s Record through the Microphone plug - not sure if that’s the laptop’s fault, windows’ fault or Record’s fault.

Webcam: (6/10) Eh. Does 640x480 and works good enough. Not super-highres, but who really cares, it’s a webcam. The HP software for it is just ok.

Windows 7: (6/10) Comes with Windows 7 Home edition. Upgrading to Pro was $50 more. Upgrading to Ultimate was $50 more yet. I would’ve upgraded to ultimate if it were $30-$40, but not $100. Windows kinda works and kinda sucks.

Laptop shell: (6/10) part metal, part plastic - some edges don’t align nicely with the other edges of the case. DVD player doesn’t align very close at all when closed.

Size: (5/10) The laptop is huge. It requires a 17” laptop bag or backpack. It’s 6 lbs not including the power supply, second battery or anything else. It’s a beast.

Battery life: (4/10) The 9-cell battery gives me about 2.5 hours of a charge when the laptop is under solid use. The 6-cell is just under 2 hours of charge. I bought both batteries because I kind of figured that the laptop would be a power-hog with the i7 processor.

HP crapware: (1/10) The laptop came pre-loaded with hundreds of packages and 50GB of my 500GB drive used as a recovery partition that I dare not touch (HP - you should hide this or something so people don’t nuke it at least). HP made all of the partitions primary, so I wasn’t able to squish-down the main partition to install linux (FYI: there can only be 4 primary partitions on a drive, but you can make one partition an extended partition and make bunches more partitions inside of the extended one - but since I can’t nuke the HP ‘special’ partitions, I was unable to re-create one as an extended partition so I could put a fifth one on the drive for linux. Boo HP!

Second Harddrive slot: (0/10) I bought the laptop with only one harddrive in it (it has the option of two and even hardware-raid if requested), but I wanted to put a second aftermarket harddrive in it and after opening up the bottom compartment (which is plastic and not very durable) I found that the harddrive sled and cables aren’t included for a second harddrive. Aftermarket parts run $70+shipping. Much more if you order the part from HP. Stop nickle-and-diming your customers!

Linux: I installed both CentOS 5.5 and Fedora 13 on an external USB harddrive and both of them installed well on the machine. Both recognized the wireless and internal network cards, X was a no-brainer, audio worked and all went pretty well. The problem was that I didn’t want to have to boot off of an external USB drive (which was pretty damn slow) when I wanted to use Linux. I eventually went with a VirtualBox VM of linux instead since I had a lot of spare CPU cycles and the HD speed was actually faster than a USB drive install. The Virtualization capabilities of the i7 CPU were turned off by default, so I had to go into the BIOS and enable it before I could get my VM under VirtualBox to be happy, but that was an easy change (hint, hit ESC at boot-time and then F9 to enter the BIOS).

Well, that’s about it after a week of use. If I find anything else out after more time with it, I’ll post another review.

Drobo Second Impressions

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 00:00:00 MDT

Had the Drobo for about two weeks now and I’ve bought a third drive for it, so I’m up to 3TB total storage and I’m at 1.4TB usable (1x 500GB, 1x 1TB, 1x 1.5TB), so it’s basically keeping a mirror copy of the data that spans three disks at this time. A mirror copy is giving me 50% of the usable space, which seems correct. So the algorithm is: Use the max space that you can span across multiple drives. If you only have two drives, your usable space is the same as your smallest drive. Three drives, is a more complicated algorithm, but improves the usable storage to almost 50% of the total storage, which is what we’d like to achieve with RAID1 also. I’m not sure that they use parity in the Drobo, so it’s more of a mirror situation that spans multiple drives.

Anyway, the system seems to be very stable and inserting drives can be done live without having to worry about any data availability. I could theoretically lose two drives with no data corruption.

Drobo first impressions

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 00:00:00 MDT

Here’s some first impression about my experiences with the Drobo.

I purchased the Drobo (v 2.0) with a DroboShare controller (embedded Linux box that exports the Drobo to your network). It has a third-party NFS server on it but it doesn’t work very well. I tried the Samba exporting on windows and it works great, but mounting via CIFS on Linux kinda sucks and has frozen a normally stable linux machine more than once. However, the Drobo *does* make a fantastic rsync server. It’s fast, it’s stable and you can do most everything over rsync that you could want to do with any other protocol except for edit a file or something like that. It’s great for backups and great overall. The theoretical full size of it can be 16TB, but I’ve got a 1TB and a 500GB drive in it now and it’s allowing me 500GB of usable space. The logical volumes are 2TB, but I’m guessing that the Drobo will go into non-stable mode (and will ask me to insert another drive) if I exceed the 500GB that it’s got mirrored on the two drives. I love that all drives don’t have to be the same size (take that ZFS) and that it tells me when a drive is failing and when it’s time to go out and buy a new/larger drive to add capacity. So-far it’s very stable and fast enough to do most operations.

Amazon starts HPC node offerings in AWS

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:00:00 MDT

Amazon announced this morning that they’re offering a new node type in EC2 - HPC nodes! Yea, say goodbye to your huge linux cluster that you paid millions of dollars for, now you can get it on-demand from Amazon and spool-up with a click of a button! :) This should put some more companies out of business pretty quickly. SGI? Linux Networx? Aspen Systems?

Basically, the node type is the same, but the nodes are guaranteed to all be high-CPU, co-located and have some special low-latency network cards in them.

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/hpc-applications/?ref_=pe_2170_16291170

My Mechanical Turk Experiment

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:00:00 MDT

So, for about two years now, I’ve been using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to generate a little extra income. It’s turned out pretty ok overall. I can do it during ‘idle’ times and not miss out too much on what’s going on around me. If I had a better laptop, I could do it while watching TV, but my laptop sucks and is tethered to a wall socket and network connection. I managed to generate about $2000 between May and November last year which was enough to cover most of our family’s Christmas expenses. Here are some things that I learned along the way.

Downsizing and consolidating my computer equipment

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:00:00 MDT

Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve got a rack full of equipment in my basement. Well, most of the gear in my rack is getting a little old and it’s time to clean house and re-purpose some of that gear. My rack takes about 12 Amps to power and I think that cutting down on some of the gear will help with the electricity bill too. I also got some money recently, and without spending too much money, I’m going to see what I can come up with for a new setup.

I’ll be replacing:

Dual 1-Ghz PC
7-drive SCSI RAID5
Desktop PC (just the PC part, not the monitor or anything else)
A couple of older Cisco switches

With:

A Drobo with the DroboShare controller
A laptop (probably i7 w/6GB ram)

I’ll also try to move my older desktop linux machine into the old rack to save on desktop space. This should cut down on about 50% of my power usage, and the Drobo should provide a better backup and storage platform than my old SCSI RAID that is functional, but basically a relic of the 90’s.

I’ll re-post when the re-org has been completed.

Looking for work in 2010 – part 2

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 00:00:00 MDT

This will be the last part in this series because I offered a position after 20 days of looking for work and I don’t need to continue the job search anymore. The job market is good, but there are a *ton* of people out there looking for work, so it’s not easy. I think that I shaved and dressed up more in the last 20 days than I’ve done in the last 60 days of working at my old job. :) I’ll try to post some hints for anyone else in the job market.

Getting laid off was the best thing that could've happened to me

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 00:00:00 MDT

Normally, getting laid off is not a very happy thing. However, when I was laid off from Pronto this summer, it was probably the best thing that could've happened to me at that time. I got to spend time with my kids for 3 weeks. Normally, I would only have an hour in the evenings after I got home in-between dinner and bedtime, but I've really had a chance to bond with my children this summer. Swimming, going to karate lessons, parties, hanging out in the back yard, running through sprinklers, ... It's these times that kids remember the most (my kids are 2 & 6 years old) and I am very thankful to be able to be part of those memories. I also love going to large, outdoor public swimming pools and we've done that a lot now that I've had some time off from work.

ZFS log server

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 00:00:00 MDT

Messing around with ZFS on opensolaris a bit before Oracle kills it once and for all.

ZFS and opensolaris make for a fantastic log server. Logs compress well. ZFS has built-in compression, snapshotting, and the Sun/Solaris NFS server is leaps-and-bounds above linux as far as stability goes. Here’s how to make a ZFS nfs server that uses transparent compression. It’s super-simple.

Install opensolaris, log in as root and do this:

format

(that will give you the disks that it finds - pick out a few that you’d like to use for the ZFS filesystem)

zpool create vault raidz disk1 disk2 disk3 ...
zfs set compression=on vault
zfs set sharenfs=rw=@10.0.0.0/24 vault

Now, wasn’t that simple?

Now, you’ve got an exported filesystem that has transparent compression, it’s raided. Let’s enable snapshots so we don’t have to worry about file rotation!

svcadm enable svc:/system/filesystem/zfs/auto-snapshot:daily

It’ll take a snapshot immediately for every new share, check it out:

root@opensolaris:/vault# zfs list -r -t snapshot | grep vault
vault@zfs-auto-snap:daily-2010-06-28-14:22                        0      -  1.48M  -

Delete some files and go get them again via the snapshot.

root@opensolaris:/vault# ls
mpdscribble.log  syslog  syslog.0  syslog.1.gz  syslog.2.gz  syslog.3.gz  syslog.4.gz  syslog.5.gz  syslog.6.gz  user.log.0
root@opensolaris:/vault# rm syslog
root@opensolaris:/vault# ls /vault/.zfs/snapshot/zfs-auto-snap:daily-2010-06-28-14:22
mpdscribble.log  syslog  syslog.0  syslog.1.gz  syslog.2.gz  syslog.3.gz  syslog.4.gz  syslog.5.gz  syslog.6.gz  user.log.0
root@opensolaris:/vault# ls -la /vault/.zfs/snapshot/zfs-auto-snap:daily-2010-06-28-14:22/syslog
-rw-r----- 1 nobody nobody 394494 2010-06-28 14:00 /vault/.zfs/snapshot/zfs-auto-snap:daily-2010-06-28-14:22/syslog

Now, just prune files > 1 day old, and we’re done. If you need to store more logs, just add another disk to your array and you’ve got more space. It’s awesome.

Woohoo! No log rotation, no compression. No mess, no fuss. :) ZFS is awesome!

Looking for work in 2010 – part1

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:00:00 MDT

June 10, 2010, I was laid off from Pronto.com after 4.5 years of employment, by a guy that I interviewed for my own supervisor’s position. Two hours after laying me off, the company immediately put my job description on craigslist in an entry-level capacity. I loved Pronto – I had worked there since it was just a few months old. I considered it “my baby”. June 10th was not a good day for me. Three days later they announced the buy-out of the rest of the original Pronto.com shares by their parent company IAC.

I’ve got a house, a wife to support, two kids and two broken cars that I need to fix. Everything nowadays requires money. I can’t wait to find work. Every day that I’m unemployed, I lose $250. Time to start my search for a new job, and fast!

The first place that I went was OneRiot.com and applied for a sysadmin position there. OneRiot.com is an up-and-coming Boulder startup that does ‘social search’. What they do is scrape twitter, digg and other sites and try to trend topics and put together news articles based on what they consider current trends. I passed their 2-hour scripting test that “nobody has finished in the 2-hour limit” in one hour and they were very impressed. I sat down with face-to-face interviews with 9 different people including their CEO. They checked all my references and after it was all done, they decided to not go with me. Later, they posted two entry-level positions for both halves of the job that I was interviewing for (part sysadmin, part QA). I figure that they decided to split my job and salary into two parts and have two people instead of one. This seems to be a trend in the smaller companies. Hire more ‘warm bodies’ (like they’re resources, not people) instead of higher-paid, more experienced people.

The typical System Administration Job Interview:

The job market is actually pretty good for my profession at this time. I’ve had at least 3-4 phone interviews per week and 1-2 face-to-face interviews per week so-far. I’ve got 5 companies that are seriously considering me and I’m just waiting them out for them to make a decision. I’ve also got a potential CTO position with a really fun startup in Boulder that I’m keeping my fingers crossed for.

So, I’m not too worried about my job search, but I’m starting to think about things like moving up into management. The money is better, depending on the position, I could still do some technical stuff, and I’m pretty good with people. I’ve lead people before and they seem to like my management style. I’m pretty easy-going. My main management principals are to stick up for my people if/when they make a mistake, give them the tools that they need to do their job and stay out of their way. It works for me and I think that it’s a fair way to manage.

My previous job was probably taken from me probably because of money. Why else would they hire an entry-level person the same day? Why would OneRiot.com not hire me and then open up two positions instead of the one that I was applying for? I have been either a Senior or a Lead System Administrator for the last 12 years of my professional life and my salary requirements are a little higher than the standard startup can afford. With experience comes higher salaries. So, either I need to start looking for a different role (programmer or manager) or go with a larger company that can afford me.

I love the tech industry. I love programming. I love Linux. I don’t know if I’d miss the whole tech thing or not if I were to make the leap into management. My perfect job would be a hybrid – a combination of management and programming, I think. If you’ve read my blog in the past, you know that I love to tinker with code and different things. I put together a bunch of systems for Pronto in the early days and I loved it. I’ve put together different ‘startup’ websites to see if they generate any interest. I love putting things together and being creative – if I go into management, I might miss that a little bit.

So, I’m thinking more holistically about my life/job/family now that I have some time to adjust my life direction a little bit. I’ll update my blog again with part 2 of my job search when I’ve made some more progress.

Mordac: Time To Upgrade

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 00:00:00 MDT

Laid off, but enjoying the summer anyway

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 00:00:00 MDT

Swimming Pool Originally uploaded by agent j loves agent a

Got laid off from Pronto.com on June 10th. I won’t go into the details, but it apparently wasn’t due to my job performance and I have a rehire-able status with IAC. It was a bummer, but I’m not letting it get me down.

I spent the day today at the Sunset Pool in Longmont and I really had a great time. It was like reliving my childhood getting sand everywhere and seeing all of the college kids in their bikinis made me want to hit the gym. My kids had a great time and so did I. I really enjoyed reflecting and not having to worry about my ticket queue at work or worrying if the boss was going to chew me out for something. I really got some destressing time in and I loved every minute of it.

Sunburn, chlorine and flopping around in the pool makes me sleepy.

Roland JD-990 instrument definition file for the Linux Rosegarden MIDI sequencer is available

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 00:00:00 MDT

If you own a Roland JD-990 Synthesizer and use Rosegarden on Linux for your MIDI sequencer, you’ll appreciate this file: Roland-JD-990.rgd. I’ve submitted it to the Rosegarden dev team and they’ve put it in their next release.

squid no Last-Modified or Etag header

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 00:00:00 MDT

Let me guess. You googled for “squid no Last-Modified header”, huh?

Short answer: squid will not cache your object if there is no Last-Modified or Etag headers in the response from the source. Period. You may go about your day. :)

We should all use the Mosaic UserAgent

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 00:00:00 MDT

A friend of mine at work today said that he wanted to change his browser’s useragent to Mosaic (the first browser, circa 1992-ish). I was thinking that would be awesome! Could you imagine the Facebook people looking at their UserAgent reports and seeing a growing, if not significant number of users using a Mosaic browser (doesn’t render javascript, css, no plugins, etc …) Barely any sites would even render properly much less work in Mosaic. If you’re interested, here’s a few Mosaic UserAgent strings. I may use it as the default in my crawler. :)

Mosaic/2.1 (Amiga ARexx) Mozilla/1.0 (compatible; NCSA Mosaic; Atari 800-ST) NCSA_Mosaic/2.0 (Windows 3.1)

I particularly like the Atari 800 one. :)

I figured that I'd crawl facebook tonight

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 00:00:00 MDT

I had nothing else to do, so I crawled 200k facebook pages just to poke around and see what I could see. I picked user id ranges 0 to 100k and my_id to my_id+100k. facebook has probably around 1 billion user pages and I’m not out there to collect any global facebook stats or anything, so I just chose a nice sample size to poke around with. I’ll let you know if I found anything interesting. :)

My Memorial Day Burger Recipe

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Fri, 28 May 2010 00:00:00 MDT

buy meat from the butcher’s case, not under plastic, AND NEVER IN A TUBE
50/50 chuck and sirloin
kosher salt and freshly-ground black pepper only
blend and season the night before, wrap tightly in plastic
hand-form and do not overhandle
let come to room temperature
grill on a fire past its peak
DO NOT TOUCH them until they run red
flip
DO NOT TOUCH THEM until they run clear
pull and wrap in foil
stand five minutes
serve

The people screaming about IPv4 running out of IP space are all drama queens

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Thu, 27 May 2010 00:00:00 MDT

Ok, here’s my stand on things. The beauty of having a blog and speaking publicly about things is that I can be proven right or wrong - only time will tell.

People have been clammering for 10 years about the end of the IPv4 address space and as of today even CNN has jumped on the bandwagon. My prediction about the IPv4 space is that it will take tens of years before anyone makes any real changes much less adopts IPv6 across the board.

Last week, Comcast has announced that they’re going to offer IPv6 routing across their network, but will require tunneling outside of their network still since the rest of the world is still not IPv6-compatible.

Facts:

There are still large organizations who own huge class-A chunks of the IPv4 address space. Some of these are military organizations. You can bet that the majority of these addresses are not in use today. So, there are plenty of IPv4 addresses out there, but nobody wants to let go of them. When IPv4 addresses become scarce, these addresses will be sold to the highest bidder instead of people adopting IPv6.

People are lazy. Not everyone, but the great majority of people are. Lazy people tend to take the easiest way out. The easiest way out is not to create something new, it’s to squeeze the last little bit of life out of something.

People will scrape together and consolidate their IPs if they run low.

People can port-forward ports to NAT’ed machines instead of needing a new IP for every new service. Wow! We have 64k ports on each IP address! Who needs more than one now?

VPNs take care of native access from site-to-site from private address to private address. One public IP on a single machine can link together millions of machines in a huge organization and can delay the need for IPv6 for a LONG time.

