Tony Coffman

Once in a while

2011-12-02T05:15:00.001-08:00

I take a break and let life wash over me . Today is going to be a day for that.

Took the girls to school today. It's amazing how the simplest things can be so enjoyable.

Google Wave

2010-08-05T06:00:00.001-07:00

So sad to see Google throw in the towel on Google Wave.

In retrospect the obvious is pretty clear - the way to get mass wave adoption was to build a really solid bridge between SMTP, IM, and Twitter/ostatus worlds.

Yes, I know people did build those all of those connections and more but the wave team was a fairly small team and they didn't focus on making any of those Google production ready which would have led to people coming to depend on them as a primary inbox type of application.

I still think the concept of a live, read/write, communicating web world is where we are headed. Wave was definitely ahead of its time.

Long trip

2010-07-04T11:04:00.000-07:00

The trip home was longer than normal. I was able to use public transport the whole way.

On the way home I walked past St. Bernard's church - it was the first day of the combined parish. The bells started ringing and the sky was pure blue on a warm summer day. Perfection!

School days

2010-06-22T17:28:00.000-07:00

We're meeting with the principal and teacher in a bit...

iPad

2010-06-05T05:18:00.000-07:00

Review -- I think this is a great way to surf at very low power.

Also - reading is immersive enough that I have gone through a couple of books on the thing.

Salt Fork 2010

2010-05-03T09:19:00.000-07:00

Tap dancing in my PJs

2010-03-02T07:04:00.000-08:00

My daughter insisted that I post this. Not sure why but it's kind of amusing to me.

My daughter insisted that I post this. Not sure why but I think it's kind of amusing to me.

HP PSC 1200 Airport Extreme Leopard

2009-08-19T14:49:00.000-07:00

I'm posting because I hope this might save somebody else some time.

Problem - a bunch of USB printers don't work out of the box with the Airport Express base station.

In my case it was an HP PSC 1200. I just bought an Airport Express and thought this thing would be plug and play particularly since I had it printing via Linux CUPS shared via Avahi (bonjour)

Anyway - it was recognized immediately but it wouldn't auto select the driver and the list of manual driver choices didn't include a driver.

The built-in Leopard driver supports direct USB printing. I'm guessing my previous setup was using the Linux CUPS driver but I don't know for sure because so much Mac stuff Just Works :-)

Anyway - the easy fix for HP printers is to run the open source HPIJS driver. See this page

Install ghostscript, then foomatic-rip, and then the HPIJS driver package in that order.

Once that is done, make sure you close out and restart System Preferences and then when you go back into System Preferences the driver should auto detect.

Enjoy!

Beach day

2009-07-04T02:15:00.000-07:00

We went to the beach yesterday with my daughter and her cousin.

The best part was just hanging out with Emi.

Where in the world am I

2009-05-04T07:30:00.000-07:00

Playing with location apps

Adieterlin - a work in process

2009-04-02T13:00:00.000-07:00

Something to listen to...

adieterlin

I think this needs more work.

And now a word from Paul Vixie

2008-12-03T06:28:00.000-08:00

I've had these words up on my wall at work for a little while. I thought I'd like to stick 'em here also. It's an interesting comment and I've been thinking about this for some time since I first read it.

This is from the NANOG list on November 2nd, 2008.

the human, as a species in the animal kingdom, is known to be the kind of animal who fouls its own nest and overruns its habitat. the idea of a tipping point, whether it be for CO2 in the atmosphere or polar ice shelves or explosively deaggregated IPv4 routing tables, does not occur in the minds of individual decision makers. instead it's left to us "chicken little" types, and the only way the individual decision makers ever make their decisions on the basis of tipping points is if some kind of "governance" makes them do so.
--
Paul Vixie

Google docs publishing to blog - the title is missing

2008-09-30T02:54:00.000-07:00

Last time I tried this - the title wouldn't publish. Let's see what happens this time....

Webtop applications

2008-09-04T10:56:00.000-07:00

Wordpress via webtop shortcut in gears mode running on chrome = decent application experience.

I think Google is pushing the state of the art in the right direction.

Homestay

2008-08-14T10:30:00.000-07:00

We have a new houseguest recently. A very nice person.

