Old Stuff

I've merged all of the old posts from the Wordpress site into a single page here. Hopefully this is somewhat helpful to people (including me) who are looking for something that was lost in the great database deletion of 2008.

The formatting was lost in the transfer so I'd recommend just using your browser search feature (Ctrl-F) on this page, which is also way to long to easily read.

Micah
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D-Link DWL-G820 Wireless Bridge
Posted by Micah Tapman on March 2nd, 2008 filed in Gear Reviews, Misc, Reviews, Tech Reviews, Technology

I run a wireless network anchored by a D-Link DIR-625 running 802.11n with WPA (compatibility mode with both WPA and WPA2 supported) and two primary wirelessly connected locations, e.g., at least one desktop PC. I also run a few laptops around the house and backyard.

I’ve seen reduced throughput on the desktop(s) because, I believe, I use PCI wireless cards (Linksys WMP54GS version 1.1) with limited external antennas. The antenna only clears the PC case by a few inches and it is right next to the floor. I decided to try a bridge solution that would eliminate the need for another wireless driver becuase they tend to be problematic with 64 bit Vista. Since I have a D-Link as the main access point I decided to go with the DWL-G820 (hardware revision B), link.

I unpacked the box, plugged it into a switch near on of my desktops, plugged in the desktop as well and configured the desktop’s Ethernet IP to be 192.168.0.2 since the DWL-G820 comes set to 192.168.0.35. Then I logged into the web page by browsing to 192.168.0.35 and entering a username of admin, no password. I jumped to the advanced wireless settings instead of messing with the wizard and scanned for wireless networks. It found my network without a problem along with several others in the neighborhood. I entered the appropriate information, including the network key, for my network and reset the key update interval, which was different from the one on the DIR-625. Hit save, checked the configuration…not good. The unit wouldn’t connect to the DIR-625 even though it could see the network. I suspected that the WPA security was the problem, a suspicion reinforced by the numerous rumors on the Net about WPA not working with a wireless bridge (i.e., with WDS). A few minutes of fruitless research on the web, and some semi-random troubleshooting attempts like rebooting the DWL-G820, etc., and I was about ready to give up. I wasn’t going to turn off WPA just to get this working. Before I called it I decided to try one last troubleshooting step, I checked for upgraded firmware. Sure enough, D-Link had released a newer version of firmware that addressed the WPA issue. I upgraded to version 2.20 for hardware revision B, link, rebooted the DWL-G820 and the connection came up loud and clear.

Once that was done I tried some performance testing of the new configuration versus my old setup using a Linksys WMP54GS PCI wireless card. The new, bridged, connection showed an increase in performance of 11-21% depending on the task at hand. The biggest improvement was seen in uploading multiple files, the smallest improvement was seen in downloading a single large file.

What this testing really answered for me was the question, “Does a wireless repeater suffer from the same 50% throughput reduction as multipoint WDS devices?” The answer, at least in my informal testing, is no, it’s actually faster than a direct connection between a desktop PC and my centeral wireless router.

All testing was done using Windows Vista 64 bit, FileZilla configured to use SFTP, standard Windows file transfer (Samba file server), and a CentOS file server.

Here are some sample transfer times:

Download/upload a 45 MB file (in seconds) using the direct connection: 31.8/65
Download/upload a 45 MB file (in seconds) using the bridged connection: 28.3/55.6
Download/upload 14 files totaling 51.6 MB (in seconds) using the direct connection: 36.1/77
Download/upload 14 files totaling 51.6 MB (in seconds) using the bridged connection: 31.1/61.1
I also saw performance improvements directly related to the antenna positioning, this was especially true for my basement work area. Moving the antenna to the shelf above my workstation resulted in a 15-35% improvement in throughput depending on the task at hand.

Sphere: Related Content

3 Responses to “D-Link DWL-G820 Wireless Bridge”
Tim C Says:
August 4th, 2008 at 12:34 am
Micah,

Did you purchase the unit that was the Revision B hardware or did you end up getting stuck with the original ‘A’ hardware release?

