Cloudburst cont…

How anyone trusts these services to important information can only be chalked up to ignorance.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/vulnerabilities/231000111

Trackdays with TPM

After a crash in the beginning of May and a poor weather race weekend in the middle of May we were lucky to finish May with a beautiful weekend at NJMP. We did Lightning on Sunday and then Thunderbolt on Monday. Since it was Memorial Day weekend the airport adjacent to the track was putting on an air-show that was icing on the cake, the F14 was very impressive. Below are a couple of videos I took while having some fun with my pal Hunter. You’ll notice the difference in bike sound between the two. On Lightning I was riding a GSXR750 and on Thunderbolt I was on an SV650.

Lightning:

Thunderbolt:

CCS Race Weekend #1


This past weekend was the first of 4 race weekends this season at NJMP. I hope it was the the worst weather we will see all year at the races. Friday practice was great but a bit on the cool side. I got in 3 practice runs on Friday. Saturday started out great and I got in one practice run and around lunch time the skies opened up so I sat out the 2 races I had booked. I was not in the mood to race in the rain. I did not have rain tires but that was second to my lack of confidence due to the fact that I’m on a different bike this season that just the previous weekend I went down on (see previous post). I spent the last week putting it back together and was not looking forward to doing that again this week. Saturday was pretty much a bust. Overnight Saturday we slept through a pretty severe thunder storm and woke up to a soaked track, rain, fog and humidity. It was a furious day for many racers putting on rains and taking off rains as the track conditions changed almost every race along with the weather. I was eventually able to get in 2 of the 3 races I had booked for Sunday. Both were on dry track so I was able to ride hard and push a little. I took 3rd place in the Lightweight GP late in the afternoon. I didn’t take as many pictures either since I spent much of the weekend seeking shelter under the canopy. Next races in July.

P.S. There were some sidecar races this weekend too. What a blast to see those on track.

My buddy Theo who took second in the LWF40 race. Great job buddy.
Wet conditions.
Sidecar action.
I and the poor weather leave the track together.

Oops.

Starship Study

Being a casual Sci-Fi fan and loving the Star Trek series this really caught my eye. I think its pretty cool that the term “Starship Project” is now part of the glossary of future achievements of the USA. This really represents a part of our governmental representation that actually advances our society and humanity.

Distributed computing.

Distributed computing is very much just what it soulds like. There are a number of reasons to utilize such strategies but the most popular is to achieve a greater amount of data processing in a given amount of time. Back in December of 2008 I wrote about how I had participated in the SETI@home project and then subsequently switched to the Folding@home project. Both of the projects are excellent examples of distributed computing. What I find most interesting about these projects is that they are using the power of distributed computing to analyze data that has already been obtained, rather than producing new data. In the case of SETI, they are able to use various radio telescopes the gather data from distant space in huge quantities. That data is then divided into very small pieces for each distributed client to analyze. Similarly, Folding@home uses the power of distribution to run protein folding simulations for far longer that was previously practical. The Folding@home Wikipedia page has some facts about the amazing amount of processing power of the Folding volunteer network. It runs in the multiples faster than the most powerful single computer in the world.

Below is a video of a protein folding simulation.

This precisely the type of work that your computer can contribute to the Folding project if you download and run the client. Many of us have computers that sit powered on all day and most of that time they are idle or using only a fraction of their processing power. Why not put that power to good use for a good cause?

Vintage computing.

I’ve always enjoyed relics. My parents frequently went on antiquing trips when I was young and many of the places we visited provided intriguing looks into the past. I usually found the old tools, clocks, cameras and automobiles most interesting. I still do. I also like looking at old photographs for the same reason. Of course now that the computer age has enough time under its belt, it too can produce a certain nostalgia. I don’t remember how but a few weeks ago I came across this You Tube video of an early 1960’s acoustic modem and really enjoyed it. I think because of what it is, it ties the past so closely to the present in that it was designed to facilitate communication between distant machines, a ubiquitous part of our current existence.

Then, this week at the NJLinux LUG meeting in Union, we had a some guests from the MARCH that provided a coincidental correlation to my discovery of the modem video. As a result of our guests attending the meeting I learned some interesting facts about the early days of computing and some significant roles that the state of NJ played back then, particularly as it relates the research and development that took place at the Marconi stations in Belmar and New Brunswick. A great deal of that history can be found at the Info Age science and history learning center and museum. The LUG meeting also included some discussion of a number of historical moments in computing advancement from the early days of the large ENIAC type machines to mainframes then to minicomputers and microcomputers. Also at the meeting was a functioning Altair 8800 that we were lucky to see in operation. Much vintage computing information can be found at the MARCH site.

If you are at all interested in the vintage computer scene you may consider attending the VCFE 7 later in May.

Free software.

Have you ever read the EULA that you are presented with when you buy a new computer or piece of software and you are prompted with that “I Agree” checkbox? I’m guessing no. I never have either. You would likely be surprised if you did read it. Here I’m doing a basic compare and contrast between the Windows 7 Ultimate EULA that comes on a new PC and the GPL (Gnu General Public License).

MICROSOFT SOFTWARE LICENSE TERMS
WINDOWS 7 ULTIMATE N

2. INSTALLATION AND USE RIGHTS.
a. One Copy per Computer. The software license is permanently assigned to the computer with
which the software is distributed. That computer is the “licensed computer.”
b. Licensed Computer. You may use the software on up to two processors on the licensed
computer at one time. Unless otherwise provided in these license terms, you may not use the
software on any other computer.
c. Number of Users. Unless otherwise provided in these license terms, only one user may use the
software at a time on the licensed computer.

