The Langleys Lately

I have installed media wiki as a repository for the stuff that Dave and I keep learning and forgetting, then relearning, and reforgetting…  It’s like the song that never ends!  you can check it out at the following!

If you own a personal video recorder from your cable company or satellite company, chances are you find that hard drive in your PVR to be too small.  Some stuff you just don’t want to delete but unless you are an avid TV watcher, things just fill up.  Furthermore, you may have recorded some movie or TV special that you would like to keep, but that storage space is valuable.

Today I decided to try hooking up a laptop to the firewire output of my HD cable box.  Interestingly enough, I can stream video directly off of my PVR over the firewire onto a hard drive, both standard definition channels and HD as well. Using VLC video player I am able to watch the raw transport stream.  Kinda cool.  Next step is to take that .ts file and remaster it to a DVD for the keepers!

Last Saturday I bought my very first iPod, I’m moving into the bling generation now!

The iPod Touch is a slick little device that serves as a replacement for my dearly (not!) departed Dell Axim x50v.

After my Dell PDA met it’s end, I needed a new PDA but I have been very disillusioned with the Windows Mobile devices, yet I am addicted to PDAs! After reading every review I could find, it looked to me that the device that would suit my needs best was an iPhone. Poor me, I live in Canada, where cellular providers are non competitive and cellular data rates mean that Canada will likely be the last of the developed world countries to have the iPhone, if ever. So next up was the iPod touch.

The iPod Touch is basically an iPhone with a bunch of stuff removed, most notably the phone. It also is missing a camera and a couple of applications and is available in two versions. The difference in price between the 16GB and 8GB versions was approximately $120, a little steep in my mind so I opted for 8GB. I was immediately impressed with the user interface of this little device. It was easy to use, easy to set up with my iTunes, and easy to get the music I wanted to synchronize with it. The calendar and address book applications can synchronize with both iCal and the address book on my MacBook Pro, as well I was able to synchronize with my Outlook on my work computer. The calendar application is crippled compared to the iPhone in that it does not allow you to create calendar events, but I didn’t find that a must have requirement for me, I just wanted to carry a copy of my calendar with me.

802.11g wireless is blazingly fast compared with the two previous Window mobile devices I have owned. The Safari web browser is very snappy and it’s multi touch zoom functionality is slick. I encountered a couple of bugs with Safari, one where I was not able to access hyperlinks within a web page, and another where I could not alter the contents of an input box (i.e. to refine a google search). The first bug went away with a reset and I have yet to encounter it again, the second is an annoyance, but I can work around it.

All up, I am very impressed with the iPod Touch. It is slim, has a beautiful screen, it is easy to use and by the way, it plays music too!

I have noticed over the last couple of days, stories cropping up over the technology news sites about Wi-LAN launching lawsuits against a number of companies selling consumer wireless networking products. Why is this something worth blogging about? It’s the subtle ways the stories are being written, then the way the typical respondents post their comments. It is… well… typical. It reinforces my belief that the masses of individuals, especially those who troll the technology web sites are utterly predictable and easily manipulated.
Manipulated you say?
Indeed. These stories talk about Wi-LAN as a technology Intellectual Property, or IP company. IP may be all that is left of Wi-LAN, I don’t know what their R&D efforts are these days, but it really doesn’t matter. At one time they used to be a player in the R&D of wireless networking equipment, then supplier of internet service provider (ISP) grade wireless access gear. Rural broadband comes to mind. They survived the dot com crash but are a skeleton of what they once were, now they are self described as a technology licensing company.
How is describing Wi-LAN as an IP firm manipulating? Simple. Let’s start with the Rambus case study.
Anybody familiar with Rambus knows that they ultimately failed in their quest to essentially own the IP surrounding the random access memory (RAM) market, and the masses of internet posters, myself included, rejoice. Rambus, used to be a member of a standards organization called JEDEC (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council). Defendants allege that while Rambus was a member of JEDEC, they participated in the definition of future memory standards and technology, for which they either owned patents for, or were writing patents for. Several years later they demanded license fees from memory manufacturers. It was a long and bitter battle, eventually their quest ended in defeat by hand of the courts. For years Rambus was the height of evil in the eyes of community posting their comments to technology forums and web sites. That is the executive overview of how Rambus became a symbol of evil to an easily identified community, their other practices and strategies are not the topic of this article but also leave a bad taste.
Next let’s consider another company described in the technology news as an IP company. This company is named NTP. NTP claimed to own patents being used by a company called Research In Motion(RIM), the makers of Blackberry. I believe NTP really was an IP company by definition. Their only business ventures were conducted by legal staff. They owned five patents that were all ultimately rejected by the US patent office after they were contested, but they stood long enough to extract over 600 million USD from RIM. If you want to research a craziness of patent law, this is a great place to start. While this story was hot in the technology news market, just mention the word NTP in the same sentence as anything else, and you could manipulate the masses of comments and opinions to follow.
The last example I will identify is the case of SCO Unix. SCO was once a reputable flavor of Unix, but their popularity instantly disappeared when they launched a series of lawsuits against other companies who had their own version of Unix, as well as the open source community. Their argument, was that these other Unixes violated their rightful copyright and ownership of Unix. In the end, it is unknown whether or not there is any copyright violation, but what SCO claimed to own, the courts found that the real owner was Novell, and Novell has stated that they have no interest in pursuing this claim. Simply suing other Unixes for copyright infringement is no big deal in my opinion, but targeting the open source community and the masses of Linux users was what ultimately brought them into the company of Rambus and NTP. Grim smiles are now exposed by those who follow these stories in the technology news sites today, as SCOs failure has led them to bankruptcy.
Back to Wi-LAN, I have no idea whether Wi-LAN is making a legitimate claim for patent infringement, and it really doesn’t matter. Simply stating in the technology news stories that an IP company named Wi-LAN is suing companies for patent infringement puts them in the company of Rambus, NTP, and SCO. People who have never heard the name Wi-LAN instantly think of them as evil without knowing anything about them or their claim. Wi-LAN is guilty, their name is forever smeared in the opinion of those who follow technology new.  If they do not win this case, they are utterly doomed, no-one would dare do business with a company who has had their name and reputation destroyed.

