William Yang

Verizon Wi-Fi for All Devices: Mac, Linux, Blackberry, iPhone, Android, and more

2012-01-22T15:32:00.002-05:00

Two and a half years ago, Verizon announced a partnership with Boingo to offer free wi-fi to its FiOS and DSL (3 Mbps or higher only) customers. Although it was a welcome addition, especially because of Boingo's coverage in airports, it was criticized for only supporting Windows devices, while everyone else was left out in the cold. The initial version of the software also had issues installing with the Firefox web browser. I had tried to install the software about a year or two ago and had not been successful, but today I am happy to report that the service actually works much better than expected.

The first piece of good news is for Windows users: Verizon has updated its software so that it is no longer browser dependent to install. You can do so by going to http://www.verizon.net/wifi/.

The second piece of good news is arguably the bigger one of the two. When you go to get set up Verizon Wi-Fi, you will be asked to create a username and password to use with the service. You are then asked to download the software. However, you don't actually need the software, although it makes the Wi-Fi much easier to use on Windows. For all other platforms, you can simply use Boingo's web login page. Yes, that's right. Remember that username and password you created? After you connect to the Boingo wireless network and get to the Boingo splash page in your browser, click on the dropdown that says "Roaming Login". Choose "Verizon Business" and enter the username and password that you set up earlier. You need to include "@verizon.net" as part of the username. This means that any device with a web browser can now use "Verizon Wi-Fi" where there is a Boingo hotspot! The fact that Verizon doesn't report this method seems to be a large oversight on their part. Or perhaps they want to keep the number of Wi-Fi users down because the more users that use the service, the more they have to pay Boingo.

It is possible you will not be allowed to register for the service at http://www.verizon.net/wifi/. without being on a Windows machine, but such a restriction, if it exists, is minor compared to not being able to receive the service at all, and is easily worked around by tech savvy users. It is also possible that this capability to login with just a username and password was only added recently. Nevertheless, it is extremely useful and I hope that other people will benefit from this knowledge, which I have not seen reported elsewhere online.
Note: Boingo's website may show more hotspots than Verizon's list, but that is because Boingo users are allowed access to some partner hotspots, while Verizon users cannot access those hotspots (you might be my friend, but your friend is not necessarily my friend too). However, this also theoretically means Verizon users can access non-Boingo international hotspots that also list "Verizon Business".

Chase Credit Cards and Credit Reports

2011-11-17T20:55:00.002-05:00

Good news for many Chase credit card holders!

Many Chase credit cards are popular because of the rewards programs and sign on bonuses associated with them. However, many of those cards feature a "No Preset Spending Limit" (NPSL) feature. Chase used to not report the credit limit on those cards to credit agencies, which could lead to a poor credit score because of a high credit utilization ratio (statement balance divided by available credit). I recently decided to contact them to see if they would consider reporting the limits and was pleased to find out that starting this month (November 2011), and because of customer requests, NPSL cards' credit limits will now be reported. I was able to verify that this is the case via creditkarma.com's free credit monitoring service.

On the Interview Trail: Transportation in the Northeast

2011-10-10T21:43:00.001-04:00

First, a little background for those unfamiliar with the medical school application process: students preparing to enter medical school the fall after they graduate from college, like me, take the MCAT anytime from the summer before junior year to the summer after junior year of college. Then, during the summer of their junior year, they submit their AMCAS application, a sort of common application for most medical schools in the United States. Once the AMCAS has been submitted, secondary applications which provide supplemental information specific to each school are submitted. After schools review both the content of the AMCAS and secondary application, they decide whether or not to offer a personal interview to the applicant. The interview always comes before an acceptance; no applicant is accepted without one. Interviews are usually held from fall through March.

I have been to a few interviews, but the most time consuming aspect of interviewing is traveling to and from the interview. I don't have a car, so I opted to take public transportation. Here, I'll just address the options as they apply to the Northeast (i.e. DC to Boston). My options have been plane, train (Amtrak), and bus (BoltBus, Megabus, Greyhound, etc.).

After having experienced both trains and buses so far, I have to admit that Amtrak is my preferred way to travel. At least up to New York, it is faster than a plane when you consider security and check-in times, as well as accessibility (Baltimore Penn Station is much closer to Hopkins than BWI Airport). Also, Amtrak ticketing is much more flexible; should plans change last minute, you can cancel any unprinted ticket and receive a full refund. Try that with a plane ticket, which is more expensive to start with.

While the BoltBus has WiFi and is cheaper than Amtrak, it is noticeably more cramped. Amtrak has wide seats and a lot of legroom, and very large overhead compartments (most suitcases that you would have to check on an airplane can even fit up there). Amtrak also has food for purchase onboard, and a tray table on which you can eat either the onboard food or food you bring on the train. Plus it is a handy place to put your laptop compared to your lap. Amtrak also has plans to put WiFi on all of its Northeast Regional trains in the future (currently it is only on Acela trains and in major stations in the Northeast Corridor).

The other main disadvantage of the BoltBus is that it takes longer than Amtrak and is subject to traffic conditions on I-95. All that said, the advantages of Amtrak seem to outweigh the higher cost of the ticket. Of course that may not be true for everyone, but I wager that for most people, $30 or so would be worth the upgrade from a bus to Amtrak.

The one case in which I could see using the plane would be for a trip up to Boston. Boston is far enough from DC/Baltimore that a train or bus affair ends up taking a good part of the day. However, if this country invests in high speed rail infrastructure, then that trip would also be competitive by train, though not any time in the near future because of how long that infrastructure would take to develop.

Anyways, that was a fairly long and rambling post. In short, don't forget about Amtrak the next time you travel in the Northeast.

Footnote: I strongly believe our country should invest in high-speed rail. If you look carefully, the opponents of such investment usually have a vested interest in the automobile, petroleum, or airline industries. As far as those that complain about the amount of money the federal government throws at Amtrak, consider that the interstate system is also largely funded by the federal government.

Patients or Cases?

2011-09-11T21:09:00.003-04:00

I'm glad to see that medical schools are incorporating activities to reinforce the human side of medicine, which, in today's rushed pace, is sometimes forgotten.

Read Medical Students Learn to Tell Stories about Their Patients and Themselves, published in the AMA's Journal, Virtual Mentor.

NextBus GPS Tracking for Johns Hopkins Transportation

2011-08-21T14:46:00.003-04:00

The NextBus service is now used to track:

Blue Jay Shuttle

Homewood-Peabody-JHMI shuttle (aka "JHMI shuttle")

Keswick-Homewood-Eastern-JHMI shuttle

Homewood-Mt. Washington shuttle

The NextBus website includes a map that shows real-time locations of shuttles overlaid on a street map.

To obtain an estimated arrival time, you can:

Visit the NextBus website

Call (410) 834-2833 and enter your stop number.

Send a text to 41411 with "hopkins 123" where 123 is the stop number.

Stop numbers are posted at each stop and can also be looked up by Route/Direction/Stop on the NextBus website.

Johns Hopkins Blue Jay Shuttle

2011-08-21T14:39:00.017-04:00

For the most current information on the Blue Jay Shuttle, including a map of the routes and list of the stops, visit the JHU Parking and Transportation webpage. At the time of this post, the only way to view individual route paths is through the NextBus interactive GPS map (click on "Select Routes...").

Here is a one page reference listing all the routes and stops with their NextBus numbers, as well as hints as to where each stop is found without a route map. (This is an unofficial document that I made, and there are no guarantees made as to the accuracy of the information.)

The JHU Gazette has also published an informative article on the new service, available online.

Hopkins has posted information on the new routes of the Blue Jay Shuttle (which replaces the old Security Escort Van service), effective August 24th. In summary:

5:45pm-11:15pm: There are 5 fixed routes (Red, Blue, Green, Orange, Pink/Purple) that depart every 30 minutes from Mason Hall with the first departure at 5:45pm and last departure at 10:45pm. Although the Gazette reported that there would be 10 vans running the routes, it currently (8/23) appears that each route will be run by only one van, each of which takes about 20-25 minutes to drive the full loop. One van alternates departures along the Pink (:15) and Purple (:45) routes, so each of those routes only has hourly service. Shuttles operate daily, excluding holidays. All shuttle stops will be marked with a sign. No schedule for specific stops is available at the time of this post.

11:15pm-2:00am: Call (410) 516-8700. All vans operate point-to-point service. An estimated pickup time will be provided.

2:00am-4:00am: The same service as from 11:15pm-2:00am, but fewer vans will operate.

Pro tips:

To board anywhere other than Mason: flag van with a J-Card.

To drop-off anywhere other than Mason: tell the driver when approaching the stop.

Vans only stop at designated stops, except for emergencies or disabilities. According to the Gazette article, students can request a ride to Mason Hall or the nearest stop if they would need to walk more than a few blocks to their destination.

NextBus has also been deployed with the Blue Jay Shuttle. See my other post for details.

Updated 8/23/2011 9:48pm with information regarding Pink/Purple.

A New Hopkins Shuttle: Keswick-Homewood-Eastern-JHMI

2011-07-09T09:43:00.004-04:00

On July 7th, JHU Transportation announced the new Keswick-Homewood-Eastern-JHMI shuttle to start on July 11th. This shuttle is a result of the need to connect the new Hopkins Keswick facility to the other campuses, and the shuttle also replaces the previous Homewood-Eastern and Eastern-JHMI shuttles. Service runs every 30 minutes from each end, Monday through Friday 8:00am-6:00pm. Before 8:00am, the memo indicates: "four Eastern departures are scheduled to arrive at MSEL and Mason Hall" although no other information is provided about that schedule.

See the Homewood Parking and Transportation website for details on stops and schedules.

For Homewood students, which I assume would also be able to take the shuttle, this effectively runs from a location near the Rotunda mall to Mason Hall to JHMI. It could provide an alternate way of getting between JHMI and Homewood campuses, especially for students that have classes on the southwest part of campus (Clark, Hodson, CSEB/Hackerman). In addition, those interested in heading to the Rotunda directly from JHMI or Homewood after class or research might be able to use this shuttle. The shuttle also stops at Charles Commons but only by request. However, it is probably better to use the existing Homewood-Peabody-JHMI shuttle to go to and from Commons since that runs more frequently.

A Revamped Homewood-JHMI Shuttle for Hopkins

2011-07-04T15:28:00.012-04:00

You can always go to http://www.parking.jhu.edu/shuttles_jhmi_homewood.html for the most current information on the Homewood-JHMI shuttle.

On June 20th, JHU Transportation posted a memo announcing major changes to the Homewood-JHMI shuttle service (colloquially known as "the JHMI" to Hopkins undergrads) that would take effect on July 1st. Four major changes took effect on 7/1:

The shuttle switched operators from Veolia Transportation to Broadway Services. Broadway is already responsible for operating the Johns Hopkins Hospital shuttles and, a couple months ago, won a contract to take over operation of the Homewood Security Escort Van (now officially known as the "Blue Jay Shuttle") from JHU Security.

New buses, reportedly all with working A/C, came into service. As I'm not in Baltimore right now, I haven't seen these yet, but I have high expectations for them (if you have good quality pictures and wouldn't mind sending them to me, I can post them here). These replaced the old fleet of primarily 7 year-old buses that were supplemented by 2 buses inherited/purchased from Denver Transit (the ones with standing space) and school buses shared with Veolia-operated Baltimore Collegetown shuttle during peak service.

The terminal stop at the JHMI campus was temporarily moved a block northeast in front of the Washington Street Garage because of planned construction at the previous stop location.

A new bus schedule went into effect.

Highlights of the new bus schedule:
(Click here for a detailed, color-coded list of changes to weekday service.)

Increased off-peak service, especially from Homewood to JHMI. During most of the day, off-peak service is now usually every 15 minutes instead of every 30.

The first bus from JHMI to Homewood is now 30 minutes earlier, at 6:50am.

On Thursday and Friday evenings, service runs for two more hours, with the last departures at 1:30am from Homewood and 1:59am from JHMI.

Most of the express buses from JHMI to Homewood have been converted to all-stop "local" buses. There remain only 3 express buses: 6:30pm, 7:00pm, and 7:30pm.

The weekend schedule remains mostly the same, except for two minor changes to the Sunday schedule:

The 4:30pm departure from JHMI is now at 4:40pm.

A new 6:30pm departure from JHMI fills in the gap between the 5:30pm and 7:30pm departures. (For the time being, Sunday departures from Homewood still feature a two hour interval in the evening between the 5:00pm and the subsequent 7:00pm departures.)

IBM's Watson goes to Medical School

2011-06-09T14:14:00.002-04:00

Remember IBM's computer, Watson, which made a showing on Jeopardy a couple months ago? It's moving past game shows and looking to assist doctors. Watson would fit perfectly with the move towards electronic patient records, but it will be interesting to see how Watson affects the role that a doctor will play in medicine.

Interview with Scott McNealy

2011-05-01T15:29:00.003-04:00

Well, okay, I never interviewed him myself, though he did visit my high school and gave a talk there about a year after I graduated, though. That was shortly before news broke that Sun was looking to be acquired.

Regardless, The Register seems to have a pretty fair article from an interview with the co-founder and former CEO of Sun Microsystems. It's worth a read if you ever got know what Sun was for anything other than "they made Java."

Articles on Medicine (May 2011): Beyond Diagnostics

2011-05-01T15:03:00.003-04:00

Just two this time.

Are patients just interesting cases, or are they people capable of emotion?

People talk about treating the root cause of a problem and not just its symptoms. Social causes should not be forgotten, either.

Sun Ray Multimedia Enhancements for Native Sessions

2011-04-25T16:31:00.002-04:00

...are coming! Because most Sun Ray customers are Windows users, most of the development effort has been directed at improving the experience for Windows users. To that end, not much work has been done in terms of improving video watchability on native sessions (UNIX or Linux sessions not through VDI). However, about a month ago, two YouTube videos were referenced on the SunRay-Users public mailing list, which Oracle employees then confirmed as demonstrating features to come in a future version of Sun Ray Software. What I see from the video appears to be fairly smooth HD video playback, even over an SSH-tunneled X session initiated from a Sun Ray server! Hopefully the improvements help with Flash as well, given the explosion in popularity of YouTube and other Flash video players on the web.

