Picks and Pans

I bought a used iphone 2G model for work. I didn't intend to use it as an actual phone. But, as time wore on, I started playing with it, and (mostly) prying it out of the hands of my 10 and 12 year olds and I've grown to like it.

Oddly, I've yet to activate it. I suppose I will soon, but the idea of spending $75/month is a little painful right now. I guess I'm paying $50/month for my current phone, so maybe it's not that much of an increase.

The most fun part for me has been the mp3 player. I have a lot of music on our home file server, all legally paid for and ripped from CD's. Except for the mp3's I downloaded directly from Amazon (THANK YOU Amazon for selling MP3's!). Anyway, all of the music is legit. And now I can load it onto the phone and listen to it as I walk to and from work. Heh - I've become one of those "young people" who wear headphones. But I swear it's great to listen to music on the way to work.

I may have to upgrade to the 3G version, however, if only for the EDGE and GPS. I think the GPS might come in pretty handy.

I'm a little sad because my sleek little MP3 playing Sony Ericson slide phone is still pretty cool. I didn't intend to cheat. It just happened.

One thing I will mention - using iTunes can be a real pain. It's a very pretty interface but for the first time user it can be pretty confusing. I spent 15 minutes trying to figure out how to get music into it from a file on my hard disk. It should not be that hard.

I should also mention that the apps you can buy (or download for free) from the Apple "app store" are pretty cool. There's a lot of things to browese through. A few too many, to be honest. I would be nice to find some place the reviews the apps and recommends the best ones. Naturally my son (he's 10) immediately downloaded the Star Wars "light saber" app. Even I find it fun after a few coctails.

Even without activation the 802.11 connectivity make it a very useful device. I can browese, get weather, stock info, you tube, send email, etc...

All in all, I like it. And I didn't think I would.

Posted by Brad at 9:31 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I had a nice year long run with a web hosting company (www.aqhost.com)
which ended in disaster. I stopped getting email from them in
December and then they shut me off and deleted my account on
12/31/2005.

They claim they sent me email throughout December but I never got any of it and my qmail SMTP logs don't show any email from them. I get a lot of email and I log all the headers so I know if something didn't arrive.

Anyway, the summarily deleted all my blog info. I had no backup (oops) but fortunately between the Internet wayback machine and Google I have been able to reconstruct most of the entries.

And, now I'm using a different method to archive and submit them which is based on one of my machines :-)

Needless to say I've chosen a new web hosting service with different policies.

In the end I've concluded that their billing system made a mistake (my credit card works fine) and their email never reached me. But they seemed uninterested in helping me or even looking into the problem so I wish them luck and have moved on.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Some of my embedded work is on X86 (believe it or not). The "tcc"
compiler is very, very small and very very fast. At 140k it can
fit on small CF file systems. And with the "-run" option it makes C
into a scripting language.

It's an impressive piece of work, capable of compiling the linux kernel.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I know it sounds like Buckaroo Bonzai, but I have a soft spot for people on a mission.

The folks at Aradillo Aerospace are building a new type of rocket engine.

It's "throatless". I'm going to say this means that if it can be made to work (where work = not melt down or blow up) it could mean that a normal machine shop could be building rocket engines capable of putting your neighbor into orbit.

Pretty neat stuff. Certainly more fun than helping McDonalds exploit MP3's with fake-fat fries.

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This enterprising young man was able to generate RF signals a VGA card. Thought that was a pretty neat trick and made me think of some other possible uses.

After all, it's just a high speed bit stream.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This is not very exiting, but people have been asking me about it. I have a small collection of MPC 8xx (850, 823e, 860) HDLC drivers. Most present a network interface but one I hacked allows userland access to the HDLC frames and modloadable 'filters' in the kernel which can do basic protocol work.

Here's the tar file

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Digikey and Freescale have created an interesting contest around a new HC12
chip. The chip is interesting as it's an SOC with ethernet, an HC12 16 bit
cpu, ram and flash. It also has SPI and I2C ports.

The contest is interesting in that you submit a proposal. The best 10 proposals are picked and given an eval board. They have 2 months to make their project work. At then end one winner is picked.

The prize is a 4-wheeler, which I don't get at all, but at least it comes with a trailer ("hello ebay!").

Here is the contest page.

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I was reading an article in Electron Design (04/14/05, pg 46) about DRAM speeds ("DRAM Advances Splinter to meet many system needs"). I was amazed at the new speeds for DRAM. I thought things stopped at about 166Mhz. Apparently not so. There is now DDR, DDR-2 and soon to be DDR-3. The seeds go from a pedestrian 100Mhz up through 1.6GHz. Last time I checked 1.6GHz was RF territory. I guess you need to be an antenna person to design SDRAM layouts.

I was confused, so I made a little table. It scared me.

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I want one of these. Apparently it's from Toyota.

picture of 'walking foot' with person inside

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Someone on a mailing list I'm on was asking about small o/s's. Someone else suggested "contiki".

It's a nice small O/S with a user interface. Might be the right thing for a small handheld, who knows. I like the look of it.

Someone else mentioned UniFLEX. That archive is amazing becuase there it's written for the 6809, has FORTRAN, Cobol, Pascal and C. Wow.

And of course, others mentioned MicroC/OS-II. . Certainly a good choice for real-time. I've used it and liked it.

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Virutech, Inc. claims to have a product, Hindsight, which is a debugger which can run programs backward.

Apparently it works with Virtutech's Simics product, which is a system level simulator. Batteries not included. And you have to use DML, their modeling language.

Still, for some projects it could be a life saver.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Who would have thought that your cell phone would become the place to store your credit card? It makes perfect sense to me now, but just like cameras in cell phones, I didn't see it coming.

NTT Docomo Inc. in Japan is testing contact-less card support in cell phones. The JR train lines in Japan have used contact-less cards (like those cards you wave in front of the computer room door) for a few years. Apparently now cell phones can emit this protocol. Here's an interesting overview.

And hey,it's a standard. ISO/IEC 18092. 10cm range using 13.56MHz according to an article in EE Times ("Japan Mobile Phones Test Transaction Tech"). Manchester encoding of a 212-kbit/second stream.

Apparently there are chips from a Sony venture, Felica Networks, Inc.

Docomo is calling it "Mobile Wallet".

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This is potentially interesting. A Hybrid CPLD/FPGA which has (it appears) some mask work done at the fab and the rest is reconfigurable as a CPLD.

Could be perfect for medium volume projects.

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I've always liked Bob Cringely. He used to throw great partied at MacWorld. Plus, he built his own plane (or tried to).

And, he's turned into an interesting technologist.

I think he's onto something with his perspective of "little wireless platforms which run linux". The LinkSys WRT54g he talks about is one such platform.

There is also a version of the WRt54 which uses a different CPU but has two POTS phone connections. It needs to run linux.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

TI has announced a new ARM7 cpu, the TMS470. It's got built in flash and RAM as well a some interesting interfaces.

While the smallest pin count is high (80 pin LQFP) it will fill a nice space between smaller 16 bit micros. The smallest part has 64K flash and 4kb of ram. This is a little small but workable. A larger 144 pin part has 1MByte of flash and 64kb of ram.