NAT

Large companies can work off a single IP. Just make each service a “directory” off their main domain, so http://google.com/search and http://google.com/docs, etc …

You may think that you need a public IP, but the odds are that you probably don’t have one now. You only need a public IP if you’re serving-up content. SERVING is the important word here. How many of you actually have a server (web,ftp,irc,…) in your home and allow other people to connect to it from around the internet. Very few, I’ll bet. Most people use their home internet connections for web surfing, email, pulling down multimedia content. All client-side operations, and GETTING of data. Not SERVING data.

The fact is that ISPs will just give you a private, NAT’ed address if they run low on IPv4 addresses and charge you more money if you really think that you need a public IP, but that hasn’t really happened yet.

If you look at all of the facts, and the fact that people are lazy and will use other means of operations if they run low on IP addresses, you’ll see that most pro-IPv6 people are just touting their new technology and want to put it into place, but the real fact is that there are people out there that still use Windows 95 and AOL and refuse to upgrade. IPv6 is one of those things that gets better the more people adopt it and those kinds of technologies always take a while to get into the mainstream. It’s going to take a LONG while to convert the number of people it’ll take to achieve critical mass to flip the rest of the internet over to IPv6. I may not even see it in my lifetime.

I may be wrong, but now that I’ve made my prediction, we’ll see how long it takes for IPv6 to take hold to the point where it’s commonplace and considered the standard. I know that I’m not itching to tunnel my packets over IPv6. I’ve got a personal VPN and I can reach anywhere that I need to directly without the use of IPv6, so I’m good-to-go.

Mordac - Wordsmith

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sat, 15 May 2010 00:00:00 MDT

I'm a system administrator but I'm not offended by this. I love Mordac. :)

Nagios service_dependency only works with active checks

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:00:00 MDT

If you found this article finding out why your nagios service_dependency isn’t working, it’s probably a passive check (sent from a machien to the nagios server). service_dependencies only work as active checks.

Even Firefox knows that Java sucks!

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 00:00:00 MDT

While recently upgrading the java firefox plugin I got this error dialog:

Want to see some really web 1.0 web pages?

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:00:00 MDT

Want to see some really web 1.0 web pages? Just google for “GPS recording software”. You’ll see a whole range of web 1.0 web pages with flashing graphics, no javascript, static pages, and applications written by people who write programs and web pages without any style or sense of artwork. :) Lots of links to the here: http://www.maps-gps-info.com/fgpfw.html

Why the carrot-and-stick methodology of employee motivation doesn't work

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:00:00 MDT

TED talk about why the carrot-and-stick methodology of employee motivation doesn’t work:

As soon as they port VNC to the iPad, now, we're talking

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:00 MDT

So, when they port VNC to the iPad, then, I’ll be interested! I would love to remote into my machines from anywhere in the world via cellular and get a decent display. Now, we’re talking! :)

Inside 10 of the largest datacenters

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 00:00:00 MDT

http://wikibon.org/blog/inside-ten-of-the-worlds-largest-data-centers/

JavaFX might be dead before it gets out the door

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 00:00:00 MDT

Infoworld ran an article http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/it-too-late-javafx-succeed-582 saying that JavaFX (which nobody that I know has even heard of) might be DOA due to the Oracle takeover. From the article:

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<cite>Nearly three years after its introduction, the JavaFX multimedia application development platform that Oracle inherited from Sun Microsystems remains just another entrant in a crowded field, with questions looming about how much momentum the platform can gather.

Unveiled at the JavaOne conference in May 2007, JavaFX is intended to provide a Java-based entrant into the growing market for development of multimedia whiz-bang applications for desktops and mobile devices. JavaFX 1.0 was released in December 2008, and as of June 2009, there had been more than 400,000 downloads of the JavaFX tools and SDK, according to the official JavaFX Web page. JavaFX is available on more than 250 million desktops, the page says. The platform features the JavaFX Script scripting language, a rich client platform and tools, and integration with the Java runtime.</cite>

20GB in 1980 versus 32GB in 2010

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 00:00:00 MDT

My latest anti-java rant

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:00:00 MDT

I’m not really part of the “older” generation of programmers, but when I was a teenager I experienced the personal computer boom first-hand. I remember the days of 4.7 Mhz computers doing incredibly wonderful things on 8-bit and 16-bit architectures with crappy video chipsets and very low memory. I majored in college in Computer Science and programmed a bunch of C code on DOS and Amiga computers. I used to download 3k demos written in assembly code over my 2400 baud modem.

Review of PVFS2 (2.8.2)

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:00:00 MST

I read a review of a few parallel file systems the other day (I tried to find the link and couldn’t find it, sorry), but it suggested PVFS, Lustre and GlusterFS. I had used PVFS back in the 1.0-days and thought that it was worth trying again.

I installed 8 vmware instances of Ubuntu 9.10 on a machine that I had lying around and started compiling PVFS. I got the server running on all 8 instances and got the kernel module running on one node, so I had a real, mountable filesystem. I’m not sure how to measure performance because it’s all done in a virtual machine on a 100Mbps network in my home, but I was surprised to find that PVFS was not fault tolerant if/when I took a machine down. What?

I dug through the docs and it turns out that PVFS is only fault tolerant for the server if shared storage is available and it uses heartbeat to do the failover, so the ‘server’ is fault tolerant, but the file system isn’t if we lose a machine or harddrive. Bummer.

Oh well. So much for PVFS. Although it has matured quite a lot since the 1.0 days, it’s still not a ‘redundant’ solution if you need replication and want to design around storage hardware failures.

SysAdmin John McCain!

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 00:00:00 MST

Why your employees are losing motivation

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:00:00 MST

Taken from “Stop Demotivating Your Employees!” Harvard Management Update, Vol. 11, No. 1, January 2006

Most companies have it all wrong. They don’t have to motivate their employees. They have to stop demotivating them.

The great majority of employees are quite enthusiastic when they start a new job. But in about 85 percent of companies, our research finds, employees’ morale sharply declines after their first six months—and continues to deteriorate for years afterward. That finding is based on surveys of about 1.2 million employees at 52 primarily Fortune 1000 companies from 2001 through 2004, conducted by Sirota Survey Intelligence (Purchase, New York).

The fault lies squarely at the feet of management—both the policies and procedures companies employ in managing their workforces and in the relationships that individual managers establish with their direct reports.

Three key goals of people at work

To maintain the enthusiasm employees bring to their jobs initially, management must understand the three sets of goals that the great majority of workers seek from their work—and then satisfy those goals:

Equity: To be respected and to be treated fairly in areas such as pay, benefits, and job security.
Achievement: To be proud of one’s job, accomplishments, and employer.
Camaraderie: To have good, productive relationships with fellow employees.

To maintain an enthusiastic workforce, management must meet all three goals. Indeed, employees who work for companies where just one of these factors is missing are three times less enthusiastic than workers at companies where all elements are present.

One goal cannot be substituted for another. Improved recognition cannot replace better pay, money cannot substitute for taking pride in a job well done, and pride alone will not pay the mortgage.

What individual managers can do

Satisfying the three goals depends both on organisational policies and on the everyday practices of individual managers. If the company has a solid approach to talent management, a bad manager can undermine it in his unit. On the flip side, smart and empathetic managers can overcome a great deal of corporate mismanagement while creating enthusiasm and commitment within their units. While individual managers can’t control all leadership decisions, they can still have a profound influence on employee motivation.

The most important thing is to provide employees with a sense of security, one in which they do not fear that their jobs will be in jeopardy if their performance is not perfect and one in which lay-offs are considered an extreme last resort, not just another option for dealing with hard times.

But security is just the beginning. When handled properly, each of the following eight practices will play a key role in supporting your employees’ goals for achievement, equity, and camaraderie, and will enable them to retain the enthusiasm they brought to their roles in the first place.

Achievement related

Instil an inspiring purpose. A critical condition for employee enthusiasm is a clear, credible, and inspiring organisational purpose: in effect, a “reason for being” that translates for workers into a “reason for being there” that goes above and beyond money.
Provide recognition. Managers should be certain that all employee contributions, both large and small, are recognised. The motto of many managers seems to be, “Why would I need to thank someone for doing something he’s paid to do?” Workers repeatedly tell us, and with great feeling, how much they appreciate a compliment. They also report how distressed they are when managers don’t take the time to thank them for a job well done yet are quick to criticise them for making mistakes.
Be an expediter for your employees. Incorporating a command-and-control style is a sure-fire path to demotivation. Instead, redefine your primary role as serving as your employees’ expediter: It is your job to facilitate getting their jobs done. Your reports are, in this sense, your “customers.” Your role as an expediter involves a range of activities, including serving as a linchpin to other business units and managerial levels to represent their best interests and ensure your people get what they need to succeed.
Coach your employees for improvement. A major reason so many managers do not assist subordinates in improving their performance is, simply, that they don’t know how to do this without irritating or discouraging them. A few basic principles will improve this substantially.

Equity related

Communicate fully. One of the most counter-productive rules in business is to distribute information on the basis of “need to know.” It is usually a way of severely, unnecessarily, and destructively restricting the flow of information in an organisation.

Workers’ frustration with an absence of adequate communication is one of the most negative findings we see expressed on employee attitude surveys. What employees need to do their jobs and what makes them feel respected and included dictate that very few restrictions be placed by managers on the flow of information. Hold nothing back of interest to employees except those very few items that are absolutely confidential. Full and open communication not only helps employees do their jobs but also is a powerful sign of respect.

Face up to poor performance. Identify and deal decisively with the 5 percent of your employees who don’t want to work. Most people want to work and be proud of what they do (the achievement need). But there are employees who are, in effect, “allergic” to work—they’ll do just about anything to avoid it. They are unmotivated, and a disciplinary approach—including dismissal—is about the only way they can be managed. It will raise the morale and performance of other team members to see an obstacle to their performance removed.

Camaraderie related

Promote teamwork. Most work requires a team effort in order to be done effectively. Research shows repeatedly that the quality of a group’s efforts in areas such as problem solving is usually superior to that of individuals working on their own. In addition, most workers get a motivation boost from working in teams.

Related to all three factors

Listen and involve. Employees are a rich source of information about how to do a job and how to do it better. This principle has been demonstrated time and again with all kinds of employees—from hourly workers doing the most routine tasks to high-ranking professionals. Managers who operate with a participative style reap enormous rewards in efficiency and work quality.

Participative managers continually announce their interest in employees’ ideas. They do not wait for these suggestions to materialise through formal upward communication or suggestion programs. They find opportunities to have direct conversations with individuals and groups about what can be done to improve effectiveness. They create an atmosphere where “the past is not good enough” and recognise employees for their innovativeness.

Why I hate java

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:00:00 MST

This is a re-post from my old webpage back in 2000:

(from C/C++ Users Journal):

Reasons we prefer C to Java in two words - transparency and control:

In C, an array of structs will be laid out contiguously in memory, which is good for cache locality. In Java, the decision of how to lay out an array of objects is made by the compiler, and probably has indirections.
C has data types that match hardware data types and operations. Java abstracts from the hardware (“write once, run anywhere”).
C has manual memory management, whereas Java has garbage collection. Garbage collection is safe and convenient, but places little control over performance in the hands of programmers, and indeed encourages an allocation-intensive style.

In short, C programmers can see the costs of their programs simply by looking at them, and they can easily change data representations and fundamental strategies such as memory management. It’s easy for C programmers to tune their code for performance or for resource constraints.

I could go on and on, but here’s just the google search for “Java sucks”: http://www.google.com/search?q=java+sucks&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a Disclaimer: I was taught programming using Pascal, then C, then C++. I’m used to programming “close to the metal”. I use PHP and Perl when needed, but steer clear of Java at almost all costs. I don’t even like using java applications whenever possible - not because of principal, but because of poor performance or resource hogging. What do you use uTorrent (C) or Azurus (Java)? Why aren’t operating systems written in Java? Most anything that needs good performance is written in C or assembly to squeeze as much out of the hardware as possible.

Java is the SUV of programming tools. A project done in Java will cost 5 times as much, take twice as long, and be harder to maintain than a project done in a scripting language such as PHP or Perl. … But the programmers and managers using Java will feel good about themselves because they are using a tool that, in theory, has a lot of power for handling problems of tremendous complexity. Just like the suburbanite who drives his SUV to the 7-11 on a paved road but feels good because in theory he could climb a 45-degree dirt slope. – Greenspun, Philip

JAVA truly is the great equalizing software. It has reduced all computers to mediocrity and buggyness. - NASA’s J-Track web site

If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution. – Robert Sewell

Java is a DSL to transform big Xml documents into long exception stack traces. – Scott Bellware

Java: the elegant simplicity of C++ and the blazing speed of Smalltalk. – Jan Steinman

More “java sucks” pages online:

http://www.cs.arizona.edu/projects/sumatra/hallofshame/ The Java Hall of Shame

http://www.wekk.net/blog/2009/05/05/why-java-sucks-for-sysadmins/

http://www.jwz.org/doc/java.html (“Java sucks” written by Jamie Zawinski - known for Netscape, Xscreensaver, emacs, XCeyCaps, and many other popular and useful unix utils)!

http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/entdev/article.php/11070_3761921_1/The-Anti-Java-Professor-and-the-Jobless-Programmers.htm - A CS professor says that today’s Java-savvy college grad is tomorrow’s pizza delivery man. He stresses that he’s not against Java itself. But the fact that Java is taught as the core language in so many colleges is resulting in a weak field of computer science grads, he says.

http://www.advogato.org/article/624.html - leaked internal memo shows that Sun doesn’t allow Java for its internal applications on Solaris and another java sucks advocate.

While the Java language provides many advantages over C and C++, its
implementation on Solaris presents barriers to the delivery of
reliable applications. These barriers prevent general acceptance of
Java for production software within Sun.
[...]

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10453213-16.html - and just a pro-PHP article to round it all out and put Java in its place: “PHP and Perl crashing the enterprise party”

Finished my "last search" plugins

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 00:00:00 MST

A while ago, I had an idea about search. What if a search engine recorded the last hit that you went to off the search results page and used those urls as the most popular results from that page? The theory is that once you find what you’re searching for, you stop searching for it, aka - you don’t go back to the search engine anymore. So, the last link that you click on from the search page should be the one you wanted. If enough people click on the same link, that link should be the most popular and should be at the top of the page.

I wrote two greasemonkey plugins. One that allows a user to submit results to the study and one that queries the study database for results. They can be found here:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/31639

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/64039

You’ll need to be running firefox and install the greasemonkey plugin https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748 first in order to install the above scripts. Once everything’s installed, you’re part of the project!

Amazon needs a mysql replication/snapshot service

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 MST

Amazon has EC2, S3, their key/value database, their mysql service and about a jillion other great services and tools, but what I think would be awesome and not hard for them to do is to just have a replication/snapshotting service for mysql - a backup.

In mysql, it’s very easy to just point a slave at a master mysql server. Just give it an IP, name, password and a pointer into the transaction log. How nice would it be to just point your mysql server at an Amazon IP and know that it’s now being replicated, backed up and snapshotted at regular intervals? Instant Mysql backups! A one-liner on your side configuration-wise and your whole database is being backed up? How awesome is that!?!?!? It would be pretty simple for Amazon to put together, just another EC2 instance and they could charge the normal rates and get some more business. Making this easy would inspire many people to use it and could bring in some instant revenue to ‘the Zon’ in my opinion.

Why git is faster than jgit

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 00:00:00 MST

The author of jgit shows why C is so much faster than Java when comparing his version of jgit to the original C version. http://marc.info/?l=git&m=124111702609723&w=2

2009 Christmas Stream is up

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 MST

The annual Christmas stream is working again! Let the holiday season begin!

The url: http://badcheese.com:8000/stream

This year I’m using an icecast streamer from my new web host in Florida.

Compatible clients:

itunes (ctrl-U, then type in the url) fstream (free for the iphone) foobar2000 http://www.foobar2000.org winamp http://www.winamp.com XMMS http://www.xmms.org Zinf http://zinf.sourceforge.net MPlayer http://www.mplayerhq.hu Xine http://www.xinehq.de VLC http://www.videolan.org

Steve

System Administrators: who we are, what we do, how to manage us & why we look at you that way when you come to us for something

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 MST

This is an open letter from us, that is, the system administrators, to you, management, users, and everybody that has to deal with us and our sometimes very bizarre behavior.

I’m 41 years old and I’ve been a linux/unix system administrator for about 11 years. Before that I was a unix programmer for about 5 years. One day when I was only a few years out of my C.S. degree, I shared an office with our solaris sysadmin. We became good friends and got along great, except for when I asked him to install something on a system for me, he’d give me this look that said to me, “Dude, we’re great friends, why do you want to spoil that and have me do some work for you?”. I never really understood that look. I figured that it was his job to support me and to do what I ask him to do. If I need something done to do my job, he should do it without any attitude and just let me know when it’s done. We continued to be great friends throughout the company’s existence and still contact him from time to time, but I could never get over or understand that look … until now.

Many people treat me and my fellow system administrators as an angry god when they want us to do some work for them. They offer a peace offering and apologize 5-10 times for interrupting us and then explain the problem hoping that we won’t get angry. Or perhaps they see the same look that I used to get from my friend when I asked him to do work.

Being a system administrator for 11 years taught me a few things. I now understand the sysadmin attitude. It’s not that we’re assholes. It’s not that we are lazy and don’t like to work. It’s not that we hate or think less of a certain type of employee. It’s very simple.

The cardinal rule: Don't make us do any unnecessary work

That’s it. Keep that in mind and you’ll never feel weird when approaching your local sysadmin and asking him/her to do something for you.

Nobody likes to do unnecessary work. Not programmers, not managers, not the office secretary, nobody. Programmers fully question whether some work that they were asked to do is truly necessary and can’t be solved better using existing technology (don’t re-invent the wheel) or done using hardware or other solutions. It’s normal - everyone in the office has a TO DO list as long as their arm already and doesn’t need someone coming up to them asking them to do something that hasn’t been thought through and will generate a lot of unnecessary or duplicate work. An example of this is when someone approaches a sysadmin and requests to have them install some known-buggy or known-insecure software on a system. The sysadmin knows that one day the software will crash or be compromised and can cause bigger problems down the road.