Here are the links to the videos, which were posted by Wim Coekaerts, the Senior VP of Linux and Virtualization at Oracle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Fgf8wGD24g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_WTlvLyQoM

Comcast Customer Support and Internet Speeds

2011-03-14T21:44:00.007-04:00

Comcast is notorious for its poor customer support. My experience with them has not been totally inconsistent with most of the terrible things I've heard. Back when I initially tried to get internet service ordered, one customer service agent at the Baltimore service center even went as far as to say that another agent (via Comcast online chat, who asked me to visit the service center to verify my identity) lied to me about being able to pick up a self-install kit. Whether or not I should have been able to is besides the point; I think it's quite something if Comcast calls itself a liar just because an agent made a mistake in what they thought was possible. In general, I've found that things one customer service agent tells me may no longer apply with the next agent. The level of consistency, or rather lack thereof, can get to be extremely frustrating.

About a month or two after my Comcast service was initially connected, I noticed that the sustained download speed I was getting was inconsistent with the tier I signed up for. I signed into the Comcast online chat support service, explained that I believed the modem was not receiving the configuration file for my level of service, and had the issue resolved very quickly.

More recently, I signed up for a promotion for a higher tier of internet service. Between about 5-6 customer support agents including a supervisor, none were able to get the correct modem configuration file sent. Most of them claimed that the issue had been fixed and I had to wait 24 hours for the change to take effect. In one of these cases, waiting 24 hours resulted in my modem returning to the Comcast walled garden (unregistered modem). When I attempted to go through the first time registration process, I was told by the online system that no service tier was on my account number. Fortunately, phone support was able to restore my previous tier of service fairly quickly.

After about the 6th agent in trying to get the correct tier of service, and a callback to my voicemail saying that no internet billing codes were on my account, some neuron in my brain fired reminding me that Comcast had a Twitter account which was staffed by an effective support team. I did some quick research online to gauge others' experiences, and decided to give it a try. I e-mailed the address listed on the Twitter page since I don't use Twitter, and within 15 minutes of my request I received a reply saying that the issue was fixed. I checked and indeed it was fixed! So if you are a Comcast user, I highly encourage you to use Comcast's Twitter support team, whether by Twitter or e-mail.

In Comcast's defense, however, if you are using wireless and feel that your internet is very slow, and you are living in an apartment complex, try a wired connection first. It is very likely that your speed is low due to interference from neighbors' WiFi. Most people only have wireless routers and laptop wireless cards that operate in the 2.4 GHz frequency range, in which there are only 3 non-overlapping WiFi channels. In my building, I can see more than 30 access points of varying signal strength from where my laptop sits. That means all of these 30 cause interference to some degree in the 2.4 GHz range, and that doesn't include interference from microwaves, portable phones, and Bluetooth devices which also operate in the 2.4 GHz radio band. My solution was to get a dual band wireless router, which includes the ability to operate in the 5 GHz frequency band in addition to 2.4 GHz. Although 5 GHz does not penetrate walls and bend around obstacles as well as 2.4 GHz does, it has many more non-overlapping channels (20). Not being able to penetrate obstacles as well can also become advantageous if everyone had a 5 GHz-capable router since the degree of interference from neighbors would also be reduced. Dual band wireless routers are more expensive, which is probably why most people don't have them, and will also require that your laptop have a wireless card that can talk 5 GHz. Generally, if the wireless card says it can connect to 802.11a networks, it can do 5 GHz. 802.11n can be either 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz, so if you have a card that says it can connect to b/g/n, that's likely to mean only 2.4 GHz, and a 5 GHz wireless router will not help you. Over a 5 GHz connection, my laptop can get the same speeds to the internet as a wired connection can (30 Mbps downstream, 6 Mbps upstream), but over 2.4 GHz, speeds are much slower (about 4 Mbps downstream, 5 Mbps upstream).

Censored!

2011-03-08T15:35:00.003-05:00

...by China's censorship policies.

Although I am an ABC (American-born Chinese), I am taking Chinese classes. At home, I learned to speak the Shanghai dialect of Chinese, and passively picked up some ability to listen to basic conversations in Mandarin Chinese, but I never learned to speak it, or to read or write it. I started taking classes in high school when they were introduced during my sophomore year. In any event, for the current Chinese class I am taking, one of the recurring assignments is to write a blog entry on a weekly basis. Our professor chose blog.sina.com.cn as the blog host. Part of that assignment is to also read and comment on three of the other blog entries posted by classmates.

One of the entries my classmate posted asked for advice in finding off-campus housing. My first attempt to comment said something similar to:
今年学生政府推出了校外房评比网站，应该对你很有帮助：http://www.jhusga.com/ochd/
[Translated: This year, the student government launched an off-campus housing comparison website, which should be helpful for you. Here is the link: http://www.jhusga.com/ochd/]

When I noticed that this comment had disappeared, I posted a new one:
好像我的评论被和谐了。。。。反正，你可以去看http://www.jhusga.com/ochd/
[Translated: It seems that my earlier comment got censored (using a term that means harmonize, but is popularly used by bloggers to mean "censored by the government in the name of harmony"), in any case, you should check out http://www.jhusga.com/ochd/.]

That also disappeared. I e-mailed my professor and we both thought the first was removed because of the word "government", but I tested a bit more and it turns out it was because of the link! If I paste only the link, the comment gets deleted. If I change the comment to say "Google for JHU OCHD" instead of providing the direct link, the comment stays.

Apparently any link that goes to a "foreign" website is considered worthy of censorship, at least on Sina's blog platform.

Doctors and IT

2011-02-18T21:23:00.004-05:00

Well, first of all, this blog is not dead. It has just...undergone a period of deep hibernation. Unfortunately I don't think I'll ever be able to keep up with it as much as I used to, but I'll still try to post here more often than I have in the past few months.

Today, I read an interesting article intersecting technology and medicine: U.S. patients trust docs, but not e-health records, survey shows

As someone who is on the road to a medical career, it's certainly encouraging to hear that most people trust their physicians. But as a technologist, it's also worrisome to hear that patients don't always trust electronic health records, and that the lack of trust can be justified. On the one hand, a doctor's job is to be a doctor, not to worry about computer and network security, which is the job of an IT specialist. On the other hand, digital security is a real problem that every computer user has to worry about to some degree. I don't know if most doctors are aware of IT security best practices, but it is more likely that most doctors can't afford to hire an IT team to run systems and security, nor do they have the time to learn and deal with it themselves. As much as EHRs have their benefits, I can see how they become a burden as it takes considerably more technical know-how to maintain than a filing cabinet; correspondingly, hiring someone to maintain an EHR system is more costly than hiring someone to maintain a filing cabinet.

It seems that computer security is becoming increasingly important in the healthcare industry with the push for switching to EHRs. The simplest solution would probably just be to isolate EHR computers from the internet, but that runs counter to the collaborative ability to share EHRs between health organizations. As a result, doctors will probably need to have a higher level of security awareness than the average home user, simply because the stakes (i.e. protected health information as defined by HIPAA) are much higher. While I by no means claim to understand how EHR systems are being deployed, my guess is that, like other enterprise software, the software is developed and deployed by a software company that maintains an active support and maintenance contract with the medical practice. If that's the case, then perhaps those companies should include services to maintain a network where there is otherwise no dedicated IT infrastructure or staff, and at least provide minimal training materials to doctors and their staff so that the digital security issues that have plagued other industries ("Big Company loses SSNs and credit card numbers of 1 million customers due to network breach") do not now begin to affect medical practices. One way or another though, it would seem that, in general, doctors need to gain a better understanding of computer security than they have now, for the good of their patients.

Aramark, What’s Your Game?

2010-10-12T09:44:00.006-04:00

About four to five years ago, Sodexho was the food service provider at Johns Hopkins University. Sodexho predated my time at JHU, but those that were here at the time reported the food being of poor quality. One even described a "freshman negative 15." In addition, unrelated to Hopkins, Sodexho also managed a number of prisons, which drew the ire of many students who objected to paying a company that also ran prisons. Given the circumstances, the University was pressured into changing foodservice providers. They selected Aramark. Students that were here at the time reported a noticeable increase in the quality of food.

Although Aramark may have improved the food, there have been questions regarding Aramark’s treatment of its employees recently. There are rumors (and by which I mean that I did not hear this firsthand) the staff were treated much better by Sodexho and that Aramark had been paying below minimum wage, but that no one dared to complain for fear of being fired. After all, a job that pays less is still better than no job at all. It would appear, in part, that these conditions existed due to a conflict that resulted in Aramark employees at Hopkins being without a union to represent them for about a year or two (see JHU Newsletter: Workers vote, now have representative union). Other “rumors” aside, the same reference from the Newsletter cites that Aramark had been scheduling employees one to two hours below the minimum necessary to qualify as a full-time employee in order to avoid providing benefits such as health insurance and paid leave. How does Aramark get away with this sort of thing? In another article by the Newsletter back in April of this year (A Buffet of Choices), Hopkins was described as being in a contract with Aramark that prevents them from intervening in employee issues. In addition, because the term of the contract is multi-year, Aramark is really only motivated to perform well when it is time to renew.

Most students may not notice or care about how employees are treated as long as the food is good, but even students are affected by Aramark's practices, year after year. I acknowledge that some of these decisions may have been made by JHU Housing and Dining, some by Aramark, and some collaborative, but the issue remains regardless of who points a finger at who. One thing that has been noticed consistently is the annually increasing cost of a meal plan to those required to hold one. Not only that, dining dollars are never worth getting since there is a roughly 30% premium when converting cash to dining dollars in the initial plan. Some cite the lack of tax when using dining dollars, but let’s do the math: tax is about 5%, and 5% is much less than 30%, isn’t it? Plus if you use a rewards credit card, like what I use, then you can actually get a percentage of what you spend on food back. Dining dollars: 130%, credit card: 95%. And herein lies the problem: that meal plans are mandatory. If dining dollars and cash had a one-to-one conversion, then I wouldn’t have as much of a complaint. But that students are required to pay a 30% premium...what’s up with that? Officially it is to cover the staff and facility costs of running the dining hall. Why does that not apply to people paying with non-mandatory means (i.e. cash, credit, JCash), then? And maybe if dining services were increased year-to-year the complaint would also be less significant. But it just ain't so. Examples of what I mean (as of this semester, Fall 2010):

Cheese-stuffed ravioli and tortellini used to be available at the made-to-order pasta station at Nolan’s in previous semesters. Multiple staff have reported that, this semester, management prohibits staff from taking the pasta out of the freezers to make them for students. If anyone has an explanation, I’d love to hear it.

Levering Leaves, the made-to-order salad station, used to charge a fixed price for any number of toppings. As of this semester, the old price applies only up to 5 toppings, with an additional charge for any toppings over 5.

The omelet station at Nolan’s has been relegated to the 9pm-12am time block only. In the past, omelets could be ordered from 5pm-9pm, if not also during 9pm-12am. This was done to increase the amount of people that could be simultaneously served by the pasta station. However, an equivalent effect could be achieved by improving the workflow at a smaller pasta station rather than reducing options.

The second Newsletter article mentioned above proposes a possible solution: to allow competition between foodservice companies on campus. I can see why this type of situation could be difficult though, since it is less attractive to foodservice companies between lack of economy of scale and having profits reduced due to competition. The University may also be worried about higher costs. However, given what we’ve seen between Sodexho and Aramark, maybe it’s time to give the proposal a try, in some form or other. Something should be done; the status quo is not acceptable. Even if employees have a union, that a company would be willing to act in the way Aramark did in the absence of one is extremely unethical, and the way that money is effectively extorted from students when tuition is already $30,000 a year just adds insult to injury. As a bonus, while food quality is usually adequate, it could definitely be much better and would more than likely improve under a competitive system.

UPDATE 10/12/2010 9:19 PM:
It appears that Aramark has brought back stuffed pastas at Nolan's as of today or yesterday! Hooray!

UPDATE 10/19/2010 9:16 PM:
Hold your horses...last week there was tortellini on Tuesday, and there was definitely tortellini this Monday, but there wasn't any last Wednesday through Friday. I'm not sure if there was tortellini any other day this week so far, but it's not quite the same as it used to be. For one, each plate is only allowed to have 16 pieces of tortellini, instead of a big scoop like it used to be (this was a LOT of tortellini). The tortellini also seems smaller than it used to be.

Another thing I forgot to point out originally is that take-out boxes are now smaller, or at least the compartments in it for sides are. This really only affects the home station, but is still annoying. Also, the pans used to cook pasta at the pasta station are also smaller, as if trying to imply that portion sizes should shrink accordingly.

Articles on Medicine (Oct 2010)

2010-10-08T18:15:00.003-04:00

Well it's been awhile since I posted anything here, but I'll try to get back into writing some stuff. For now, I'll catch up sharing some interesting articles I read over the summer.

Advances in biomedical instrumentation enable a portable mini-lab.
Live in a city? Take some time to get away to a more natural environment.
Trade some study time for exercise.
There is lots and lots of medical waste, thanks to the popularization of disposable supplies. Many hospitals are now seeking to reduce that quantity.
Scientists are good at science, but medical doctors need to be better at more than just science.
Hospice care and discussions about end-of-life plans are not "death panels." If you haven't discussed this issue with your family at all, don't wait until it is too late. (This is a long, in-depth article, but is a good read nonetheless.)

The Future of OpenSolaris

2010-08-13T14:15:00.006-04:00

The clouds of uncertainty over OpenSolaris under Oracle have parted, but while what we see behind them was perhaps expected, it is certainly still disappointing. I've included the original sources below, but here are the key sentences (emphasis added) from the internal Oracle memo regarding OpenSolaris:

We will distribute updates to approved CDDL or other open source-licensed code following full releases of our enterprise Solaris operating system. In this manner, new technology innovations will show up in our releases before anywhere else. We will no longer distribute source code for the entirety of the Solaris operating system in real-time while it is developed, on a nightly basis.