I'm still enamored with the Philips LPC2138, however, because of it's 64 pin package and it's large (512kbyte) flash space for code.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I managed import old copies of my pre-blog "pick and pans" letter using a simple awk script. I'll place them here for posterity. Or something.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It's a new age in IDE disks. Volume is up (way up) and quality is down (ahem, not sure how far). I've noticed that disks last about 2 years. In fairness, it's often the power supplies which go first.

After loosing too many IDE hard disks I decided to switch to RAID on my file servers. I thought this would be hard but it turns out to be easy. The first thing I did was buy a new, cheap PCI IDE controller. Then I bought two 80gb hard disks (Maxtor). I made them both masters and plugged them into the PCI dual IDE controller. I learned this trick from a friend who claimed it was easier to install a new HD to upgrade linux than install over an existing install (he was right).

Convincing linux to use two hard disks as a single RAID-1 array was easy. Interestingly I had one disk fail the first night I installed it. It turns out my power supply had a lot of connectors daisy chained with a lot of fans on one leg and the IDE drive did not like this. I cleaned up the disk power distribution and the disk was happy again. At least I got to test the RAID array. It noticed the drive was down, took it out of service and kept working. Bravo.

One thing to note. I've had one sever for about 5 years and in that time two (2) IDE disks have failed and none of the IBM SCSI disks in it have failed. My impression is that SCSI disks are just plain better and more reliable.

So, I'm now completly sold on RAID-1 for file servers. I won't go back to risking my data to a sinlge IDE disk, even with nightly backups.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Does your TV run linux?

Your next one might. It seems Sony is going to deploy about 30 tv's all of which will run Linux.

Certainly my TIVO runs linux.

Is my car next?

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While talking with some friends about a person looking to 'retrain' as a Linux admin (after 21 years as an IT person), someone made a humorous comment.

I had been ranting about Walmart employees being the largest group of comsumers of free state health care (because they get no health coverage from their employeer).

He suggested the person become a Linux admin for Walmart in China while, at the same time, trying to organize a union.

That seemed to summarize my views perfectly :-)

I personally this it's shameful that the nation's largest employeer is 'taxing' people like me who pay state income tax. It appears I'm personally subsidizing the Walmart corporation.

Here another article about corporations free-loading off the state.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I found an interesting article in EE Times about Philips and 90nm fab. It talked about the upcoming LPC3000 familty of ARM cpu's from Philips, with biult in flash and ram. Looks like it has a ARM926F core and 64k of sram.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I think I've seen this in the news before, but I liked it so much I thought I'd add it in.

This is a device that detects when a radial saw is about to cut your finger and instantly stops the saw. The demo (on a hot dog) is amazing.

SawStop LLC was formed to make active devices for woodworking equipment.

It would be great to work for a place like that and feel really good about what you are doing, instead of say, helping exploit low paid Chinese workers while helping to polute the Chinese countryside all to create a lower cost product.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Year of the ARM SOC

Seems like everyone and his brother is making an ARM SOC. I'll swear there are 50 different vendors making them. Do we need all of these? I guess so. Intel, Sharp, Fujitsu, Samsung to name a few. It is nice because each one seems a little different.

It's also nice because building a small embedded device which runs linux is now pretty much a commodity. Anyone can string up a cpu with some SDRAM and flash and make something pretty powerful. Amazing.

I'm trying it with a Sharp ARM chip. We'll see how it goes. One thing is for sure - I have great respect for cad operators who can layout a dense board quickly.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

My vote for the cool SOC of the year (2003) is the Xilinx Virtex II Pro. It's a PPC 405 with a giant fpga. It's also a lot of IP which does all of the normal things like ethernet, serial, etc...

Maybe everyone knows this but looking over the interface docs I was having some major deja-vu from some work I did for IBM a few years back. It sure looks like the guts of the IP all came from IBM. Personally I like this because my impression is that IBM folks up in VT did a really nice job most of the time. (except for those odd PPC DCR registers - oh well, can't ask for everything)

Anyway, I've always been frustrated by this controller or that and always wanted to tweek things in the cpu/peripheral interface. Now it appears I can. We'll see... I plan to try.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I've been doing some PIC programming lately. I really love Microchip's parts. Simple, cheap, effective. The 18F series is my current love. The 18F458 has lots of flash, a CAN controller, serial an a little RAM. I wired one up to a Cirrus 8900 ethernet chip and write a simple TCP stack for it. Amazing huh? Other have done this before me, but I was amazed how easy it was to do and how robust the part is.

Now I have a simple ethernet device which does serial, parallel, CAN for very cheap. Can't beat that.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

"The day the music died..."

What hath venture capital wrought?

dateline 2000: Way too much money chasing to many bad deals. Way too
much money put into marginal or even bad ideas. Insane valuations.
Insane investments.

dateline 2002: many, many, many failed startups. everyone is running
scared. M&A has slowed or stopped. IPO's have gone away. Companies
are running out of money and can't sell anything.

We end up in the "last money in wins" scenario. Greed rules.
Fairness and ethical behavior are left for sissies. Money is put
into companies with terms which would have been denounced as ridiculous
in the "good old days".

If I see another company "refinanced" with a last round liquidation
multiplier of 4x and all of the previous shareholders crammed down
into worthless common, I'll puke. Or go postal. It's hard to say.

Certainly all of the angel investors are going to run for cover
because this strategy leaves them with no return after taking
significant risk.

Hey big company CEO's - where do you think those juicy little start ups
come *from*? They come from angel investors, that's where. And later,
the VC's come in. But in the beginning there are only angels. If you
screw the angel investors by buying companies and giving the original
common shareholders nothing, guess what they will do? They will stop
investing. And guess what will happen to your stream of juicy little
start ups? it will go away.

There, I said it.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

System-on-chip cpu's are coming like a train. The first one I spent time
with with Motorola's 8xx line, the
860, 850 and 823. These chips had
all the peripherals on the chip on one big melange. Static memory interface
for flash, SDRAM interface for memory, an MMU, serial ports and built in ethernet.

Needless to say it ran linux well, thanks to people like href="http://www.embeddededge.com">Dan Malek. About the same
time two chip SOC sets like the Intel
SA1110/SA1111 came about and
helped in the low-power area. More about ARM and low-power later.
Why can't MOT ever make a low-power cpu?

The 850/823's are great but I wish MOT would allow people to write
microcode for the serial engine inside it. It's certainly running some
sort of microcode and it would be nice to be able to fix bugs and do
custom work with it.

I can't much too many really flattering things about Intel and it'a ARM
work except, "how many times can you EOL the SA1110 before no one will
believe you?". Sure seems like the marketing people keep trying to kill
it when at the last second the sales people say "but hey, we're selling a
*lot* of these". Maybe it's just me :-)

I next ran into the Alchemy (now AMD)
Au1100 line. Nice SOC. Everything but
the kitchen sink and all the ants (bugs) too. Still, they seem to have a nice
road map and do seem to be fixing some of the bugs. Seems that all too
often large companies by IP and slap it into their chips without bothering
to test it in a rational way. Sure it passes someones vectors or testbench
but the tests don't reflect what normal mortals do... I keep finding the
same USB host and function bugs. Some day I'll meet the guy who wrote that
verilog :-)

The AU1100 line is very fast (400Mhz) but also rather power hungry.
And not very incline to sleep. On the other hand the ARM SOC's can't
get past 200Mhz but have many low power features.