It was sweet while it lasted, but alas it’s over.

Last weekend I retired my Web Server VM, and a couple of days ago I retired my Mail Server VM. I now have a surplus computer (anyone wanna buy a quad core intel box with 4gb of RAM and 1.5TB of hard disk space?).

After my inability to get my media center extender to pair with my Windows MCE based quad core powerhouse, that left said powerhouse with only two purposes, 1. Web Server and 2. Mail Server! Hardly justifies throwing that kind of horsepower at such a small task so I re-purposed an old Athlon 2500+, installed Ubuntu 7.10 Lamp server and moved my web server over on the weekend.  On Tuesday night I went live with the mail server. While that may seem like sad news (if you’re like me) it wasn’t all a loss!

After getting the mail server up and running, I used part of this tutorial to convert my postfix/courier install to add anti virus and spam scanning capabilities. I was pretty pleased with how simple it turned out to be.

Some people might think that I have a love/hate relationship with Microsoft, that’s only half true!

I have been muddling around with my network resources as of late, bought some new hardware and did some reorganizing to retire some tired old computers and improve the performance of my mail server, web server, media server, etc.

The main host of all this would be my new quad core intel Q6600 server with 4GB of RAM, 1.5TB of hard disk space, running Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. That last one may confuse the casual reader, but I have been running Media Center for a couple of years now and have a media center extender so we can view the many gigabytes of recorded TV in the living room without having to park a PC there. It really is the only real reason we have left to run any instance of Windows in our home. Now that reason is gone.

After resetting my extender and attempting to pair it with my new computer I was left redfaced! My out of warranty and unsupported extender refused to pair with my Media Center, I tried for about 2 hours, everything appeared to be working, connectivity was fine but it just refused to work.

grrr…

The MacBook Pro (2.2 GHz, 15.4″) was kind of hard to find! I went to a number of retail outlets including the two main Mac dealers in town and found none. After I arrived home I went online and checked out one of the main distributors, all of their warehouses across Canada were out of stock with lot’s on order but it certainly appears to be a bit of a shortage.

Not to be completely discouraged, I started phoning different London Drugs outlets, I had already exhausted Futureshop and BestBuy. I found one store that had one, new in box! I love it, more to come!

Sean

There are so many ways in which various geeks of various sorts can find themselves in states of geek euphoria.  Historically, the main path is having a house full of computers doing different things.  A file server, media server, web server, mail server, vpn server, plus his and hers… the list goes on.

In the last few months, I have begun to enjoy the world of virtualization.   As I am typing this message, I am compiling a web server in a virtual Gentoo machine, all while listening to “The Cars: Greatest Hits” on my iTunes.  Everything runs smooth if you have the right kind of hardware too, which is where this post is going next.

What is the right kind of hardware?  A computer that can handle multiple threads, has lots of memory, and supports virtualization in hardware are all ideal.  For that I chose the quad core, 2.4Ghz Intel Q6600 processor, put it in an Asus P5K motherboard and loaded it up with 4GB of memory.  My Host OS, Windows Media Center Edition 2005 (based on 32 bit Windows XP) only recognizes  3.25GB and with some tweaks I can get it to see 3.5GB.  Unfortunately, the less than 4GB max memory is just a limitation of the Host OS, I don’t have the confidence in Windows Vista’s 64 bit options.

The cpu is a great buy, just for yuks I changed the front side bus settings on it and ran it through a CPU stability test at 3.0GHZ, it ran flawlessly!

So with this box, my goal is to transplant/amalgamate the following into a single PC:

• media server from my old Athlon XP 2500+ sitting in my utility room, using the Windows MCE Host OS;
• mail server in a dedicated Gentoo virtual machine;
• web server in another dedicated Gentoo vm;
• vpn server (again) in another dedicated Gentoo vm; and
• file server… nah, the geek in me wants to keep using a NAS!

All this above can easily be run on a single box with enough horsepower to run games, or watch video!

Does reducing the number of computers in your house sound counter to geek euphoria?  On the surface it might, but I am increasing the number 0f computing machines, and any geek can see why I think that is cool!

But wait… There is more…

Another euphoric concept of virualization is that a vm is portable.  You can create a vm on one hardware platform and run it on another.  This means that future upgrades will require very little work to migrate over.  Furthermore, by creating on base capability vm,  you can clone it and add the features required for that vm without starting from scratch each time.

My product of choice right now is VMware 6.0, though I have not tried the product from Parallels and I hear that they are rather comparable.

Over time, there will be more to come on this one!

Cheers,

Sean