My DWL-G820 is of the ‘A’ variety but now that I’ve upgraded my router to a DIR-655, I’m not able to get the gaming adapter to connect to the new router unless I turn my old WBR-2310 into an access point and then connect the DWL-G820 into the access point and then into the router.

I’m afraid if I attempt to upgrade my ‘A’ hardware with the ‘B’ firmware I’ll have to junk the adapter.

Thank you for your insights and blogging about your experience.

Take care,
TC

Tim C Says:
August 4th, 2008 at 12:38 am
Micah,

Just glanced through your blog again, and like an idiot I missed the fact that you are running the Rev B hardware.

How and where did you come about getting this hardware? I wonder if everybody sells this version now and in buying my unit in October of last year just missed out on getting the best version…alas…

Thanks,
TC

Micah Tapman Says:
August 5th, 2008 at 1:15 am
TC,

I picked up my adapter last fall, if I remember right, from Micro Center. I’m not sure where you could find another Rev B version. If you can you’ll probably find it pretty solid. Mines been up and running continuously for many months now without any problems. I feel your pain about connecting all the gear together. I’m probably going to either look for another DWL-G820 or maybe just run some cables to reach another room in my house.

Fedora - Apache (httpd) Pitfall
Posted by Micah Tapman on July 17th, 2008 filed in Technology

I recently ran into a strange problem with a default installation of Apache’s web server (httpd) on a Fedora 8 box. After initializing the httpd server I tried to browse to the box from another computer on the same network but Firefox just received an error 400, Bad Request. I checked into the connectivity issue, and rechecked the httpd.conf file before stumbling across a new “feature” in Fedora, the modsecurity web application firewall. This little software firewall inspects incoming http connections and one of the rules prohibits requests that use an IP address in the URL. Since I was just checking the initial setup I’d tried to browse to the web server using http://ipaddress, which was intercepted by the web application firewall, modsecurity. The modsecurity rule was configured to return an error 400, Bad Request, hence why I received that error. I commented out the rule in the modsecurity configuration file (modsecurity_crs_21_protocol_anomalies.conf in /etc/httpd/modsecurity.d) and the web server’s now working like a champ.

This is a great example of how difficult it is for a new feature to be implemented. I’m sure the designers of modsecurity thought about whether or not to include that rule by default specifically because of the problems it would cause people like me when they ran yum update or did a new install without specifically thinking about the modsecurity features.

Configuring a Linksys wireless network with a range expander and encryption
Posted by Micah Tapman on February 24th, 2008 filed in Tech Reviews, Technology

I spent some time this weekend troubleshooting a configuration challenge with a wireless network. Here’s the write up of the solution in case anyone else runs into the same scenario.

Technologies:

Linksys WRT54G Wireless Access Point and Router
Linksys WRE54G Wireless Range Expander
802.11g
WEP and WPA (Personal)
Basic scenario:

This network was originally setup as an 802.11b/g hybrid network using the Linksys WRT54G as the access point and router. The WRE54G was added to redistribute the signal on the other side of an exterior wall and across three stories of a residence. WEP was enabled on the Linksys WRT54G and on the WRE54G, and both were configured with the same SSID to enable seamless roaming throughout the area. No major problems with this configuration.

I upgraded the Linksys WRT54G to WPA2 (Personal) and immediately ran into problems. Vista reported that the network properties saved for the network were different than those provided by the network. I realized (eventually) that I’d forgotten to upgrade the Linksys WRE54G to WPA2, and since the computer was trying to connect to the range expander, which had the same SSID, I was trying to connect to a WEP network using WPA2 credentials.

Upgrading the WRE54G to WPA2 proved problematic. I connected directly to the device with an Ethernet cable (default IP for the device is 192.168.1.240, no username, password is admin) and tried to setup the new wireless security, however, the device doesn’t support WPA2 at this point in time. I ended up selecting WPA and having to go back to the WRT54G to downgrade that to WPA from WPA2. Additionally, I set this all up and still had problems connecting from a Vista machine. Eventually I circled back around and realized that for some reason the WRT54G had defaulted back to the old configuration, WEP, which was causing essentially the same problem as before. I reentered the new WPA configuration, double checked the WRE54G configuration to make sure the two devices matched, and now things seem to be working well.