I'm looking forward to next year, with even more SOC's and more power
conscious SOC's.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

"Metricom to close Ricochet"

This is sad. I thought that this idea was strong enough to live in
some metropolitan areas at least. The problem (IMHO) is that VC's
often kill the idea by pushing the "big score/massive expansion"
rather than the "slow but sure wins the race" strategy. I can't tell
you how many CEO's I've talked to recently who have told me about
their board meetings over the past two years. All the same. Yelled
at for not expanding fast enough ("sure, we'll make sure the money is
there") followed by getting yelled at for having no cash ("why did you
spend all the money?").

I think this would be excusable if most of the VC's in the world had
never actually run a company before, but I've seen this behavior out
of almost all of them (not all, thankfully), including the ones who
have had harsh P&L responsibility in the past. hi ho.

Bryan Prohm, a wireless industry analyst for Gartner (market
research and consulting firm) has previously described it as "the only
logical Darwinian outcome."

Who is this guy and what's his rational for making that sort of
statement? I think he missed the point. I doubt he ever used the
technology.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Have you used an 802.11 PCMCIA card? I'm using one right now, from my
kitchen table. When the price went below $100/card I jumped and never
looked back. This technology, as a user, is amazing cool. As an engineer
is pretty poor, but since when has technical eligance won?

Sites on the net are reporting 20miles using a yagi ("yah-gee") antenna. This,
with reasonable math behind it. I saw a huge parabolic connected to an
802.11 at a research facility near me. They where getting amazing distance
and 2mb/sec.

I have to believe this will have some noticable effect on the "last
mile" problem. I want want to send voice over it as well as data.
When I mention this all of my qeek friends screem "QOS", a term I am
all too familiar with. I have to believe that like water going around
a dam, voice will find it's way into 802.11 (and blue tooth will disappear).

I had hoped that DSL would provice a $60/month T1 line into my house. That
does not seem to be in the cards. However, a 2mb/sec radio link does seem
to be not only practical, I think it it's something I could set up pretty
quickly right now. Check out Rooftops. I'm intrigued by guerrilla.net

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Would you wear a computer? I'm not sure I would. Except for maybe my
wrist watch, cell phone, pager, oh, and the keys to my car.

How
about one which had a 600x800 eyepiece? or one that had an audio
earpiece/microphone? Seen anyone with a phone and ear microphone
lately? (they really work well - I tried one).

There are research folks all over the country (and world) working on
wearable computing platforms. Some are pretty innovative. They
include thinks like cameras, microphones, GPS receivers,
accelerometers and IR sensors.

The notion of "context sensative computing" is often connected to
these platforms; For instance, the camera will "recognize" a face and
put info on the screen about the person. Or the GPS notice what
building you are in and guide you to the office you or looking for. Or
the bathroom. Or the nearest printer or coke machine. Seems dumb on
the surface, but I'd like a cell phone which would tell me how to get
out of a building during a fire.

• The PC goes ready-to-wear
  
• MIT's wearable group
  
• ETH's wearable group
  
• CMU's wearable group
  
• CMU's wearable computers
  

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

My accountant told me he had clients break down and cry
in his office this year. On one hand I totally understand. On the other, I'm
not sure I do. Did people actually think that money existed? What if everyone
had tried to sell their CSCO or Redback shares at the height of the
market? The price would have dropped. There would have been no
market for the market makers to manipulate.

Sorry, I just had to say that.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I sat in my truck on the morning of April 17th (I live in Mass, we have
ridiculous holidays here and taxes were delayed one day) and wrote checks
to the government. It was depressing but not unexpected.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I moved my office recently and actually managed to move my phone lines and
DSL line in 2 weeks. I found this amazing since the building I moved into
had no physical lines to it (they had been cut several years before and
the building was unoccupied).

Verizon (and I can't believe I'm saying this) did a really excellent job,
scheduling the work and getting the lines installed. My DSL provider
is Covad. They also did an excellent job following Verizon and scheduling
their install. There was a problem (the line they grabbed in the CO went
into someone's house instead of my office) but they corrected the mistake
overnight and got the line installed. I was very impressed.

Covad (and UUNet behind them) has been flawless for me for over a
year. I think there may actually be room for one company to provide
DSL after the incombent (in this case Verizon). While Verizon did a
great job on the phone lines and copper, I've heard nothing but bad
things about their DSL service. It's ashame, because they really seem
to be trying to provide good customer service on the phone side.

AT&T, on the other hand, seems to be trying to create new lows in customer
service with their 'local dial tone' service. I switched my business service
and had nothing but trouble. It took me seven (7) trouble tickets to get
my voice mail working. Worse, when I tried to switch back to Verizon it
took Verison 3 weeks to call me back and that was just to schedule an
interview with their "Wecome back" service. hah.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This is an amazing product. I love it. If you need to run Linux as your
native OS but also need to run Word and Excell this will do it for you for
only $50. It works great, does not eat a lot of memory and runs fast. I tried
VMWare, another great product but it was huge overkill for the causual Office
user. It was also (imho) too expensive. (aside: vmware is perfect if you
are a developer or q/a person and need to boot several o/s's and need that
level of control - it's a great product but more than I need).

Win4lin installed cleanly (well, ok, I had to patch my kernel but hey,
this is linux) and has been great. I am so happy that I can now boot Win98SE
and run Office. It has changed my computing life. http://www.win4lin.com.
I can't say enough good things about this.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I recently ungraded my home machine from Windows NT 4.0 Sp3 to Windoew 2000.
Everyone I talked to said they liked Win2k. I finally took the plunge because
the video editing software I wanted to try did not run on NT.

Well, the upgrade was a little rocky but it did work. First off I needed to
have 600MB free on my C: drive. hah! who has 600mb free on C:? Not me,
that's for sure. Then, after it installed and rebooted in Win2k (insuring
that I'd *never* be able to run WinNT again) I got a blue screen. Bummer
dude. Luckily I've been here before and held back the urge to convert the
drive to NTFS. I went to MS's web site and noticed some tech notes on
DirectCD crashing the Win2k setup. The note stated how to turn off the
services which DirectCD had installed. I was able to boot a DOS (remember dos?)
floppy and simply remove the bad .sys files. (I used to write NT services
so I know what to look for :-) This fixed the problem. I want to thank
my guardian angel for putting that web site entry together...

Anyway, it booted up and the setup worked. I actually like Win2k. It's
a bit of 'fresh and new' UI and seems to work well. All my old apps work
fine (so far). I'm now a 2000's kind-of-guy.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A friend warned me when I said I was going to work on a USB controller. He
said it was a huge spec and it would take me months to figure it all out.

I didn't believe him. I went off to write a host controller for the PowerPC
8xx chip. Six month passed. Turns out he was right. Still, it was fun
to learn the entire spec from top to bottom.

Who ever claimed that USB was going to make anyone's life easier was a liar.
There are days when I am amazed it works at all. While I like many things
about it it seems way too complex for the job it need to do. Maybe I'm
just too simplistic.

It's been interesting to track the Linux USB project for the last
year. They have been slowly adding devices while struggling with
controller driver issues and (mostly) software interface issues. The
first generation of USB stack was simple and worked for keyboards and
mice but didn't help more complex devices. This was scrapped for the
2.3.x/2.4.x kernels. The new API is better but has some
synchronization holes in it which are both poorly specified and poorly
understood. But, as with most things linux it will get sorted out and
the problems will get solved.

