netnerds.net

Tomorrow, the University I attend will be getting "The Internets." They'll have not just one Internet installed, but two! Ever since I heard of the project sometime in 1999, I've wanted to attend a school awesome enough to participate. I can't wait to download scholarly papers and what not at 10 Gbps!

I've got another final due tomorrow, is it obvious I'm procrastinating? But seriously, if your city has Zipcar and you don't have wheels, I highly recommend using their service. I chose them over CityCarShare and FlexCar and I've been really satisfied. Just last weekend, I rented a Volvo for 2 days and safely headed up to Napa. Tomorrow, I'm renting a Mazda 3 and using it to get to Stanford and back (and my employer is footin' the bill!).

Zipcar has both hourly rates ($8.75-13) and day rates ($65-95) and all of the rates include insurance and gas. Access to the car is granted via a membership card that's somehow connected to satellites. When you swipe your card on the designated area, it communicates with the company's dbs, finds out if you've reserved the car and, if so, unlocks the doors. From there, the key is hangin out and you plug in and go. So far, I've driven a couple Prius(es), some Mazdas, a convertible Musky-stang, a Volvo, those funky looking Scion xB's and now I've got my eye on their Mini rentals. All of the cars have XM radio too which is cool.

Their setup is incredible, everything is automated, even reporting a dirty car. One time, some crazy person left a bunch of bird seed and some feathers in the backseat. I didn't want to be charged for that mess so I called, pressed like 5,4,2 & left a message. Everything was taken care of and I didn't even talk to anyone.

I was looking up something on the FAQ's today and came across this.. I love their style.

Can I smoke in a Zipcar?

No, never.* That's a bit like asking if you can take a knife to the leather or pour milk in the CD player — also no's. Smoking damages our Zipcars and can impact the health of other members who may be allergic to it. And aside from the guilt of having potentially harmed the lungs of another Zipster, we'll charge you for the cost of cleaning the car to make it completely smoke free.

*Oh, holding a cigarette outside the car while driving is STILL considered smoking in the car. There are members (maybe even the allergic ones) who will report fellow users for doing these things. Just sayin'.

They some knee slappers, them. Ohh my servers are here, time to pick them up!

Okay, so me and Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief of Wired Magazine aren't best friends, or even friends at all, but I'll be seeing him speak tomorrow at Startup School in Palo Alto at Stanford University. I don't recall how I came across the URL but seeing that it was close by and a bunch of badasses were speaking, I decided to apply. More people want to attend than there are seats so they came up with a few questions to narrow down the list. I got accepted so that means, according to their FAQ, that someone in Sillycon Valley considers me to be a bona-fide hacker (in the classical sense of the word). Sweet!

The application is no longer online but I recall a couple of the things they asked: What is your educational background, what are your favorite tools & why and what's the coolest thing you've built. To which I answered, along the lines of:

Speaking of, today I purchased two of the awesomest machines. A friend hooked me up with two slightly used Rackable servers. Dual duo core Opteron 64-bit processors, half-sized 2U case, 4GB of RAM and 4 142GB SCSI drives. FOUR! That's way too much, actually. I'll be removing some and saving them for backups. And to top it off, the price was so low I can't even list it here. It was the hookup of a lifetime and they aren't even stolen! I had to get new machines though, Microsoft requires that Exchange 2007 run on 64-bit machines and my colocated stuff is currently all 32-bit. The two servers be staying at my office at the law firm until Longhorn is final. Till then, I'll be beta testing Longhorn and testing the final version of Exchange 2007. Thanks MSDN and SA!

To add to all this excitement, my friend Zach and I are going to the SupperHappyDevHouse gathering in Hillsborough for a night of raunchy tech-talk. If you're in the area, you should join us

P.S. If Startup School sounds like something you'd like, you can read some notes from the 2006 conference. I'll also keep an eye out for notes from the 2007 event and keep the blog posted.

TweakVista.com is one of my favorite Vista sites. Yesterday, they posted something that I had in mind for posting on this blog but now they've saved me the trouble "Extend Activation Period past 180 days" has step-by-step instructions for using Task Scheduler to legally and permanently delay the Activation requirement. This should work for awhile.. at least until Microsoft decides to release a patch to stop the workaround.

My blogless friend Zach shared this great tip with me: if you would like to test ping times to a machine from an outside source, telnet to route-server.ip.att.net. There, you will be presented with a command line which allows you to ping from the AT&T servers.

############## route-server.ip.att.net ###############
######### AT&T IP Services Route Monitor ###########
The information available through route-server.ip.att.net is offered
by AT&T's Internet engineering organization to the Internet community.
This router has the global routing table view from each of the above
routers, providing a glimpse to the Internet routing table from the
AT&T network's perspective.