There is no System Administrator college or degree. You can take an operating systems class, or get a degree in I.S., but there isn’t a major in I.T. that I know of. Most really good sysadmins that I have worked with in the past have a programming degree or have some sort of a programming background. I’m not talking about java or perl or other interpreted language programmers. I’m talking about programmers to write code for a specific architecture and know their hardware. Programmers that know about memory and performance issues and think about those issues before writing one line of code. Most system administrators that I know that evolved from being a programmer were working for a smallish company and needed someone to do some administration of some software or system when none was available and just morphed into the role.

Now don’t think that I think that every other type of sysadmin sucks, I don’t think that at all. I work with many people who didn’t evolve into being System Administrators through the programming path, and they’re very good administrators, but I feel that they don’t have the same understanding of a system as an ex-programmer does. I’ve worked with many younger “hot shot” sysadmins that are in their mid-20’s and don’t have a degree of any kind but can out-admin me any time of the day and I look up to and respect their skills. However, this is mostly a personal ‘fight’ with me now that I’m in my 40’s. I sometimes find myself in a decision where a younger admin has an idea that conflicts with my own personal beliefs. I used to stand up for myself and fight the fight for the better solution, but I recently have lost the will to fight the fight and let the young guy take the reins and run the show. I simply don’t have the energy to fight for the right way with some of my co-workers anymore, and more times than not, it leads to problems down the road.

I remember when I was fresh out of school and started my programming career. I came into a company and tried to convert the engineers to the latest and greatest technologies. I converted our project from C to C++ and from TCL/TK to motif on Solaris. I thought that I was doing the right thing because I was using the things that I learned in school and through all of my reading about the latest technologies, I figured that using a newer, better technology could only be better. I managed to get the company to switch gears and go the way of C++/Motif, but it was wedging different technology into a working system, making it more broken than fixed. The one thing that I lacked was knowledge of the second rule (good for sysadmin and programmers alike):

Use the proper tool for the task

The whole key to this rule is that “proper” doesn’t mean ‘latest flavor of the month’ or even ‘best practice’. Sometimes TCL/TK is better than Motif. Sometimes C is better than C++. It depends on the situation, the project, the scope of the whole task, if rapid-prototyping is more important than having a polished application, … To me, the way to decide which tool to use in most of these decisions is to follow the third rule:

Keep It Simple, Stupid

The K.I.S.S. rule works for most situations. If you can keep it simple (keeping in mind future maintenance), it’s probably the right way to go.

How I see the role of a system administrator: The system administrator is the construction man and the fireman. We try to build a structure that will stand up to the weather and sit around waiting for the alarms to go off (sometimes in the middle of the night) from a possible storm and when the structure falls or burns down, we rescue what we can and rebuild the structure.

The key to all of this is experience. I cannot stress enough the value of experience in the role of a sysadmin. Best practice is not always the best way to go in every situation. Not every circumstance can be solved by just stating the ‘best practice’ and going with it. Just because a tool is good doesn’t mean that it has to be used to solve every situation (rule 2). You need to pick the tool that fits the situation - not the tool that your flavor-of-the-day favorite blog or instructor decides for you is the best.

What does all of this mean? Is Steve on a rant with no direction?

When I asked my friend the Solaris admin to install some software, he wasn’t thinking about me asking him to do work. He was snarling at the software that I was requesting him to install. In the back of his mind, he was thinking to himself, “Oh god, that’s going to snowball into a shitstorm of a mess and I’m going to have to clean it all up!”. He didn’t want to tell me that, but he was thinking it. I was a hotshot kid and wanted to bring positive change to the office and the project but the office elders knew better than I did. The old “Wayne’s World” line, “We fear change” in this instance is well-founded. Experienced engineers and system administrators work their best and are the most productive when they are in a familiar environment using familiar tools. When someone comes along and throws a wrench in the works with some newfangled concept or tool and says that it’ll be better than the existing framework, there are two ways that the elders can go. They can reject the new guys’ new ideas and continue to push steadily down the road as they were before possibly missing out on a better path, or they can shift ownership to the new guy with the new ideas. The new idea may be better, but it puts the control in the hands of the new guy and the elders have to stop, back-pedal to learn the new framework and then try to catch up to where they were before the change if indeed the new framework fits into the old project well without too much ‘massaging’.

Sysadmins are no exception. When approaching a sysadmin and asking for work or a new tool installed, a good system administrator will ask you, “WHY?”. Don’t feel put-off by this. We’re just checking to see if there might be a better option. It’s our house, we don’t need some punk asking to knock down a load-bearing wall in our carefully-designed structure (of course if a boss demands to knock down the load-bearing wall, we kind of have to do it even though it may be a stupid decision and everyone knows it - after all we all need our jobs, right? If you have a boss or manager that hands down decisions like this, you may find that your work environment is less than pleasant and you constantly find yourself fighting fires that you wouldn’t have had to do if the decision hadn’t been handed down from above). So, if a sysadmin asks you “why”, just rationally defend your decision and you’ll probably get your task done in a speedy manor, assuming the task is sound. If there is a better option, please feel free to listen to the sysadmin’s options and be open about it. It may not be what you expected to hear, but the sysadmin is probably thinking holistically about the whole system when making his/her decision about an alternative option and may be much easier to work with in the long-run.

How to manage a sysadmin: Pretty simple. My rule is: give your sysadmin the tools and time to do their job and leave them alone. When it comes to layoffs, do what any good manager does, stand up for them. When it comes to raises and promotions, it’s simple. Promote from within (don’t hire from the outside) and give appropriate raises based on performance and completeion of milestones. It’s not hard. Basic management skills always work with system administrators. Micro-management, implementing the latest thing from wired magazine because it sounds cool, jumping in bed with the vendor that offers you the most bells and whistles … ALL BAD DECISIONS! When in doubt, K.I.S.S. Trust me, I have experience in these things. :)

How to enter the grub 2.0 boot menu - hold down the shift key

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:00 MST

The secret is holding down the shift key during the boot.

The new grub 2.0 is coming as default in all of the major linux distros now. The focus is on fast boot times. Grub 2.0 offers a very pretty boot screen and very speedy boot time, but the problem is that the old way of getting into the boot menu doesn’t work anymore. The key is to hold down the shift key to get the boot menu and you’re in. :)

Searches: How do I get into the grub 2.0 boot menu? Ubuntu 9.10 grub menu? Ubuntu 9.10 different kernel?

Steve

linux w/ reiserfs 3.x vs a SUN SAN 7410 running solaris and ZFS

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 MDT

We used to serve up the images for http://pronto.com from a couple of linux machines running reiserfs 3.6 with 6x 750GB SATA harddrives in them. We began to run out of room and decided to go to a SAN. We got a good deal on a SUN 7410 SAN through our corporate deals (22TB, 14TB usable) and it had all kinds of great stuff in it so we said what the heck.

Now, the problem. Our storage platform holds 366M 5-8 kilobyte files. This is a LOT of little files. At the top directory, we have a 256 directories (00-FF) and under each of those, we have another 256 directories, so we have 65,536 directories total. This means that we have about 5000-6000 images in each directory.

This is where we start to notice differences. Reiserfs does an “ls” in a directory with 6000 files in it in about 3-5 seconds. The SUN SAN does it in about 1-2 minutes. Serious problems here.

Our only option is to add a third level of hashed directories. This will give us about 16.7M directories and will solve our performance problem, but to all of you people out there that think that ZFS is hot shit, I say to you, “It depends on your situation”.

There's no way that balloon could've lifted a 50 lb boy

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:00:00 MDT

REXML could not parse this XML/HTML: 
<img src="/files/balloon.jpg" align=left />

Now, can you calculate the amount of money that would’ve been saved if this calculation has been performed before the huge rescue effort started? I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader. :)

Linux guy tries out a Mac for a weekend for the first time

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:00:00 MDT

I’m a linux guy. I’ve been using linux primarily since before the 1.0 kernel days back in 1993. I’ve never owned or used a macintosh for more than just helping someone get their mail or VPN up and running.

On friday, I installed Leopard (not Snow Leopard) on a MacBook Pro laptop for work which is about a year old and I decided that I was going to take it home and get to know what all of the fuss is about.

Friday night, first impressions: Nice hardware. Beautiful screen. Clean fonts. Nice, quiet keyboard. I liked the initial ‘take a picture for your profile’ which uses the screen as a flash - nice touch. I found more wireless access points from my home living room than I’ve ever found using any laptop that I’ve ever used before. Nice wireless/antenna. I changed the battery to the most conservative option and I got > 3 hours of battery life from it the first night. Nice. The magnetic power connector is also a nice touch. I had known about that before, but using it several times was nice. Pretty, well-engineered, productive and useful right out of the box. Good job Jobs! :)

Saturday night, I mainly tried out the software that came with the OS. I poked around with things and got to know how good safari was and ichat, mail, etc … Some initial impressions: iTunes is way faster on a mac than on windows. Javascript on Safari is very zippy! Finding things on a mac is not easy for a Linux or Windows user. Finding installed applications could be made easier in my opinion. Time capsule is a great feature. Rock band is fun. I think that I would like to buy parallels or something so I could dual-boot with it though. I liked that the VOIP client just worked out of the box and was very easy to set up and configure.

I began to miss my > 1 mouse buttons. I tried holding the mouse button down, I tried double-clicking, I tried everything and had to figure out the mac-way of doing things without a second or third mouse button. I’m sure that I could hook up an external USB mouse, but I wanted to do things the ‘mac’ way, so I worked without it. Also, I’m used to tapping the touchpad for a left-click. I dont know how many times I tried that and waited for something to happen … :)

Saturday night, I tried to download the xcode and iphone SDK (2 GB). It was a normal HTTP download from the Apple site but the transfer failed twice (not sure if it was the wireless connection, or the web server or what, so I don’t really blame the mac or safari). I tried it with wget on linux and it downloaded great the first time, so I copied it to the mac over scp (which was standard on the mac) and I was good-to-go. I tried a torrent client - tomato torrent was the first hit on google for “torrent mac”, so I downloaded it, and it pretty much sucks and never made one connection nor downloaded anything at all.

Sunday night, I installed the Xcode stuff and tried out some of my code that I am writing on linux. CVS worked great, but I couldn’t compile something I was writing that needed PCRE (perl-compatible regular expressions) and I wasn’t quite sure how to install it, so I went on to a different set of source code that I am working on. It’s a multi-threaded application that uses pthreads. It compiled fine, but when ran, anything over 10 threads, it would hang. Using 10 threads, it ran fine. My perl scripts ran fine without having to install any CPAN modules at all.

Now, before all of you mac people start responding about how stupid I am or how easy it is to solve my problems. Let me explain. I didn’t have days to figure things out. I just wanted a good taste of a mac and overall, I was very impressed. Some things very good. Some things not quite as good, some things a little weird and different. I’m sure that if I spent more than 60-ish hours (only about 5 actual hours) with a Mac and OS X, I’d probably figure things out and everything would be great. I would love to do some iphone development and would love to really learn to make this nice laptop really sing, but I have to return this machine to its rightful owner tomorrow morning and I’ll be returning to my Ubuntu 9.04 box on my quad-core 4GB PC box. :)

I like linux and I like the mac, but being a little linux-biased, I think that more linux people should taste the macintosh experience a little bit and bring some of the mac flavor over to the linux side. Personally, I think that Windows is a lost cause and Mac and Linux are the way of the future. If anyone at Apple is reading this and wants to send me a free MacBook Pro, I’d love to use it as my primary machine every day, but if I were to spend my own hard earned money on a laptop today, I’d spend $500-$800 on an HP or Acer. I just can’t justify $2k on a laptop no matter how nice it is. I don’t think that I’d really go the hacintosh route mainly because it makes me feel dirty. :)

I never really figured out if there was a package manager or something else like apt or yum on linux. Is there?

Linux users trust the community

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 00:00:00 MDT

writing a crawler - thinking about the whole internet

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 00:00:00 MDT

Crawling the whole internet using a home internet connection and a few PCs. Can it be done in a reasonable amount of time and without buying a million harddrives and computers? How big is this problem? Let's assume that we want to do the simplest type of analysis – just pulling all of the pages on the internet, grabbing the urls and then deleting the file and crawling more. We only need temporary storage of the html, so we only have to store the urls. Recently, Google celebrated the indexing of it trillionth web page (2007, I think). So, let's say that there are 1T urls that we need to store. Are those unique pages, or 1T pages, including dupes? For each url, we need to store its return code (200, 404, …). Normally, we'd store the date/time last fetched, Last-modified, mime-type, etc, but we're just going to store the url. If we store it in a flat file, and we store urls in a per-domain file, we can cut off the domain part of the urls (aka http://mydomain.com/) and just store the path and filename in the files. Making a wild guess at the average url length is across the entire internet, let's say it's somewhere in-between 40-100 characters. We'll choose 80 chars as a stab in the dark. 1T urls * 80 chars = 80TB worth of urls. If we store all of the URLs in a key/value database that supports compression (tokyo cabinet) and use the highest compression possible, we might be able to get the storage of all of the URLs down to below 10TB. So, that's possible with a single PC for a couple of grand. We now have a machine that's capable of storing every possible url on the internet (or close to it).

writing a crawler - relative to absolute urls

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 00:00:00 MDT

Ok, as I write my crawler, I've noticed that there are many pieces to the whole crawler puzzle. I've got the part that pulls pages off the internet as fast as possible (that part works great), but that part is the easy part. The hard part is doing something useful with the data once I've fetched it. The first step is pulling URLs from the html for future crawling. Storing/de-duping/… of urls is a whole other problem with doing a huge crawl, so I'll cover that later.

How just one popular site could hack anyone's account(s) on the internet

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 MDT

Call me paranoid, but …

Ok, take facebook or Google or twitter or some other popular website on the internet. They all require accounts using an id (usually your email address) and a password to get access to, right? So what happens when you forget your password on a certain website? You try several of your ‘standard’ passwords that you use for those sorts of websites, or you use your password that you use everywhere, or a variation of it until you exhaust all of your known variations, then you hit the “I forgot my password” link to have them email your password, right?

Well, let’s say (just for argument’s sake) that one of these sites monitors all of the password variations that you type into the password box when you get locked out of your account. They could build a list of all of your possible passwords for use later. They could have your id, email address and list of possible passwords to try to get into almost any other website! The one website that comes to mind eight off the top of my head is Google. They love to mine data and they love to get their greedy little hands on as much of it as they can. We’ve all forgotten our passwords to a website at one time or another. Google probably has a list of possible passwords that any one user uses on a variety of websites - plus through gmail, they could just snoop your email to see what your passwords are anyway, since they email you your password for just about every account you generate on the web not to mention the data that they could get access to and index if they could log in as people on websites… Let’s forget about Google for now, since they’re the obvious company that already knows everything about you that they need to know and if you’re an avid gmail, gdocs, gchat user, probably hack into any of your accounts if they so desired and let’s focus on a different major website - I could pick any, but facebook is super-huge, let’s pick on them.

Facebook knows your location, education, friends, email address(es), hobbies, and possibly all of your online passwords. With this information, facebook could blackmail people, get into their bank accounts, their work accounts, … Pretty much hack into any account on the internet that requires an id/pw combination and is protected by some sort of personal information to reset your password. Social sites know so much about you - the name of your dog, where you went to school, where you went on your honeymoon, … Pretty much any question on that “I forgot my password” list of questions that you select a couple from to use as your password reset Q/A security step can be found on any social site today.

I love google and google apps. It would suck to go cold-google-turky and use desktop apps and not have the flexibility of using all of the Google tools that I come to rely on on a daily basis. I use Google Mail, Calendar, Reader, Docs, Voice, a personalized google search engine, and I’m sure that I’ll be using Google Wave when it’s available too. I’m a google junky and I also post stuff to facebook, twitter and other sites semi-regularly. I’m hooked-in and I don’t want to un-hook if at all possible. So, what can I do about it?

The obvious choice: multiple password types. I have a Google-only password. I have a work-only password. I have an ebay/paypal-only password. I have a bank/finance-only password. I have a personal-machines-only password. I have several passwords and password variations for my online accounts that I don’t care about. I need to add another one, a social-only password. Also, none of these passwords should be related or similar to each other in any way. Different phrases, different subjects, different number combinations.

This gives me 6 semi-secure passwords, and one ‘pool’ of crap passwords for sites I don’t care about. It’s hard to keep these passwords all sorted out, but I make the changes one at a time, and if I’m on a bank website, I know not to use any of my other passwords or password variations. Also, social sites don’t get to even snoop in on my bank-only password attempts since I won’t even be trying them in the password field at all if/when I forget my password.

Writing down passwords is a general security no-no. There are password-remembering tools that encrypt your passwords, Firefox and IE try to remember IDs and passwords for you as best that they can. There are password syncing utilities out there to keep your browsers in sync when you type something in at home and go to work and want the browser to remember it for you. Those are all fine, and I use them too mostly for convenience-sake, but I don’t inherently trust them. Your browser can be used when you step away at work to use the restroom. Your encrypted password app can be lost if your OS crashes. Storing them online is just a bad idea.

When signing up for a bank account, or a ‘serious’ online service (your CC company, paypal, …), don’t use any of your online email accounts as an address. I’m lucky and I have my own email server, so I use it as my email address for those more serious accounts. This way, if I do have to hit the “I forgot my password” button, the new password gets sent to a known-secure email address that only I have access to.

So how can you remember your passwords? I tend to think that ‘security through obscurity’ is one of the best ways to go. If I build a website of my own and I’m worried about someone hacking it, I will write a custom website. I won’t use drupal or wordpress or phpBB - those are sure to get hacked just a couple of months after I install them. The same thing goes for keeping your passwords safe. If you write them down, put them somewhere safe, I mean REALLY safe, like a safety deposit box or something - now that’s a huge inconvenience if you just need to log into your bank and see your statement or something, but you see where I’m going. Generate a procedure that’s not online, that is secure and has some sort of backup/redundancy to it. Then you’ll be able to say without a doubt that you have a safe location for all of your passwords that will still be available if your home machine dies, if some sort of disaster happens, etc …

Ok, enough ranting for today. Let me know below if you have any other ideas.