Most of the linux code is pretty good. The UHCI and OHCI drivers are,
well, while working they still have some bugs and problems.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Here's my list:

• That new concept Porsche (it's only about $250k but my wife says no)
  
• A TIVO which connects to ethernet and will download movies from the
  internet.
  
• An 802.11b network in my house for $200
  
• A 1.5mb DSL link to my office for $60/month
  

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Just musing about DSL. There was an article in the globe today
(12/17) about DSL. I'm finally getting a bigger picture here.

I've had a lot of cognitive dissonance about DSL lately. On one hand
everyone is saying CLECs are in the toilet and on the other hand I keep
hearing about people connecting using DSL.

I think I finally figured it out (for me anyway).

Here's my impressions of the current DSL market

• - the clec market has, in fact, gone into the toilet. too bad.

• - many manufacturer's have been selling exclusively into the clec market.

• - manufacturer's who have been selling to big phone companies are doing ok.

• - Most of the CLECs seem to have been deploying SDSL boxes connected
  to RedBack DSLAMs.

• - The 'phone companies' are catching all the customers falling out of
  the dying clec's tree... There seems to be only room (economics wise)
  for 1-2 dslams in most CO's...
  

Apparent distilation:

• - DSL as delivered by clecs isn't going to be the goldmine we thought it was. It turned out to be too expensive and too hard to differentiate.

• - ADSL will be continue to be delivered in volume buy the traditional phone
  companies. will revive the gasping customers of the failed clecs.

• - It would be interesting to talk to a sales person from Redback and find
  out who they sold to last year and who they will sell to next year.
  

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I feel like I'm the only person on the planet left without a DVD player.
I just can't figure out what to do. What I really want is a DVD player
which will output some form of HDTV format. Then, I could see a clear
upgrade path and I'd eventually have a player which output video in
a format I actually want to view.

I really want an integrated DVD player with a decoder and an amp.
Other wise you end up with a huge tv/video/stereo monstrosity which no
one can operate. A friend of mine had an existing TV, VCR and Stereo.
He made the mistake of adding a Satellite TV and a DVD player in short
order. He tried to wire them all together and found that his wife could
no longer watch tv.

It's no wonder. Just getting everything powered up is a feat, let
along getting everything in the right 'mode' to pass the audio and
video through the right processors and out of and into the right boxes
is nearly impossible. You end up with 4 remotes and no hope of ever
just pushing one button.

He ended up disconnecting the satellite and DVD and putting them on
another tv. Not exactly high tech.

One simple solution (which I plan to use) is to connect the DVD player
to "input 2" on the TV. That way everything works as it does today.
(and, btw, the fact that the VCR trumpts everything because it's last
in line is a huge blessing which I never plan to remove until the VCR
goes away).

What these devices all need is a common communication bus which they
all live on. That way the TIVO, by far the smarted and easiest to use
device I own could force them all to obey and 'do the right thing'.
(I think it's no coincidence that the TIVO runs linux, btw.)

Back to my anxiety, I want to bye the Sony DVPS360. But I also want 5
channels of sound. But I don't want one of those monster sound
processors with 400 buttons which my 2.5 year old will surely
touch/change/break. (you should have seen what he did to the on/off
switch of this old laptop).

Sony does make a box with an integrated decoder and amp. It's probably
no more than boom-box audio quality, but it is simple (it only has an
volume control on the outside)...

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Have you tried to run any applications on a PC with onl 32mb of memory
lately? It's pretty much impossible. It seems all of the application writers
in the world have gotten together and decided that their apps must have a working set of at least 32mb and take at least 64Mb of total memory.

I recently tried to get away with running Linux on a laptop, with the
idea of using some 'other' word processor to look at Microsoft Word
documents. Hah. Near as I can tell this can't be done. And, while there
are some interesting word processors out there for linux, they are generally
pretty large. Here's a sample:

• Sun's StarOffice
  
• Corel's WordPerfect
  
• AbiWord
  

Staroffice is pretty, but also pretty huge. I'd say 128Mb is a
minimum. It does import work docs better than most. WordPerfect is
pretty also and does not include a huge frame work around it. It
won't import some of my word docs, however. AbiWord is the smallest. It actually seemed to have a reasonable footprint but also would not import some of my word documents.

As a wildcard I tried "Wine", the windows emulator. It actually ran
WINWORD.EXE and EXCEL.EXE from my hard disk. A rather amazing feat.
But they both needed about 64MB more memory than I had so my little
machine paged itself within an inch of it's harddisk's life. (I later upgraded to 80mb and wine worked better. I may actually use word under wine if I find it's stable)

During this process I found I was running Netscape 4.72 and decided to
upgrade to 6.0. Again, major bloatware. 32mb was suddenly way too small
a machine for Netscape.

Personally I think it is a C++ conspiracy formed by people who don't
realize that an automatic C++ object declared inside a function will
call about 8 zillion constructors and allocate 12.5mb of memory each
time the function is called, only to dump that 12.5mb of memory back
on the heap when the function is exited...

If you really want to make a full time job out of this, you might check
out http://www.linuxlinks.com/Software/Office/"

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

CPLD's are getting really big there days. So big that people are putting
enture cpu's in them. This motivates people (like me) to try and create
some small devices to do specialized work.

Stage 1, synthesis. Cypress sells
their Warp software pretty cheap ($99) which has a resonable VHDL
compiler and simulator and fitting for (of course) all of their parts.
The simulator is pretty simple but reasonable for small jobs. It
certainly can handle my USB decode project with ease.

Stage 2, schematic capture. If you want to build a small project
using a CPLD you might think, "well jee, I only want to make a small
4x6 inch PC board, with say, 4 layers, so how hard could it be?".
I found that it was not easy to find an inexpensive package to do this.
(if you know of one, please send me email about it).

Most packages seem to be too simple and only offer 2 layers. Other packages
have 'demo modes' which limit the number of pins to say 100 (which is not
very useful for evaluation if you want to route a part with 192 pins). The
packages which allow 4 layers are over $500.

I may have to break down and spend $400 on CircuitMaker.

Send me email if you like this and/or would like to be on our mailing list.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Virtual circuits, point-to-point links and distributed phone
switches.

Looking at the phone poles around my house I'm begining to wonder
if running copper pairs back to a central office makes sense anymore.
I'm dreaming of a distributed phone system.

If bandwidth is essentially free, or very cheap, why not dedicate
bandwidth to each house?

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Listing to the debates in the IETF on multicast address assignment
has me wondering if they have missed the point. I'm having a vision of
a large multinational
ISP decideing to 'sell' a fixed IP address to a content provider (say, CNN),
and the content provider just streamed content out. For the right amount
of money, the ISP could guarantee a fixed amount of bandwidth for the
multicast traffic.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Born 3/14/98 12:08pm

7lbs, 7oz

19 1/2"

Not much else going on this month, sorry... See you next
month!

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Eeeyow. There are rented "bucket trucks" all over the suburb of
Arlington, MA where I live. It appears the RCN, the new phone, cable
& Internet company is serious. They plan to make Arlington the first
town in Mass to have two cable companies. The rumor is that
$19.95/month will get you phone and cable.