This router maintains eBGP peerings with customer-facing routers
throughout the AT&T IP Services Backbone:
12.123.21.243 Atlanta, GA 12.123.133.124 Austin, TX
12.123.41.250 Cambridge, MA 12.123.5.240 Chicago,IL
12.123.17.244 Dallas, TX 12.123.139.124 Detroit, MI
12.123.37.250 Denver, CO 12.123.134.124 Houston, TX
12.123.29.249 Los Angeles, CA 12.123.1.236 New York, NY
12.123.33.249 Orlando,FL 12.123.137.124 Philadelphia, PA
12.123.142.124 Phoenix, AZ 12.123.145.124 San Diego, CA
12.123.13.241 San Francisco, CA 12.123.25.245 St. Louis, MO
12.123.45.252 Seattle, WA 12.123.9.241 Washington, DC

*** Please Note:
Ping and traceroute delay figures measured with this box are unreliable,
due to the high CPU load this box experiences when complicated "show" commands
are being executed.

For questions about this route-server, send email to: jayb@att.com

#################### route-server.ip.att.net ####################

route-server>ping netnerds.net
Translating "netnerds.net"...domain server (12.127.17.83) [OK]

Type escape sequence to abort.
Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 69.90.210.117, timeout is 2 seconds:
!!!!!
Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 64/66/68 ms

In testing this, I also learned that telnet has been removed from Vista. Now really, Microsoft! Do your helpdesk people really never use telnet to troubleshoot network issues? I used it just yesterday to see if a Citrix server's port was open. What a load of poo. At least I learned another cool trick when researching the removal. Shamit Patel's blog suggested running start /w pkgmgr /iu:"TelnetClient" to install the client from the command line. Worked like a charm.. now to explore other options available with start /w pkgmgr.

As seen on soma.fm

The Copyright Royalty Board has announced new copyright licensing fees for internet radio stations. The new fees are a staggering increase over our previous annual royalty rate of about $22,000 to over $600,000 for 2006. And the fees are even higher in 2007, based on our current listenership, they'll be over $1 million dollars for 2007! (Which is 3-4 times what we hope to raise in 2007). If you think this is unfair to internet radio, and you are an American citizen, you can send a letter to your congressman showing your support for internet radio. We already have the attention of Congress, so now you have to let them know you support internet radio and that royalty rates shouldn't be structured in a way that will put small webcasters our of business

We need to raise at least $15,000 each month to meet our current minimum operating budget. (The new royalty rates will substantially increase our costs!) With your $50 support, you'll get a SomaFM Tshirt, or at the $35 support level get our Indie Pop Rocks! compilation CD. Or get both for $75! And if that's more than you can budget right now, your support of any amount helps us!

Well, this took awhile to figure out. I wrote a Roman Numeral converter for my Java final and one of the requirements states: Subtract only powers of ten, such as I, X, or C. Writing VL for 45 is not allowed: write XLV instead.

This means I had to see if the number I'm working with was a power of 10. Initially, I did it the manual way like if i == 10 || i == 100, etc but figured there had to be a better way. I asked my physicist friend what math function I'd use and he suggested log. I tried using Java's Math.log function but kept coming up with really weird numbers. Math.pow looked like a good possiblity but I couldn't figure out how to compare 1.0E2 to 1.0.

So from 5:00pm to 8:00pm I tried about a hundred things, talked to about four people and even posted to the Sun Java forums. My always-reliable friend Lee from Microsoft walked me through a few things and explained that Java's log base is e (~ 2.71828) and I needed the base to be 10. How would I get it? The Sun bug database entry for adding pow10 gave me the answer: Math.log(x)/Math.log(10). I implemented that into my code until I scrolled down to the resolution "Being considered as part of larger math library effort in 1.5."

From there, I plugged "pow10 java" into the Google and found that pow10 is a part of StrictMath. The final solution looks something like this: if (StrictMath.log10(index)%1 == 0 && index>1) . Because StrictMath.log10(0)%1 equals 0, I had to add index>1. Instead of using mod, I could have also checked for StrictMath.log10(index) == (int)StrictMath.log10(index).

Today, as I received an email from CERT, I was reminded of the day in 2004 when it was announced that CERT merged with the US Government. I wondered what would change and even considered the possibility that red tape could turn the highly-respected CERT into something that people just didn't respect anymore.

By the next time a CERT Advsory arrived in my mailbox, the subject had changed from "CERT Advisory" to "US-CERT Technical Cyber Security Alert." And there it was: the presence of the US Government. Who, besides them, still uses "cyber"? And then, not only is it a Cyber Security Alert, it's a Technical Cyber Security Alert as though there's such a thing as Non-technical Cyber Security. I sometimes wonder if the change made the hardcore people at CERT go ":("