When I was younger, I took advantage of the kindness of five families as a student in a foreign country.

The last few years, I've started to repay that debt by paying it forward.

It's wonderful world.

Better late than never IETF

2008-07-26T11:05:00.000-07:00

I'm a supporter of the move to the next iteration of the Internet Protocol. But a little truth in advertising is needed.

The problem with IPv6 is that it can't be rapidly deployed. IPv4 and IPv6 can't directly communicate due to binary incompatibility on the wire.

The currently recommend migration strategy was for everybody to run both v4 and v6 in dual stack mode. Once major portions of the Internet adopted both then IPv4 could be phased out over time. Anybody with half a brain can see this is just stupid. Nobody is going to waste time on v6 if there is no v6 content worth connecting to. Nobody is going to publish content on v6 until there are people trying to access that content. Chicken, meet egg, meet chicken.

People will eventually do this dual stack deployment but only with the barrel of a loaded gun in the form of IPv4 scarcity staring them in the face. Even so-called geeks have shown a serious lack of interest in IPv6. Once they do the dual stack deployment they are going to realize that they can't turn off IPv4 for years to come and that is pretty depressing.

Without the geeks leading the way, the natural hesitation of the technology followers means the whole transition will fester until the pain gets pretty great. I still see this as a strong possibility. I've never seen so many geeks fail to lead on a critical technology issue like this.

The IETF, having finally realized that having no serious transition plan was a one way ticket to a busted Internet, have started looking at NAT options for enabling IPv6 only devices to communicate with IPv4 devices.

IETF had previously come up with several transition mechanisms including at least one (NAT-PT with DNS application layer translation that were workable) but had decided to obsolete them!!! To be fair this is a fairly nasty technique but we have to keep the goal front and center - migrate quickly to IPv6 with minimal effort and disruption and turn off IPv4.

Ironically - it wasn't until IETF starting dogfooding IPv6 that serious discussions about what it would take to get to single stack IPv6 end result started happening in earnest. I don't want to discount the years of discussion that went into IPv6 development but it's obvious now that people weren't being realistic.

D.J. Bernstein was discussing the fundamental binary incompatibility and content issue years ago but he didn't make a serious dent. He would have preferred binary compatibility which would have probably meant a bunch of applications had to be changed but that work had to be done anyway but it would almost certainly have meant that we would be well into adoption by now.

I tested the "obsolete" NAT-PT option with DNS proxy translation option a couple of months ago and it certainly worked for basic web surfing and email type access but getting it compiled and operational was challenging. We need to make this or the new translation method easy and slap it into consumer routers and Linux/BSD distros and commercial firewalls or proxies so that it can be rapidly deployed. This will probably involve a bunch of stateful translators being written just like what we have for IPv4 NATs.

I strongly supported the idea of a non-wire-compatible IPng in order to enable improvements to IP. At the same time, I strongly disagreed with the idea that there shouldn't have been a preferred translation mechanism ready made to be bolted on during the transition and then discarded like barbershop hair trimmings when IPv4 access was no longer needed.

Realistically, IPv4 is so strongly embedded in the Net now that it is going to take 10-15 years to purge most of it. We can be sure pockets of IPv4 will be running on intranets long past that point like DECnet or IPX still runs today but it should be largely gone from the major backbones.

It will take at least a year and a half for IETF to pick one approach that works best. The IPv4 crunch will start to hit probably around the same time as people scramble to get the last addresses and prices for IPv4 space start to go up.

If you haven't taken time to enable IPv6 in your network please start playing with it now. It's not that big a deal to get it working in dual-stack mode. Once you put a globally routable address on your internal devices you start to get back to the Internet as it was in the old days - every node was directly reachable. And that end-to-end is a good thing.

Yes we need IPv6 NAT to get the transition done. And we may need it for a few other things like proxy servers and what not. But in the end NAT needs to be rarely used. And we need to close the book on IPv4.

Electric Cars

2008-07-26T10:59:00.000-07:00

We use mineral oils, as found in natural deposits, for various purposes. Cooking, lubrication, manufacturing, and fuel are some of the most important.

Oil as a fuel is probably the most important use, but luckily, it may be the easiest to eliminate.

When used as an energy source oil is really nothing more than a convenient battery. A battery that came charged but a battery nonetheless.