Linksys WRE54G Configuration
Linksys WRE54G Security Configuration

How to setup Outlook 2007 to save sent emails in an IMAP folder on the server
Posted by Micah Tapman on May 7th, 2008 filed in Technology

I have a love/hate relationship with Outlook that’s hard to break because there is some great stuff about Outlook but also some hidden gotcha’s that really piss me off. Here’s the solution to one of them.

IMAP accounts are handy for keeping everything synchronized with an email server and still enjoying the benefits of a local email client software suite, like Outlook. I use IMAP as much as possible because I use several computers regularly and webmail just isn’t right all the time. I recently restructured some email accounts and needed to create a new Outlook account using IMAP. One of the gotcha’s I ran into was how to save sent messages into the Sent folder on the IMAP server instead of having Outlook save them into the local Sent Items folder. Why’s this an issue? Primarily because if the emails aren’t saved onto the IMAP server I will have no access to them on my other computers.

To configure this solution follow these steps in Outlook 2007:

Navigate to Tools | Options | E-mail Options… and make sure the “Save copies of messages in Sent Items folder” is checked, then click OK;
In that same Options dialog box (Tools | Options) click the second tab, Mail Setup, and the first button, E-mail Accounts, then double click on the email account you’re trying to configure;
A new dialog box opens, Change E-mail Account, click the More Settings button in the lower right;
A new dialog box opens, Internet E-mail Setting, click the second tab, Folders;
Select the second radio button, “Choose an existing…” and then select the folder from the list below where you want to save your sent items, you can create a new folder if necessary;
Click OK then Next, then Finish, then Close, then OK;
Send a test message to yourself or someone else and see if the message was saved successfully to the IMAP Sent folder.
And then sit back, look at the above process and contemplate what sort of corporate stupidity leads to this type of obfuscated process for such a simple task. The equivalent in Thunderbird is to right click on the account name, select the Copies & Folders section, and select the right folder from the available list…about 4 or 5 total steps and it only requires a single dialog box to be opened.

Posted by Micah Tapman on March 29th, 2008 filed in Technology

I just found out the hard way that Lunarpages uses suPHP to enable PHP 5 on their servers. I upgraded from Wordpress 2.3.3 to 2.5 (trivial process, great job by the Wordpress team!) and after the upgrade I noticed that a little script I use to pull XML data from the local airport weather station, thanks to NWS’s hard work, was broken, returning this error, unexpected T_OBJECT_OPERATOR. Turning PHP 5 off and on via cPanel sorted the situation out.

Vivaty - web browser 3D chat rooms
Posted by Micah Tapman on March 31st, 2008 filed in Technology

I’ve been talking with friends for the last year or two about the next generation of telecommuting and it looks like a company is headed in the direction I’ve anticipated. Vivaty, a startup in CA, is building a web browser based 3D chat system that will interface with Facebook.

This is a bit different than my vision but certainly along the same lines. Basically, I see the future of telecommuting as a version of World of Warcraft, or any other MMORPG. Login to WoW and you’ll see a few thousand other people online doing stuff. Want to talk with them? Type /w theirname and send them an instant message (/w stands for whisper). Want to see where they are “physically” and collaborate with them? Send them an invitation to join a group, a temporary collection of players. Want to broadcast a message to your current group? Type /p yourmessagehere (/p stands for party). Need a long term group structure for a project? Create a guild and ask people to join.

Obviously the lexicon for business is different but the actual tasks are remarkably similar. You need to find people, talk with people, collaborate with people, store information, etc. WoW handles all of those tasks already. Change the interface from a gothic style D&D picture to a bunch of cubicles and you have yourself a virtual office environment. Want to talk with someone but not sure if they’re available or not? Walk down the virtual hallway, look in their virtual office, and see if they’re there. In the virtual world of MMORPG this is standard stuff. Now we just need to build a version for telecommuting. Imagine in a few years you’re working from your home office overlooking a lake in Idaho. You wake up at 7:30, grab some coffee and logon to virtualworkplace.com. As you do this your avatar pops up online and shows that you’re drinking some coffee and reading the newspaper, just as you would be in a real office. Some coworkers are also online and a few of them stop by to say good morning, etc. Believe it or not, this is pretty much how WoW feels. You “run into” people as you’re doing stuff, have conversations pseudo-randomly, and basically interact as if you were sharing real physical space.