They are pulling what looks like shielded fiber cable all over town.
I would love to know what kind of equipment they are going to use.
Will they multiplex the phone and cable over one line or use separate
lines? Will the phone be over a shared media or all point-to-point back
to a CO? They have torn up the street for some serious wiring in front
of their new office.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I recently moved (all of one block), so I had to move my cable modem
and ISDN connections. What a fiasco. The cable company disconnected
our cable 2 times in the weeks before the move and then lost the order
completely and did not show up on the install date. The only good
part is that the old cable modem still worked at the old house and
continued to keep my email flowing... (moral: do I really want
to get phone service from my cable company?)

On the advise of a colleague (thanks Chris!) I decided to convert one
of my analogue lines to ISDN rather than opt for a fresh install. I
called "1-800-GET-ISDN" and told them I wanted to keep the old phone #
(it is my fax line). The called back in a week, as promised, and gave
me the "SPIDs" - those ridiculous numbers which look like long phone
numbers with "0000" or "0101" at the end. (imagine if you had to configure
your phone with SPIDs before it work - NO one would have working
dial-tone). Anyway, they checked out the line and gave me the SPIDs
and said that in two weeks my line would magically convert to ISDN.

The morning of the cutover I noticed I'd lost dial tone so I connected
an ISDN TA to the line. No joy - I could not get any D channel
activity (the "D" channel is one of the 3 channels used in ISDN; the
D, B1 and B2. The D channel is for signaling and the "B" (bearer)
channels are for voice & data. If the D channel is not "up", you can't
talk to the phone switch to send and recieve calls.

Around 11am I called to inquire. They said it was scheduled but was
not up yet. Shortly after I noticed I had the D channel working and I
could make and receive calls. OK! Not bad. Worked right away. This
is nice because I used the existing premise wiring without any
changes. All of the other ISDN installs I've had required new wiring
in the house (mostly due to inexperience/paranoia I think).

So, the moral is, converting an existing line to ISDN is faster and
easier.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

If you live in the Boston area, have you noticed how nice the NYNEX
people have become? Helpful too. I have to wonder if this is a
result of the Bell Atlantic merger or the threat of competition.

I remember back in 1994 I could get a trouble ticket # from the repair
people and a guaranteed one hour call back. Then, in 1995 they would
not even open trouble tickets much less give you the number and you'd
be luck if you could get a 24 hour call back. The NYNEX people all
sounded angry and the service got real bad. (on more than one occasion
I had T1 lines go down for 3-4 days and NYNEX people playing games
with not being able to test lines because no one was at the CO, etc...)

That all seems to be over now. I recently got a trouble ticket number
on a residential line. And, I got a callback. Amazing. I
like the new NYNEX/Bell Atlantic...

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I Can't wait to see what 1998 brings. Both in terms of new services
and new/merged companies. Seems like staying at home just gets better
and better from a networking point of view (56k modems, cable modems,
ISDN, ADSL). The stock market is going through the roof and this
seems to be the fuel for acquisition after acquisition. The "VC event
horizon" must be about 18 months no days. What a shame. Let's here
it for taking the long view... (and really delivering a solution to
the customer).

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Given that bay is willing to pay $156M for New Oak, they must see some
huge value in VPN technology. I'm still hazy on the application,
however. I use Microsoft PPTP right now, which offers some encryption
and some security, but it's a pain to setup and use. It's nice when
it works, however. I use it over a cable modem modem. Nothing less
than T1 speeds end-to-end.

But will normal folks use this over modems? I understand the
technology (i.e. how a NAS can to PPTP or L2TP style tunneling from the
modem to something inside the corporate firewall) but I'm not sure I
get the application yet.

It's interesting to me that large companies seem to be willing to put
$5k routines in people's houses, in front of their cable modems in
order to guarantee security over the public data network (i.e. the
Internet). If so, there is gold in them there hills. Perhaps Bay
sees that gold. Seems like they should have a piece of customer
premise equipment also.

An interesting bet - will MIS people trust software running on W95 or
NT to do the encryption? My guess is that anal-retentive MIS/network
types won't go for it. They will want it done in a separate box which
only they control... Plus, what if I have two machines at home?

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Are you seeing adds for RCN in the paper? It all started when
I read about a weird thing in the local paper. It seems that
Boston Edison and some other little firm had placed the
city council's underwear in a knot because they had petitioned
to pull fiber all over town and the dead-line for the council
to respond was only two weeks. They needed more time. But
legally Edison and the other little company were entitled to
their permit.

Turns out the other little company was RCN.

So, six months later I'm seeing adds about how bad NYNEX is
(did we need to be reminded?) and how they are going pull
fiber into our houses and give us phone, cable and Internet.

I want to believe. I want the fiber. I want a gigabit network
connection. But can they really do it? I'm not sure I want to
give up my copper phone and copper cable connection just yet.

But if they did pull fiber to my house. Wow. That would be
cool. And, if they did they could give me phone, cable
and Internet and it would probably be cheaper and only one bill.
Humm...

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I remember reading about someone (AT&T?) about to deploy a box
you put in your attic. It would be a wireless box giving you
cable, phone and Internet. Has anyone seen one of these?
I might not stand too close to it if I did :-)

My theory has been that there would be eight different ways to
get Internet: copper, fiber, wireless, blah blah, etc... It looks
like we're getting close.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A friend recently discovered that there are new modems out which
"do voice". I don't mean you can talk over the phone while using
the modem (I think that was a dumb idea). I mean there
are modems which when connected to your computer can digitize
speech and turn digitized speech into sound. So what? Well, it
means you can have your computer answer the phone and act as
an answering machine or turn on the air conditioner or tell you if
you have email. Sounds geeky, I know, but it's just the sort of
application which I love. My next phone will be a computer with
a web server and one of these modems :-)

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Did I mention that my cell phone is also a pager? You can send
me email and some nifty software will send it to my phone as an
alphanumeric page. I think this is way cool. Now I want my
phone to display video...

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Wow boy. I'm not sure. I have a cable modem. I love it. But
it has failed. And when it did they said I would have to wait
a week to have it fixed. My heart sank. I get so much email
that this would cause a serious problem. My mail server can
not be off-line for a week.

So, I installed an ISDN backup system. Luckily this is easy for me.
For many people this would be hard/impossible/expensive. The good new
is that my cable modem came back to life the next day. It turns out
that for a while it was flakey when it rained (I now understand this
is not an uncommon phenomena for cable modems).

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

OK, so I have my cable modem, personal domain, mail server, etc...
I even back up my files to tape. I discovered recently I'm my
own personal mini-ISP to myself. How scary.

So then, I discover that my packets are taking 1/4 second to get
from my house to work when I can drive there in 15 minutes. This
might see OK but if you do the math and remember how fast the
speed of light is, it should take a lot less than 1/4 second or
250 milliseconds (we say "250ms" in the trade).

So, I do some probing (it turns out that 250ms is *very* noticeable
if you are typing in a telnet session) and found out that my packets
went from Boston to San Francisco and then back to Boston then to my
office. Nothing like a little trip to the coast and back. This
little "mis-routing" was cause by a mis-configuration at a place
known as MAE-east. A "MAE" is a metropolitan area Ethernet. This
is an idea cooked up by a company know as MFS and now known as WorldCom.
Loosely it's a way to connect up a bunch of Ethernet speed LAN's
using fiber and routers. Think of it as a room in a building near
Washington DC with lots of routers and blinking lights. Anyway,
in this room many (but not all) ISP's connect their networks together.