8. SCOPE OF LICENSE.

The software is licensed, not sold. This agreement only gives you some rights
to use the features included in the software edition you licensed. The manufacturer or installer and
Microsoft reserve all other rights. Unless applicable law gives you more rights despite this limitation,
you may use the software only as expressly permitted in this agreement. In doing so, you must
comply with any technical limitations in the software that only allow you to use it in certain ways. You
may not

· work around any technical limitations in the software;
· reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the software, except and only to the extent that
applicable law expressly permits, despite this limitation;
· use components of the software to run applications not running on the software;
· make more copies of the software than specified in this agreement or allowed by applicable law,
despite this limitation;
· publish the software for others to copy;
· rent, lease or lend the software; or
· use the software for commercial software hosting services.

26. LIMITATION ON AND EXCLUSION OF DAMAGES.

Except for any refund the manufacturer or installer may provide, you cannot recover any other damages, including consequential, lost profits, special, indirect or incidental damages. This limitation applies to
· anything related to the software, services, content (including code) on third party Internet sites, or third party programs; and
· claims for breach of contract, breach of warranty, guarantee or condition, strict liability, negligence, or other tort to the extent permitted by applicable law. It also applies even if
· repair, replacement or a refund for the software does not fully compensate you for any losses; or
· Microsoft knew or should have known about the possibility of the damages.

Taken from: http://www.microsoft.com/About/Legal/EN/US/IntellectualProperty/UseTerms/Default.aspx

The Free Software Foundation & The Gnu General Public License

The Foundations of the GPL
Nobody should be restricted by the software they use. There are four freedoms that every user should have:
the freedom to use the software for any purpose,
the freedom to change the software to suit your needs,
the freedom to share the software with your friends and neighbors, and
the freedom to share the changes you make.

Taken from: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html

In the GPL v3 any language devoted to what you may not do with the software is for the purpose of ensuring that the freedoms granted by the license are not infringed. For example, you may not modify it and then license it in a different way.

There is one way in which the GPL and the Microsoft EULA are quite similar. They both provide no real warranty. The GPL is even more absent of warranty as it provides none at all. The MSFT EULA does provide a 90 day warranty for defects.

I have on numerous occasions heard the argument that proprietary software is better if only for the fact that, if it performs poorly or causes damage then there is some recourse against the manufacturer. As paragraph 26 in the MSFT EULA above states, you can see that is not the case.

I suspect that people not familiar with “free as in speech” software have the notion that if it doesn’t cost money then it can’t be good. Those that are familiar understand that is not the case. If you have not had the pleasure to experience free software then you owe it to yourself to give it a try. You can get started with something like The Open Disc .

Be aware that terms are often used that misrepresent the true nature of software licenses. You will hear the term “open source” applied to many software product that may not necessarily be “free as in speech” free. Free software is however inherently open source and this can cause confuision. This is a topic for another discussion but it is good to be aware of it.

FreedomBox project.

I like this. I particularly like the idea of this being able to form a mesh. In my opinion it will be the mesh network that we will eventually rely on for the free dissemination of information. There are many other projects out there that can be aggregated to form the mesh. I mentioned the mesh-potato in the past. There are also many consumer grade wireless routers that can be adapted to the mesh task with freely available custom firmware. I use the WRT54GL and Tomato at home now. Its brilliant.

Here are some other mesh network related sites:

Business FIOS at the office. Part II.

Our changeover from XO DSL for Verizon FiOS is now complete. We just ordered the cancellation of the DSL line yesterday so there is no turning back now. Our network topology with the DSL service was not what I would call ideal, particularly when it came to security and because of that it was quite an effort to get completely functional with the new design. We leased a block of 32 IP’s from the DSL provider and every device on our network had a public Class A address (I know, not cool), it’s just how I did it from the beginning 11 years ago. But I was able to keep everything secure with diligent firewall rules and reviews and by keeping all the systems up top date. I knew long ago that I should change this but it was one of those things that just remained on the back burner.

With the new FiOS package that we chose I went with leasing only 14 IP’s which obviously forced me into making the long needed change. We have approximately 30 network devices here at the office including the IP phones (they were not publicly adressed, thank you). So, logically I did what should have been don in the first place and put all of our network devices on a private network and left only the servers on the public IP’s. Needless to say this required the reconfiguration of all the desktops, printers, the scanner, switches and servers. The switch was the most involved as we had to reassign a number of ports and add an additional VLAN for the new private address network. A number of the servers were also converted to multihomed mode so that they would have a physical connection to both the public and private networks because they provide services to both. Additionally, we have 2 primary DNS servers here that provide name resolution for a number of domains including some that are not ours. The coordination of reconfiguring those servers and making the authoritative record changes was done carefully so as to avoid any downtime for web-services, they were completed on Monday this week.

As I mentioned in the previous post, we are using a Soekris Net5501 as our router and firewall. It runs BSD’s well regarded PF packet filtering software via pfSense and has more than enough processing power to allow our bandwidth to operate at full speed.
net5501_70_bo_front_big_new_1
Our Sonic Wall SOHO 50 is now retired after almost 12 years in service. Proprietary it may have been but it ran like a champ. It’s so out-dated I can’t find a picture of it on the internet. We have the Soekris set up to provide NAT to the new private address LAN and then we set up a bridge from the WAN port to another port that provides the connectivity to all the new FiOS leased public IP’s. Its a mildly complicated configuration but once its going it is rock solid reliable.

I also mentioned in the earlier post that I was looking forward to the speed increase that would allow us to do offsite backups in a reasonable amount of time. That is working out great. We have about 330GB of current and archived data. It wouldn’t pay to start the offsite transfer from scratch so I made an initial transfer at the office and then took that drive to the offsite location. From then on all that needs to happen is to transfer the incremental updates. That amounts to a few GB at most a on any given day, only mere minutes now instead of hours.

It’s done.