Maybe I’ll expand on this more…or just try to find some venture capital to make it a reality instead of talking about it all the time.

PHP, Mediawiki, and CentOS…
Posted by Micah Tapman on March 26th, 2008 filed in Technology

For some odd reason the default PHP configuration on a recently built CentOS server failed to include the PHP DOMXML class. This caused an error with Mediawiki, which was trying to find DOMDocument, and the only thing returned when we tried to access the wiki was a blank HTML page. We tracked this down in the log file for the web server as an error PHP Fatal error: Class 'DOMDocument' not found but it took a while. Once we figured out the issue we used yum to update the PHP installation with the package yum php-domxml restarted the webserver and everything was fine.

Drupal cron job on Lunarpages.com
Posted by Micah Tapman on March 20th, 2008 filed in Misc

I’ve been messing around with Drupal (very cool) and needed to configure a cron job on my hosting provider, Lunarpages.com. I just use a shared server with command access through cPanel. Here’s how I ended up getting it to work.

Navigated to cPanel | Cron jobs. Chose Advanced (Unix Style). Entered a job like this, */30 * * * * GET http://fullurltodrupal/cron.php. I’d tried using a couple other options with wget but couldn’t get that working. I did see a forum post that Lunarpages had disabled wget for security reasons.

The bike shed color story
Posted by Micah Tapman on April 18th, 2008 filed in Misc

I came across a reference to the bike shed story and figured it’s worth revisiting. As I’ve spent plenty of time in policy groups I can say with some authority that there is wisdom in these words. And the email system recommendations should be made mandatory…as much for me as anyone else.

Subject: A bike shed (any colour will do) on greener grass...
From: Poul-Henning Kamp
Date: Sat, 02 Oct 1999 16:14:10 +0200
Message-ID: <18238.938873650@critter.freebsd.dk>
Sender: phk@critter.freebsd.dk
Bcc: Blind Distribution List: ;
MIME-Version: 1.0

[bcc'ed to committers, hackers]

My last pamphlet was sufficiently well received that I was not
scared away from sending another one, and today I have the time
and inclination to do so.

I’ve had a little trouble with deciding on the right distribution
of this kind of stuff, this time it is bcc’ed to committers and
hackers, that is probably the best I can do. I’m not subscribed
to hackers myself but more on that later.

The thing which have triggered me this time is the “sleep(1) should
do fractional seconds” thread, which have pestered our lives for
many days now, it’s probably already a couple of weeks, I can’t
even be bothered to check.

To those of you who have missed this particular thread: Congratulations.

It was a proposal to make sleep(1) DTRT if given a non-integer
argument that set this particular grass-fire off. I’m not going
to say anymore about it than that, because it is a much smaller
item than one would expect from the length of the thread, and it
has already received far more attention than some of the *problems*
we have around here.

The sleep(1) saga is the most blatant example of a bike shed
discussion we have had ever in FreeBSD. The proposal was well
thought out, we would gain compatibility with OpenBSD and NetBSD,
and still be fully compatible with any code anyone ever wrote.

Yet so many objections, proposals and changes were raised and
launched that one would think the change would have plugged all
the holes in swiss cheese or changed the taste of Coca Cola or
something similar serious.

“What is it about this bike shed ?” Some of you have asked me.

It’s a long story, or rather it’s an old story, but it is quite
short actually. C. Northcote Parkinson wrote a book in the early
1960?ies, called “Parkinson’s Law”, which contains a lot of insight
into the dynamics of management.

You can find it on Amazon, and maybe also in your dads book-shelf,
it is well worth its price and the time to read it either way,
if you like Dilbert, you’ll like Parkinson.