When they connect them together they need a way to communicate who
and what is where on the combined network. These days we use
"routing protocols" to let routers speak to each other about what
is where. SO, if the routing protocol says the wrong thing, or
if one router misunderstands or misinterprets the routing protocol
information, your packets go to San Francisco instead of Billerica.

OK, that's complex stuff. Imaging if you understand it, but don't
work for a ISP. Imagine trying to explain to them that there is
a routing problem. I did this for 2 (yes, two) months before I got
my cable company to fix the problem. Ugg. Even the phone company
was not that slow. The eventually fixed the problem (one ISP
was emitting a BGP-4 MED which cause them to prefer a route to
MAE-west over a local route to MAE-east, for the routing geeks) and
now my packets take only 40ms to get to work (that's 5 times faster
and I am much happier).

I think the cable companies are much more at home dealing with
people who can not get to the ESPN web site, but this is complex
stuff at the bottom and not fully baked yet...

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Starting up new leased line Internet connections is pain. It's
pain for the users and a pain for the ISP. It's slow, error prone
and manual labor intensive.

For leased lines it would be nifty if the ISP would run PPP and
force the remote side to "log in". Once logged in it seems like
the ISP router could use RADIUS to assign the IP address to the
line and add any static routes. The router would then have to
'remember' the config and the associated leased line connection.
The pay back is that turning up new lines would be automagic and only
require a human if it did not work...

It would require that the remote router be able to identify itself
with some sort of "secret", but that's not hard. The identity should
also be tied to billing information so the 'back end' systems at
the ISP can start billing for the line when the initial log-in
occurs..

So what? Why is this important? Well, if the CLEC's (a nifty
acronym of the new wave of phone-company-like companies which
can rent copper lines from the existing RBOCs) appear like everyone
seems to think they will, and they start selling T1 lines to
mortals like you and me for $60/month, they won't be able to
turn the lines on fast enough to satisfy the demand. (sorry for
that run on - I got carried away).

Some folks believe that $60 T1 lines will cause explosive growth.
If one of the barriers to growth is how fast one can provision
new lines, automated provisioning will become very important.

I think there's a new protocol here, or at least some extensions
to RADIUS.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I just have to say it. Is Java the COBOL of the 90's? I used to
hear people say they would only program in Visual C++ and nothing
else. They wanted to windows programming and nothing else. They
wanted to be Microsoft junkies. I had this vision of thousands of
out of work Visual C++ programmers standing on a street corner
hawking windows apps for pennies.

Now I am seeing the same thing with Java. Java this, Java that.
So many coffee metaphors. Too many coffee metaphors. Not enough
computer science or just plain engineering.

I fear that people will be only able to make cute little animations
jump across the screen and no one will be left who can actually
tell me how the machine actually works.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I recently had an "episode" trying to get an ISDN basic rate
line to work (n.b. 'basic rate' is the terminology for the type
of ISDN line you would get in your house). The paperwork from
the phone company said the line was configured as "5ESS Nation ISDN".
This was odd, because two of the (many) choices when configuring an
ISDN router for a basic rate (a.k.a "BRI") line are "5ESS Custom"
and "Nation ISDN 1" (or "NI-1"). So, which to pick? 5ESS? NI-1?
We guessed 5ESS. The router would answer the phone but nothing worked.
We got garbage packets from the remote side.
HUmm... After a week of scratching our heads (and trying 1000 other
things) we had the bright idea to try "NI-1". Viola. It worked.

Now, it seems to be that the switch knew how it was configured. And
the router knew how it was configured. And since the router could
answer the phone the two where at least having a basic ISDN conversation.
So, why couldn't the router tell that the switch was configured for
NI-1?

It would have been really helpful if somehow we could have been
informed that we had the configuration wrong.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

You might notice that a rash of these pages appeared out of the
blue, many after the fact. I can blame that on several things.
First, I'm lazy. Two, I wrote up some of them and forgot to
put them up on the web (see #1). Three, I have disk problems
on my Linux box. Four, people who write paragraphs with
numbered sentences should go back and read Strunk & White.

Fell free to complain - that's the whole point.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

What's a VPN? A Virtual Private Network. A misnomer really,
or more of an anacranism. In the old days if you strung two
T1 lines between two sites you had a Private network, or "PN".
Now days if you run a 'tunnel' or encapsulated link between two
sites it forms a 'virtual' T1 or Virtual Private Network.

Lots of people seem to be convinced that this is the next wave
of "remote access". To me it looks like a giant extension cord
from my house to the office. To my ISP it looks like more traffic.
To Microsoft it looks like a way to sell more NT servers. To the
VC's it's just another gamble. I wonder what the corporate IS guys
think...

As the corporate firewall becomes a VPN server, more and more
Internet traffic will be via encrypted, authenticated tunnels.
Perhaps some day all Internet traffic will via virtual circuits
which are brought up and down on demand. Like phone calls,
only authenticated and encrypted. Sounds like ATM, huh? Don't
tell anyone I said that.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The world needs more VPN client tools. It sounds like Cisco and
Ascend are venturing into this world. No doubt others are too.
I use "PPTP" from Microsoft currently for NT systems and "ssh"
and the commercial "F-Secure" product from DataFellows (www.datafellows.com)
for Unix. I really like ssh. I found PPTP to be ok, but it's rather
complex and required me to hack code to get my firewall to pass the
GRE encapsulated traffic. Obscure point: VPN technology that does
not use TCP or UDP protocols may not work with off-the-shelf firewalls
or routers. If the VPN protocol (like the new L2TP protocol) uses UDP,
it's reasonably easy to convince a firewall or router to pass it.
Don't ask why. It has to do with recognizing protocol headers and
the fact that TCP and UDP headers have similar structure.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In something akin the "Bride of Frankenstein" I read about someone
porting SS7 software to Windows NT. SS7 is the protocol which
giant phone switches (like the AT&T 5ESS) use to talk to other
phone switches. So, why would you want to connect your NT server
to a giant phone switch with SS7? You wouldn't. But, you might want
to *replace* some of the functionality of the giant multi-million-dollar
phone switch from New Jersey with a much, much cheaper Windows NT box
if you were not so concerned about reliability or employing thousands
of engineers. Ever wonder why AOL is always in the news for their
outages? Just kidding.

Seems like a trend that people will be trying to do flanking maneuvers
around these giant phone switches for all sorts of reasons, including
toll reduction, call diversion, remote access, etc... Interesting
stuff. I always wondered how giant phone switches talk to each other
and now I can run it on my pentium at home.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Last months edition was a little light. What can you expect for free?
I'll try and be a little more verbose as the summer wanes and we move
into the fall. Stay tuned. I may also invite a few guest speakers
in.