We will have a Solaris 11 binary distribution, called Solaris 11 Express, that will have a free developer RTU license, and an optional support plan. Solaris 11 Express will debut by the end of this calendar year, and we will issue updates to it, leading to the full release of Solaris 11 in 2011.

All of Oracle's efforts on binary distributions of Solaris technology will be focused on Solaris 11. We will not release any other binary distributions, such as nightly or bi-weekly builds of Solaris binaries, or an OpenSolaris 2010.05 or later distribution. We will determine a simple, cost-effective means of getting enterprise users of prior OpenSolaris binary releases to migrate to S11 Express.

It remains unclear how OpenSolaris as a community will transform, but it certainly doesn't look that good.

References (from the osol-discuss mailing list):
Leaked internal memo
Confirmation from Oracle employee

Where Am I on the Subway?

2010-08-12T21:28:00.005-04:00

On Shanghai's very new Metro Line 10, there's a nifty little information panel located above all the railcar doors. Since pictures are worth a thousand words, I figured I'd make this post a couple thousand words shorter and post a video (watch in 720p/HD for best clarity; I apologize for the shakiness). While watching, you should be able to answer the following questions:

Which station did I just leave?

Which station am I approaching?

Approximately how far am I between the last and next stations?

Which direction is the train moving?

Which branch of the line is this train traveling on? (although at the time of recording, only one branch had been built)

Enjoy!

FreeRange Reader

2010-07-04T16:40:00.004-04:00

RIP mDigger...sort of. Just a year after I adopted mDigger Reader as a replacement for AvantGo to keep up with news and RSS on my Windows Mobile PDA, mDigger decided to drop support for Windows Mobile, shifting their focus solely to Apple's iPhone and iPad platforms.

Once again, forced to hunt for alternatives, I first investigated Viigo. However, that was recently purchased by RIM, the company behind Blackberry, so they've killed all non-Blackberry platform support for the app.

Many other programs out there either required purchasing and/or did not download more than an RSS feed itself, which often doesn't include a full article in the case of news. However, I happened upon FreeRange Reader. This program gives the option to configure a feed to download the full story page for each headline when updated. It effectively downloads the normal verison of the wepage but reformats it for better reading on a mobile device.

FreeRange Reader seems to be what I will be using for now...I don't know how long this run will last, as it seems development has stopped since the company was purchased by Handmark. The version for Windows Mobile was last updated in 2007, and the version for Blackberry was last updated in 2008. Compared to mDigger, FreeRange doesn't have as extensive of a catalog of feeds, but since you can configure it to download full stories for any feed you find, there is a nice flexibility there (mDigger required the developers to create an mClip for any feed that didn't include a full story; this did yield better formatting than what I get with FreeRange though). The feed configuration is online, which is also handy.

Some gotchas with FreeRange:

Each feed that only has headlines instead of full stories needs to be individually told to download the full story. This configuration can only be done from the mobile device and not from the web configuration.

It works on VGA devices (like my Dell Axim x51v), mostly. Fonts show up larger than they should and are not as crisp as they could be.

Scrollbars don't show up in some parts of the configuration where they should. Of note is the "screen font" configuration page. I use size 6 to get a reasonable font size, but I had to use the directional pad while in the drop-down to select it, as it is hidden by default.

Oracle Virtual Desktop Client 2.0

2010-07-02T21:31:00.003-04:00

(The new version of Sun Desktop Access Client 1.0.)

The new version of the software Sun Ray client hasn't yet been released, but some details on its features have been leaking out. Although the original source is no longer available, search engine cached pages have preserved the content.

What's New

Limitations

Supported Platforms

Known Issues

Product Requirements

For those that just want it short and sweet, here is what's notable:

Support for Mac OS X

Audio recording, in so far as it was already supported on a hardware Sun Ray

IPv6 support

Smart card support

Serial port or USB-to-serial port passthrough (Windows only)

Multiple connection profiles

Clean Up C:\Windows\Installer

2010-06-24T15:40:00.006-04:00

If you have a Windows computer that's been around for awhile, you may have noticed that your free disk space has gotten kind of low, lower than you would expect. WinDirStat is a great little utility to figure out where that space is going. If you use that program, you might discover that C:\Windows\Installer is really big. Sometimes that directory is not as clean as it should be because of various failed program installations or unclean uninstalls.

Use the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility to safely get rid of the unneeded cruft. Download the installer here. Once installed, open up a command prompt and type:

cd "\Program Files\Windows Installer Clean Up\"
msizap G!

In one case that I saw, 7 GB was reduced down to about 1.5 GB.

I do not recommend using the other utility included with the installer unless told to do so elsewhere. This is the utility that you will see a new entry for in the Programs menu and is not a command line program. Its purpose is not related to the one this post is written about.

If you see an error message like:

MsiZapInfo: Performing operations for user S-1-5-21-.....
Removing orphaned cached files.
Error opening 9040110900063D11......\InstallProperties subkey of Products key for S-1-5-18 user. Error: 2.
FAILED to clear all data.

don't worry about it. The program has finished cleaning up all it can. If you're bothered by it and know your way around the Windows Registry, you'll find the GUID listed somewhere under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData. If you're sure it refers to something you've uninstalled already, go ahead and delete the key, run 'msizap G!' again and you shouldn't see the error message anymore.

(Note: I am aware this information is already available online elsewhere in some for or other, but I found it to be somewhat scattered and confusing.)

Microsoft and Thin Clients: Revised

2010-05-21T21:40:00.005-04:00

A couple months ago, Microsoft revised their Virtual Enterprise Centralized Desktop (VECD) licensing scheme, which is used for Windows on thin client deployments. I first mentioned VECD in this earlier blog post, but one of the changes has since made VECD more affordable. For starters, there is no longer an additional cost for Software Assurance users. Non-SA users also have a slightly lower cost per device. See this Computerworld article for the full story.

(I did actually see the article in March, I just didn't get a chance to write about it until now.)

UPDATE 3/17/2011:
After a closer look, the new VECD, known as Windows VDA (Virtual Desktop Access) is not as good as I thought it originally was. In fact, it's much worse, or just as bad. The fee for SA users is waived only when the client device accessing the VDI infrastructure is covered by SA, which means a full Windows-installed computer that's also under SA. Other client devices, which would include any specialized thin client device, must have a $100/year/device Windows VDA license to legally access a VDI infrastructure with Windows VMs in it. Ouch.

The Oracle Business Model

2010-04-20T13:57:00.003-04:00

For those not in the know, "Oracle" here refers not to a divine intermediary but a company that has traditionally focused on providing database products and services for the computer industry. Most people have heard of Sun Microsystems because of Java but comparatively few people know what Oracle is. Recently Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems.

Sun wasn't very profitable for its stockholders, but they were named one of the top places to work in IT by Computerworld. They were also a very open company in comparison to many in the IT industry.

In a recent CNN interview with Scott McNealy, co-founder and chairman of the board of Sun until it was acquired, Scott had this to say about Larry Ellison, Oracle's CEO:

He’s a great capitalist, but not all into that sharing thing and all the rest of it. You have to give the guy credit; he has found a way to extract every dollar he can from customers from every product he offers. He is very impressive, and there are very few who have lasted as long as he has.

OpenOffice, the free productivity suite that competes with Microsoft Office was formerly sponsored by Sun. As a result, it is now also in the hands of Oracle. Naturally, OpenOffice prefers ODF (Open Document Format) for saving files over Microsoft's office formats. In order to allow Microsoft Office users to use ODF files, Sun developed a free plugin that could be easily installed. Although Microsoft Office 2007 has begun to add native support for ODF, it only supports up to ODF 1.0 so far, while the plugin enables up to ODF 1.2. In addition, there are still a significant number of Office 2003 deployments that only have the option of the ODF plugin.

Oracle now charges $90 for this plugin. While the current newest version of the plugin is 3.2, 3.1 is still available for free from Softpedia. I would highly recommend downloading the installer and keeping a copy because it may not be available online forever.

While Computerworld speculates that this may drive some companies that want to use ODF with Microsoft Office to purchase the plugin, I think it is more likely they will just be pushed to switch to the Office native formats as there is no additional cost to open those documents in either Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.

Security and Blackboard

2010-04-14T20:51:00.004-04:00

...the online course management system Blackboard, not the one that instructors literally write on. Apparently it's insecure enough that a 9-year-old student in my K-12 school district was able to grant himself administrative privileges, according to this article in the Washington Post. I'd be interested in knowing what was actually exploited, but since the software is developed under a closed source model, I doubt the general public will find out the details of the problem, even if it is fixed.

See my previous extended write-up on Blackboard here.

Long Term Investment (or Solaris is Dying)

2010-03-30T13:48:00.002-04:00

If you know me, you might be surprised to see me write "Solaris is Dying." Well, unfortunately I suspect that may be the case. Oracle seems to be making good on its promises to make its Sun acquisition profitable, but in the long run something is going to give.

Two things have recently happened that have made me think that Solaris may not be around in the next 10-20 years, as the next generation or two of computer engineers enters the workforce:
1. Solaris isn't so free anymore.
2. Changes to the scope of Sun Education programs.

While there may not be any DRM (yet) to enforce the non-free-ness of Solaris, the fact that the license only permits legal use of Solaris for 90 days without a support contract or other paid license and that security patches are no longer available to non-paying customers severely restricts access to all non-enterprise customers. If it doesn’t restrict access, it at least strongly discourages anyone who had an interest in trying out Solaris.

A Bit of History

Back in the old days (before Solaris 10’s 2005 release), Solaris had a separate paid license. Intel/x86 support was a joke and it pretty much only ran on SPARC, but since it shipped preinstalled on Sun systems which were the lion’s share of SPARC systems in the world, it was practically free if you had the hardware. All patches were free. When Solaris 10 came out, Sun changed the scheme. Solaris 10 would be free for anyone to download and use, and only support would cost extra. Work on decent x86 support also began in earnest. Patches, however, were restricted. They were no longer 100% free; only security and hardware patches would remain available to non-paying customers. Solaris update releases (also free), however, would include all the other patches, so if you needed the other bug fix or enhancement patches but did not have a support contract, you could just wait a few months for the next update release.

In addition to the Solaris side of things, Sun hardware was prevalent at many universities in the 1980s and 1990s, exposing students to Sun technology. The dates might be a little skewed as that was way before my time as a college student, but from what I've heard from others that were around then, that was roughly the era of Sun workstations. In any event, during that era people didn't have cell phones and students didn't have personal computers in their rooms, and the PC didn't really even take off in households until the early to mid-90s. Today most educational institutions run primarily Windows and Linux, and if Sun hardware or Solaris is present, it is very often as part of a legacy installation.

What Happened?

Here's my theory: the PC happened. And I don't mean PC as in PC vs. Mac, I mean PC as in Personal Computer.

With the PC came an increased accessibility to computers by the ordinary citizen. Microsoft came in with DOS and then Windows. IBM made an attempt at OSes with OS/2. And there was Linux, the closest thing to UNIX that could run on a PC. UNIX was still king in enterprises, but that would change eventually. The first computer that many people were exposed to was no longer a Sun or other UNIX workstation in college, it was a PC at the local electronics shop or at home. People got comfortable with Windows and Linux before UNIX systems ever came within reach, and before long, all three OSes could boast comparable features, at least comparable enough that the average computer user would not realize any significant difference.

The PC generation then entered the workforce knowing Windows and Linux, but not UNIX. There are two options for this new workforce: learn something new, or push what they are already comfortable with. Guess what happened?

The Old IBM Integrated Systems Strategy

Oracle says it wants to repeat the successful IBM strategy of integrated systems that put IBM in the “no one gets fired for buying IBM” position in the 70s and 80s, but I have to wonder if they considered why the IBM strategy was not sustainable. Sure, UNIX systems became more suitable for many environments than the original mainframe model, while IBM stuck with the mainframe, but I think it also had to do with accessibility. UNIX systems were smaller than the mainframe, and therefore more accessible to smaller companies. The PC, driven by the x86 processor architecture, was affordable by someone as “lowly” as the home user. UNIX replaced the mainframe, and then x86 replaced UNIX architectures. Each successor was cheaper to acquire than the previous as well, but I attribute that more to economy of scale due to the level of accessibility. Of course mainframes and UNIX remain around today, but in a significantly smaller capacity than they once existed. Of the UNIXes still here, Solaris seems to be the biggest in terms of widespread use. At least, besides my level of exposure to it, it seems the fact that when applications have support for Windows, Linux, Mac, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, with support for AIX and HP-UX having been pulled many years before Solaris support was pulled would suggest Solaris as being more prevalent. (Matlab recently pulled support for Solaris/SPARC. Mathematica still supports Solaris but recently dropped support for other UNIX operating systems.) And I think that's related to Solaris having had a significant presence in educational institutions for quite some time.

Oracle has cut off Solaris from the hobbyist. The hobbyist will no longer even have an opportunity to know Solaris. And when the hobbyist becomes a college or graduate level professional, they will report to work not knowing Solaris. The market will shift away from Solaris as people choose to stick with what they are comfortable with. Just as Oracle seems to be focused on short-term profits, corporations in the future will be similarly focused, and using the existing knowledge base of the pool of potential hires is often much more cost-effective (in the short run) than training them on a new system which the employees have no existing experience with.

The Last Straw

Okay, so no hobbyist. But educational institutions? As far as I can tell, the Sun Academic Excellence Grant and Sun Education Essentials hardware deep discount programs have both been discontinued under Oracle, with mumblings that even the standard education discount may be significantly reduced or even eliminated. Why wouldn't they be? They aren't exactly programs that make an obvious profit. But by killing those two programs, accessibility to and interest in Sun technologies is significantly reduced at the university level. As I mentioned earlier, college and graduate students won't know about Sun or Solaris when entering the workforce. Maybe Sun didn’t know how to market its products or was unable to develop a profitable roadmap, but I think it at least got one thing right, and that was investing in the future by increasing accessibility to Solaris and promoting its technologies at education institutions.