The way to do url-shortening right

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:00:00 MDT

http://www.adjix.com has figured out the solution to bit-rot with url-shorteners. They have all of the standard stuff with regards to the normal url-shorteners, but they do one thing interesting. They allow for the user to back up their shortened url links to an amazon S3 bucket. What does this do? It allows you to OWN your shortened links! Yea, I set up a CNAME of url.badcheese.com to point to my amazon S3 bucket, gave adjix permission to write to my bucket and now when I make a shortened url, it fetches an actual file off of S3 and does the redirect through javascript. Why would someone like to own their shortened urls? Well, bit-rot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rot is a problem with url-shorteners. If a url-shortener goes away, your tweets, IMs and all of your content looses a LOT of meaning. Take for example, the tweet: “Check this out: http://tinyurl.com/xxxx”. Meaningless without the following page, right? If I own my own shortened urls, then I can take those shortened urls and move them around from machine to machine and do whatever I want to with them. I know that they’ll always be there because I own them, and if I want to remove one, I just nuke it. Simple enough!

Anyway, hats off to the guys at http://www.adjix.com , also - I sent in a bug report last night at 11:30pm MT, and they answered and fixed the bug by the time I got up in the morning, so they’re midnight hacker types and could really be onto something! I’m a big fan already.

Google Stock Chart on Google Finance: http://url.badcheese.com/57m5

Google Voice needs a little work for the transcription service. :)

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:00:00 MDT

Here’s the transcription text:

Hello in. Thank you for trying. I respect Radiance patented information system. Hi Miss provide crappy communications any device for Texas beach or voice recording. I received the state of the our solution with multiple features including dynamic grouping survey and conference calling for more information about I read, please contact us at (281) 263-6300 or visit us on the website at W W W dot used Iris, dot, com This message was brought you by tyrant press 1 to repeat the message, Hello in. Thank you for trying. I respect Radiance patented information system. Hi Miss provide crappy communications any device for Texas beach or voice recording. I received the state of the our solution with multiple features including dynamic grouping survey and conference calling for more information about I read, please contact us at (281) 263-6300 or visit us on the website at W W W dot you. Cyrus dot com.

TechStars 2009 demo day companies

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 00:00:00 MDT

http://Reteltechnologies.com - mostly just uses something like amazon’s mechanical turk to have people watch surveillance videos and flag when something happens. Good for guys who own a 7-11 store, but I wouldn’t use it.

http://everlater.com - travel site that combines many social sites to tell a story of your trip (the guys were very good at selling the product, but I don’t think that I’d use it)

http://timzon.com - was just a customer support tool, I wouldn’t use it.

http://TakePublishing.com - itunes for comic books. I’m not a huge comic book fan, but it has potential.

http://NextBigSound.com - for big record labels or bands to monitor which social site they need to focus their marketing on.

http://vanillaforums.com - I would use it! Great forum software - used by tons of big-boys.

http://sendgrid.com - Better ‘transactional’ email, like the email that you get from facebook and twitter (aka, Mr Jones is now following you on twitter). I don’t need that.

http://SpryPlanner.com - Manager software for high-level overview of a software development package/group. Integrates into nagios, github, etc … Not something I need.

http://Mailana.com - the least impressive tool, like linked-in, but for the major social sites. Combines all of your friends and makes meta-friend circles out of all of your ‘best’ friends and allows for you to search within those circles.

http://Rezora.com - The real estate email marketing tool. Impressive tool, but I don’t have a need for it.

Finally a video that explains some of the things that I do in a language that even my mom can understand

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:00:00 MDT

Yahoo engineers explain their new homepage design/architecture with closed-captioning for the geek-impared.

http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?cl=14758196

I spend too much time online to deal with crappy JavaScript

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:00:00 MDT

I must spend 10-12 hours on a computer every day most of it online in one form or another.

Update on the GeoCities rescue from archiveteam.org

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:00:00 MDT

If you didn’t already know, I’ve been trying to help Jason Scott at http://archiveteam.org to back up Yahoo’s 18-year-old free hosting service http://geocities.com before they take it down for good later this summer ( http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/geocities/geocities-05.html ). Well, everything was going well until I got capped by Comcast ( http://badcheese.com/?q=node/94 ) at 250GB of bandwidth in May 2009. So, my effort was put on hold. Jason and the rest of the gang at http://archiveteam.org has methodically run through all of the ‘neighborhoods’ at GeoCities already and downloaded nearly 1TB of content. There is still a lot of information in the user’s directories that Jason has not downloaded yet.

Since I was using the http://archive.org crawler (Heritrix) to crawl GeoCities, I was asking a lot of questions in the forums and it turns out that the guys at archive.org were actually paying attention to my problems. So when Comcast cut me off, the guys at http://archive.org decided to help us out and do a “deep crawl” of GeoCities which started in early June. They also said that they’ll do “catch up” crawls until the service closes to make sure they get any recent updates up until the day that Yahoo closes their doors.

So, thanks to Jason @ http://archiveteam.org and Gordon Mohr @ http://archive.org, GeoCities and all of it’s animated gif goodness will remain on the internet until the end of time. Yea!

NOTE: We tried contacting people at Yahoo and most tape and harddrive storage companies to help us with the project and nobody even bothered to return our phone calls or emails except for the guys at http://archive.org

Collage of 5000+ images taken from Amazon's iPhone app via mechanical turk

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:00:00 MDT

The reason to see UP - Dug the Dog

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 00:00:00 MDT

I got the dreaded phone call from Comcast today

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:00:00 MDT

“Sir, we’d like to talk to you about your internet usage if we can.”

I knew exactly what the Comcast representative was going to say. I was given a phone number that was not the 1-800-comcast typical sit-on-hold-for-thirty-minutes-and-get-a-peon-who-gives-me-the-runaround line. I got straight to a tech. I knew this was trouble.

“Sir, I’m not sure if you’re aware of it, but Comcast has an acceptable use policy that states that no one user can use more than 250 gigabytes of data in one months, and it looks like you used (pause) Oh my (pause) 750 gigabytes during the month of May. If you continue next month to exceed the 250GB limit, you’ll be disconnected from comcast internet for 12 months.”

It turns out that this is a new-ish addition to Comcast’s Acceptable Use Policy that was changed on October 1st, 2008 and there’s no exceptions - I explained that I was trying to crawl geocities.com for http://archiveteam.org and for posterity and was trying to be a good netizen ( Network Citizen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netizen ) and that I didn’t use all of that bandwidth to download porn or mp3s or movies, but they didn’t seem to care. “No exceptions” they said.

I asked them about other account options. Comcast has a business-class line that has a 750GB bandwidth cap, but that’s still really not enough to download all of geocities in a summer, much less offer it up in any sort of manor for people to grab later. I was even contacted by archive.org (the Internet archive) asking me if I could help them out with their own archive of geocities which hasn’t been updated since 2001, but now I’ll have to turn them down since I don’t have the bandwidth to grab the site.

So, my true feelings about Comcast now? I’m even more upset at them than I was before. Comcast screwed me from day-one; over-promising me at the time of install, then under-delivering and over-charging when I got my first bill. Taking care of that took about 3 months of emails, calls and regular mail. It’s getting harder and harder to get someone to actually HEAR a customer’s complaint nowadays. Upper management has so many layers of defense in place to make sure that complaints get taken care of somewhere downstream that they don’t seem to care anymore at all. It’s like the beach-landing scene at the beginning of the movie “Saving Private Ryan”. When I get off the 30-minute boat ride to the shore (on hold time), I’m shot at with every excuse that the first-level tech support guy has in his arsenal of excuses. Then escalating the call to the manager-level is relative to the sniper in the pillbox that is mowing down everyone who made it through the first line of defense. I eventually sneak up to the pillbox by sending emails, cold-calling techs and upper-management types that I can find on the internet and take out the pillbox sniper in the back of the head and get the original pricing and features that was originally promised to me by the installation/sales guy in the first place.

I even contacted the old “comcast cares” twitter account, but no response from that guy either. Nothing from anyone at all about this bandwidth cap issue.

I’m working on getting a second line now. Qwest DSL is about the same speed/price, but they have a little-documented bandwidth cap also. It’s about 400GB, and when you reach it, you just have to hit “accept” on a webpage to continue internet use. No evil threats with disconnection, no extra charges, just a web page.

Another option is a hosted machine somewhere locally that I can go to and swap out harddrives with. Good bandwidth on a host, plus sneakernet back to my home to crunch the data is actually also acceptable with my current projects, so that’s something that I’m working on also.

I’m also looking into the business-class comcast connection, however according to the business class Acceptable Use Policy, they state:

“Comcast reserves the right to suspend or terminate Service accounts where data consumption is not characteristic of a typical commercial user of the Service as determined by the company in its sole discretion, or where it exceeds published data consumption limitations. Common activities that may cause excessive data consumption in violation of this Policy include, but are not limited to, numerous or continuous bulk transfers of files and other high capacity traffic using (i) file transfer protocol (“FTP”), (ii) peer-to-peer applications, and (iii) newsgroups.”

so it looks like anything that would require a large amount of data-transfer, even for a business-class account, could flag the account for termination also.

Comcast seems to hold all of the cards, or so it would seem.

The reason that Comcast and other Cable/Entertainment providers are putting these bandwidth caps in place is simple. Cable companies make money on ‘premium’ services. These services are things like Pay-Per-View, HBO, etc … You are all familiar with the typical bait-and-switch that cable companies provide you with when you sign up. Get tons of stuff for only $20 a month!!! Then in the fine print, you find out that $20 gives you basic cable, no DVR, no movie channels, and the $20/mo is only good for a short time. After the initial period expires, they start to slowly ream you for more and more money until you end up paying out the nose for standard TV and internet. I’m paying approx $150 for Comcast’s Internet and HD DVR with basic HD service (no movie channels, no phone service). This is almost a car payment. At least with a car payment, you get the car after a few years and can stop paying! This is $150/mo FOR LIFE with nothing to show for it when you leave! I have a real tough time swallowing that one.

But where was I, oh yea. Premium services. The killer problem with the cable company’s revenue model is that downloadable content is right around the corner if not here already. If people can download all of their favorite movies and TV shows directly off the internet via HULU, YouTube or any number of emerging video websites, why would anyone pay for cable TV anymore? Cable companies are a thing of the past and will die out some day. Perhaps not soon, but the writing is on the wall and Comcast and other cable companies know it. That’s the real reason for the bandwidth caps. Not to stop piracy, not to keep their neighboring customers happy, but to limit LEGAL multimedia downloading that competes with their high-priced premium services. It’s an anti-competition move to save their asses. Remember newspapers and Craigslist? just think Cable companies and HULU now.

So, what’s the lesson learned here? I’m unable to build a startup cheaply that competes with largely-funded companies due to bandwidth caps and low upload speeds (I can’t crawl the web, I can’t store large chunks of data, I can’t host a high-volume website) from my home internet connection, so I need a business-class connection (which still has a cap, is more expensive, still not unlimited use, …) or better (hosted machine in a datacenter (actually the best solution for my needs)) from a company that doesn’t have a competing interest in the Entertainment industry. I need to get away from Comcast. Comcast has some really upset and pissed off users out there and I don’t see it getting any better any time soon. The more popular online video sites become, the more Comcast is going to clamp-down on internet usage. For my projects, I can’t have that. I’m going a different direction. Sorry Comcast. You lose in the end.

Why making a startup out of your basement is so difficult

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 MDT

I like building startups. Sure, I could make a blog about my dog’s favorite chew toy. Sure, I could make another url-shortening service. Sure, I could make a mashup of something that involves CraigsList, eBay, Google maps, Hulu and flickr.

However, that crap is boring and I prefer to think bigger. I always like to dream about putting something together that will really make a difference. I would love to take on the big guys and beat them at their own game. However, there are more and more stumbling blocks to do this as I try more and more different things out of my basement with my shoestring budget:

REXML could not parse this XML/HTML:
<ul>
<li> ISP bandwidth caps - I can get 7Mbps downstream from my Comcast ISP, but I can't crawl any large sites due to Comcast's 200GB/mo bandwidth cap, and don't even get me started with the upstream bandwidth ...
<li> Storage/indexing - I can buy a few 1TB hard drives every once in a while and stay within my startup shoestring budget, but getting mysql or lucene to index terabytes of content is not a simple solution anymore. I've got a basement with 8 old-ish computers of varying capacities that are pretty busy on a regular basis with miscellaneous things to do. Keeping on top of a mountain-sized chunk of data is not an easy task anymore.
<li> Google is huge. I can't compete with Google at crawling/indexing/search. Nobody really can. However, I could choose a subset of Google's empire and focus on it and build a better mousetrap and win, just choosing an interesting nitch to hack on is a difficult task in itself. To me, Google's adsense/adwords system seems the most profitable and interesting target that I'd love to build a competitor to. Troy and I built http://bidboxr.com in an effort to experiment with the online ad space and we learned a lot in the process, but we didn't go the extra distance and take on the big-G at their own game. One of our other ideas http://mediawombat.com a flash search engine proved to be a valuable experiment, but again, my shoestring budget kept me from really hitting this one home.
<li> People/Time - I'm a husband and father of two wonderful children. I find it difficult to go to the bathroom without being interrupted by someone or something nowadays. Finding spare time is becoming a difficult thing to do in itself. Most of my development time is done in the wee hours of the night when I'm low on energy, but finally have some free time to myself. I tend to try to work out the details in my head over a series of days or weeks. Take notes about possible solutions and new directions, then think about that. When I think that my brain has slept on the problem enough nights, I can usually whip out a solution in code-form in an hour or two. This is my current way of building things. The actual work has been delayed a lot longer than it was when I was single or in college and could just pound on the keyboard for 24 hours in a row until it worked. I'm not sure if this new way is better or worse, but it fits in with my lifestyle a little bit more.
<li> I'm trying to learn about SEO. It seems to me that SEO is an always-changing and challenging market that is profitable and un-tapped on several fronts. I've got a few experiments going with an SEO twist mostly so I can learn about the whole SEO world, but SEO takes a long time - search engines take a long time to index your content, so changes are only reflected after a long period of time. My SEO experiment is http://xis.cc and is doing well with Yahoo, but Google doesn't like it very much.
</ul>

Anyway, that’s all I have for now. More later. :)

Table Mesa & Flatirons Summer and Snow

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Wed, 13 May 2009 00:00:00 MDT

Table Mesa & Flatirons
Originally uploaded by notanyron

This is a great shot and pseudo-typical Boulder weather. A cross between Winter and Summer in the same shot. :)

Apache tuning for small-ish linux machines

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:00:00 MDT

I started with a dedicated web server running on a 256MB Linux machine with a single-core. It's the machine that's hosting this website right now. I've had some very good experiences with this machine and some not-so-good. I've upgraded the memory to 512MB, but still finding myself stretching for resources. Also, apache seemed to crash on occasion and I kept fighting with it over and over again to provide good response times and still tune for low-memory. I found several issues that I'd like to mention in case others are having similar issues. Mysql is taking 200Mb for a key buffer, the OS takes approx 100MB, so that leaves about 200MB for Apache/PHP. The solution is to not keep servers hanging around processing unlimited keepalive requests. The setting "MaxRequestsPerChild" forces apache to respawn children after a certain number of requests have been processed. This keeps apache and PHP from dying - if PHP has a bug and hangs, then PHP will be broken, but apache will continue to serve static content until it reaches the limit of this value, then it'll respawn and PHP will be all better again. This is not optimal for a mega-busy webserver, but it's a good 'stable' configuration for a medium-busy web server like mine. I host 40+ medium-to-small websites on this single machine using these settings.

Got rejected by TechStars again, but we're getting better at it

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:00:00 MDT

Last year we applied to TechStars 2008 for our website http://mediawombat.com (a search engine that indexes the contents of flash media (*.swf files)) and were rejected. That was our first rejection and stung a little bit. Much like Micah, we were already dreaming about the fast servers and huge pipes that we could afford with the seed money and were looking forward to doing something huge.

A little experiment

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:00:00 MDT

Ok. I’ve started a little experiment. Knowing what I know about SEO (not a ton, but some), I’m wondering if I can capture some kind of SEO-based randomly descent placement in google’s results. Here’s the plan: I capture google “trends” terms every hour. Then, I pipe those terms through all kinds of news sites and extract the top hits via yahoo pipes. I grab the RSS results from the pipe and create a web page using those results. So, I have popular queries, good-ish content, and do all of the things right (as far as I know) to get them indexed as fast as possible (still not great at that). However, the site is chock full of content. Sitemap is updated hourly and downloaded by google every 24 hours (trying to get faster fetching than that), and google’s crawler is hitting my site every 2 seconds almost all day long fetching new links and pages. Pages have titles, keywords and should be very seo-friendly overall. It’s been about 2 weeks since I started the project and it is really interesting watching google index my site and rank them accordingly. I think that 2 weeks is not enough time to say one way or the other how good the experiment is going since the pages don’t actually enter google’s real index for about 4 weeks. I’ll post more when things get interesting. :) The site: http://xis.cc

So, with Woz's legions of geek/hacker fans, how is he not going to automatically win Dancing With The Stars via a python script?