Is it me or did June just fly by? I blinked and it was gone.
Perhaps it's the new job or maybe it's too much fast living in
cyberspace. Did you read about the woman who locked her children in a
room and spend 22 hours a day on-line with AOL? Let's just skip over
the obvious mental issues here and get to the really weird part. What
could be so interesting on AOL? No doubt this woman would have been
selling her children for cocaine if the calendar read 1981. I wonder
if she'll sue AOL for not putting warning labels on their chat groups.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

On the two misguided occasions when we chose to fly across the country
with our less-than-five-year-old child (more on the 5 year part in a
second), we bought an extra ticket and used a car seat. The 'cabin
attendants' where very impressed. I thought it was common sense.
I've come to find out that people think carrying their children on
their lap and risking their lives is "saving money". I actually
heard a woman tonight talk about going on "one last free vacation" with
her child on her lap before the child was "too old". I had to bite
my tongue.

I'm a licensed pilot (general aviation) and commercial jets scare the
$%#%$ out of me. You can not afford not to buy an extra seat
for your child. If the plane hits "rough air" (what us pilots like to
call "light chop") you will not be able to keep your arms around that
35 pound mass. I can show you the law of physics which make this so.
No amount of caring or loving will change these equations. Buy the
extra seat. Use a car seat. Or better yet, stay home until your
youngest child has reached the age of five. That's my plan.

I was in a commercial plane the other day and had an unusual
experience during the takeoff. The pilot pulled the nose up, realized
he did not have enough air speed, put the nose back down, waited about
10 seconds and then "rotated" again. I thought I was going to wet my
pants. No one else around me seemed the least be worried. Sometimes
it's better to be ignorant. This episode would not have been that
noteworthy expect that the plane was 3 hours late taking off because
the crew had not had the required time off between flights. So this crew
might have been, shall we say, fatigued. Guess what the #1 cause of
airplane accidents is - fatigue combined with schedule pressure.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Has anyone out there tried to write a Java program which injected data
back into the HTTP stream? I understand the Javascript can do it. It
seems that making Javascript and Java speak is at best difficult and
at worst really clumsy. Why did Netscape have to call it JavaScript
anyway? It has nothing to do with Java at all. It they intended it to be
an integration tool for Java one wonders what their criteria for
success was.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

OK, here's the truth about NT.

• It's wicked slow (even on my 266Mhz P-Pro II)
  
• It needs a lot of memory (128mb)
  
• The vm system does weird things and image activation fights with
  the file system buffer cache
  
• It's not as reliable as UNIX
  

There. I said it. Please note that I've been using NT for a long
time and like it. I am at that crux where using NT and UNIX are about
the same. I used to be a huge SunOS bigot. Then I became very
NetBSD/FreeBSD oriented. Then I discovered SVR4 and Solaris. Most
recently I turned to Linux (a lot, and I like it a lot). But the truth is
that if I had to trust my job to an OS I'd pick Sun Solaris 2.5.1 and
run it on a Sparcstation. Sad but true.

I like NT but it is anything but crisp. It seems to eat memory for
breakfast lunch and dinner. CPU also. It also has these weird effects
where apps will just hang now and then. Who knows why.

And the DOS baggage. Can we please loose the DOS baggage? No more
"C:" PLEASE. Can't we all just use UNC file names and live in peace?
And while were at it, can we use forward slashes everywhere? Thanks.
I'll be using an editor with 8-space-tab-stops thank you very much.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Why would anyone want to do this? Is it just me? I recently
configured a nice little router from Compatible Systems. It was
inexpensive, high quality and it did not have a C: drive. Why would I
allow one of the 1,000,000 things which can go wrong on an NT box to
jeopardize my routing? Routing needs to be like the phone system -
always available. Also, good NT boxes are expensive - good routers
are not. I'd pick a nice little router box over NT.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Ever set up a SOHO ISDN router? Whoo boy. Fasten your seat belts.
I have done it with several products and I must say the vendors have
sure gone out of there way to make it impossible.

Here's a great diagnostic:

	(516,1520650) c021: Automaton Layer Started

For the un-hip, "c021" is PPP LCP, or link control protocol. It's
documented in an RFC, which I'm sure most people have on-line. Not.
How about "Call connected. Starting PPP". Gosh, wouldn't that
be a nice message.

The box in question does not even tell you when the PPP negotiation
fails. No, that would be far to easy. I think you should have
to dive into the trace buffers to bring any product up.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Have I ranted about my cable modem recently? It's a really odd world
when I have more bandwidth and better connectivity at home then at
work. Well, I do. I love my cable modem. Everyone should have a T1
at home. I can watch the MBONE sessions, I can down load files. I
can even work from home. It's great. Continental
Cablevision (a.k.a. MediaOne) has done a fine job so far. The first
3 months have been great. We'll see what happens as they ramp up, but
so far it's a huge win for $50/month. (but now I want a T3 :-)

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I sometimes wonder if the real issue of the information age isn't
right-of-way and the ability to dig a trench to lay fiber cable.
Someone recently told me that the current limiting factor in the
growth of the Internet is the ability of the manufacturers to make
multi-mode fiber cable. I have this weird vision where all of the train
tracks are replaced with four foot trenches filled with fiber cables.
If this happens, there will be a lot of bandwidth available.

If there does end up being a lot of "dark fiber" for sale, many folks
may just rent "st-to-st connector" physical links and run SONET. Who
needs a common carrier?

With tons of low cost (not free, but low cost - like water) bandwidth
available won't the cost transfer from transport to content? We don't
seem to mind giving the UPS man $3 to deliver our $24 book in three
days. Content always seemed to be the important part to me but the
Internet seems to have it all backwards with free content and expensive
transport. In my opinion that should invert in the future.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I remember the "PicturePhone"... I was going to buy one as soon as they
where available. Something went wrong, however, and along with those
thousands of Popular Science covers it never made it to market.

I've been using the MBONE for a few years now. It's a cool experiment
which is not quite ready for prime time. I think it will be at some
point, perhaps soon. There's still some technology issues and many
routing and policy issues to be solved but meanwhile the applications
keep progressing.

The first application as audio. Next came video. I recently watched
Vint Cerf give a talk from Japan as I sat in my office in Boston. It
was great - I could understand everything and even view his graphs.
I enjoyed the talk and almost forgot the technology which brought it to
me (this is a good sign).

Now that sound cards and video capture cards are cheap (a reasonable
video capture card is now $99) I would think that video conferencing
over the Internet is going to increase. I ran into "cu-seeme" the
other day. It seems popular in many circles (including, unfortunately
people who like to sell sex). Mitch Kapor once said that it was
pornography which made the VCR take off. No doubt chat+video
conferencing will make the MBONE grow. Personally I'm happy not to
have to board an air plane.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It's interesting to me that people who know better often confuse basic
routing (which I'll call next-hop-reachability) with policy. Most of
todays routing systems are only concerned with next-hop-reachability.
They don't address policy at all. To me policy looks like "you go in
the slow lane because you're not paying as much as the guy who goes in
the fast lane".

Most of the routing policy discussions I've seen recently seem to have
gotten side tracked on some form of tag-switching. The tag-switching
seems like a way to prop up slow Ethernet switches and dumb ATM
switches instead of addressing the real policy issue.

I think ISP's will (or do) want to charge different rates for different
levels of service. This means policy should determine what path the
packets take, not reachability. I don't think the policy has to be very
complex, but it has to tie together the policy mechanism at a router
port (like bandwidth limiting and fair-share) with the end-to-end path
(like you take the oc-3 and the other guy gets the oc-12).