Is Oracle trying to kill Solaris? Maybe it is. If so, it's certainly done a good job without making it blatantly obvious. It will be a slow death. Maybe something will happen in the OpenSolaris realm to keep the goodness of Solaris alive. Or maybe I'm all wrong and everything will turn out fine. But considering that Solaris already has a limited presence in the minds of students today, further restricting access to Solaris will not help that. And it is certainly the students today that will be the technical employees and business leaders of tomorrow.

Food For Thought

Sun Microsystems was rated the #13 best place to work in IT by Computerworld in 2009. Oracle did not make the list.

If you ask the average (or even above average) college student today, they’ve heard of Sun, if only by way of an introductory programming course in Java, but have never heard of Oracle.

Keywords: oracle, sun, solaris, unix, linux

Broadband Networks and Google Fiber

2010-03-28T13:15:00.001-04:00

An interesting read on Verizon, Comcast, and the new Google Fiber initiative, written from a Baltimore perspective.

Articles on Medicine (Mar 2010)

2010-03-04T23:31:00.002-05:00

Really now?

Simulation-based training, something I'm a little familiar with from my Emergency First Responder training. And yes, it's not just the technical skills that are important. The teamwork and communication skills are often the harder ones to practice abstractly.

End of life, hard decisions

Doctors on Haiti: NYTimes, American Medical News

The Value of a Job

2010-02-20T12:28:00.003-05:00

Ever think about the jobs that are really important to society? Ever consider that they are usually the lowest paying jobs?

Do you want to be a sanitation worker? Bus or cab driver? Security guard? Cashier? Probably not, but what would society do without them? Given, most people probably don't even want to take their own trash from the house to the curb if they don't have to, let alone pick up everyone else's.

The BBC recently published an interesting article where they assessed the value to society of some high-paying jobs and low-paying jobs.

At least in the United States, you could almost extend the thought to illegal immigrants. The common argument made to deport them is that they are here illegally and are taking up jobs that Americans would otherwise have. Well...is that really true? Yes, they are here illegally. But why would an employer hire an illegal resident and risk consequences if they could hire a legal resident? If you were an employer and couldn't find a legal resident, and now your business is suffering financially, are you more likely to want to shut down your business or perhaps be willing to overlook a potential hire's legal residency status? I'm not trying to be political here, just thought-provoking.

Articles on Medicine (Feb 2010)

2010-02-04T23:12:00.002-05:00

A commentary on the influence of Western medicine in understanding mental health in the international community.

The human side of being a doctor: here and here.

There may be some cases of physician malpractice, but sometimes you need to let go. RIP stands for Rest in PEACE. And that doesn't mean cause trouble for those left behind.

Be careful with analysis of cost-effectiveness. You can't easily reduce everything to numbers, in this case relating to end-of-life care.

Updating DST on Windows CE

2010-02-01T20:51:00.003-05:00

In a post coming soon I'll talk about Handheld PCs more, but essentially, I recently rediscovered a 10-year old piece of technology that is a Jornada Handheld PC. Unfortunately, it still has the old United States Daylight Savings Time definitions and apparently no simple way to update them automatically. HPC:Factor has an installable update for Windows CE 4.2 and Microsoft has official updates out for newer versions of Windows CE/Windows Mobile, but I could not find anything for Windows CE 3.0 and older. Eventually, by comparing all the hexadecimal values of the registry modifications made by the HPC:Factor update and the current built-in time zone settings, I was able to come up with an appropriate workaround. While it's a little cumbersome to apply and isn't as permanent (if you change your home city, the time zone definition will be reloaded from built-in settings), it certainly works and I think is sufficient for my needs. Note that this fix assumes your location has always and still does observe DST, but springs forward in March instead of April and falls back in November instead of October now.

To update the rules for the new DST rules:

Control Panel -> World Clock -> Home City -> pick one and stick with it!

Open a registry editor (you will need to install one on your own, Microsoft supplies a PowerToy download if you have trouble finding an editor)

Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Time

There should be one binary value, "TimeZoneInformation", at that location. Edit the long sequence so where there was a segment reading "0A 00 00 00 05 00 02" it now reads "0B 00 00 00 01 00 02" and where there was a "03 00 00 00 02 00 02" it now reads "04 00 00 00 01 00 02"

If you want to go back to the old DST settings, just go back to the World Clock Control Panel and change your city. Similarly, you'll need to redo these steps if you change your city.

Keywords: DST, Daylight Savings Time, Windows CE, HPC2000, HPC, HPC/Pro, Jornada

Microsoft Licensing for Schools Lock-In

2010-01-22T13:43:00.007-05:00

Like many large IT companies, Microsoft offers discounts for educational institutions. But what most people don't realize is that these licensing agreements make it financially undesirable for schools to use anything under than Windows and Office on their computers. Since schools participate in volume licensing, some sort of counting is needed to determine how much that school should be paying. After all, a fixed cost regardless of how many computers or users would be pretty unfair. But it's in this counting itself that results in lock-in. The bundle typically includes Windows upgrade, Office, and Client Access Licenses (CAL) for Windows Server and Exchange. Note that this means any PC purchased must already have some version of Windows on it in order to qualify; a school can't just buy a PC with no OS license and install Windows based on this program alone. Upgrades and extended patch support are included as long as the school maintains the agreement contract.

K-12 schools can use Microsoft School Agreement. This is what Fairfax County Public Schools uses. FCPS spent $2.9 million on Microsoft School Agreement in FY2009 for its roughly 98000 desktops and laptops. That comes out to about $30 for each PC, which, considering the retail cost of Windows Professional and Office Professional, is a really good deal. However, from the School Agreement information booklet:

School Agreement requires an institution-wide commitment for any application, system, and Client Access License (CAL) products selected. To that end, you must include all of the eligible PCs in the participating school(s) or district. Eligible PCs include all of the Pentium III, iMac G3, or equivalent or better machines*. You must also include any additional machines within your institution on which any of the software will be run.
*Includes machines with similar processors, such as Intel Celeron and AMD Athlon.

In other words, if a school has PCs that are Pentium III or iMac G3 or better, they have to count them even if those PCs won't be using some or even any of the products covered under the agreement. Another way to put it is if a school runs Windows on only half of its computers (the other half could be Mac or Linux, etc.), and all of those computers are less than 5 years old, the school wouldn't pay Microsoft any less than if it ran Windows on all its computers. Older computers only have to be counted if they are going to run software from the agreement, otherwise they can be left out.

Higher education can utilize a similar program, the Microsoft Campus Agreement. The lock-in here is potentially worse:

Campus Agreement pricing for any application, system, and CAL products you select is based on a count of your total faculty/staff FTE employees and requires organization- or department-wide coverage. To that end, you must include all FTE employees in the participating institution(s) or departments(s) (including student employees) using the calculation below.

Non-knowledge workers, such as maintenance, grounds keeping, and cafeteria staff may be excluded from the faculty/staff FTE employee count if they do not use institutional computers.

So colleges and universities don't even pay based on how many computers there are, but based on how many people they hire. Part-time faculty and staff are included as fractions.

From a financial perspective, then, it makes the most sense to run Windows on every computer.

So what about thin clients?
I found an interesting article from Computerworld, written about three years ago. The Software Assurance mentioned is included with both School and Campus Agreement options. Microsoft has a Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop program for thin clients, it seems. However, it's unclear exactly what the interaction between that and a School or Campus Agreement would be. In any event, from the information document:

Thin client license. For thin clients, a single annual subscription purchase is required. With this subscription, companies can install unlimited copies of Windows Vista Enterprise or earlier operating systems, such as Windows XP Professional or Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional, on any number of physical servers, as long as the VMs are accessed only by licensed client devices. Users can access up to four running VM instances on up to four servers per subscription license. In addition, the annual subscription has Software Assurance built-in and provides for earlier versions, and well as upgrades that are made available within the license time frame.
To use desktop applications (for example, Microsoft Office Professional 2007) from the licensed device, each accessing device must be licensed for the application. Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop does not include application licenses.

It sounds like the OS would be licensed on a concurrent user basis (assuming the thin client disconnects from a VM when it isn't in use), while Office would need to be licensed per-thin client that might potentially use the application. It's also unclear if licensing under VECD would be more or less expensive than licensing under SA/CA. At the least, though, VECD seems to be less restrictive than the traditional licensing agreements, but perhaps only by necessity. However, it's also possible that Microsoft assumes the use of a Microsoft-based thin client, and they would demand a more stringent contract in the presence of, say, a Sun thin client that runs no Microsoft OS on-board.

So yes, maybe a school district or university stands to save by using alternative platforms such as Linux or Solaris, or would like to do graphics work on Macs. But unless they completely dump Microsoft, or opt for a different and probably more expensive (unit cost-wise) licensing agreement, this is at best difficult to do, especially in economically hard times. That said, I'm not saying institutions shouldn't try, and VECD may be a good way to go in and of itself if I've understood it correctly.

UPDATE 1/24/2010: I want to clarify the volume licensing mentioned above is on a subscription and not a perpetual basis. Customers have to recount and repay for each and every eligible system on a regular basis (either annual or three year contract).

Virtual Memory Allocation

2010-01-10T19:40:00.003-05:00

Systems administration is definitely something that involves lifelong learning, and every so often something interesting comes up, especially when it involves comparing multiple operating systems in their default behaviors.

Since analogies can be fun, imagine for a minute that you live in a simplified world that includes your bank, its customers, and merchants. The bank has a limited quantity of cash on hand. The bank also has assets that are less liquid but can be turned into cash as needed. In order for its customers to use the money that the bank has, interest-free deadline-free loans are issued via cashier's checks. When the checks are redeemed, the bank wires the cash directly to the merchant in real time. So naturally, customers would rather that the bank have enough cash on hand for their purchases, since waiting for the bank to convert their non-liquid assets would mean customers may end up waiting a long time at the checkout line for a transaction to clear.

And here is where banks differentiate: how much in cashier's checks they issue and what they do when the cash and other assets backing the checks runs out.

For the purposes of this discussion, let's say there are four banks. Three of the four banks are more profit-driven and will issue as many cashier's checks as it has paper to print on, counting on the high probability that a number of those checks will not be redeemed in full and that they will always have enough assets on hand to cover all the checks redeemed at any given point in time. Of course that cash reserve is replenished when the customer repays the loan.

The fourth bank, however, will never issue more in checks than it has in assets of any type. This bank does not need to worry about what to do if it runs out of cash, because if it does, it knows that there are no further outstanding IOUs.

The other three banks, however, have to decide what to do. Two of these banks know how to contact all of its customers at all times and if it runs low on assets, it will send out an emergency alert asking for anyone that can to repay their loans. 99% of the time this will be sufficient and enough people will repay their loans such that the bank always has enough assets. The third bank does not have a way to contact its customers. In either case, if any bank runs completely out of assets and another customer tries to redeem one of the checks already issued, the bank can't break its promise. So it goes out and kills a customer, reclaiming the value of the loan made to that person.

Okay, let's come back to the real world. Obviously, killing customers is illegal and would never fly. But this was an analogy. Banks are actually operating systems, cash is RAM, non-liquid assets is the page file (sometimes called swap, it's basically when part of your hard drive is used as RAM when all of RAM is used up, but this isn't something you normally want to use because hard drives are much slower), and customers are programs. Issuing more checks than the bank has assets is called "memory overcommit." The emergency alert is the message that pops up telling you that your computer is low on memory, and repaying loans is when you close a program and the memory it was using is freed. A cashier's check is issued when a program requests memory but before it is actually used by it (for instance, if an array is declared but before data is stored in it).

Windows, Mac, and Linux will kill programs when they run out of memory (remember, they "promised" more than is available). Windows and Mac have standard user interfaces and so they have a reliable way to notify you that you should close some programs. Linux has more choice in regards to a user interface, but that also means there isn't a standard way to tell you that you are low on memory. You can monitor it manually, or try to notice when your computer slows down a lot (you are out of RAM but still have page file space), but sometimes you don't notice because the OS is doing a good job at managing memory. In addition, Windows (and maybe Mac) can dynamically expand the page file so far as your hard drive still has free space, and although there is a performance penalty for doing so, sometimes that can be better than killing programs. Linux won't expand your page file for a number of reasons (there are cases when you don't want this to happen automatically, which is why Windows also lets you manually set a static size).

Solaris is the conservative. It will only promise as much memory as it has. As a result, there is a higher chance that Solaris will start saying "no" to requests for more memory before it is actually out of it.

In the case of Windows and Mac, this makes sense since they are primarily personal operating systems, where you want to make sure that programs continue to run as best as possible, and occasionally killing a program is not the end of the world. Plus, most users will close some programs if they are warned to do so. For Windows, Mac, and Linux, this allocation model also generally enables higher utilization of the RAM you have, especially in the face of lazy programming (i.e. asking for more memory than you ever plan to use). An example of lazy programming might be declaring an array that is too big or declaring a double variable when you only ever intend to store an integer.

For Solaris, which has a heritage of being a very stable and reliable server operating system, it's important that your mission critical program stays running and has no chance of being killed off automatically. As a side effect, actual memory utilization will probably be lower, resulting in higher costs (more RAM costs more money, after all).

BUT what this means is that while it is fine to run with very little or even no page file on Windows, Mac, and Linux (since your system isn't really running well if it starts paging; it'll be crawling), on Solaris, the page file should be much larger in order to ensure that you are able to get full use of your memory. Determining the optimum size for the page file is a difficult task and is very dependent on the applications being run, but it means the age-old rule of thumb for anywhere from one to two times RAM doesn't change by much even when you start to get to larger amounts of RAM in modern servers, sometimes even 16 GB and up. Yes, you may be reserving a large part of your hard drive that you never use, but it guarantees the safe behavior.