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 00:00:00 MDT

Denver DIA wireless is free, but completely broken

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:00:00 MST

So, I’ve got 2 hours to wait before my flight leaves for JFK today, so I open up my laptop to change my email to vacation mode and read some news, etc … Linux connects to the WAP, but fails to get any DNS info from the server, so I reboot into WinXP. XP detects the WAP with “excellent” connection status, but getting the ‘portal’ server to actually serve any information is almost completely useless. The server serves up a 30 second commercial before it allows the user to get access to the internet, but I’m guessing from the speed of things (now about 45 minutes since I started trying to get access to the internet, when I decided to whip out my offline BLOG writer application), the server is busy serving up the ad, to so many people that the server is completely unresponsive. The actual wireless strength of the signal is great, it’s just that whoever they chose as the ISP (http://freefinet.rtr ???) does a completely crappy job at actually doing the connection redirection. Blech! Sure, it’s free wireless, that you have to hit “accept” for twice, and watch a 30-second video that never shows up, but come on!!! Ever heard about caching? Proxying? Load-balancing? Or how about this, if a connection completely fails after about 30 minutes of attempts, how about just lifting the proxying crap and just allowing normal internet in case your stupid server can’t handle the load??? In by book, DIA wireless is completely useless to me. This is both the fault of the ISP and DIA. DIA should give the ISP 2 days to fix the problem or drop them like a hot rock. I'm sure that there are thousands of ISPs in Denver willing to provide the access hardware for one free ad.

Dell's new packaging

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:00:00 MST

Just got in some rails from DELL. Looks like they also altered their packaging standards.

Steve

mysqlgame is my kind of game!

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 00:00:00 MDT

Ok, no fancy graphics. No sound effects. No FPS actually. :) Check out mysqlgame here: http://mysqlgame.appspot.com

Had to post this.

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 00:00:00 MDT

Gonna play with Nutch tonight

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:00:00 MDT

Gonna play with Nutch tonight as a possible replacement for my own personal web crawler. Nutch is a java-based web crawler that we may implement for our large crawling process, but not for our ripping/indexing layer.

Followup:

Why I’m not going to be going with Nutch:

REXML could not parse this XML/HTML: 
<code>
fetching http://www.everydaybirthday.com/
fetching http://welcome.hp.com/gms/gr/el/sz3/smb/notebooks_tabletpcs.html
fetching http://boomp3.com/listen/fbnoc45_p/am-gold-1970-04-your-song-elton-john
java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.apache.hadoop.fs.FSDataInputStream$Buffer.getPos(FSDataInputStream.java:87)
at org.apache.hadoop.fs.FSDataInputStream.getPos(FSDataInputStream.java:125)
at org.apache.hadoop.io.SequenceFile$Reader.getPosition(SequenceFile.java:1736)
at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.SequenceFileRecordReader.getProgress(SequenceFileRecordReader.java:108)
at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.MapTask$1.getProgress(MapTask.java:165)
at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.MapTask$1.next(MapTask.java:155)
at org.apache.nutch.fetcher.Fetcher$FetcherThread.run(Fetcher.java:115)
fetcher caught:java.lang.NullPointerException
java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.apache.hadoop.fs.FSDataInputStream$Buffer.getPos(FSDataInputStream.java:87)
at org.apache.hadoop.fs.FSDataInputStream.getPos(FSDataInputStream.java:125)
at org.apache.hadoop.io.SequenceFile$Reader.getPosition(SequenceFile.java:1736)
at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.SequenceFileRecordReader.getProgress(SequenceFileRecordReader.java:108)
at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.MapTask$1.getProgress(MapTask.java:165)
at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.MapTask$1.next(MapTask.java:155)
at org.apache.nutch.fetcher.Fetcher$FetcherThread.run(Fetcher.java:115)
fetcher caught:java.lang.NullPointerException
java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.apache.hadoop.fs.FSDataInputStream$Buffer.getPos(FSDataInputStream.java:87)
at org.apache.hadoop.fs.FSDataInputStream.getPos(FSDataInputStream.java:125)
at org.apache.hadoop.io.SequenceFile$Reader.getPosition(SequenceFile.java:1736)
at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.SequenceFileRecordReader.getProgress(SequenceFileRecordReader.java:108)
at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.MapTask$1.getProgress(MapTask.java:165)
at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.MapTask$1.next(MapTask.java:155)
at org.apache.nutch.fetcher.Fetcher$FetcherThread.run(Fetcher.java:115)
fetcher caught:java.lang.NullPointerException
java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.apache.hadoop.fs.FSDataInputStream$Buffer.getPos(FSDataInputStream.java:87)
at org.apache.hadoop.fs.FSDataInputStream.getPos(FSDataInputStream.java:125)
at org.apache.hadoop.io.SequenceFile$Reader.getPosition(SequenceFile.java:1736)
at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.SequenceFileRecordReader.getProgress(SequenceFileRecordReader.java:108)
at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.MapTask$1.getProgress(MapTask.java:165)
at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.MapTask$1.next(MapTask.java:155)
at org.apache.nutch.fetcher.Fetcher$FetcherThread.run(Fetcher.java:115)
fetcher caught:java.lang.NullPointerException
java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.apache.hadoop.fs.FSDataInputStream$Buffer.getPos(FSDataInputStream.java:87)
at org.apache.hadoop.fs.FSDataInputStream.getPos(FSDataInputStream.java:125)
at org.apache.hadoop.io.SequenceFile$Reader.getPosition(SequenceFile.java:1736)
at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.SequenceFileRecordReader.getProgress(SequenceFileRecordReader.java:108)
at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.MapTask$1.getProgress(MapTask.java:165)
at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.MapTask$1.next(MapTask.java:155)
at org.apache.nutch.fetcher.Fetcher$FetcherThread.run(Fetcher.java:115)
fetcher caught:java.lang.NullPointerException
java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.apache.hadoop.fs.FSDataInputStream$Buffer.getPos(FSDataInputStream.java:87)
at org.apache.hadoop.fs.FSDataInputStream.getPos(FSDataInputStream.java:125)
at org.apache.hadoop.io.SequenceFile$Reader.getPosition(SequenceFile.java:1736)
at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.SequenceFileRecordReader.getProgress(SequenceFileRecordReader.java:108)
at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.MapTask$1.getProgress(MapTask.java:165)
at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.MapTask$1.next(MapTask.java:155)
at org.apache.nutch.fetcher.Fetcher$FetcherThread.run(Fetcher.java:115)
fetcher caught:java.lang.NullPointerException
java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.apache.hadoop.fs.FSDataInputStream$Buffer.getPos(FSDataInputStream.java:87)
at org.apache.hadoop.fs.FSDataInputStream.getPos(FSDataInputStream.java:125)
at org.apache.hadoop.io.SequenceFile$Reader.getPosition(SequenceFile.java:1736)
at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.SequenceFileRecordReader.getProgress(SequenceFileRecordReader.java:108)
at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.MapTask$1.getProgress(MapTask.java:165)
at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.MapTask$1.next(MapTask.java:155)
at org.apache.nutch.fetcher.Fetcher$FetcherThread.run(Fetcher.java:115)
fetcher caught:java.lang.NullPointerException
Exception in thread "main" java.io.IOException: Job failed!
        at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.JobClient.runJob(JobClient.java:604)
        at org.apache.nutch.fetcher.Fetcher.fetch(Fetcher.java:470)
        at org.apache.nutch.crawl.Crawl.main(Crawl.java:124)

REXML could not parse this XML/HTML: 
</code>

HOWTO: diff'ing two huge files in linux

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:00:00 MDT

Situation: I have two computers with a large number of files on them (approximately 250 million files on each machine). I need to sync them up and rsync is not an option because it takes way too long. So, I need to ‘diff’ the files on the two machines. I did a ‘find’ on both machines to a file. These files turned out to be about 15GB each, but the file size was too large to just ‘diff’ because diff wants to read everything into memory: [root@fs105 tmp]# diff imagelist_image01.txt imagelist.txt diff: memory exhausted Solution: sort the files manually first, then use the ‘comm’ command to find the differences [root@fs105 tmp]# ls -la total 27935834 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 120 Oct 6 10:18 . drwxr-xr-x 8 root root 192 Oct 3 13:56 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 13859131915 Oct 6 10:13 imagelist_image01.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 14719246513 Oct 3 14:02 imagelist.txt [root@fs105 tmp]# sort -S 2G -T . imagelist.txt > imagelist_image02_sorted.txt ; sort -S 2G -T . imagelist_image01.txt > imagelist_image01_sorted.txt [root@fs105 tmp]# comm -3 imagelist_image01_sorted.txt imagelist_image02_sorted.txt > diff.txt [root@fs105 tmp]# ls -lah ; wc -l diff.txt total 55G drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 240 Oct 6 14:16 . drwxr-xr-x 8 root root 192 Oct 3 13:56 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 895M Oct 6 15:09 diff.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 13G Oct 6 14:11 imagelist_image01_sorted.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 13G Oct 6 10:13 imagelist_image01.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 14G Oct 6 12:25 imagelist_image02_sorted.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 14G Oct 3 14:02 imagelist.txt 17487092 diff.txt

Made my wife a blog

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 00:00:00 MDT

Check it out: http://hollysworkshop.com :)

Adobe confirms flash for iPhone – time to write the iPhone app!

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 MDT

MediaWombat.com Gets an IM search bot!

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 00:00:00 MDT

For you Google Chat people, Add flashsearch@bot.im to your contact list and start searching for flash stuff! :)

Steve

My pre-marriage life in a nutshell

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 00:00:00 MDT

Why isn't there a linux distro out there that is made for huge web 2.0 infrastructures?

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 00:00:00 MDT

I’m the Lead Linux Sysadmin for a prominent web 2.0 company.

Most Web 2.0 companies are all built around the same technologies: Linux, mysql, memcache, tomcat, Apache, php, high-availability (ha-linux), mysql replication, load-balancing, …

How come there isn’t some Linux distribution out there already that I can just deploy, configure and turn off what I don’t need? How come every time I install a Linux distro, I have to configure it the same way for my enterprise, or make my own kickstart script or make a custom distro myself, or write cfengine and post-install scripts to do it all? These platforms are so common amongst all of the new-ish web 2.0 companies, I’m mega-suprised why this type of distro isn’t already in existance somewhere. I could build one, but like I said, I’m the Lead sysadmin for a dot-com company, so I don’t have any time to do this.

Can one of you Mtn Dew swilling, no-sleep getting, no girlfriend, wife or children having, college kids out there whip this up for me tonight so I can come into work tomorrow and just install it everywhere and get some peace of mind so I can do some of my more lengthy tasks on my to-do list?

Oh, and throw some off-site backup stuff in there as well. :)

DjangoCon 2008 Keynote: Cal Henderson (Flicker Design Engineer) "Why I hate Django"

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 00:00:00 MDT

Disconnecting from Google (or) Regaining some of my Internet privacy back (Part 1)

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:00:00 MDT

I love Google. I’ve got tons of accounts on all of the associated Google services and I love them all. However, I’m beginning to get paranoid about what Google knows about me. There’s been compromises of different sites before and I’m sure that Google will get compromised also some day. Or, Google will throw away their “don’t be evil” mantra and blackmail everyone who has a gmail account with their personal email content in exchange for something. Look at it this way. If you use Google services, have the Google toolbar installed and use Google Chrome, there’s nothing that Google can’t find out about you. They can see all of your files. They can track every website that you visit and the information that you send back and forth to those websites, and of course track everything that you do on the Google services which contain every search you’ve ever done, to your health information (if you decide to connect Google to your local hospitals).

It's 2008, how come cheap wireless isn't everywhere by now?

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 00:00:00 MDT

Well, another weekend and I’m at the mother-in-law’s place again. She’s got AOL dial-up and it royally stinks. Myself, I have an iPhone (no tethering – don’t get me started) and there is no wireless in her neighborhood to illegally leech from. I called AT&T and they’ll sell me a 3G laptop PCMCIA modem, but the service is $60 mo. How sucky is that? I’m already paying them $130/mo for my iPhone family plan – now they want to leech another $60 out of my wallet so I can have lame, 3G connectivity to check my email a couple of times on the weekend?

MediaWombat.com gets a facelift

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:00:00 MDT

Troy has been hard at work at giving MediaWombat.com a much-needed facelift. He’s put out a great new version (still has a few technical wrinkles to be ironed out) for the search results page. Now, there’s an intermediate search results page which shows meta-results from all of the results in one place, then when you click through to one of the results, you get the new mega-results page.

How do you keep a 4 year old boy busy?

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 00:00:00 MDT

2008 Malibu Hybrids suck at gas mileage

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 00:00:00 MDT

I drove a 2008 Malibu hybrid around Denver for 5 days during the DNC this year and man did the mileage suck. Check out this picture taken from the dashboard of the car. Yea, 18.6 MPG in hybrid-mode city driving. That’s about the same as my 2001 gas-guzzling 8-cylinder Dodge Dakota truck. Come on! Hybrids doing < 20 MPG? Give me a break!

My iPhone 3G gripelist

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:00:00 MDT

If you read tech blogs, you’ve probably heard all of the gripes about what people want from their iPhones. You’ll hear things like tethering, unlocking, blah, blah, blah, … I’ve got an iPhone 3G and here’s my list of (all new gripes except one - with a good reason) gripes about the 3G iPhone:

) Tethering (yea, this is #1 on most people’s list and I wanted to do something original), but tethering is such a nice feature, I wish so badly that I had it. I don’t want to download bittorrent movies over my AT&T network or anything, but here’s why I want it. This weekend, I’m staying at my mother-in-law’s house and she’s got crappy AOL dial-up and she always asks me to ‘fix’ her computer. She usually downloads some 3rd party software that some pop-up told her to install and she ends up muddy-ing up her whole machine. Re-downloading AVG Anti-Virus, Ad-Aware, wireshark (to check for weird network traffic), Firefox 3.0 and other stuff takes about 24 hours on dial-up AOL. Sure, I could fill up a thumb drive and take it wherever I go, but I’ve had many thumb drives die on me so it’s not reliable hardware, and I’d have to keep the thumb drive up-to-date all of the time. I have a laptop and an iPhone … If I could tether my laptop, I’d have it all downloaded in a few minutes and get on with my life.
) Let the App-store applications have access to the iPod area of the iPhone. I want to have my alarm clock play a song instead of 10-year-old Mac sounds when I wake up. I want some 3rd party apps allow me to change the sort order on podcasts, so I can listen to them in reverse-date-order instead of newest-first (duh… Apple, this should be a 2-minute code fix - get on it!). I’m sure that Apple keeps the app/iPod memory spaces separate so the apps can’t muck with the protection on the iPod-side of things, but come on!
) More stability - I swear that I’ve rebooted my iPhone 10 times in the last 30 days since I got it. I upgraded to the 2.0.1 software and it seems to have gotten better, but now it’s slower and hangs frequently. Some things just hang for what seems like minutes before the phone comes awake again. My guess is that it’s a memory leak somewhere in some 3rd party app and Apple just forced a garbage collection instead of the reboot in the OS. If this is the price to pay for 3rd party apps, I’d rather have a rock-solid iPhone with no apps, then a bug-ridden iPhone that can play tetris.
) Map data seems like it’s at least a year out-of-date in Denver. I’m going to NYC this weekend, so we’ll see how current it is there, but come-on. Clean up the data a little bit. My kid wanted to go play putt-putt golf and I put my faith into my iPhone to find me one somewhere close to where I was in Denver, but went to 3 different ones and they were all out of business. I had to apologize to my 4 year old son 3 times. I blame myself for putting my son’s happiness in the hands of the iPhone map data now. This can be done easily on the Apple-side by just paying for updated data on their servers. It doesn’t even require a firmware update! Come-on Apple!
) ‘It’s the little things that count’ - Apple has done some nice things with the tilt sensor and the touch interface. Things that you show off to friends and they say, “wow, that’s really sexy”, but in some areas of the phone’s interface, even the most basic of functionality is not to be seen, much less automatic like it is in other parts of the interface. For example: icons move around when updated, why can’t they stay where I put them? Another? Can we add a ‘clean up icons’ button somewhere? Another? How about when installing apps, we queue them up for download/install when the phone’s in sleep mode instead of switching back/forth to the app installation program? Another? Contact management is nice, but needs more. How about sorting by other things instead of just first or last name? Company name? Location? Nick-name? Come on! Think! Another? How about an accurate measure of battery time left? I see the tiny icon that looks like about 30-40% left, then plug it in and when the big battery shows up, it’s more like 50-60% left. How about an option to erase all of your contacts without wiping the whole phone? I needed this when first setting up the phone. The iTunes install prompted me to grab my gmail contact list (which was everyone that I’ve ever email’ed since before time - ebay people, craigslist people, … about 90% of the contact in gmail are people that I’ll never need to contact in my life again.). I blindly said, ‘yes’ and then spent about 5 hours cleaning out 90% of my contact list because there wasn’t a button to un-do everything. Hey, that’s an idea! Screw cut-n-paste, how about an un-do! :)
) Conference calling seems broken. I tried one and it never ‘merged’ the calls. That sucked when I really needed it. Lost the first call, never got the second one to ‘connect’ back to the first guy. Had to apologize. Not good. This should actually be #1 on my list since it’s a basic phone thing and this should be a phone first, then a PDA, but I’m a geek. I do more PDA things than phone things with it anyway.
) Queueing sending of photo emails if it can’t send immediately. This should be a quicky thing. Can’t connect to outgoing email, then queue until you can. Sending more than one photo email in a poor coverage area takes forever to fail and you have to wait a long time before it fails to send/queue a second one.
) 3rd party apps suck - even the ‘pay’ ones. pterm is my chosen SSH client and I can’t even use arrow keys with it. $4.99 down the toilet. I also bought a NYC subway maps app for $2.99 - it has some of the stuff, but didn’t have street names or maps on some of the stops, so of course I got lost. Better off with a free subway map from the booth guy if you ask me.
) If you take pictures and send them in email, it drains your battery in just a few hours. Both my wife and I are touring NYC this week and both of our iPhone 3G’s are needing recharging after only about 5-6 hours on the town. If you go on a vacation, take a real camera - the iPhone won’t cut it.
) No way to ‘bulk’ upload images (that I know of, there might be a 3rd party app to do it that I’m not aware of). Sending images one at a time using the crappy keyboard to write the email just plain sucks.

That’s all I can think of now, but I’ll add more when I think of them.