Somebody recently told me that he had read it and found that only
about 50% of it applied these days. That is pretty darn good I
would say, many of the modern management books have hit-rates a
lot lower than that, and this one is 35+ years old.

In the specific example involving the bike shed, the other vital
component is an atomic power-plant, I guess that illustrates the
age of the book.

Parkinson shows how you can go in to the board of directors and
get approval for building a multi-million or even billion dollar
atomic power plant, but if you want to build a bike shed you will
be tangled up in endless discussions.

Parkinson explains that this is because an atomic plant is so vast,
so expensive and so complicated that people cannot grasp it, and
rather than try, they fall back on the assumption that somebody
else checked all the details before it got this far. Richard P.
Feynmann gives a couple of interesting, and very much to the point,
examples relating to Los Alamos in his books.

A bike shed on the other hand. Anyone can build one of those over
a weekend, and still have time to watch the game on TV. So no
matter how well prepared, no matter how reasonable you are with
your proposal, somebody will seize the chance to show that he is
doing his job, that he is paying attention, that he is *here*.

In Denmark we call it “setting your fingerprint”. It is about
personal pride and prestige, it is about being able to point
somewhere and say “There! *I* did that.” It is a strong trait in
politicians, but present in most people given the chance. Just
think about footsteps in wet cement.

I bow my head in respect to the original proposer because he stuck
to his guns through this carpet blanking from the peanut gallery,
and the change is in our tree today. I would have turned my back
and walked away after less than a handful of messages in that
thread.

And that brings me, as I promised earlier, to why I am not subscribed
to -hackers:

I un-subscribed from -hackers several years ago, because I could
not keep up with the email load. Since then I have dropped off
several other lists as well for the very same reason.

And I still get a lot of email. A lot of it gets routed to /dev/null
by filters: People like Brett Glass will never make it onto my
screen, commits to documents in languages I don’t understand
likewise, commits to ports as such. All these things and more go
the winter way without me ever even knowing about it.

But despite these sharp teeth under my mailbox I still get too much
email.

This is where the greener grass comes into the picture:

I wish we could reduce the amount of noise in our lists and I wish
we could let people build a bike shed every so often, and I don’t
really care what colour they paint it.

The first of these wishes is about being civil, sensitive and
intelligent in our use of email.

If I could concisely and precisely define a set of criteria for
when one should and when one should not reply to an email so that
everybody would agree and abide by it, I would be a happy man, but
I am too wise to even attempt that.

But let me suggest a few pop-up windows I would like to see
mail-programs implement whenever people send or reply to email
to the lists they want me to subscribe to:

+————————————————————+
| Your email is about to be sent to several hundred thousand |
| people, who will have to spend at least 10 seconds reading |
| it before they can decide if it is interesting. At least |
| two man-weeks will be spent reading your email. Many of |
| the recipients will have to pay to download your email. |
| |
| Are you absolutely sure that your email is of sufficient |
| importance to bother all these people ? |
| |
| [YES] [REVISE] [CANCEL] |
+————————————————————+

The second part of my wish is more emotional. Obviously, the
capacities we had manning the unfriendly fire in the sleep(1)
thread, despite their many years with the project, never cared
enough to do this tiny deed, so why are they suddenly so enflamed
by somebody else so much their junior doing it ?

I wish I knew.

I do know that reasoning will have no power to stop such “reactionaire
conservatism”. It may be that these people are frustrated about
their own lack of tangible contribution lately or it may be a bad
case of “we’re old and grumpy, WE know how youth should behave”.

Either way it is very unproductive for the project, but I have no
suggestions for how to stop it. The best I can suggest is to refrain
from fuelling the monsters that lurk in the mailing lists: Ignore
them, don’t answer them, forget they’re there.

I hope we can get a stronger and broader base of contributors in
FreeBSD, and I hope we together can prevent the grumpy old men
and the Brett Glasses of the world from chewing them up, spitting
them out and scaring them away before they ever get a leg to the
ground.

For the people who have been lurking out there, scared away from
participating by the gargoyles: I can only apologise and encourage
you to try anyway, this is not the way I want the environment in
the project to be.