Essentially the different approaches to memory allocation are attempts to address the same set of problems, with different consequences. Linux certainly has ways to change the behavior of its memory allocator and out-of-memory (OOM) killer, but as I mentioned earlier, what I discussed was its default setting.

ext2/ext3 on Windows

2010-01-04T14:45:00.010-05:00

UPDATE 10/8/2011: It appears that ext2fsd 0.51, released 7/9/2011, has fixed the corruption issue according to the changelog on its website: "1. FIXME: Data corruption issue, especially for multiple-thread writing on XP system." The version tested in the original blog post below was 0.48.

ext3 has long been one of the most commonly used filesystems on Linux. While it is sometimes displaced by competitor ReiserFS or newer players such as ext4 and Btrfs, ext3 is still around, at least on my computer, because it can be mounted on Windows, while the others cannot (although I think ReiserFS might also be mountable on Windows). ext3 is the same as ext2, with the addition of journaling, so mounting an ext3 filesystem as ext2 is akin to mounting without journaling.

NTFS has been the filesystem used on Windows for long enough that every Windows computer out there probably has it for the C: drive. Linux has an ntfs-3g driver that allows read/write to NTFS partitions and is generally considered stable. I believe ntfs-3g also does not emulate journaling. I also use NTFS on my external backups hard drive primarily since it has the highest chance of being mountable on any computer (Windows can do it natively and most Linux systems today have ntfs-3g).

On Windows, there are currently two primary methods of mounting an ext2/3 filesystem as a drive letter. There is Ext2 IFS and Ext2Fsd. Both drivers offer the same basic functionality. For the longest time, I used Ext2 IFS and was happy with it. But I recently decided to try out using Unison for backups to my external hard drive, and discovered that symlinks on my Ext3 partition were not handled when read with the IFS driver; any operation would simply return access denied. So I decided to try out Ext2Fsd. As it turns out, although Ext2Fsd has a number of nice features in it, Ext2 IFS is still the stabler product and I have switched back to it. I've decided that backing up directories with symlinks will just have to be done from within Linux, since the ntfs-3g driver is able to store symlinks (they are just represented as binary files when viewed under Windows).

However, I did want to offer my comparison chart of the differences in the two ext2 drivers on Windows, as I attempted to search for one myself but could not find one. Note that this chart applies to Ext2 IFS 1.11a and Ext2Fsd 0.48, and I have not listed all of the differences, just the ones that were the most obvious. My system runs Windows XP SP3 32-bit.

Feature	Ext2 IFS	Ext2Fsd
inode size	up to 128	up to 256 (the default on recent Linux systems)
ext3 journal present (unclean unmount from Linux)	refuse to mount	roll journal and mount
symlinks	return access denied	follow valid symlinks (but they look like regular files or directories on Windows)
Explorer shell features	standard folder icon only and no Recycle Bin	desktop.ini processed (folders can have non-default icons, etc.) and Recycle Bin used with deleted files
stability	all files okay	some files (large Outlook psts and some small Office documents) error'ed during Unison backup, so read operations

UPDATE 3:20 PM: It would appear that two of my PST files that I attempted to backup are actually now corrupt. I haven't yet run Outlook's repair utility, but if it fails, at least it was only IMAP downloaded mail data (the mail is still on the server).

NORAD and Santa

2009-12-24T10:21:00.001-05:00

CNN published an interesting article on some of the history of NORAD's Santa tracker. Read it here.

Shaping the Future

2009-12-22T12:06:00.003-05:00

Wired recently published an interesting profile on Oracle and its CEO's possible role in influencing the computing world as we know it today. And something else the article implies to me is that perhaps Oracle's recent acquisition of Sun was actually pretty appropriate given that Sun's slogan is "The Network is the Computer."

Here's the link (don't worry, it's short for a profile): Time Your Attack: Oracle's Lost Revolution

Everyone Uses Blackboard

2009-12-07T16:17:00.002-05:00

Today was the last day for fall semester classes at Johns Hopkins, and tomorrow is the official start of the three-day reading period. Technically my reading period is much longer since my exams don't start until a week from today, on December 14th, but it does seem I will need most of that time to be studying.

It has been awhile since I posted something of substance here, yet I still don't have much time to write anything new, so I figure it's time to start posting some op-eds I wrote for a class in high school. They may be a tad bit out of date, but should not be any less relevant. So here goes the first:

Everyone Uses Blackboard
Monday, March 31, 2008

But why? Should we really be using it?

Consider that Fairfax County Public Schools is facing a large budget deficit for fiscal year 2009. Among the things that were considered to fix the deficit were cutting the subsidizing of standardized test costs for students (2.66 million dollars) and charging students a fee for participating in activities and athletics (2.5 million). (Those proposals were later rejected by the school board after many parents and students protested.) Now consider that out of the 15.4 million dollars allocated to technology, 2.2 million (or 14%) of that is for “FCPS 24-7 Learning Initiative Enhancements.” (FCPS 24-7 Learning is Fairfax’s name for their implementation of Blackboard.) The only technology ticket items that cost more are licensing for Microsoft software (2.9 million) and computer lease costs (4.3 million). Costs in the 2008 budget were very similar, with Blackboard costing 2.1 million and computer leases at 3.7 million. Microsoft and replacing computers are a few pages of discussion by themselves, so I won’t talk about them here.

Okay, so cutting Blackboard wouldn’t completely make up for a student activities fee, but how is Blackboard worth 2 million dollars a year? Most of my teachers have an enabled Blackboard site, but only a handful post anything on it regularly, and next to none use it for anything other than posting syllabi or assignments. I’ve very rarely used the discussion forum tool. The situation isn’t much different on university campuses, according to college students. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t pay 2 million just for teachers to post a few documents online. The 2 million is really going towards often poorly implemented collaboration features that aren’t even being used most of the time. Blackboard, Inc. has largely been able to get away with this since it pretty much provides the only commercially-supported course management system (CMS) available, thanks to its patent portfolio which, up until a few days ago when the USPTO reevaluated and then invalidated all of its software patents, it was able to use to sue CMS startups like Desire2Learn.

On the topic of the discussion forum feature, I have to say that the Blackboard backend is apparently more insecure than I could have ever imagined. When students come together on a forum, it’s understood that they can post and reply. It’s also understood that they can delete their own posts. As it turns out, they can delete anyone else’s posts by writing a little code of their own. There is no backend security protecting one student from deleting another student’s posts; there is just the lack of a button on the webpage to do it. Sending the code that says “delete other post” still works, or so I’ve heard from other students.

Use the 2 million dollars for something else. Blackboard sucks. Oh, but wait, we’ve now become dependent on an online course management system....

Before FCPS even began evaluating Blackboard in schools, a group of Thomas Jefferson High School students developed the first TJ student Intranet, which launched in 2000. One of the features implemented, IOTA, was essentially a simple course management system which would have satisfied nearly all teachers online needs. It would later sit unused as FCPS adopted and mandated Blackboard as the CMS for all schools. When Intranet 2 was developed and launched 6-7 years later, no course management tool was included since it was simply assumed that teachers would only use Blackboard anyways. However, because of the way the new Intranet was designed, it would be fairly easy to add such a system to integrate with the existing Intranet codebase. While that hasn’t happened yet, a group of underclassmen are leading an effort to develop a product they’ve dubbed “Whiteboard,” which would be their offering for a replacement to Blackboard.

Did I mention that there hasn’t been any exchange of money here? All of these student-led efforts have been free contributions, and more or less open source. Apart from in-house efforts, there is also Moodle, a more larger, community-based open source CMS project. Commercial support is an issue, you say? I agree! And yet somehow Blackboard has still managed to be down more than is acceptable for something we pay 2 million dollars a year for.

Universities and school districts, it’s never too late to look at alternatives.

Some More Articles on Medicine

2009-11-30T11:14:00.002-05:00

Articles on Medicine

2009-11-17T10:49:00.002-05:00

Interesting articles on caring for seniors:
The Patients Doctors Don't Know
Experiencing Life, Briefly, Inside a Nursing Home

The Dog-Eat-Dog World of Applying to Med School - sort of a med school version of an earlier blog post I wrote about applying to college.

Are you reading this blog post at 2am in the morning? Have a look at this.

We can detect cancer, but what should we actually do about it?

And on the topic of healthcare reform, what Hopkins medicine already does.

Sun Ray Software 5 Released

2009-11-10T10:16:00.004-05:00

SRS 5 was officially released today. While I didn't get a chance to evaluate the few new features added in EA 2, I look forward to deploying the final release version within the next month or two.

Here are the download links:
Sun Ray Software 5
PC/SC-lite 1.2
Sun Desktop Access Client 1.0

Geocities - The End

2009-10-26T22:59:00.003-04:00

Sometime in the next 24 hours, Geocities is expected to stop serving webpages forever. For those that don't know what a Geocities is, read on.

In the mid to late 90s, Geocities was the premier free web site service organized into communities. I used to own a Geocities account. Originally it was located at http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Cockpit/8423/index2.html, a part of the science and technology community. (Unfortunately this site no longer exists due to an account issue I had in the early 2000s, by no fault of Yahoo's.) I remember the e-mail I received telling me that my quota had been upgraded from 13 MB to 14 MB, and then a couple years later when Yahoo! purchased Geocities. Geocities was not only where I first played with a website over a 28.8k dial-up connection, but it was also the source of the first password I ever used (randomly generated but constructed in an easy-to-remember way), and is actually a password that I still use to this day, albeit usually with variations.

To commemorate the end of Geocities, XKCD modified their website layout to match one that might be seen on a Geocities page; it is also archived here.

We will miss your historical significance, Geocities.

Prosthetics 2.0

2009-10-22T16:19:00.003-04:00

Or rather, optogenetics. It's been awhile since I've posted here since I've been busy with schoolwork. I'm still busy, so I haven't really written anything substantial despite my to-do list of things I want to write about. But I did want to share the following biotechnology article, which I found interesting:
Algae and Light Help Injured Mice Walk Again

2009 Ig Nobel Prizes

2009-10-01T22:00:00.002-04:00

No, not the real thing, but a fun read nonetheless:
BBC's coverage of the 2009 Ig Nobel Prizes

Yet Another Overlooked New Sun Ray Feature

2009-09-28T10:09:00.003-04:00

The Ctrl-Alt-Bksp-Bksp keystroke used to hard terminate a session can now be disabled. While not listed as a new feature, the documentation has been updated with the note that it can be disabled using the utxconfig command, specifically using the -q option. Disabling this keystroke can be useful in lab environments where users that know about it abuse it to free up locked terminals.

ADDED 10:15am:
In addition, a new -A option is also available to make certain settings mandatory. This was probably added in complement to the above.

The -c, -D, and -L options are now marked as reserved, but they used to have the following descriptions:
-c config-file: Sets a specific configfile to use. The usage of this option is beyond the scope of this manual.
-D: Debug flag.
-L geom: Lists out the X server screen device start-up arguments for the user preferred geometry set with -R or for geom if none is set.

Sun Ray Portrait Mode

2009-09-20T19:30:00.002-04:00

One of the friendly bloggers over at Sun reported that Sun Ray Software 5 EA2 now has support for screen rotation! As it turns out, the feature was actually added to the Sun Ray X server in Sun Ray Software 5 EA1, but was another one of the new features that was not listed in the documentation. Happy rotating!

The End of Reading Rainbow?

2009-08-28T22:18:00.001-04:00

A Facebook friend pointed out the following news article:
In Memoriam: "Reading Rainbow"

One of the many good shows I remember from my early childhood....

Ordering McNuggets

2009-08-28T21:29:00.002-04:00

McDonald's chicken nuggets are an interesting price conundrum. These days, most people are been conditioned to automatically believe that the higher the quantity of a product you buy, the more value you get. While this is usually true, saving us the work of having to calculate unit prices for everything, this isn't necessarily so with McNuggets. It's been awhile since I noticed this; perhaps it was originally during my vacation to Hawaii two summers ago (prices in Hawaii are high for just about everything because things have to be imported), but whatever the case, because of the ubiquitous dollar menu at all McDonalds, a 4 piece McNuggets can be bought for $1. At least in my geographic area, all the higher quantity purchases have unit prices higher than $0.25. In fact, it is more cost effective to purchase 3x 4 piece McNuggets than it is to purchase the box of 10 (and this is true for the 6 and 20 quantities as well). There is never a case in which I would get a better value buying a box that had more than 4 nuggets in it. The nuggets aren't any different in size or taste. For the nitpickers, the only noticeable differences are that you get a few more boxes that have the words "Happy Meal" on them (since Happy Meals get 4 McNuggets). Just thought I'd share this cost saving tip with those that hadn't noticed this already :)

Google DragRacer

2009-08-13T10:33:00.002-04:00

A friend pointed out an interesting Google Maps street view of what appears to be a race in progress. Looks like a Google employee had a lot of fun that day!

Google Apps and Privacy

2009-08-10T17:21:00.003-04:00

About a week ago, there was an interesting Slashdot posting about privacy of data and Google Apps, specifically in respect to HIPAA compliance and legal liability. Based on the very interesting train of comments, it seems that using Google Apps for medical data would not be HIPAA-compliant because the data is not stored in an encrypted form. I certainly don't claim to be very familiar with either HIPAA or Google's Terms of Service, but that does sound like it could be a problem.

More importantly, though, is the point raised that Google employees can read your data. This is something that most people don't really think about. I had an interesting conversation with a fellow TJ student once. As a sysadmin, I had access to the mail system, and I mentioned that the nature of having administrator access was that we could read students' TJ e-mail if we wanted to, but that we were highly unlikely to do so. This student wasn't very comfortable hearing this, so I also brought up that using any other mail system like Gmail had the same issue. For some reason, this person was more comfortable with strangers having access to her data than a fellow student. If I remember correctly, the rationale was that some information (e.g. personal relationships, etc.) could be more damaging in my hands than in the hands of a total stranger. At the same time, that's saying you would trust a random stranger with your most personal secrets more than you would another responsible student (because becoming a student sysadmin is not as easy as "here you go") at the school you attend. And yet, as illogical as that seems, more and more people opt to go this route. For instance, people will blog or post things online but then are surprised when other people find it and it gets used against them (the classic example is a prospective employer finding an embarrassing photographs of or information about you online).