To me, these are bigger issues than cut-n-paste, unlocking, more network selection, and the regular gripes that you hear about. Don’t get me wrong, my wife and I both love the iPhone, but it seems like Apple wanted to go the extra step and only did it in some very visible areas and neglected any ‘brains’ in the interface in other areas.

Steve

I'm a VIP driver for the DNC in Denver

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:00:00 MDT

I’m driving around Chris Whittington (Louisiana Democratic State Chairman) and his bodyguard for the 2008 Denver DNC. It’s kind of fun, but I haven’t seen any big celebs yet. Some pictures here: http://badcheese.com/~steve/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=95

Help me test my search engine theory

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:00:00 MDT

Check out my post below for the theory (last search result is the best).

Usenet Newsgroup: news://badcheese.com/lastsearch.general
</p>

- Steve

badcheese.com is going old-school

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:00:00 MDT

I installed an IRC server and a net news NNTP server on http://badcheese.com today with the hopes of going old-school with things. PHP forums and blog software is constantly getting exploited by PHP bugs and SQL injection problems and I just don’t have the time and effort to deal with keeping these things upgraded as much as I used to. IRC and NNTP have been given the test of time on the internet for 30+ years and have survived. Their tried and proven technologies and I’m going back to the old way of doing things. Twitter is cute, but overkill for a simple 140 character message. Blogs and Forums are great, but overkill for the purpose that they serve. Yea, I won’t be able to embed the latest and greatest CSS or Youtube video in my posts, but a URL works just as well. Time machine, “Back to the 80’s!!!”. :)

irc://badcheese.com/badcheese news://badcheese.com/badcheese.general

Why isn't the last search result followed the best one?

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 00:00:00 MDT

Ok, people have told me that this logic is typically not valid, but here’s my thoughts on the subject:

When you do a google (or other engine) search, and go through the search results clicking on the ones that seem to be the right ones, one-by-one why don’t we remember the last one that we click on as the best answer to the search? If we find a good result that solves our problem, we don’t go on and continue to search for more results … the last url clicked is very likely the page with our answer on it. So, if we record the last result that we click on and after a week or so, we send that last result url as the ‘best’ result for that search term to a server somewhere or just remember it, the next time we search for the same thing, our ‘last’ search result will be the first one on the list. It’s probably the best answer for what we were searching for and also it’ll bring us back to where we left off last time.

This seems like it’s a no-brainer to me, but other people in the search industry have told me that there have been studies that have proven this theory wrong. Can someone tell me why this is a bad idea? Why wouldn’t this work? If there is noise because a user gave up or something (record a ‘dead end’ as the last result), then we just aggregate all of the search results together and the most popular (the most times someone has clicked on a URL as the ‘last’ search result) gets top billing in your next search result. Or both (the world’s most popular last result and my personal last search result)?

The Next Browser Scripting Language Is — C?

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:00:00 MDT

Looks like Adobe is creating a scripting language based on C that will have hooks into flash, so good bye actionscript, and hello C!!! :)

From Slashdot here:

mad.frog writes to tell us that in a recent talk by Adobe's Scott Petersen he demonstrated a new toolchain that he has been working on (and soon to be open-sourced) that allows C code to be run by the Tamarin virtual machine. "The toolchain includes lots of other details, such as a custom POSIX system call API and a C multimedia library that provides access to Flash. And there's some things that Petersen had to add to Tamarin, such as a native byte array that maps directly to RAM, thereby allowing the VM's "emulation" of memory to have only a minor overhead over the real thing. The end result is the ability to run a wide variety of existing C code in Flash at acceptable speeds. Petersen demonstrated a version of Quake running in a Flash app, as well as a C-based Nintendo emulator running Zelda; both were eminently playable, and included sound effects and music."

I've been invited to be interviewed on a podcast!

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 MDT

I’ve been invited to be interviewed on a tech podcast, about my http://mediawombat.com site. The podcast is done by a guy in the UK and seems to be pretty popular. His podcast is here: http://podcast.technologygazette.com/ and it seems like he’s been interviewing a bunch of big names in the tech/startup sector. http://podcast.technologygazette.com/guests-that-have-appeared-on-the-technology-gazette-podcast/

Anyway, I’m a big podcast listener and I’m looking forward to actually being on one. Turns out that our little flash search engine is starting to get a little bit of well-deserved attention what with all of the press and now an interview. :)

UPDATE: Here’s the podcast link: http://podcast.technologygazette.com/2008/07/24/technology-gazette-episode-49-steve-webb-co-founder-of-mediawombatcom-joins-us/

ISPs should embrace and cache bittorrent packets, not throttle it.

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 00:00:00 MDT

Several years ago, AOL decided that internet downloaded pictures (JPGs, GIFs, …) were taking a huge chunk of the AOL bandwidth, so they implemented a caching proxy that was transparent to their users, so any queries to the internet for an image first checks the cache. That way no internet bandwidth is wasted on repetitive fetches of the same data. This is done with a lot of ISPs for images and is a fairly common practice nowadays.

Now, the ISPs are complaining about basically the same thing, but with bittorrent traffic. In my mind, they should just do the same thing that they did with images and use it for caching bittorrent traffic. The ISPs bandwidth to the internet is expensive, but the ISP’s bandwidth to their customers is free (they own the infrastructure). So, if they could cache the bittorrent traffic, it would take a huge chunk of traffic out of their upstream bandwidth usage and also provide faster bittorrent downloads for their customers. Win-win! The ISPs wouldn’t have to throttle the bandwidth and they wouldn’t look like the bad guy anymore. I believe that bittorrent supports the Cache Discovery Protocol - the ISPs just have to implement it and we’re golden!

I’ve got comcast service at home and I occsionally will pull down a TV show that I like to watch it in HDTV on my PS3 since I don’t have an HDTV Tivo yet via bittorrent, and I upload tons of (legal, non-bittorrent) data that I generate by myself to the internet (which is slow as a dog under comcast’s basic plan (like 300kbit/sec or something like that). If they could free-up the bittorrent traffic, they might allow for giving customers fatter pipes for transferring non-fileshring data just as a normal service upgrade!!! :)

Just a thought.

Steve

Google and Yahoo announce Flash search

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:00:00 MDT

Looks like Google and Yahoo are just now finding out what I’ve been doing with Troy over the last 6 months and they’re now talking about indexing Flash (SWF) content in their search results. Troy and I are doing this on our website http://mediawombat.com and have been crawling the web for about 6 months now pulling in and extracting content. Weird that techstars denied us funding, but now Google and Yahoo are announcing that they’re interested in it? :)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/01/AR2008070100176.html

What the people at ycombinator think: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=233166 Some “market validation” talk being thrown around about our idea.

Our new home at http://altsearchengines.com is here: http://altsearchengines.com/2008/07/02/media-wombat-flash-search-engine/

Steve

WALL-E was pretty good!

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 00:00:00 MDT

So, if you’re reading this, you probably are aware of Pixar and the WALL-E movie. We were jonesing to go see a movie after running a garage sale all day on Friday and discovered that WALL-E was opening that day (yesterday). We had to talk my 4 year old into it by playing the trailer on my PS3 and convincing him that it wouldn’t be scary.

We ended up going to the 8:15pm show and about 1/2 way through my kid started getting scared. He’s gotten scared in many movies before and I’ve had to leave without seeing the end of many of them (still haven’t seen the ending to Ratitoulli). I managed to keep him on my lap and we saw the end of the movie just fine. My 6 month old slept through the whole thing.

SPOILER ALERT: Anyway, it was a great movie. Standard sci-fi with a few political statements about waste and some pokes at the technology-addicted and overweight people. The plot goes like this. The human race leaves the planet because of the huge garbage problem and leaves in a huge space ship to wait out the clean-up which is done my hundreds of trash-compactor robots (WALL-E model). Every now and then the space ship sends a probe to earth to see if the soil can support life. WALL-E falls in love with the probe robot (EVE) just as she discovers that life has returned to earth. WALL-E follows her back to the space ship and teams up with a bunch of misfit robots to save the space ship and help it return back to earth. The plot is not great, but the animation and special effects are great. There are a few chuckles and some great characters, but kind of a kids movie more than for adults. Obviously made to merchandise well, there are 1000 different robots and I’m sure the shelves will be full with WALL-E toys in just a few weeks.

All-in-all a very good movie and a great experience for the kids and parents.

My wife keeps asking me

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:00:00 MDT

My real thoughts on Kevin Rose

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 00:00:00 MDT

TechTV used to be a great network. When Leo Laporte was hosting the screen savers TV show that was only available on DirecTV, it was full of interesting and useful computer-related information. It was great. I used to leave it on for hours on end and enjoy it quite a lot. TechTV is no more, but before it was demolished, the network wasl called the G4 network and was sort of a kids-only version of its previous life. They concentrated on getting rating and pandoring to the lowest common denominator instead of focusing on the viewers who used to watch the old TechTV. Leo Laporte was no longer hosting the show and a kid named Kevin Rose took over as the host. Kevin had done some “dark tipper’ spots on the previous show showing how to “hack” stuff - which was really just Slashdot posts that he acted out. He made a few videos about his hacking excapades, threw in some cool audio and people started to believe that since he could sniff-out an open wifi signal or mod his xbox that he was really something special.

When G4 was no more, he went into limbo and was bouncing around from gig to gig when he wanted to try a social experiment which turned out to be digg.com (what he’s currently known for). Kevin’s digg.com idea was a good idea, but was nothing more than a voting mechanism on top of a social news site like Slashdot and many others at the time. The real fact is that digg.com would’ve been not that great if it were not for his name getting mentioned to all of the previous TechTV fans that were still in the loop with Leo and the gang, traffic to digg.com would have been a trickle compared to what it was (a huge hit). Digg.com is one of the top-50 websites (probably top-20) nowadays and he has noone to thank for it but the old TechTV fanbase and Leo and gang. Kevin is supposedly worth millions with his ownership in Digg.com, but not really worth anything until Digg.com is sold, which will be when its value is much less than it is right now.

Kevin and his friend Alex do a podcast called diggnation which review the top several stories on digg.com that made it to the front page. They edit the stories that they review, so many times Kevin promotes articles that he posted himself.

My beef with Kevin Rose is that he’s now got an ego. If you listen to the diggnation podcast and if you’ve watched his rise to stardom, you’ll realize that he sits on the shoulders of giants and doesn’t really provide any real value or personality to anything. Alex mainly carries Kevon on the diggnation podcast. Kevin loves Tea, not beer as it was originally thought. Kevin grew up in Vegas and brags to have done a bunch of stupid stuff in his youth, but according to his stories, it’s not anything much more than any normal kid has done when he was young and stupid. I myself grew up in Colorado and have equal stupid stories and I didn’t have half of the resources that Kevin did to make bad decisions living in Las Vegas, NV. Kevin is not a ‘dark hacker’. Kevin is not a rebel without a cause. Kevin is not a millionaire … and Kevin is in no way good with the ladies as he insinuates in the diggnation podcast (listen to his ‘dating advice’ on the latest few diggnations). Mainly, he’s probably an ex-linux guy who knows a little about mysql and php, got lucky with digg.com using his popularity from TechTV and Leo and now has a big head.

Just typing this, I think that I’m going to stop wasting my time listening to diggnation - it’s an hour out of my day. Alex is a great personality - coming from the Hollywood section of L.A., I can see listening to something of his, but Kevin’s lack of substance is not worth listening to anymore in my opinion. Instead, listen to Alex’s podcast or just make an RSS feed of the top digg.com or slashdot items (they’re mostly the same anyway) and safe an hour of your life once a week.

The voice of DJ Atomica in Burnout Paradise is ...

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 00:00:00 MDT

Ok, so I don’t have any data to support my theory, but my when we first got Burnout Paradise for the PS3, the voice of the narrator was very intriguing and I didn’t know who it was, but my wife said, “That’s Billy Bush from Access Hollywood”. I email’ed Criterion Games and Billy Bush’s email address at his radio show and asked them, but got no response. However, after watching Access Hollywood and switching back and forth to the game, my wife and I are both very convinced that Billy Bush is the voice of DJ Atomica in the game. There is quite a controversy online about the voice of DJ Atomica and nobody has actually figured it out, so let me be the first to announce what my wife and I believe is the voiceover: Billy Bush. :)

So, if you’re asking yourself “Who is D.J. Atomica?” Here’s a link to Billy Bush’s radio show website: http://www.billybushshow.com/ See if you can hear the similarity also and feel free to comment below. Random MP3 link here

My birthday money however will be going to Apple, inc.

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:00:00 MDT

My wife and I have decided to drop T-Mobile and go for the new iPhone that is rumored to be coming out on June 9th. We’ve about had it with t-mobile lame reception in our neighborhood, the poor customer service, the overage charges, and the best tethered modem speeds that I can get via T-mobile is GMRS which is only good enough to do SSH over, not any web browsing or anything better. Also, my wife is always struggling with her nokia phone - they’re small and they work, but they’re also clunky and about 15 year-old technology.

For those of you who don’t know about the new iPhone that’s supposed to come out on the 9th, the hardware is about the same as the rest of the ‘next gen’ phones that’s coming out (3G, GPS, touch-screen, full web browsing, etc …) but the software is very easily upgradable, it’s very rugged, it’s not v 1.0 of the phone (I tried to hold my breath and not be an early-adopter) and it’s also an iPod. I’m going to try to get AT&T to sell me two phones (not sure if there’s a limit yet) and a family plan with data) to get the full feel of the capabilities of the phone.

I’ll post another note when we’ve got the phones.

My stimulus check will be staying in the USA

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 13 May 2008 00:00:00 MDT

Many people will be spending their stimulus check on electronics or video games or HDTV’s or a PS3, but remember, all of that money goes to Japan. The stimulus check is made to stimulate the U.S. economy, not other economies. Spend it eating at a local mom-n-pop restaurant. Don’t buy electronics!

FeedHub.com finally wins me over

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:00:00 MDT

I read a TON of RSS feed stuff. I read RSS stuff from all over the place. I use Google Reader http://www.google.com/reader but I've got limited time to scan all of my RSS stuff and way too much info to wade through. I built my own RSS dupe-finder and it was working well for about 6 months, but I decided to try http://feedhub.com a while ago to do the same job. When I first tried FeedHub, their servers were not super stable (they still are unreachable on occasion when I need to leave feedback (thumbs up/down), but it's minor enough to live with. The service collects feeds from all over the place and can use statistics and heuristics to only give me the "top 100" or only like 50% of my daily articles. If I have less time, I crank it down and FeedHub gives me only what I can ingest. I'm not going to go into the details of how FeedHub works - try it out yourself and see if you like it. If you need every article from a certain source, keep it out of FeedHub, but if you just want to get the most important news from 20+ news sources, FeedHub is your answer. It nukes most dupes. It gives me an option to move priorities around depending on topics or popularity, etc ... Very well done! :)

mysqlPP "Bad Handshake" and old_passwords=1

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:00:00 MDT

Ok, you probably got here because you just googled getting the “Bad Handshake” with perl’s DBD::mysqlPP with old_passwords=1 set on the server. To fix, change old_passwords=0 on the server, restart the server, then create a new account using the new password types, then use that one to connect to the DB. Once you do this, you can change the server back to old_passwords=1 (the setting only affects how mysql creates passwords, not validates them) and restart mysql.

1080p or 720p - the REAL HDTV buying guide

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 00:00:00 MDT

Ok, I bought an LG 1080p 42” LCD HDTV last month to replace our aging SONY 53” rear-projection 4:3 television and after a few intimate weeks with it, I’ve got a few thoughts about HDTV.

I love PIXAR movies just like the next guy and my kid loves them too. I’ve got a PS3 which plays blu-ray movies and there’s nothing better than a PIXAR movie played in full 1080p at 30 FPS with no compression for 90 minutes. It’s better than the movies. In fact, I think that it’s a little too good. Why? How can something be TOO good? Let me explain…

First of all, when I unpacked my HDTV from the box and hooked it up, it looked great. It was crisp, bright and very vivid color-wise. But after just a few minutes of watching TV and a couple of movies, I found that it took effort to watch a movie. I couldn’t understand, but I figured it out.

All of the attention to detail, all of the technology improvements that went into making my TV experience the very best that it could be makes viewing normal television TOO good. It’s too crisp. I’m looking for detail, and finding it, then analyzing how much detail there is, and then losing the big-picture and missing some of the movie or tv show.

A word about Brightness: In the store, the HDTV manufacturers try to out-do all of the other manufacturers with brightness. The sales guys sell you on brightness - this one is better because the colors are more vivid and brighter. Well, let me tell you something … When the TV is sitting in your living room with a lot less ambient light - the TV is TOO bright and TOO vivid. I had to turn down the brightness and the ‘temperature’ of the colors on the TV to make it easier on my eyes. This is the first thing to do when you unbox your TV. On my 42” LG HDTV (which I love, BTW), I set the color settings to ‘warm’ and adjusted the brightness to one notch below the middle (default is max brightness on all inputs). This solved the TOO bright problem and I was able to watch things much better. TV became a great experience and things we great.

Computer-generated movies: We bought a blu-ray movie of “Meet the Robinsons” for our 3 year old son. It’s a 100% CG Disney movie that’s great and all, but here’s the catch. It’s BETTER than at the movies. In the movie theatre, even though the movie is CG, there’s still a lens, some glass with dust on it and a focal point to fine-tune in the theater. There is some blurring happening even though it’s 100% CG. With an HDTV, that’s not the case. The computer has figured out exactly how much lighting , how much color, how much blending with neighbor pixels, … goes into every single pixel. It’s MUCH clearer than in the theater and almost TOO good to actually view without constantly saying “Man, is that crisp and clear” for every minute of every second of the movie. It’s almost annoying how clear it is. It’s almost better than real life vision. I wear glasses and I sometimes have a scuff or smudge on them. During my daily routine or working on a computer I don’t always bother with cleaning off my glasses 100% because the vision is ‘good enough’ to get the job done. I live with little imperfections in my eyesight all day long. However, when I see these CG movies in all of it 1080p exacting perfection - I damn my glasses for having even the slightest smudge on them. I clean my glasses thoroughly before watching anything CG on my HDTV. If I don’t I feel like I’m missing something. Like I’m cheapening the experience since the source video is better than the destination optics.