This is not a new idea, but rather, one that I think is lost on a good number of people.

We have never completed a transition away from oil and natural gas for home heating.

It will be a few decades before that transition is done. We should try to accelerate this effort.

The same is true of oil as a transportation fuel. We can see the beginnings of an effort to go to electric hybrids or straight electric cars. This effort should be accelerated. Time is of the essence.

Batteries

2008-07-26T10:56:00.000-07:00

battery: noun ( pl. -teries) a container consisting of one or more cells, in which energy is converted into electricity and used as a source of power.

Mineral oils found as deposits in the earth's crust are roughly analogous to finding batteries charged with energy left lying around by a long-dead civilization.

Hydrogen, wood, flywheels, gasoline, capacitors, a hot rock, kerosene, Uranium, and an ice cube are all different ways of storing energy's potential in a form that can conveniently be used after a period of delay.

This shouldn't be surprising but I'm surprised how often I see people focus on a particular type of stored energy without considering others simply because the energy takes a different form.

I think we can all agree that burnable wood, which was one of the human race's first and most frequently used energy stores to be harnessed, isn't the most suitable battery on a global scale with 6.5 billion humans needing convenient and portable power. Of course, it does the job for a good portion of our population but there are the negative consequences of increased pollution, increased carbon dioxide output, and deforestation.

So which of these batteries could we choose to supply all human portable power needs? The answer is that none of them are universally suitable. We will have to continue to use all of these for the indefinite future.

One thing has become clear to even optimists is that the oil age is coming to a close

With that in mind the primary question before us is how do we generate the power that goes into these batteries?

IMHO - I think we'll slowly transition from natural gas and coal to nuclear, wind, hydro, wave, and, of course, solar.

Version Six

2008-05-19T12:51:00.000-07:00

I enabled IPv6 via 6to4 tunnel a couple of years ago when Fedora Core 2 made it easy to turn on.

It's been humming along. IP through a tunnel isn't the best thing but that is clearly how we are going to get this done until AT&T and the other US ISPs get off their collective rear ends.

Recently, I've been reading up on what it will take to run single stack (IPv6 only). It seems like IPv6 + NAT-PT + a DNS proxy services can get you most of the way there. I'm going to try it out and see where the gaps are.

The cafeteria

2008-05-10T03:01:00.000-07:00

I spent the morning in the cafeteria reading a book and working on some ideas.

There was a tornado drill - it was kind of cute to watch the little kids duck and cover in the hallways.

Constitutional Amendments

2008-05-10T02:30:00.000-07:00

I think our country might be better off if we squarely faced the limits of the federal government's power, made a sober assessment of the same vis a vis our long term interests, and passed amendments as necessary.

Of course, reality means this is like herding cats. So it's easier for us to pass another bread and circuses bill.

I'll be spending my check just like everybody else. I'll be giving it to my wife :-)

Efficiency

2008-04-20T01:14:00.000-07:00

You don't have to choose between economic growth and protecting the environment. They are two sides of the same coin.

Economic growth is all about efficiency. You are always doing more with less; faster, better, cheaper. Any waste is inefficiency.

When a car exhausts CO2 or nitrous oxide into the troposphere you lose heat and energy that makes an ICE less than 100% efficient. Also - there has been a rise in the concentration of these gases in the atmosphere that can be linked to human activity so it seems likely that at some point somebody will be willing to pay to try to recapture that gas which could mean that many of us that have been releasing it will have gotten a free ride.

This is not a new idea and it's certainly not my idea. It is also not a complete solution for environmental problems. It is clearly impossible for us in the current time to accurately calculate the eventual full costs of a current action. Small actions have a ripple effect and interact to create larger problems.

But as with anything difficult that doesn't mean that we shouldn't even make an attempt.

A moment

2008-04-09T11:00:00.000-07:00

This is one of my favorite pictures - for obvious reasons.

Tonight's the night

2008-04-02T08:35:00.000-07:00

They are on the way home tonight. Can't wait.

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

2007-10-27T06:45:00.000-07:00

I don't like to be a fawning fanboy but this operating system is the most killer thing I've used in quite a while.

The attention to detail is extraordinary.

I'll be interesting to see if I still feel this way a month or a year from now...