Back to the original topic, then. While Google Apps offers a lot of benefits, including low cost (it's free unless you opt for a premium version) and familiarity (just about everyone has a personal Gmail account and finds Google products easy to use), there are times you want to consider the implications of putting things in the hands of people that you don't really know. There is a reason, after all, that passwords and other sensitive information aren't supposed to be sent in e-mails. But let's say that every employee that works for a company handling your data is trustworthy. You still have to deal with the possibility that data is accidentally mishandled or lost, because even with the best intentions, accidents do happen ("lost laptop with thousands of Social Security Numbers" ring a bell?). That is, after all, the definition of an accident.

So the next time you choose to use a public service for storing or transmitting potentially sensitive information, consider not only the benefits, but also the implications of doing so. And if you're in healthcare, I advise you to do your research thoroughly, and consider whether or not your patients would approve of the way your data is being handled. But who knows, these days it's possible plenty of people would be quite happy with their private health information in the hands of computer nerds they've never met.

Audacity on Solaris

2009-08-10T15:48:00.003-04:00

I finally got Audacity (both stable 1.2.6 and beta 1.3.7) compiled and working on Solaris 10, albeit with some minor remaining issues. While 1.3.8 is already out, I opted not to compile it since I had already started working with 1.3.7 and 1.3.8 is also the first release after the project's announcement that PortAudio v18 was no longer supported in the 1.3 branch. We need PortAudio v18 to support Solaris audio framework since Solaris 10 does not have OSS support, at least for Sun Ray. These packages should also work on OpenSolaris, using the legacy Solaris audio interfaces.

Click here for the SVR4 package downloads and a README file with dependency and known issue information. As with the VLC package from a few days ago, dependencies are not included, and I would appreciate if someone would be willing to mirror these files.

Not My Spleen!

2009-08-10T09:49:00.000-04:00

The spleen is apparently more useful than once thought.

High Tech Schools

2009-08-08T16:39:00.004-04:00

TVNZ: Wired for the future

I had trouble getting the Flash version to load, possibly because the server is half way around the world from where I am. The Windows Media link did work. For those on non-Windows systems, here's a direct link to the Windows Media version of the video. Of particular note are the Sun Rays running what appears to be GNOME with Firefox 2. In addition, it seems that they use Zimbra for their e-mail.

VLC on Solaris 10

2009-08-06T16:12:00.006-04:00

Yes, it works! All the little things I had to do to get it compiled I've filed on VLC Trac (tickets 3027 through 3040). As of the time of this post, five issues have already been fixed in SVN. There might still be some other runtime issues that I haven't found, but for the most part it seems to be working.

I've uploaded SVR4 packages (installs in /usr/local) for VLC on both x86 and SPARC. Note that it does have dependencies! For any audio support, you will minimally need SDL. ncurses is needed for the ncurses interface, QT4 is needed for the standard GUI, libmad is needed for MPEG decoding (including MP3), ffmpeg is needed for a lot of video formats, etc. I am currently not supplying these dependencies, but if I get enough requests to, that can change. The package specifies the maximum set of packages that are dependencies (that is, if some are missing, VLC may still work but not all of the plugins will). For those not very familiar with the various community-based package sources for Solaris, SMC packages are at sunfreeware.com and CSW packages are from either opencsw.org or blastwave.org. STJ packages are ones that I compiled at TJHSST (VLC included), and are not presently accessible outside of TJ.

Enough talk already! Click here for the downloads. I would appreciate it if someone was willing to mirror these packages since this site has limited bandwidth. Feel free to let me know what you think of the packages! They should work on OpenSolaris as well.

UPDATE 8/11/2009 10:00 PM:
I've added a binary SVR4 package for QT4 (GCC) since it isn't as easily found and is also a very lengthy compile. I've added a README at the site as well for some additional information, including tips and pointers to get your dependencies. For OpenSolaris users, you should be able to get a working VLC with no source code compilation needed!

GPS and Paper Maps

2009-07-30T13:01:00.005-04:00

When I grew up, we didn't have personal GPS devices to help us find our way around town, or even MapQuest or Google Maps. We used maps on paper and our brains to find routes. In first grade, I even remember a brief unit on learning how to use a grid-based paper map (although I had already learned how to navigate a few years earlier using the maps at home). Basically, navigating worked something like this:

Pick the map for the region

Look up the street names in the index

Go to the indicated page number and/or grid number

Find the street in the grid and trace it to your desired location

Repeat for the other point of interest and connect the dots

It seems, however, that not everyone can read maps anymore...

For the record, I usually use non-GPS-based computer mapping programs, but often like to retrace the route on paper and build my own alternate routes based on that. I do not own a GPS navigator (yet).

John Doe and Musicians

2009-07-30T12:58:00.004-04:00

It's a real John Doe, even if it was an accident.

This is something I'd like to see sometime, for now the video will do: Glass harp player brings Old Town alive

Johns Hopkins Internet Connections

2009-07-27T20:55:00.005-04:00

Most higher education institutions (i.e. universities) have connections to both the commodity Internet and the Internet2 research networks. I was browsing around the JHU IT website when I happened upon this IT newsletter from 2004. It seems that during the summer of 2004, Hopkins upgraded its Internet2 link from 45 Mbps (which is what TJHSST still has today; few high schools have a connection to I2 at all) to 1000 Mbps. That's quite a jump there! The regular internet connection was also bumped 20% to 110 Mbps.

Today (well, as of last winter), Hopkins has a 1.1 Gbps commodity internet connection. The primary I2 link remains at 1 Gbps, but there is an additional 10 Gbps link for Physics and Astronomy, probably because Hopkins houses ground control for the Hubble Space Telescope.

For those not familiar with Mbps and Gbps, let me put it this way: a home DSL connection in the Northern Virginia area is typically 3 Mbps, cable internet is 10 Mbps, and fiber optics (FiOS) is 15 Mbps. And those are download speeds; upload speeds at home tend to be slower than download speeds, whereas enterprise internet connections (like those used at corporations and educational institutions) run the same speed in both directions.

Healthcore Costs, Doctors, and Salaries

2009-07-27T13:55:00.004-04:00

There have been some interesting articles recently about health care. The point about the value of prevention is an old one for me, but the salary vs. fee pay system for doctors was something I had not heard about before. I'm not sure which is better since my experience in comparing the two is limited, but I think what any healthcare reform needs to boil down to is patients first, not profits. I'm not going to deny that the limited sources from which I read these articles may provide a biased view, but it seems that in the cases presented, improving patient care led to a reduction in healthcare costs, without cost savings being a primary goal.

References:
NYT: Getting Good Value in Health Care
NYT: Hospital Savings: Salaries for Doctors, Not Fees
NYT: Forget Who Pays Medical Bills, It’s Who Sets the Cost
The New Yorker: The Cost Conundrum

Bears and Your Food

2009-07-25T17:06:00.003-04:00

From the New York Times: Bear-Proof Can Is Pop-Top Picnic for a Crafty Thief.

My two favorite quotes:

"But wildlife officials say that Yellow-Yellow, a 125-pound bear named for two yellow ear tags that help wildlife officials keep tabs on her, has managed to systematically decipher a complex locking system that confounds even some campers."
"BearVaults, one of several canister brands, are favored by many backpackers because they are light and can be opened with bare hands; most others require a coin or screwdriver."
(Bear hands?)

Snail Mail

2009-07-25T17:02:00.002-04:00

It seems that USPS mail volume has declined significantly in recent years. Combined with the struggling economy, the article claims the USPS is "looking to cut home mail delivery from six days a week to five." Feels like as big a change as switching from 7 to 10 digit phone dialing was back in the 90s; an inconvenience that most people will get used to eventually.

Zero Gravity Coffee

2009-07-25T12:28:00.001-04:00

This is pretty neat:
Astronaut demos drinking coffee in space
(Thanks to a fellow blogger at http://miniandmicro.blogspot.com/ for the tip!)

You Get What You Pay For - Promise Technology RAID Arrays

2009-07-24T17:02:00.005-04:00

TJHSST's Computer Systems Lab has a student systems administrators program, of which I was a participant during my time there. The "sysadmins" run production systems that support core school services such as student e-mail, the student Intranet, and the main website. The program is very fortunate to be able to use a part of the school's IT budget to purchase equipment to support these services; there was once a day and age when this was not so and the hardware ran ancient. So of course, in trying to be good stewards of the privilege, we try to find good deals on hardware that we are after. But in some cases, we learn the hard way that cheap hardware is cheap for a reason.

Enter the Promise VTrak M310i storage array.

On paper, this product looks great. It's cheap and comes with hard disk carriers so you can buy your own hard disks instead of being tied down to overpriced OEM disks. It supports everything that we want it to do. But at the end of the day, the on-board disk controller is unreliable. Maybe that's because we are using it with Solaris systems. Maybe it's because we're trying to use it more as a JBOD than a RAID. Neither of those are legitimate reasons, though, since the product advertises support for iSCSI, and allows you to create a JBOD configuration. If you claim to support an industry standard protocol or claim to be able to do something, there is no such thing as "it should work with this OS but not that one," or "we support this but not the very specific way you're doing it." There is a reason some things are called standards. Whatever the reasons, though, we are now stuck with a product that fails erratically; sometimes only a few days pass between failures, and sometimes a couple of weeks do. What we'd like now is a JBOD (no RAID controller to fail) that we can just put these disks in. However, to buy a good product from a Tier 1 vendor means that you can't just put your own disks in, and we aren't in a hurry to part with the disks that we already bought. Or at least with Sun's J4200 JBOD array, the product is new enough that it's hard or expensive to get the needed parts from the aftermarket. We've tried complaining to Promise and asking to get our units exchanged for their JBOD models, in hopes that they would work better since our units are still covered under warranty, but last I heard was that we'd gotten nowhere in trying to do that.

On a related note, we recently attempted setting up a donated Promise SuperTrak RM8000 RAID array. It has a decent amount of storage, but we were disgusted after spending 5 minutes trying to configure it. Apparently the product lets you accidentally create an invalid configuration using its non-intuitive interface, then has no way for you to delete it. It's possible there is a reset-all button hidden somewhere on the device, but we haven't had time to look for it.

So while Promise seems to have been slowly improving their products over time, I cannot deem their budget products production-worthy. It's possible their more expensive enterprise-class products work okay, but I can't speak to those. And before you say "upgrade the firmware", the product should at least work before it even ships. Blatant bugs like these show what seems to be either poor engineering or a lack of sufficient testing. And to be fair to the engineers, it could as well be a failure of management. A BlueArc storage product I've worked with had some issues that, after conversing with some of their engineers, turned out was a result of having the product rushed to market.

What is our solution? We don't really have one yet. We'll either wait until aftermarket parts are both available and affordable, or we'll just have to fork over additional money to buy a fully integrated and tested product. So much for trying to save some money. What I do know is we won't be buying a Promise product again anytime soon.

Keywords: Promise VTrak, storage array, review, SAN

Google Voice + Gizmo = Free VoIP

2009-07-23T16:31:00.003-04:00

I don't have an invite...yet. But I am sharing an account with a friend, and I have to say that, despite some privacy concerns, I expect to be using Google Voice in the future. The main reason is that I don't have a cell phone. Yes, that's right, I don't have a cell phone (not yet, anyways). Last year, I purchased the SkypeOut unlimited calling plan at $8 per 3 months while I was at Hopkins so I could call home and friends. However, with Google Voice I can now make calls for free within the continental United States.

But wait...Google Voice connects two phone endpoints. I have a Bluetooth headset that I can use with my computer. So I can use Skype for free PC to PC calling and Google Voice for free phone to phone calling (dorms have phones that are free for campus and incoming calls). But what if I want PC to phone or phone to PC, if only so I can use my headset? As it turns out, Google Voice can interoperate with the Gizmo SIP protocol. A Gizmo5 account can be used as a Google Voice phone endpoint, and has a Skype-like program that runs on Windows (and other OSes too).

Gizmo5, however, doesn't have a Windows Mobile Pocket PC client. However, it is SIP-based, so any SIP client can interoperate with Gizmo5 accounts. I found that the only SIP client to work decently on my Windows Mobile 6.1-flashed Dell Axim x51v was SJPhone. (If you use it, there is a caveat. The PPC 2003SE version doesn't hog the CPU like the unstable/beta for WM5 does, but the little notification message for incoming calls doesn't have buttons for Accept or Drop Call like the WM5 beta does. I went with the 2003 version, and mapped those two functions to hardware keys, since the only other way to answer a call is to enable automatic answering. It does, however, mean that those keys don't launch their usually mapped applications while SJPhone is running.) To dial using Google Voice on my PDA, I can either use Google's mobile web interface or the 3rd-party iDialer application (check out the companion iContact too). The latter is a little nicer to deal with, but if Internet Explorer is not the default browser on the PDA, it doesn't work. It's also a little buggier than the web interface sometimes.

But otherwise, I seem to have found a decent and free Skype-replacement for calling regular phones. The only other missing feature now I think is the lack of support for my special headset features (answer call, hang up, redial) that Skype supports.

Poor Password Practices

2009-07-23T14:32:00.003-04:00

When you use an online service, you can pick as secure a password as you want, but you're putting a lot of trust on the other end to handle it securely as well. There are a few things that some websites or applications do that are insecure. Apparently it's bad enough to lead to this breach of security. There are at least three things that you should be wary of:

The ability to recover your current password. This means that your password is stored in clear text instead of as a non-reversible hash (yes, in most places, the systems administrators CAN'T actually get your password out of a database). This is different from being able to reset your password.