Distance from the screen. If you have approximately 20/20 vision, like I do with my glasses on, you’ll find that a 42” television is great up until about 10 feet away. After 10-12 feet away from the TV, I lose the ability to tell between good, not-so-good and regular TV depending on the distance from the TV that I sit. So, if you are up-close-and-personal with your TV, I’d recommend a 42” 1080p screen or better, however, if you’re not a “videophile” and/or sit 15-20 feet away from your TV, 720p should be fine for you and your family (my wife isn’t a geek like I am and sometimes she says that she can’t tell the difference between SD and HD). 720p is about 1/2 price of 1080p of the same physical size, and is very good quality for most situations. If you’re a geek like me though, even though you can’t appreciate it 100% of the time, I still couldn’t show my face around my friends if I told them that I settled for 720p when I could’ve had better. :)

So, in summary, If you’re a geek and sit close to your screen and have great vision and appreciate CG movies - go for the gusto. Get the largest, brightest HDTV that you can afford to fit through your front door. But if you’re Mr and Mrs Joe Average and possibly wear prescription eye-ware and appreciate great video, but don’t want to be overloaded with too much detail or too much going on and just want to watch TV or a nice movie, 720p is more than enough for anyone in the market for a modern HDTV television.

A few other notes: If you have kids. Consider buying a wall-mounting kit. Don’t get them from Best Buy, they’re $200-$500 there and they want to sell you the mounting service. You can get the exact same thing online for approx $30 for a 40-ish inch TV if you shop around a little bit. It’s good to keep the nice, new TV away from greasy hands. The hard part is burying the cables in the wall and finding the stud to screw the mount into, but it’s worth it in the long run.

Never clean your TV with water or Windex. If you do clean your TV, use micro-fiber cloth and if you use any liquid, spray just a tiny bit of it on the cloth and clean it then. Never spray directly onto the screen.

Get a name-brand TV. You may not think that it’s necessary, but stick with Sharp, LG, Panasonic, SONY or the others that you recognize. Visio is making a name for themselves in the market and are pretty good too, but stay away from Insignia (Best Buy) or Olympia or others that you’ve never heard of. This is mainly just for pure manufacturing quality’s sake.

Pronto thinks globally, acts locally

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:00:00 MDT

Jason Calacanis' 17 statup tips

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 00:00:00 MDT

http://www.calacanis.com/2008/03/07/how-to-save-money-running-a-startup-17-really-good-tips/

A link to Jason Calacanis’ 17 tips to running a successful startup. Personally, I agree with most if not all of them. Great way to save money and get things rolling super-fast and super-efficiently. For those of you who don’t know, Jason Calacanis is a pretty good internet visionary - responsible for Mahalo.com and thisnext.com (social shopping - like pronto.com, but not really as good)

Ok, I want one of these. :)

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:00:00 MST

NASA uses Fedora - a lot!

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:00:00 MST

“There has been a long standing rumor regarding NASA running Fedora which all of us in the Fedora community have been always intrigued by. Is it true? What are they doing with it there? Why don’t they run RHEL or CentOS. Fortunately enough, a couple of weeks ago, I got to experience NASA behind the scenes, first hand, and hang out with the coolest members of the Fedora community, and find out the answer to these questions and lots more.” The main article: http://jaboutboul.blogspot.com/2008/02/fedora-on-final-frontier.html

All programmers and developers should be forced to develop on a 200Mhz Pentium computer with 32MB of ram

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:00:00 MST

All programmers and developers should be forced to develop on a 200Mhz Pentium computer with 32MB of ram. This would keep their applications, trimmed-down, sleek, fast, and remove any need for huge memory/cpu hogs like java, python, perl, javascript, etc … C programming is still a very good option for programming and can do fantastic things with a 200Mhz processor and 32MB of ram. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge perl fan and I’m currently trying to learn python, but my 1.6 Ghz work machine sometimes comes to a screeching halt when by browser is thinking about something (javascript or other). I hate that! I have a 200Mhz machine at home and can install linux on it and as long as I’m not doing anything browser-related or starting up anything too huge, 200Mhz is totally enough horsepower for getting most tasks done (email, any OS-type programs, ssh somewhere, download files, listen to audio, …). Forcing developers to work on under-powered, under-sized computers will magically produce faster, smaller, tighter programs that run cleanly on anyone’s PC. The problem with MS Vista, massive games and other huge applications and unnecessary upgrades is that the programmers are given the top of the line computers to develop on. Long-gone is the day that a game comes in a 100k, 5-second download, but they’re still possible. Why not? Because they don’t have to. Many of my friends long for the days of the old Zork games or 8-bit or 16-bit games - why aren’t small programs like that still getting made? They’re fun!

Where the hell is Billy?

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:00:00 MST

After giving a speech at an elementary school, President Bush allows the kids to ask a few questions. One little boy, Billy, gathers the courage to raise his hand and asks, “How come you invaded Iraq without the support of the U.N.?” Just as Bush begins to answer, the recess bell rings and he says they’ll continue afterward. Half an hour later the kids come back inside. “Where were we?” says George. “Oh, yes - does anyone want to ask me anything?” A different boy raises his hand and says, “I have three questions: First, why did you invade Iraq without support from the U.N.? Why did the recess bell go off 20 minutes early? And third, where the hell is Billy?”

IAC needs a single-sign-on service

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:00:00 MST

MSN, Yahoo & Google all have single-sign-on services to tie their properties together. If you have an account on one service, you don’t have to fill out a ‘new user’ form on any other XXXXX-owned site. IAC doesn’t have a single-sign-on service, but they desperately need one. Also, it’s a great opportunity to put the IAC logo out there and have it become a known symbol of quality internet websites. If you see a single-sign-on widget on ticketmaster, ask.com, match.com, pronto.com and others and you stumble upon some tiny other IAC site, you may not want to join it, but just seeing the familiar single-sign-on widget gives the user a warm-fuzzy that this site is part of a larger family of trusted sites. It almost seems like a no-brainer and could be implemented by a php programmer in a few hours. How come this isn’t being done?

Doing taxes for all of my relatives today

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 00:00:00 MST

Ah, TurboTax and modern technology, how I love thee. :) I signed up with T-mobile for GPRS data access (additional $19/mo), so I'm all set up at the relatives in Pueblo, Co this weekend doing everyone's taxes for them. E-filing, electronic PDFs of the returns. All done wirelessly (Bluetooth to the phone and GPRS to the Internet) from my mother in law's living room table. :) Posting this also via GPRS using Windows Live Writer (one of the better blogging utilities that I've found - unfortunately, it's windows-only (duh)). BTW, T-mobile sent me the wrong settings for my GPRS settings on my phone when they sent the configs to my phone via SMS, so I had to look online to find the "access IP" for tmobile. Once I changed that, things worked well.

It's the weekend!!! Woohoo!

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 00:00:00 MST

It's friday evening and I'm going home! Woohoo! I'll be pulling an allnighter tonight and staying up late with my newborn to let my wife sleep tonight. She's been very good and letting me sleep all week, so now it's my turn to stay up. :) Have a great weekend everyone!

Got my fery first Google Adsense check! Woohoo!

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 00:00:00 MST

So, Google finally sent me a check for $30. By first ad revenue check since putting google ads on my different domains for over a year. Perhaps I should be more agressive at the ad placement, huh? :)

Anyone know of a good Mysql Query Browser?

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:00:00 MST

Hey. Anyone know of a good mysql query browser that works under linux? I'm trying to put together some rather complex SQL for a project and I'm having problems wrapping my head around some of the more complicated SQL. I've tried mysqlcc (mysql control panel) and the linux mysql query browser and they're not really what I'm looking for. I'd prefer a graphical representation of where clauses and stuff that makes the logic look graphical so I can connect the logic and make sense of it all and/or see easily if/when something's messed up. Please reply in the comments below if you know of something.

Nokia acquires Trolltech -- the biggest little company you've never heard of [Engadget]

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:00:00 MST

Filed under: Cellphones

In a move meant to bolster its software development prowess, Nokia just announced the acquisition Trolltech. Who’s Trolltech? Well, its software can be found in some 10 million devices. In fact, Trolltech’s Qt is used by such familiar applications as Skype, Google Earth, and Photoshop Elements while their Qtopia was spotted on a hacked Archos 5 series earlier this month. By acquiring Trolltech’s software development frameworks and application platforms, Nokia hopes to help developers create Internet applications that work on PCs and across Nokia devices. Specifically, Nokia claims that the move will “further increase the competitiveness of S60 and Series 40.” The deal also grandfathers Nokia into the LiMo Foundation and its attempt to bring open-source to your handset. Hear that Android? The $153 million offer must still be processed through regulatory channels and approved by shareholders – all expected before June in out.

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Hot Cheese Gun

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:00:00 MST

Why make nachos in a microwave? Modify a hot glue gun to deposit pre-melted cheese directly on to your nacho chips. No more messy cheese globs on the tray! Now, why didn’t I think of this? :)

If I were to buy a new MP3 player, I'd buy ...

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 00:00:00 MST

~~an iPod~~

Pronto ranked as #7 of the top fastest-growing sites by Compete

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 00:00:00 MST

Go Pronto!!! :)

Who's Who?

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 00:00:00 MST

Sean Dances

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 00:00:00 MST

Professors Slam Java As "Damaging" To Students [Slashdot]

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 00:00:00 MST

Hey! Java is ruining our youth! :) Another nail in the coffin for that useless language that we all call Java. :) jfmiller calls to our attention to two professors emeritus of computer science at New York University who have penned an article titled Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow? in which they berate their university, and others, for not teaching solid languages like C, C++, Lisp, and ADA. The submitter wonders whether any CS students or professors would care to respond. Quoting the article: "The resulting set of skills [from today's educational practices] is insufficient for today's software industry (in particular for safety and security purposes) and, unfortunately, matches well what the outsourcing industry can offer. We are training easily replaceable professionals... Java programming courses did not prepare our students for the first course in systems, much less for more advanced ones. Students found it hard to write programs that did not have a graphic interface, had no feeling for the relationship between the source program and what the hardware would actually do, and (most damaging) did not understand the semantics of pointers at all, which made the use of C in systems programming very challenging."

Things I forgot about newborns since our first kid

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:00:00 MST

Sitting up at 3am last night trying to calm, change and feed our newborn, I realized that there are tons of things that I had forgotten about dealing with a newborn since we did it 3.5 years ago with our first kid: <ul> <li> Feeding takes at least an hour and both hands. If I get an itch while feeding, I’ll have to wait 60 mins until feeding is done to scratch it. <li> Sleep is necessary to maintain sanity and a healthy attitude. <li> Burping is vital to maintain a clean crib. <li> Leaving the house for an hour of errands means packing a large med kit full of anything that anyone would need to support a child for up to two weeks. <li> Sleep is necessary to maintain sanity and a healthy attitude. <li> Mommy is bed-ridden for at least a week, so other than the mammorial lunch wagons, mommy is pretty much out of the picture during late-night maintenance. <li> The formula formula (one scoop for every 2 oz of milk, 1/2 hot, 1/2 cold water). <li> A rough night can generate a whole basket full of laundry in the morning. <li> Drawing blood is done through the heel (ouch!). <li> Poop color changes daily. <li> Slep is nezessary to maintain sanitee and a healthy attitude. (I know, an old joke, but I couldn’t resist) </ul>

The New Years Webb Baby is doing well

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 00:00:00 MST

Sarah likes the old pronto.com homepage design better!

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 00:00:00 MST

I asked Sarah what she thought of the new pronto.com page which shows the 'most liked' products instead of the 'newly liked' products and she said that she wasn't a big fan.

worldPopulation++;

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 00:00:00 MST

Sarah Ann Webb was born Monday, Dec 31st, 2007 at 8:23am at 7 lbs 2 oz. Mother and child are both very healthy. 10 fingers and 10 toes. :) Anyone want to light up a cigar with me? Pictures are here.

We're all getting ready for the big day

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 00:00:00 MST

If you don't know, we're expecting our second child any day now. We're expecting to have a brand new, bouncing baby girl on Dec 31st. We've been working hard on getting the house ready, crib, painting and cleaning out the baby room, all of the new pink clothing, safety stuff, breast-feeding stuff, cameras, video camera, extra batteries, extra tapes, bassinet, blankets, pacifiers, all of the hospital paperwork, making sure that Holly gets her short-term disability pay for the time she'll be away from her job, teaching Sean about what will happen in the next couple of days, and about 50 other things it seems. Grandma has been here since the 24th helping us out and it's a HUGE help, but somehow, the house is still a mess and things are still crazy.

Portal Rocks!

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 00:00:00 MST

Mordac, the preventer of information services

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 00:00:00 MST

Caught a bird in flight on my security camera

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 00:00:00 MST

Helllloooo ... Echooooo ...

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 00:00:00 MST

Spending Dec 26th in the office because I’m saving up my vacation days, so the office was locked and empty this morning when I got here. There’s one other guy in the office so-far, but it’s looking like today will be a super-quiet day. :)

Put up my Christmas Song Stream http://badcheese.com:8000 2300+ songs this year!

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 00:00:00 MST

I’ve been putting up a Christmas stream every year for the last 6 or 7 years now. This year, I’ve accumulated up to about 2300 songs (last year was about 1800). Includes all of the traditional songs, plus about two thousand that you’ve probably never heard of before. Some Parodys, some Disco, some in other languages, you name it, I’ve got it. :) I’m also streaming via shoutcast this year which is different from before, I think that shoutcast is a little more robust than the perl script that I was using last year. :) So, point your winamp (windows) or xmms (linux) at http://badcheese.com:8000 and sit back and enjoy. :)

Merry Christmas!

Steve

RedHat CEO steps down - replaced with the former COO Of Delta Airlines

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 00:00:00 MST

In a suprise move, the CEO of Red Hat stepped down yesterday. Replacing him on Jan 1st will be the former COO of Delta Airlines. Buddies with the former CFO of American Airlines which is not the CEO of DELL. Apparently, he does use Fedora on his home computer. :)

http://redhat.sys-con.com/read/478789.htm

Started looking at data for the netflix challenge last night

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:00:00 MST

So, I loaded all of the netflix data into a mysql DB last night and started all of the indexes building while I slept. Most of it was done when I woke up this morning. I’ve been thinking about the whole problem a little bit. It seems that’s it’s mainly just a profiling problem more than a statistical problem. I installed a CPAN module to pull info from IMDB. I think that the genre data will be the most helpful to classify movies, then classify people based on the movie classifications and the likes or dislikes. Also, I used to be a netflix subscriber, so I know that when a person joins, he/she starts liking stuff right away just to populate the netflix suggestion DB and get recommendations from the system, so that’s a known pattern that I’ll be watching for. Some immediate things I noticed: The average ‘rating’ for all moves was a 3.6. There are many customers who only reviewed one movie - this could either present a problem (noise, unpredictable) or an easy classification type. I’m not sure yet. :) More later.

Thinking about entering the Netflix Challenge

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:00:00 MST

A friend of mine and I are considering entering the Netflix Challenge. I’m going to load some data into a DB and start messing with it tonight. :)

Steve

People really do ask for permission sometimes!

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 00:00:00 MST

I got an email today that read:

Hello,

I try to contact Mr Steven Lee Webb, which created in the past a 3D model of a spacecraft … If you’re not this Mr Webb, please delete this mail :-/

I’d like to use tour Fighter spacecraft model in my 3D game. This project is commercial, but the game will probably be free for the users (advertising).

Is it freeware or shareware ?

Best regards, Olivier (from France, sorry for the bad english ^^)

It was a stupid little model that I made in 1991 or something like that a long time ago on the Amiga. I told him that he can use it for free without any strings attached. It made me feel good that someone was using it. :)

Got php-exploited by a script kiddie this weekend.

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 00:00:00 MST

Well, it turns out that the PHP exploits are more frequent than I would’ve guessed. I was suprised to see an /usr/sbin/httpd running on my machine (my machine is debian and under debian, apache runs as /usr/bin/apache) and my CPU usage was pretty high.

Needless to say, I was broken into, but it wasn’t a root compromise. They used a known php exploit in phpBB2 to run code as www-data on my machine. No passwords were cracked and no information was retreived, but they did use my computer resources and I was a little pissed about that. Without stopping the /usr/sbin/httpd process, I brought up ethereal and found the irc server and channel that they were sending data to (the program was scanning for machines with known windows vulnerabilities). So, I fired-up bitchx and logging into their chat room. There was only one person (admin status), so I started-up a conversation with him. It turns out that he’s a kid in Portugal and (through much copying and pasting from BabelFish) I was able to talk to him and tell him that hacking was illegal in the states and that what he did was punishable in the U.S. with a lengthy stay in prison.

He insisted that in Portugal, it was not illegal because he wasn’t making any money at it.

He eventually stopped talking to me and I removed all of my php stuff on my machine and upgraded the stuff that I couldn’t do without. I guess I’ll be writing my own web stuff from now on. The hack didn’t do any damage, but I still don’t like the feeling of someone effectively getting into my computer without my permission.

Oh well, expect to see more custom code on badcheese.com from now on! :)

Sysadmins are the plumbers and car mechanics of today - we keep the world running!

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 00:00:00 MST

Car mechanics are powerful. So are plumbers. In fact, anyone you hire to help you fix something that you don’t understand can basically screw you pretty hard as far as the costs to fix things. As George Costanza of Seinfeld fame said, “Gee, you need a new Johnson valve in there …”. The consumer is basically at the mercy of the person who services your equipment that you don’t or can’t understand.