Poul-Henning

Enso and Humanized - trying to redefine the world
Posted by Micah Tapman on March 23rd, 2008 filed in Tech Reviews

A while back I came across the Enso tool. It’s an interesting little application that tries to ease the pain of figuring out how to get a computer to do what you want. The real challenge it addresses is finding the right application and/or command to do exactly the right thing. Let’s say you want to divide 154 by 5. Normally, you open up a calculator, or perhaps use a handheld one on your desk, or a spreadsheet. How do you do this? How many clicks or keystrokes does it take to go through this process? Enso makes it faster by linking a type of hotkey and opening up access to a calculator function directly. In just a few keystrokes you have your answer inserted nicely into the document you’re writing.

What Enso has done is to provide a fairly intuitive access channel into some rather esoteric computer functionality. It’s definitely still geek stuff, just like any “command line” interface, but it’s close to be something that any computer user would be comfortable with.

Enso recently decided to release the code under the open source BSD license, which is an interesting move. This is probably in part because the original development team is breaking up. Three of them are heading to Mozilla and one is apparently leaving the technology field to work in aerospace engineering of some sort.

Adding the Enso functionality into the Mozilla suite could be a match made in heaven. The browser is already a ubiquitous part of everyone’s desktop experience and that could include the Enso functionality. I particularly like the idea of allowing for very easy insertion of graphics, which is currently still a major pain in the ass.

Internet Survival Time
Posted by Micah Tapman on July 15th, 2008 filed in Technology

This article, link, talks about the average Internet survival time of a “normal” unpatched box. It’s an interesting article, though a bit confusing in it’s attempt to comprehensively discuss the issue. My own experience shows that the average survival time is less than the time required to download and install patches. This means that you have a dilemna when you’re building new systems. Somehow you need to download the latest patches from vendors on the Internet but you can’t connect the new system to the Internet to do this. Most of us are working off the legacy solution, i.e., we have a legacy box somewhere that’s up to date and we use it to download the patches for the new box. We then transfer the patches to the new box using a private transfer medium, such as a private network or USB drive. Once the new box is patched we move it to the Internet-connected network.

The shortest time I’ve seen between deployment of a new system and a compromise was about 13 seconds for a Windows box during the nimda worm heyday (2003).

bash shell and OS X
Posted by Micah Tapman on August 10th, 2008 filed in Technology

A friend of mine, Curt Stapleton, installed OS X on a 250 GB Western Digital external hard drive and I had an opportunity to try it out on a Dell D630 Latitude the other day. With the external hard drive plugged into a USB port, the system automatically detected the bootable hard drive and loaded OS X without any prompting. If you can’t see an option to boot from a USB device you need to check your system BIOS options, usually accessed via F2, F12, or a similar keystroke immediately after turning on the system.

My first impression of the OS X system was that it’s a pretty interface; equal to the visual appeal of Vista and more integrated overall. OS X didn’t natively support the D630’s integrated wireless card so Curt also bought an external USB wireless antenna, a Belkin Wireless G Plus MIMO USB Network Adapter. Using this card, OS X automatically detected my local wireless network and was smart enough to just prompt me for the pass phrase needed for the WPA security. With that setup I was online in just under a minute or two.

Safari, the default browser, is respectable although I think I still prefer Firefox because of it’s extensible architecture (although to be fair I haven’t done much research on trying to extend Safari). But…the real winner for the OS X platform is the complete integration of a shell. Because OS X is based on Open BSD, a Unix distribution, it natively integrates a couple of shell programs. For those unfamiliar with a shell program, it’s basically a text-based program that includes a wide variety of utilities to do stuff with the computer. The most common shell tasks are finding things (find), moving/copying things (mv/cp), deleting things (rm), listing things (ls), and performing a series of advanced tasks on other things (e.g., grep, gawk, sed).

Having native access to these tools is really an eye opening experience for a Windows user. Normally I access a shell via a Putty connection to a Linux computer somewhere. This is certainly a workable setup, however, it does require a number of extra actions sometimes, like transferring files across the network for certain tasks.