Use of secret questions and answers. Or rather, choose them wisely. Some of those questions can be answered by someone other than yourself. For instance, mother's maiden name is often a poor choice for a lot of people. Keep in mind that the answer doesn't have to be related to the question; as long as YOU remember what the answer you put in is (for example, you could put in the name of your elementary school when asked for your pet's name).

Passwords that are e-mailed to you. Did you know: e-mail is not considered secure? (It's about as secure as logging into a website without SSL.) In addition, if your password can be e-mailed to you, then the first bullet in this list is probably also true. If this happens to you, delete the e-mail with your password in it, change your password to a unique or throwaway one, and contact the website asking them not to e-mail out passwords.

Parallel Programming in High School

2009-07-21T20:41:00.005-04:00

Intel recently made a press release regarding a program they are hosting at Brooklyn Technical High School. To the question in the title: Are High School Whiz Kids Ready to "Think Parallel?", I respond with a resounding YES! But perhaps that's just where I'm from. My high school has offered at least one course in parallel computing every year (formerly called "Supercomputing Applications") since the late 80s, it seems, and even the introductory computer science course that I took there went a bit into threading, if not the other more advanced aspects of parallelism. It probably helped that we had a supercomputer on-site for a large number of those years (and still do today, although it is largely obsolete). We very recently built a modern x86 cluster, and have also been using NVidia graphics cards to cover GPU programming using CUDA since last year. In any event, I'm glad to see that more technical high schools are covering parallel programming, especially today when even a laptop typically has two CPU cores.

EDIT: For those nitpickers out there, my mention of threading was meant to say that if you don't understand threading, you probably won't understand parallel computing either, since in my opinion, threading is a simpler related concept.

Experience

2009-07-21T14:04:00.002-04:00

I've heard experience described a number of interesting, yet true ways. I came across this quote on the opensolaris.org storage-discuss mailing list today:

"Experience is the comb you get after your hair falls out."

Interesting, don't you think?

Single Individual DNA Differences

2009-07-20T18:18:00.003-04:00

Here's some interesting research about differences in SNPs when DNA is sampled from a different tissue in the same person.

The Cost of College

2009-07-20T12:44:00.002-04:00

...or, rather, the extent that some will go to. Colleges are trying to get a sense of who you really are, not a figuratively PhotoShopped version of you. Yet some seem to be making a living off people who want to do just that: Before College, Costly Advice Just on Getting In .

Reminds me a bit of an experience that a friend told me about. During a high school visit to Hopkins, he overheard someone else in the group talking about how he was sure he was going to get in because he was participating in all the "right" activities. To me, that seems to be the wrong approach...I certainly hope the admissions counselors saw through it.

Solaris vs. Linux

2009-07-20T12:40:00.002-04:00

I found an article that makes a good point about using Solaris and Linux. I happen to agree with it 99%. See the article, which I originally found from another blog.

Things Money Does

2009-07-16T15:51:00.001-04:00

Don't make dares you don't intend to keep: Attorney's Million Dollar Dare Comes Back to Haunt Him

Sometimes it's possible to buy a continent at a gas station: Glitch hits Visa users with more than $23 quadrillion charge

Microsoft Uses Sun Ray

2009-07-16T15:49:00.002-04:00

Microsoft recently released a white paper titled "Virtualizing Windows on Sun Ray Thin Clients at the Microsoft Enterprise Engineering Center", available here. Even Microsoft uses Sun Ray (albeit with Windows).

Sun KCA 2009

2009-07-15T20:44:00.004-04:00

Sun's Kernel Conference Australia seems to have some interesting sessions.
Not in Australia? Not a problem! There is a live feed of current session and recordings of previous sessions. Sessions are primarily Solaris/OpenSolaris oriented, but there are a few that involve Linux and BSD.

Source: The Blog of Ben Rockwood

Many Links, 2009-07-15

2009-07-15T16:44:00.003-04:00

In United States news: Paulson admits bank merger threat. Apparently Paulson thinks that deciding not to take on assets that would hurt a company's financial interests has "no reasonable legal basis and which would show a lack of judgment." I assume, of course, that BBC is not misquoting him.

In Northern Virginia news: Faith, and Friendliness, Helped in Hostage Crisis

Technology and healthcare: Cisco, UnitedHealth team up to build a national network for virtual doctor visits

And finally, a look back in time at internet technologies:
CompuServe, Prodigy et al.: What Web 2.0 can learn from Online 1.0

Thin Clients and Ultra Thin Clients

2009-07-13T17:11:00.003-04:00

There's a distinction made between fat clients and thin clients, but a lot of people overlook the difference between the different types of thin clients. For instance, Wyse thin clients aren't as thin as Sun Ray thin clients. The former run embedded versions of operating systems, while the latter runs a firmware. Sometimes, Sun Ray-types are referred to as ultra thin clients, which is probably where the "ut" prefix on Sun Ray commands comes from. The security track record of Sun Rays are also comparably superior. Wyse thin clients, on the other hand:
'Secure' Wyse thin clients vulnerable to remote exploit bugs

Bank Insanity

2009-07-13T16:14:00.002-04:00

Something's not right here:
Al Lewis: Wells Fargo Bank Sues Itself - FOXBusiness.com

One Year After Terry Childs' Arrest, IPSec VPN Security

2009-07-13T09:53:00.001-04:00

He's still in jail, actually, going through a number of hearings. There have been a good number of analyses about the topic, particularly on Paul Venezia's blog and some of the links from it, so I won't reanalyze it here. But I am reminded of a huge security mistake that the prosecution had made, yet I feel very few people realized the implications.
Just prior to Childs' arrest, I had been working on implementing an IPSec VPN that would work with the built-in firmware VPN client on Sun Rays. This meant all the settings had to be compatible with Cisco EasyVPN (doing so was harder than it sounds). Since IPSec is so complicated, I'd been doing a lot of research on the topic at the time. When news broke that the prosecution had entered a list of VPN passwords Childs had kept into public evidence, I had an understanding of what exactly those passwords were for. Those passwords were what are known as "pre-shared keys." If you want to set up a Cisco IPSec VPN, both sides of the connection need to have a shared secret string. These were the passwords that the prosecution had supposed were other users' personal passwords that Childs was keeping so he could impersonate them. But as a systems administrator, I knew that knowing these passwords were essential to properly configuring Cisco IPSec VPN devices. In addition, these keys encrypt the user-specific password that gets passed over the network. You see, for Cisco IPSec VPN clients, you need two passwords: the pre-shared key, which only the administrator and VPN program are supposed to know (but is easily decrypted for human consumption), and the user's personal password. The former is used to encrypt the latter. After both passwords are accepted, additional encryption is negotiated.
What this means is anyone with the shared secret key is able to obtain the user-specific password if they have a network dump of the VPN traffic while logging on to the server. Where I implemented the VPN, I was able to mitigate this risk by assigning each user a unique key, but in most legacy Cisco deployments, everyone has the same key. That these keys were posted online meant that during the time between the document becoming public record and when the city of San Francisco IT realized that the VPN server was insecure, hackers may have been able to extract users' passwords. Based on news sources, though, it seems San Francisco was lucky enough to have avoided that consequence.

Screen Candy

2009-07-11T19:55:00.004-04:00

Back in the old Windows 95 days, when I was but a wee child in elementary school, there were a handful of fun screen candy applications. One of them was Neko, a cat that would chase your mouse cursor around the screen. I rediscovered it online here, but since that's a Geocities site, and Yahoo! is shutting down Geocities later this year, it's nice to know that archive.org has a copy of the site.

There's also Screen Mates Pumpkin and Sheep. They walk around your screen and use window edges as platforms. Here's a site that seems to have downloads for them, although it says Orange instead of Pumpkin (the original Japanese website for Screen Mates no longer seems available). I think my copies of the programs are from the days when floppies were the way to share programs :)

The Sad State of Networked File Systems

2009-07-11T16:49:00.002-04:00

When it comes to networked filesystems, you pretty much have three choices: CIFS, NFS, and AFS. We won't talk about others here, such as Lustre, Gluster, other cluster-based things. CIFS is mostly for Windows, and NFS and AFS are mostly for *NIX systems. CIFS and NFS are strictly over the network (i.e. if you're on the fileserver, you don't have to use a CIFS or NFS client to read the files), while AFS additionally maintains its own on-disk layout (you need the AFS client, even on the fileserver).

Naturally, NAS appliances tend to use CIFS and NFS. The appliance can maintain its own on-disk layout, and just about every client is covered by exporting CIFS and NFS. Yes, I know Windows can also do NFS and *NIX can also do CIFS, but if given a choice, what would you choose? That's to say they don't do them very well.

CIFS on Windows just works. It's a kludge on just about anything *NIX, though, at least when you start supporting multiple users. Plus using symlinks means the server has to be very specific in implementation. Most appliances don't support CIFS symlinks, and symlinks are a *NIX user's friend. Okay, moving on.

NFS just works, until you want to start enabling security features, namely NFSv4 with Kerberos. Now it only works for the most part. On Solaris or Linux, you edit a file to enable Kerberos features. But on Linux, you also need a client keytab, and then find out that the GSSAPI credentials context (basically the authorization to NFS derived from your Kerberos credentials) stick around in a way that they shouldn't (at least on Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10); they don't go away like your Kerberos credentials do when you log out.

AFS is it's own little monster, but on Solaris and Linux, it works pretty well. So you conclude that for Linux, AFS is your best option if you want reasonable security and features. And it usually is. But that's sad. AFS works pretty well on Solaris, too. However, you can't do AFS in combination with CIFS because of the on-disk layout, and the AFS client on Windows leaves much to be desired in its current state (I'm not very reassured by the list of bugfixes for Windows that are listed for each new release). In time, AFS on Windows might be something desirable.

Windows: CIFS. Linux: AFS. Solaris: NFS, AFS. Well they say you can't please everyone. I guess they're right. We'll see where the future goes...perhaps Linux NFSv4 with Kerberos will get better, AFS on Windows will be stabler, or Microsoft will make NFSv4 work really really well on Windows.

Microsoft Shenanigans

2009-07-11T11:39:00.002-04:00

Over two years ago, I was playing with the the Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 Business Contact Manager. I decided to uninstall it since it wasn't something I was going to use. Now, as it were, BCM uses Microsoft SQL Server. When I finished uninstalling BCM, I got this friendly reminder:

Microsoft just admitted that its own products are a security risk?

Yesterday, I noticed that Google and Microsoft seemed to have entered a new partnership as well...

For those a little more behind on the times, Bing is Microsoft's latest attempt at a search engine.

Sun Ray 5 EA 1 GUI Firmware -- Update

2009-07-10T15:38:00.003-04:00

One of the Sun Ray engineers responded to my question regarding the new Advanced options. I realized what "Video Input Disable" was last night before reading his reply, but basically on some models of Sun Rays, there is a source button to switch to using the Sun Ray as a monitor for another device. In some cases, this is problematic (for instance, when using Sun Rays as kiosks, or in places where users are apt to press random buttons to get things to work). I wonder if the option would be more aptly named "Source Button Disable" instead, since initially I thought "video input" was referring to the composite video in port on Sun Ray 1 models.
The Fast Download apparently improves tftp firmware downloads over high latency connections. I've found that firmware downloads in the default mode over my home broadband connection are reasonable, though, so I don't have a strong reason to test this feature now.

Ice Cream Trucks and License Plates

2009-07-10T13:34:00.002-04:00

Every so often you see something that makes you smile. Walking home from the bus stop today, I passed a parked car with a license plate "HIHIHIH". A few months ago, driving through my neighborhood I saw a car with the plate "LUL WUT". And longer ago I overheard an ice cream truck in my neighborhood playing Tetris Rock on its chimes.

More Sun Ray Software 5 EA 1

2009-07-09T13:55:00.005-04:00

A couple more hours of evaluation and a lot more to report!

Adobe Flash HD
This time I used the 2009 JHU Commencement highlights video, after clicking the little HD button. The size of the video on-screen was approximately 896x504. Here's a table again:

Test	BW (Mbps)	CPU (%)	Quality
WinXP/off	15	40	Very Poor
WinXP/x11	35	65	Poor
WinXP/xvideo	50	60	Fair
WinXP/all	4	17	Good
S10/Firefox 3/Flash 9	25	40	Poor
S10/XVideo/MPlayer	65	65	Better

So even with HD YouTube, the enhancements help a lot, especially in reducing bandwidth used. However, this time it couldn't match MPlayer's playback quality.
According to a post in this forum thread, Flash enhancements for UNIX are coming in a future release. Hopefully that's sooner rather than later.

Soft Client on Linux
It works with Wine on Linux. I couldn't test it with Wine on Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris, and the way I tested it on Linux meant that I couldn't check if sound worked, but otherwise it seemed to work pretty well.

New GUI Firmware Options
There are at least two new options in the Advanced menu; these are ones that I took note of because it's not obvious to me what they do, and the documentation only lists them but does not describe them:

Enable Fast Download

Video input disable

Hope Sun updates the documentation soon so we figure this out. I've posted a question on the Sun Ray forum as well to see if I can get an answer.