I’m a system administrator by trade. I recently realized that this is also true of my job. System Administrators keep your computers and employees working, your data flowing and your storefront (the web) running. System Administrators are usually considered “support” and “maintenance” people. They do the computer work that nobody else understands and they do the physical work that nobody else wants to do. They spend time on their knees, under tables, inside the network closets strewn with tons of network and power cables, under floors, above ceilings, etc … If a website goes down, the system administrator is very likely the one that will get the midnight phone call and have to drive somewhere to fix something that may take days to fix. For example, in the case of the New Orleans hurricane, a system administrator stayed behind to make sure that the company’s computers stayed up and operational during the storm.

So, do you treat your system administrator like a used car salesman? Do you distrust them and hope that they’re not pulling the wool over your eyes, or do you appreciate your system administrator? Sure, there’s System Administrator's Day (every July 28th), but do you realize that without system administrators, there’d be no internet, no email, no phone systems and everyone would be using only the most basic of software that requires no help at all? How does your system administrator treat you? Does he/she look down at you every time you ask for something to be done and brush you off, or does he/she snap to it and get it done in a few minutes?

Being a system administrator, I can talk about what it’s like being on the other side of the wall. System Administrators are usually computer geeks and love using computers. We’re commonly ex-programmers and we are a very creative and fun group of people in most respects. However, when in a work environment, there’s a lot that system administrators have to take into account before accepting and filling a work order. Security - will the change that I make make the company or user vulnerable to attack or abuse? Policy - will this change go against any set policy? Reinventing the wheel - is there already an existing method of filling this request that can be used instead of making a new thing? Legality - will this work result in something that’s not legal? Annoyance - will this work result in annoying someone else (spam)? Breakage - will this break something else? Design - many other people may also want this too, I should design a tool for people to use instead of just doing this one instance. Laziness - man, I just got back from the data center, can this wait for a while? Education - you just need to learn how to do it the accepted way - RTFM. :)

There are a lot of issues that need to be taken into account for a system administrator. If a sysadmin takes time to fill a request or rolls his/her eyes at you, please don’t take offense to him or her. The system administrator is here to help you out and to support you. He or she will be happy to do his or her job and make your life a much more enjoyable place, but please realize that his or her responsibilities are vast and there may be more than meets the eye when you ask for a change that you may think should not take much time to complete.

This is just my opinion and will probably be taken lightly. :)

Where's the Subway ... or should I just go fuck myself?

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 00:00:00 MDT

So, I’m in New York (Manhattan) for business this week. All-in-all, everything’s going very well. I was concerned about the street hustlers and homesless people and getting mugged, but everything seems to be working out very well.

Day one: The flight out.

I sat next to a very nice lady who lived in Crested Butte, Colorado. She told me that she ran a clothing store in Colorado and in California and jet-sets around the U.S. looking for different clothes to clone for her stores. She was a very nice, down-home woman, but when we got off the plane and got into the taxi, she flipped into ‘New York’ mode and started talking shit with the taxi driver and talking about getting drunk and was talking to a friend about getting together at the same time.

I think that New York city lifestyle does something to people.

Everyone walks super-fast from place-to-place. I have problems keeping up with the sidewalk traffic that’s going everywhere.

Got checked into the hotel and went to the bars to have a couple of beers. This trip is going to be interesting …

Day two: First day of work.

Breakfast was pretty good. Get a taxi (weee) to the office. Need some more hardware. Take a taxi (weee) to a store to get some more network stuff. Take a taxi (weee - whoa, that was close) to the data center to start working. Work all day long (ouch, damn rack!). Ready to go home - my feet hurt. Taxi (weee) back to the hotel. Expensive Steak Dinner w/ a beer. Yummy! Saw my first homeless guy. A couple of drinks and time for bed.

Day three: Second day of work.

Slept-in a little - Hangover. Walked to a deli, had a Philli-Cheese-Steak for lunch. Another homeless guy. Taxi (weee) to work. Damn. Need some rack shelving. Taxi (weee) to computer store. Damn, the racks won’t work. Taxi (weee) to data center. Make cables and do more stuff. Walk to office. 2 hour meeting. Headache. Dinner (pork with fried peaches - weird). Back to office to load 12 computers into a car. Drive to datacenter. Hook up all machines. Taxi (weee) to hotel to go to bed. Write this blog. IM friends and family. Go to sleep. :)

Day four: Work, Work, Work ...

Got up early. Had Taco Bell for breakfast. Taxi (weee) to data center. Work. Stabucks for lunch. Work. Starbucks for Dinner. Work until 9pm. Taxi (weee) back to the hotel. Drink a few beers. Sleep.

Day five: Back to Colorado!!! Yea!

Taxi (weee) to the office to make sure everyone is still happy. Taxi (weee) to the hotel to drop off bags. Walk to Empire State Building. Wait in line 1.5 hours to get to elevator. Take pictures. Buy souvineers. Come back down. Taxi (weee) to JFK. Wait … Drink … Wait … Wait … Get on plane. Got to Denver around 11pm. It’s NICE to be home! :)

Steve

Sweet Dreams are Made of Cheese

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 00:00:00 MDT

(Found on a forum posting from an online game)

For decades parents have warned their children not to have cheese before bedtime to prevent bad dreams. But researchers have disproved this old wife's tale and found that cheese could actually aid sleep.

But they reported that the type of cheese you choose can affect the dreams you have.

When it came to dream type, it seemed that Stilton caused the most crazy dreams, with 75 per cent of men and 85 per cent of women eating Stilton experiencing odd and vivid dreams.

If you want a star-studded dream then your best bet is cheddar. Almost two-thirds of volunteers eating cheddar reported dreaming about celebrities, including Jordan and Johnny Depp.

Or if you are missing old friends then try Red Leicester. More than six out of 10 volunteers eating the cheese had nostalgic dreams about their past, including school days and childhood friends.

British brie tended to give women nice dreams, such as Jamie Oliver cooking dinner in their kitchen, while the men had odd dreams such as having a drunken conversation with a dog.

Drew Carey pays homage to badcheese.com!

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Thu, 11 Aug 2005 00:00:00 MDT

I was sitting home one day watching the Drew Carey show and this scene immediately caught my attention. Download and watch! ;)

(right-click and select “save as”)

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Steve

Travelling across the US with just my Treo 600 and PSP!

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 00:00:00 MDT

Ok, I’m off on Sunday on business to visit some states that I’ve not visited yet. I hope they have a Subway and a Wal Mart! :)

The only tech gear I’m taking along is my Treo 600, my PSP and my digital camera. I will also have a laptop, but I won’t use it for non-work purposes. It’ll be interesting to see how things go without a laptop to use on the plane for programming or whatever - I usually do REALLY good work on the plane. I’m not sure what it is - perhaps the total strangers watching me write stuff or something, but I usually do AWESOME work on the plane for some reason. When I arrive in my hotel, my work is pretty normal. Perhaps the weird stimulation of the airplane interior or something. Anyway, this trip, I’ll send email through my cell phone via gmail.com, play games and listen to MP3’s on my PSP (just got a 512MB stick in the mail the other day) and take some pics with my camera. Should be fun and interesting!

I’m going to miss my little boy Sean while I’m away. This will be the longest time away from him that I’ve done so-far. Last weekend we spent about 5 hours apart and it was really hard, so we’ll see how the 4 days will go. The weird thing is that he learns new stuff every day. I don’t want to miss anything - like him “finding” a new sound to make or learning how to drink from a straw - everything that he does that’s new is like discovering gold to him. He just grabs on and doesn’t let go! I’m sure that I’ll be calling home to check in many times a day! :(

More reasons to hate Qdoba

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Tue, 04 Jan 2005 00:00:00 MST

I hate Qdoba and chipotle

) No parking - I hate trendy places.
) It was so crowded in there, some guy took my change ($0.93)!!!
) Bumped my knee on the support brace for the “bar” seat near the window when trying to leave. Not much space to eat or move around.
) Also it was very cold sitting at the window - my food got cold fast! Ok, it was snowing outside, but nobody likes cold chineese, er mexican food!!!
) The “naked burrito” plastic bowl doesn’t fit in the trendy, metal 6” round trashcan hole on top of the trash can. You’d think that their own stuff would fit in their own trashcans.
) I think that they put rice in their burrito just as a filler and to save a few bucks. Rice is not supposed to be in mexican food!!! Rice should be in Chineese food!!! Rice is the cheapest food known to man. When you see people delivering food to starving countries, what do you see them throwing bags of off the truck? RICE!!!! You can buy a gunny sack full of it for $1.00!!!! When I went there previously, they scowled at me for asking for no rice.
) No Refried Beans option for a burrito - what is this L.A?!?!!!!

My good friend Adam Sleek died in early November 2004.

steve@badcheese.com (Steve Webb) — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 00:00:00 MST

Adam Sleek was a very good friend of mine. I first met him when I was in the 4th grade and I last talked to him about 3 months before he passed away. He was a very weird and fun guy to know and he made friends wherever he went. I used to watch movies with him, go to his band performances, talk with him about many different things and of course, yell at him for messing up my house. I remember the first time that I met Adam. I charged him $5 to watch “The Green Berret” (John Wayne). I was probably 12 years old and he was 16 or so. We became friends over time. We partied together, we played instruments together, I helped him with his computer education a little, we were even roomates for a period of time in Boulder. Memories of Adam with all of my friends and I in the gunbarrel estates area take up a very large part of my total life-long memories and I’m very sorry to not be able to have any more good times with my good friend Adam.

I only met his son once when he was a little boy and I met his ex-wife when they first got married. I wish them both very well and if Devon has half of the interesting life that Adam had, he should be a very happy and worldly adult some day.

I couldn’t find Adam’s obituary anywhere - the funeral house took it offline after 30 days, so I emailed them and managed to get a copy of it again. Here’s his obituary:

Adam David Sleek, of Honolulu Hawaii, formerly of Longmont Colorado, went home to be with his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ on November 6, 2004. He was 39 years old.

The son of Sewell “bud” and Elaine Sleek of Erie, Co, Adam was born on June 21, 1965 in New York, NY. Adam lived a short time in Newburgh, New York before moving to Colorado where he spent most of his life. He attended Niwot schools and graduated from The Denver Academy, and then went on to earn his associates degree from Front Range Community College.

Bright and creative, Adam perceived and approached life in an innovative style uniquely his own. He had a passion for music and composed songs and lyrics, played bass guitar and performed vocally for a number of area bands including The Fourth Republic. He loved his son Devon, neice Jordan and nephew Christian, and enjoyed playing original and imaginative games with them. He also enjoyed creating exotic culinary dishes which he would enthusiastically share with adventurous friends and family members. His other interests included collecting antique books, reading avidly and writing poetry.

Adam had a varied and interesting professional life. He was a certified computer network analyst and worked for a time at Rocky Mountain Christian church assisting with systems administration. He was a shift manager for Zone Cab in Denver and also received his EMT certificate. In Honolulu, Adam did security work at the airport.

Most importantly, Adam had a real and personal faith in Jesus Christ. He contributed his musical and technical talents to various congregations including Rocky Mountain Christian church, where he was a member.

We miss his unique contribution and creative energy. His hope was in the Lord, and as Christians, we are confident that we will see him again in heaven.

Adam is survived by his son Devon Harrison Sleek of Arvada, Co; parents Bud and Elaine Sleek of Erie, Co; sister Jennifer Sleek-Klevdal, brother-in-law Stein Klevdal, neice and nephew, Jordan and Christian Klevdal of Niwot, Co; and grandmother, Grace Agnew of Orlando, FL.

A memorial service will be held at 11:00 AM Friday, November 12, 2004 at Rocky Mountain Christian Church at 9447 Niwot Road in Niwot. Memorial contributions can be made to the Devon Sleek education fund in care of Ahlberg Funeral Chapen, 326 Terry Street, Longmont, Co 80501

The memorial service for Adam was very nice. It was great hearing from all of his friends and family again and reminding me of how wonderful Adam was and what a good friend he was over the past 24 years of my life. Several members of “The Forth Republic” made it to the funeral and we had a good time talking about Adam and what a great and at the same time weird and wonderful guy he was.

Here are some of the comments that were made on the funeral chappel website from some of his aquaintences:

Dear Bud, Elaine and Jennifer,

Our sincerest condolences to you from the Boles’ family.

Alan & Betty Boles Concord, North Carolina Friends

I’m very sorry to hear about Adam. I spent a large part of my life with Adam and I feel that he was one of my very best friends. My family and I will definately be at the memorial service on Friday. Our hearts go out to you and your family - Adam was a very wonderful person and I’ll miss his friendship very much.

Steven & Holly Webb Longmont, Co Friend

Dear Jennifer and Family, My mother passed along the sad news about Adam and I wanted to send our deepest condolences for your loss.

Cyndi Boman Thompson Portland, Oregon friend

I met Adam in 1988 when we joined the fourth republic. This band was unlike any other I’ve been in, this wasn’t a business relationship, we were like family, the brothers we never had. You could do anything, move anywhere, it didn’t matter, when you came back, you were not forgotten, you were accepted. Adam was a gifted bass player, vocalist, and a prolific, soulful lyricist. He did a passable job on piano and guitar too. The last songs we recorded were probably in 2002, I had always assumed that it was just a matter of time before we’d once again regroup and pick up where we left off. We’d spent a lot of time together, sharing dreams and some of the best times of my life. I’d be a different person today if I hadn’t met Adam. There’s a hole in my heart. He will be missed.

Brian Kauffman Nederland, CO Friend, band-mate

Bud, Elaine, Jennifer, and Devon, I am saddened to here of Adam’s death and sorry that I am unable to share this time with you. Adam’s stories and experiences while I was with him will always be with me and still are told to those who never knew Adam. What a spirit for life he has. My thoughts and prayers are with you all. God be with you until you meet again.

Jeffery M. Saxton Omaha, NE Old Friend

Dear Bud and Elaine, Adam was so much a part of our life while living on Parklane, that I have him in my thoughts many times even now. His creativity and energy gave us many hours of entertainment. I can only say how sorry I am at his death. My deepest sympathy to both of you.

Mary Saxton Burlington, IA Friend and neighbor

It was a privilege to know Adam and spend close to 14 years creating music with him. He was one of the most gifted and natural musicians I have ever played with. But more than that, he was one of the most genuine and passionate people I have known.

Adam came to the Fourth Republic in 1988 and instantly put his mark on our style of music. Being a big Alarm fan and U2 fan like myself, we would spend hours discussing the merits of these bands. These discussions helped form the style of the Fourth Republic.

In 1998, after one of the many Fourth Republic hiatuses, Adam stepped up and became the lead singer of the band. Even after playing with him for almost 10 years, I had no idea he had this great voice and was such a wonderful lyrist. Adam would come up with wonderful images and words off the top of his head. I truly feel his lyrics are in the league of a Dylan or Bono Hewson. It was during this period that I really got to know Adam. We used to commute together from Denver to Boulder for rehearsals. During the ride we would talk about everything. From music to religion you could always count on Adam to have a passionate opinion. He would make you think of things from a new perspective and you were better off for it.

Adam was full of love. He loved his Lord, he loved his son, he loved his parents and he loved his friends. If the world could just have an ounce of his love there would be no problems.

As Brian stated in his message, I too always felt that it would only be a matter of time when we would pick up our guitars and pick up right where we left off. I hope in heaven they have guitars and drums because if we are privileged enough to join Adam in heaven, one of the first things I want to do is plug in and play with my Fourth Republic brother.

I am lucky; I have hours of tapes containing Adam singing his songs so I will always have Adam with me. He left quite a legacy of wonderful music and everybody that has heard it is touched in some way. I hope this continues.

Adam was my friend, my band mate, and my brother. I will miss him dearly.

Andy Prebish Playa del Carmen Mexico Band Mate

Bud, Elaine & Jennifer,

Very saddened about your loss of Adam. He was blessed with such a wonderful, dear family and many will share in your grief. Praying for your comfort -

Teresa Walker Broomfield Friend

May our Lord comfort you at this time of loss.

Irene Eggers San Diego, CA Friend of parents

Bud and Elaine

Angie and I were out of town a while, so we’re a little late on the news. We’re so sorry. We wish we would have been here to attend the services to offer a little more support and love. We offer our best to the family, and our hopes your son has found a kinder existence. His soul sounded good, and we believe what energies you create in this reality is all you carry forth with you, so we shall smile for him in that he left with no ill will, but rather grace and kindness.

Bruce & Angelina Bucholz Longmont, CO Associate of Bud

I just heard the news and am shocked. I still dont know what happened, but have to write to the parents of Adam to offer condolences. I loved Adam dearly. He was a great friend to me for many years. We have made music, talked, philosophised…. I have so many fond memories of him. Even at times when Adam could be at his most overbearing, all one could do was just love him more. He was such a unique individual. I remember back in the 80’s when he and I were making music in the living room of our Boulder home; He was on Bass and I was on guitar. We were being joyfull in the Lord and all I could see around me, written on our faces and everything around were the words, “Heaven is ours” I remember that vividly to this day. We were so happy in the Lord, praising him….We knew that we had salvation and were praising with music. There are so many memories. I love him. I only wish I could have spoken to him again. We had parted company in 1996 in a bad way. I wish I could have hugged him and told him that I was sorry for my bad actions. I pray for you all, especially for his parents, siblings and most of all Devon. God bless you.

Michael C. Buckman (Maynard) Knoxville Tn. Friend

Adam’s cause of death is still unknown. His father told me at the funeral that when he was found, he had already been dead for some time. The corroner had ruled-out foul play and there is a chance that they may never know. Adam had some health problems and it may be that his body just gave up. I’ll post an update if/when I find anything out, but we may never know.

If you knew of/about Adam and didn’t get to go to the funeral, feel free to leave a posting about your memories with Adam. I’m sure that it will be enjoying to hear about how Adam affected the people in his life.

Steve Webb

p.s. Adam had some good ties with hospital and EMT people and he was always happy to pull a fast one over on people - something in the back of my mind keeps telling me that he may possibly have faked his death and is running around Hawaii using an alias and living a wonderful life … at least that’s how I prefer to think about it. :)