I’m not sure if having direct access to a shell is worth the pain of trying to use an Apple computer, especially given the high cost of Apple software, but it’s certainly a nice change. I suppose I’m more likely to switch to a Linux computer than OS X but who knows what the future might bring. I’d certainly recommend that everyone check out an OS X installation, and being able to set it up on a portable USB hard drive really is nice.

Your 33 Black Angels
Posted by Micah Tapman on March 21st, 2008 filed in Music

A friend’s brother is the bass player for the band Your 33 Black Angels, link. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to buy their album online but I like the stuff on Myspace. Found it, http://cdbaby.com/cd/your33blackangels.

MediaWiki
Posted by Micah Tapman on March 3rd, 2008 filed in Tech Reviews, Technology

I’ve spent some time playing with MediaWiki these last few weeks. It’s really an amazing program. The level of sophistication available to an average user is sort of mind blowing. It’s a definite paradigm shift on the horizon. Interestingly, where I see the real value isn’t in the massive online sites, like Wikipedia, the value is to companies that run private networks and can host a semi-private wiki. This also applies to tech-savvy families, or any group that restricts web/network access at the perimeter. Within a closed environment the admins can unleash the wiki’s full suite of capabilities and make it into a central piece of an office’s technology system. And overall, I like the broader capability of MediaWiki compared to phpwiki and tikiwiki, see The great wiki debate for my original thoughts on this issue.

Information Transfer
Posted by Micah Tapman on March 19th, 2008 filed in Philosophy

I’ve spent a lot of time driving over the last several years and when I drive I do a lot of thinking. These years I’ve been thinking about the transfer of information from one person to another. I’m not really sure why I started down this path but it’s been a fascinating journey and one that’s likely to keep me busy for a long, long time.

I’m not trained in any type of information theory so these are just the thoughts of a novice. I’m hopeful that all of them have been considered before by other people, and even better I hope that lots of people out there already know this stuff.

Information is conveyed from person A to B. This is a common, everyday occurence. There are a few different mediums used for this transfer. I’ll list the ones that come to mind, perhaps there are more. Text, images, visual, spoken word, music, video, plays, opera/musical. I’ve listed these an order associated with the amount of information that can be transferred in a set period of time. For example, to look at the extremes, I think opera can convey more information in a minute than text.

Information is processed by us in a linear fashion. We accept input, process the input, and being accepting the next available input. If more than one input is available at the same time we queue the inputs, prioritize them, and process them as quickly as we can. Once the queues are all filled we lose track of any more input until we can clear space.

Information transfer between people follows this basic framework. And we can manipulate the medium in order to achieve certain goals.

Each medium has distinctive characteristics that help to strengthen or weaken transfer of the information. For example, I’m using text to convey my thoughts in large part because it allows for a generally linear transfer of information with little outside interruption. The reader can take these words anywhere and focus on them without interruption.

OOXML Versus ODF May Become a Moot Point
Posted by Micah Tapman on May 22nd, 2008 filed in Technology

According to the New York Times, link, the OOXML versus ODF battle may become a moot point. If so, this would be a good thing for all of us. Currently there are three competing formats in the document world, .pdf, .doc, and .docx. PDF is a lost cause becuase it’s not an editing format. It will remain as a standard for low-grade security against inadvertent editing and easy transmission of documents without fear of different presentations when different users open the file. The old MS format, .doc, is dying quickly and will be replaced within a year or two by .docx. The new MS format, .docx, is based on an XML structure and it’s proven to a good upgrade from .doc, however, it’s now facing (a little) competition from ODF because MS hasn’t fully opened the .docx format for other vendors.

My money is still on MS to win over everyone with the OOXML format, using .docx, but there is a chance that ODF could win out because MS will be incorporating the file format into Word in 2009. That’s probably not a big deal, honestly, because most people don’t know how to save a file under a non-default file format. Just look at how many people don’t realize they can save a Word file as a PDF straight from Word 2007.