REAL BONUS - new X extension: XRender
I have to say REAL here since last time I said BONUS, it turned out that it was in the SRSS 4.2 What's New list, but not in the SRS 5 What's New list (see the edit that I made to yesterday's blog entry). This time, I'm much more sure it's not obvious from the wiki docs. The only place it's mentioned is in the man page for utxconfig (and the corresponding version included on wikis.sun.com).
By default, the XRender extension is not turned on. You can turn it on for your token by running "utxconfig -n on", then logging out and back in. I have no idea how XRender support will affect performance of apps like Firefox on Sun Ray (Cairo uses XRender), but what I do know is that KDE 4 should now be usable! Over a year ago, I compiled the base libraries and desktop for KDE 4.0.5 (with QT 4.3.3). I logged in to see how well it was working, and I was not impressed. The desktop was very ugly and the Logout button didn't even work! (There's a screenshot linked to from this forum thread, but the link seems to be dead now.) I abandoned ship and waited. Today I pulled out that archived set of packages and it works great! As it turns out, the logout button fails if XRender isn't present.
A KDE developer had previously suggested to me compiling QT 4.5 with -graphicssystem raster to work around the lack of XRender. I never got a chance to do this, so I don't know if that would perform better than letting it use the new XRender extension. With the QT and KDE that I have now, running over my desktop icons rapidly and continuously results in Xnewt usage of 50% CPU and plasma process usage of about 35% CPU, as well as a bandwidth stream of 10 Mbps. Contrast that to about 30% CPU usage of the Xorg process when I used KDE 4 from the VirtualBox console (plasma CPU usage was comparable). It's possible a newer QT and KDE, even with XRender, would do better because of optimizations made to the code since I compiled it. I don't know whether raster would do better or worse though. I do know that someone on the SunRay-Users list had tried QT-raster on Linux and found it unusable since QT made the assumption that the color mask on the X server was RGB, instead of querying and determining that Sun Rays actually use BGR. It's possible this issue would not appear on Solaris.
To get a more objective idea of how XRender actually performed since one of the Sun Ray engineers had mentioned on the mailing list that the feature would be kept in for release if it performed well, I downloaded render_bench and ran it against both the Sun Ray and the X console running in VirtualBox. The first time I ran it on the Sun Ray, the X server crashed or reset for an unidentified reason before the test completed. The second time, the test completed without incident. I found that off-screen XRender and Imlib2 tests were comparable between the Sun Ray and console, but that for on-screen XRender, the Sun Ray took 5-12 times longer to complete the test. Subjectively, though, it still looks pretty good.

This ends my formal testing of EA 1. I will make another post if I find another hidden new feature, or have an update on something else I've already blogged about. Otherwise, we wait for EA 2!

Sun Ray Software 5 EA 1 First Impressions

2009-07-08T21:39:00.011-04:00

After several hours of testing, I've got a somewhat lengthy initial evaluation of two of the major new features: Adobe Flash enhancements and the Soft Client. I don't have Windows Server 2008 that I can play with, but I trust it just means that some extra QA testing has gone into making the Terminal Services Client play well on 2008, as well as added support for multimedia features. With that said, a quick description of my testing setup:

Windows XP laptop (ThinkPad T61, Intel Core 2 T8300 dual core CPU, 3 GB RAM) -- doubles as both the Windows Remote Desktop server and the host for the Solaris 10 VM. The Soft Client was also tested from here.

VirtualBox (3.0) VM running Solaris 10 Update 7 and SRS 5 components (32-bit, 2 VCPUs, 768 MB RAM)

Sun Ray 270

Adobe Flash acceleration
Short comment: It works great!
Long comment: Flash (while limited to IE 7 and 8, sizes less than 1024x768, and Sun Ray 2 series DTUs) has been brought up to par with other video enhancements already made in earlier releases. Here's a table of bandwidth and CPU usage, as well as perceived quality of a particular YouTube video. For those interested, the video I used was the NewsChannel8 story on the TJHSST Sun Grant. Perceived quality was differentiated at about 0:51 (video of walking across the room). CPU usage only accounts for the Xnewt (X server) process, and in the case of Windows sessions, the uttsc process as well. For the WinXP lines, the word after the slash is the argument passed to uttsc. Off equates to how performance was before SRS 5.

Test	BW (Mbps)	CPU (%)	Quality
WinXP/off	35	100	Good
WinXP/x11	40	85	Good
WinXP/xvideo	65	85	Better
WinXP/all	6-7	25-30	Best
S10/Firefox 3/Flash 9	40	70	Better
S10/XVideo/Xine	30	40	Best

As with a lot of the other multimedia enhancements, Sun Ray 1 series DTUs don't fare as well. While I haven't actually tested them in this case, according to the documentation, WinXP/FlashAll isn't even an option there. Now...if only video on *NIX could get some love, too. But, as Sun once told us, most of Sun's Ray customers use Windows, so that's where most of the engineering effort goes these days. Oh well. C'est la vie.

Soft Client
Short comment: It works! Needs some polish and advanced features, but otherwise works!
Long comment: To get the soft client to work, remember to enable "Software Client Access" from the administration GUI or set a utpolicy that has "-u pseudo". You also need to be using the EA version of SRSS as older versions don't understand soft clients. I initially overlooked these two requirements and almost passed the Soft Client off as not working.
The overall experience was comparable to that of a hardware DTU (even sound works!), although the performance in some intense cases (i.e. video) seemed slightly inferior. This is surprising since the Soft Client is running on my comparatively powerful Windows PC, while the Sun Ray has a little 4 watt embedded CPU. Of course, the DTU firmware has probably been significantly optimized. Note that I was able to test the Soft Client with a fully powered Sun Ray server (Sun Fire X4150, 8 core Intel Xeon X5460, 24 GB RAM), although only over my home WAN connection (DSL, 3 Mbps downstream). I don't know how well it would do in a LAN environment with that same server.
What is missing is hotdesking and support for non-Windows! Actually, I think hotdesking would work with NSCM, but I have my own reasons for not using it where I work. Having said that, Soft Client tokens can be registered just like other smart card and DTU pseudo tokens, so by setting up alias tokens, you can effectively use the soft client to attach to an existing smart card session, enabling hotdesking without NSCM! It'd be nice if the Soft Client could offer to present different tokens to the server though, since as a systems administrator, I've got about 5 different smart cards that I use (one for each FOG, redirected using AMGH). But for most people, the default of one token should be fine.
The Soft Client is Windows-only...but it shouldn't be too hard to port to *NIX! In fact, if you look in the installation directory, you find none other than GTK+ libraries. GTK is widely used on *NIX anyways, so I guess it's just a matter of customer demand. Personally I'd find a Linux version very interesting, since it then opens up the possibilities of building a Sun Ray netbook (the existing Sun Ray laptops don't impress me all that much in terms of battery life and lacking a middle mouse button, as well as lacking other modern laptop features).

BONUS new security feature: Client Authentication
It's in the docs. It's in the administration GUI. It has new commands and man pages to go with it. But it's not listed on the "What's New" listing! I won't say too much more here since the official documentation explains it pretty well. Perhaps Sun wasn't all that ready for it yet; the docs on the new wikis.sun.com for it even have colored notes left inline for documentation editors to address.

That's all for now, folks. More to come soon :)

As a footnote to help un-confuse some things, SRS 5 includes SRSS 4.2, SRWC 2.2, and Soft Client 1.0. SRS refers to the entire suite and stands for Sun Ray Software, while SRSS stands for Sun Ray Server Software.

EDIT 7/9/2009 11:56 AM: Client authentication is listed as a new feature in the SRSS 4.2 docs, but not in the SRS 5 docs.

Sun Ray Software 5 EA 1 Announced

2009-07-08T14:55:00.007-04:00

Sun just publicly announced the Early Access 1 program for Sun Ray Software 5 beta on the community SunRay-Users mailing list (at http://www.filibeto.org/)! Key features listed in this EA are Adobe Flash enhancements for Windows sessions, Windows Server 2008 support, and a new Sun Ray Soft Client. The announcement also mentions that EA2, due later this summer, will feature USB redirection for Windows sessions.

While it's not Adobe Flash enhancements for UNIX, it still sounds like an exciting release which I will be sure to test!

The program officially starts at 3:00pm EDT today. Details and the original announcement can be found here.

Warm and fuzzy news

2009-07-06T23:15:00.002-04:00

CNN has a nice article up:
Stolen wallet found in cherry tree after more than quarter century

It's not often you read good news these days :)

Financial Aid and the Economy

2009-07-05T21:10:00.004-04:00

No, I'm not talking about the numerous congressional bailouts that have been taking place within the past year. I'm talking about something a little less noticed...financial aid programs for college students. Financial aid programs are great since they give an opportunity to those that are economically disadvantaged to pursue a higher level of education. But there's an irony to these programs and how they may be impacting the economy.

Say what you will about our economic problems, but it is difficult to deny that debt is not a significant, if not primary, cause of economic troubles not just in the United States, but in many other nations. The federal government is deep in debt. Individuals are filing for bankruptcy and foreclosing on mortgages. But wait! These days, what's usually the first time a person finds themselves in debt? Isn't it during the college years, either from paying tuition or spending more than one has via a credit card? And then financial aid comes around and tells us, "Okay, you have a big house that you barely own, not much in savings or investments, and a couple of kids in the family off of two sources of income. You sound like you could use some help."

And then the other guy. A family that knows how to save so losing a job doesn't mean losing the house. Doesn't indulge in buying a new car and computer every year just because it's the latest and greatest. The mortgage on the small but sufficient house has nearly been paid off. All-in-all financially responsible. Financial aid: "You get nothing. You'll give us everything you have before we help you out."

Wait a sec...if you're financially responsible, you have to pay through the nose for college, but if you live paycheck to paycheck you get lots of help? Granted, this statement doesn't cover everyone. There are those families that are very well off where the kids can be sent off to top notch colleges and the parents can retire and still have extra leftover. There are also those that suffer financially through no fault of their own and really could use the help. But that group in the middle...what's going on there?

I really don't know what to do here. I have no better solution to this potential issue. But it's something I think is worth pondering.

As a footnote: I do not intend to offend anyone by writing this, but there is just something that bothers me a bit when I think about the system that compels me to share my thoughts, disorganized or poorly expressed though they may be.

People that can read

2009-07-01T16:18:00.000-04:00

I'm generally a very patient, calm, hard to stress person. However, a pet peeve that I have is when I have to repeat myself. Especially in writing. Specifically, I'm referring to a number of support cases that I've been filing with Sun. With a number of them, when the assigned support rep contacts me, I feel like they haven't read anything that I've written beyond the title, and that answering their question would just be rewriting my detailed problem statement. Now, granted, I'm generally very happy with Sun (Oracle?), and I'll give the benefit of the doubt that maybe this somewhat new Member Support Center makes it difficult for techs to read the problem statement, but really now. It'd be so much easier if you would just read the problem statement that I already spent time writing and then work from there. I would like to thank those techs that DO read my entire submission and subsequently are able to bring the service request to a quick resolution. Hopefully Sun will be able to address and correct whatever issue there is here.

RIP AvantGo

2009-07-01T16:10:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago AvantGo announced that it would discontinue providing mobile content on June 30th, 2009. For those that didn't use a PDA in the early 2000s, AvantGo allows you to sync online content to mobile devices for offline reading. Despite wireless data connections via cellphone and proliferation of WiFi networks, I've still found a use for AvantGo. I'm not always online, and AvantGo is handy when I'm using public transit (whether it be a school bus or taking Metro to an internship or to volunteer at the hospital). The content is also formatted nicely for mobile devices, so even if I do have a wireless connection, sometimes I'll use AvantGo anyways. Besides that, I don't have a cell phone (yet), and even if I did, it's not likely I would purchase an expensive data plan.

Strangely enough, with the disappearance of AvantGo (which predated the proliferation of RSS, mind you), I was hard-pressed to find a new alternative. However, I was very lucky to find mDigger. mDigger is in many respects similar to AvantGo, although it also has a Windows and Mac client. Much of the content offered is similar, although mDigger doesn't have everything that I used to read on AvantGo, nor does it seem to have as much complexity in channels (mDigger calls them mclips). For instance, with AvantGo, you can save your ZIP code in the Accuweather.com channel and it will always sync your weather. News channels also have multiple levels of nesting. With mDigger, only one level of nesting is there and I have to pick a specific mclip for my weather region (in this case, Washington DC). But my favorite change in going to mDigger is that it's actually FAST when it syncs! I think AvantGo may have been that fast when I used it back in 2002, but something happened and the service became sluggish and prone to spitting out errors (this despite have switched from dial-up to broadband). mDigger, like AvantGo, supports adding external RSS feeds. Unfortunately, there's no link traversal for feeds so feeds that only have headlines and short summaries aren't very useful for me (this is the same reason I didn't just pick an RSS reader). mDigger also doesn't let you add any old website that you want, although I admittedly rarely used that feature in AvantGo.

All in all, I think mDigger is something I can get along with. But as for AvantGo, RIP.

Useful Laws and Other Random News

2009-07-01T15:59:00.001-04:00

Some interesting news in the Washington Post today. Fairfax County seems to be talking about reinstating the decal because of budget deficits...despite the decal just having been eliminated a few years ago (the article says 2006). Also, apparently the "I Voted" stickers were cut from the budget :(

In better news though, starting today Virginia drivers can't legally text or read e-mail while driving (how is that even possible to do safely, in any sense?). There's also supposedly a new law in Maryland that'll promote bookstore competition in regards to buying textbooks; colleges have to provide information to allow students to shop around, as it were. I don't know how that'll be different from what I do now, since the Title, Author, and Edition of the books is already available. It would be nice if the ISBN number were released though.

The law that I'm most excited about is the smoking ban in most Virginia restaurants that goes into effect on December 1st. It's already illegal to smoke in Maryland (or just Montgomery County?) restaurants, so this will be a welcome change at some of the restaurants I go to. Smoking areas don't usually work all that well, but apart from that, lines should get shorter too (smoking areas tend to be underseated).

Citations:
Ailing Budget May Lead Fairfax Back to Car Tax
Prohibition On Texting By Drivers Starts in Va.; State, Md. Plan To Launch Other Laws Today, Too

Hello, World!

2009-07-01T15:48:00.000-04:00

So I've given in...I'm blogging to a directory for now since I don't have a real blog nor the motivation to set one up right now. EDIT: Those entries have been moved here!

For those of you that don't know me, I was a 2008 graduate of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. My most significant contribution during my time there is probably the Sun grant that I wrote with Trey Repetski. In any event, I'm now an undergraduate (rising sophomore) at Johns Hopkins University, pre-med and majoring in Biomedical Engineering.

Despite this being my first blog post, I will probably make some posts in the future that predate this one just for sentimental reasons or whatnot. I don't know how I plan to backdate them just yet though.