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I often wonder why the largest ISP's don't using out-of-band
signalling for routing information. The dynamics which routing
protocols create are fine for small networks but can create real
havoc in a large nationwide network.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Why not calculate all the routes in one place? These days when "next
hop shortest path / reachability" style routing is no longer correct,
we need to have a central place to apply policy. The interesting
thing about policy is that is has little to no place for dynamic
rerouting. Policy is a force for rigidity.

It sure seems like the people working on tag switching are more
interested in keeping their low-capacity switches and routers alive a
little longer than in implementing policy. What the world needs is
policy because policy equals differentiated billing rates. This looks
like a train to me.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Most people don't realize it but email can be routed just like network
packets. If one publishes their email address widely it doesn't make
sense to have to change it when you move your office. That's where
email routing comes in.

I would guess that large organizations with thousands of people find
this a nightmare. It's also something not addressed by mail systems
such as Microsoft Exchange or Lotus notes. This e-mail routing is
really a layer above (or below, depending on your vantage point).
It's between the final work-group email server and the
router/firewall.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Do NAS vendors ever actually use their equipment? My
guess is no. I'd love to know if the CEO of 3Com and US Robotics
actually use ISDN from home and call in to their office using 28.8
modems. They're probably too busy. My sense is that few people at
Shiva actually dial in from home. I'm sure the folks at Ascend don't
use their products (because if they did they'd notice all the bugs and
the fact that their boxes reboot all the time).

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

So why *did* we just toss out all bridges in favor of routers just
to put bridges (switches) back in?

Is switching mostly hype?

I don't really think switching is all hype, but it does seem like everyone
on the planet is making a layer 2 switch. And most are rather feature
poor.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Have you read all of the recent hype-ware from the 'big 3'? (Cisco, 3Com, Bay)
Find anything in there you could actually buy or use?
Not me. These companies are all hardware vendors, not software vendors.
I wonder sometimes if they need hype to push boxes.

What about Microsoft?

Don't you get tired of hearing that? I know I do. It reminds me of IBM twenty years ago. I think that Microsoft does an amazing job of making the desktop fun to use (OK, now you know - I love Outlook and Office 97. I used to be a Mac weenie. I've shed that addiction. Outlook is for me. I'm going to dump Meeting Maker and my HP 100 for Outlook and a USR Pilot. You heard it hear first.

But back to the top. Microsoft is a desktop O/S company. Despite what they say they're not a network company, not a data center company and not an enterprise company. You only have to ask any Fortune 100 IS person to learn the truth. They make a great desktop but don't ask them to federate your enterprise naming.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Have you noticed that SNMP statistics are not very interesting? Me
too. I want network events. And only interesting network event need
apply.

Why don't more servers send SNMP traps? It seems like the only thing
which will cause a trap on my network is the T1 going down. Thats like
the little red light on my dashboard lighting up when a wheel falls off
the car. I would like some traps from servers when problems happen.

DHCP, ARP and the Integrity of the LAN

Is it just me or is ARP a huge security problem on the LAN? It seems to me that anyone with Linux or FreeBSD can take down an entire segment just by publishing the IP address of the local router in their arp cache. Hummm... Perhaps what I want is an ARP server tightly coupled with my DHCP server. Perhaps the DHCP server should populate the ARP caches.

But then, I'll want authentication in my DHCP server. I'd like the DHCP servers to have a X.509 certificate and have the clients verify out before believing the server.

Between routing and the workstation is the corporate identity

Microsoft does not do well here and neither does Cisco. It's a whole new market to me.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I read an interesting article (no doubt written by someone at IBM)
that shipments of IBM 370 architecture machines has never slowed down
(now called S/390). I remember writing PL/1, COBOL and BAL for those
giant fossils. I also remember seeing an emulation running on a
486 laptop that ran faster than the original machine.

Somehow I'm not buying this. I know there's a "y2k" play here
somewhere but I don't quite see it yet.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Just in case anyone was wondering, I was stupid and got a Skytel
2-way pager. I lived the dream for six months before I woke up.
It never worked right. Let me repeat - It never worked right.
The really weird thing is that in Boston it was completely unreliable
but on the show floor of Comdex in Las Vegas it worked perfectly
for three solid days... Guess I should move to LV.

Also, to add to the frustration Skytel's Internet gateway was setup
via UUCP (hey, wake up guys - UUCP went out 10 years ago) and their
customer support was just plain bad. Their billing people were
even worse. Never again. I got a PCS phone instead.

I like my PCS phone. It works. The audio artifacts are a little
strange but it works better than the analog phone I had before.
The cool thing is that the PCS phone will also do AMPs if thats all
it can find. (and they claim it will be a pager also, but I've
yet to see that service)

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I never understood ATM. I must not be part of the target audience.
Now that 100base-T is here, I get it even less. I heard a speaker
from the ADSL forum lately who claimed that ADSL would eventually
be all ATM. That does not make sense to me.

Sometimes I wonder if the phone companies of the world have been
tricked into believing that they want ATM only to find out that
what the customers want is large packets (not 48 byte payloads)
and that their networks are setup all wrong.

I'm planning to look into wireless-ATM next, just because anything
that sounds that twisted might actually be interesting.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I've been debating moving some servers over to 100base-T. The idea
is to put them behind a switch that will clean up the network
and aggregate high use servers on a high speed link.

Adapter cards are easy to find these days. It's getting hard to buy
a card from 3Com which does not support 100Base-T. Switches, however,
are a bit more confusing.

Why don't these switches do basic IP routing?

(one might ask oneself why we are taking a giant step backwards to bridging when we just got done tossing all the bridges out in favor of routers, but that's a topic for next month)

All of the 1-4 VLAN switches claim you need a router also to route between the VLANs. What load of guano that is. It would no be that hard to put basic IP routing in the switch. It does not have to be wire speed (perhaps that's what holds the product marketing people back). Just basic routing. Still, none that I could find will route. None do DHCP either. Bogus.

My perfect switch

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

You have to ask yourself, why would someone leave Sun Micro right now
and go to Novell? I can only guess that money was a factor since
technology and leadership was clearly not part of the equation.

In 1995 it was easy to see that the only out Novell had was to embed
the Java runtime in Netware. The trouble with Novell (ok, one of the
many troubles) is that they move at a glacial pace. Plus, they promote
things with the excitement of clump of dirt. They should be creating
thousands of cool Java apps which would make people burn to get the
Java run-time on their netware servers. Instead they push InternetWare
which no on seems to understand except that it seems to have something
to do with Groupwise, which seems interesting. Maybe it's just me.

It's not hard to figure out why no one develops for Netware. Perhaps
Java can fix that. Or maybe it's too deeply ingrained in body Novell.

Novell should change the name of NDIS to LDAP. No one ever understood
NDIS anyway (despite the fact that it is reasonable technology). If they
did this and put a simple SMTP & POP/IMAP server (written in Java) in
every server, they could make a very good case for intranetting existing
Novell sites. Instead they will ceed the internet email cause to
Microsoft. My prediction is that all non-Internet email will be
dumped for standards based Internet (i.e. tcp/ip) based email. I love
what I can do with Netscape Communicator 4 and HTML. Microsoft email
never let me do that. (now if I could just get Excell to save those
charts as .gif's!)

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)