I Hate When Bad “People” Make Me Rethink My Opinion Of Them
Posted by Micah Tapman on June 10th, 2008 filed in Technology

Apple’s announcement, link, of a new focus on parallel computing may make me rethink the whole Apple-thing. For years I’ve watched with amusement as people ga-ga’d over Apple’s mediocre offerings and “innovative” ideas, like stealing the Open BSD foundation for their operating system, but now, if they actually focus on a real problem, parallel computing, I may just need to pay more attention.

For those confused over parallel computing, it’s actually really simple. In the past a computer was a computer. If you asked it to add 2+2 and also add 3+3 it would first execute 2+2, store the result in memory, and then execute 3+3 and store the result in memory. We’ll assume it would then display those results to you in some way, 4 and 6, respectively. Obviously, doing two math problems took a little longer than either of the problems would alone. Some smart people came up with a brilliant idea…what if we used two computers at the same time? One of them adds 2+2, the other adds 3+3, and we combine the results at the end so we still get 4 and 6, respectively. Brilliant! The only problem was that in order to get two computers to talk to one another you needed to network them together. Most people recognize that networking is still a dirty word in the computer world. Best case scenario, it’s works pretty well assuming your benchmark is an slide rule ;-). The worlds best networks are still awful compared to the communication system inside a computer so networking two computers together is very, very slow, not to mention pretty complicated.

The parallel processing part enters the picture as a solution to this problem. Instead of needing two computers, Intel and AMD and other chips manufacturers were nice enough to make computers that are actually lots of computers. Nowadays most new computers are at least “dual core” meaning they are actually two computers in a single package. This allows you to access the power of parallel processing without any need to hookup to a network. The catch is that the software you’re using, let’s say Microsoft Excel, needs to know how to use a “dual core” processor in order for the parallel part to actually work.

What Apple is claiming is that they bought a company that already knows how to do this, and they are improving that product and adding it to the new version of their operating system. This could, in theory, make OS X very, very fast compared to the old style operating systems, like Windows XP. Best case scenario, Apple does solve this problem and makes it really, really simple for application developers (like Microsoft’s Excel team) to build programs that use more than a single “core”. If they do that it will mean a sea change in the world of technology. And I will say, Apple’s made progress along a similar path in the world of the user interface.

The reason Apple could be so successful is touched on by Steve Jobs, parallel processing is increasingly difficult as the number of computers involved increases. This means that software developers actually need to design specifically for parallel processing. Not to slight anyone, but that’s not normally a forte of programmers, in fact they usually don’t know anything about it. Parallel processing is still an esoteric part of programming and most people believe it’s not something that will ever be a core focus for software developers, rather it should be handled by the operating system, like Apple is trying to do.

Why is this a such a big deal? Because most programs do a lot of basically unrelated things. If you diagram a program’s logical structure, there are generally a lot of steps with very little relation to each other. These steps can be performed in any order as long as the results are combined in the right way. For example, the equation X = (2+2) * (3+3). A computer can easily break that into 2+2; 3+3, and 4*6…the only “sequence” issue is that we don’t know the numbers are 4 and 6 until we’ve done 2+2 and 3+3. Because of the breakout and recombination of data we probably won’t see a true 50% improvement in the speed of a dual processor parallel computer, but we could see a nice 30% or so improvement, in theory. This is exactly the same logic/reason that allows a construction company to build prefabricated houses, with different pieces built by different shops and then combined at the last minute.

Good luck to Apple. I hope one day to see them half as successful as people seem to think they already are.

Support our troops, volunteer to take their place.
Posted by Micah Tapman on June 2nd, 2008 filed in Misc

It offends me to see the “Support Our Troops” stickers around town because I know that most of those people never served, never actually supported the troops. They drive around in SUVs that guzzle the gasoline that ties us to the Middle East and pretend to be decent human beings by putting a bumper sticker on their car.

If anyone wants to support the troops they can do so by volunteering to serve in the military. Until you’ve at least tried to volunteer just keep you mouth shut about the war and supporting our troops. Bow your head, pay your taxes, and voice your opinion about something closer to your reality than poor people fighting for your right to drive an SUV in the city.

Or, if you have the guts, go ahead and volunteer, link.

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