Archive for January, 2005
January 28, 2005 at 2:50 pm · Filed under General
If all goes well, I’m going to switch to some different IP addresses this weekend. I’m probably going to host my main sites with some hosting providers on the net rather than colocate. The price for these services is so low for the value that it just makes great economic sense. For my personal domains and email, I’m going to temporarily host that on a static IP via some friends until I get rid of those domains.
I do want to mention some companies that others have recommended, but did not use:
Terramark - This was recommended by a guy at work. They have rackspace for a machine at about $60 a month with everything.
Fiber Internet Center - I didn’t visit this place. It was recommended by someone who has been there (thanks again Neville). The cost is $99 a month and you get connected to the Palo Alto community fiber ring.
I doubt the prices will go much further down from here.
January 27, 2005 at 11:46 am · Filed under General
Intel has beat AMD and created some technology called Vanderpool that assists Virtual Machine Monitors (VMM) with some hardware. Otherwise, software like VMWare has to go through all sorts of tricks to safely run more than one OS on some hardware. I believe that in the near future, everyone will be running a VMM. It is just too useful when dealing with OS failure (which still happens, and is still painful to recover from) and the technology will become commodity (ie. inexpensive). Whether the Vanderpool implementation is good or not, I can’t determine right now.
It is also nice to see the return of the ‘Monitor’ concept. Back in ye old days, there was another layer between the OS and the hardware, it was called the ‘Monitor’. On some systems, people considered it to be the OS, especially smaller systems like the Apple ][.
On larger, much more interesting systems, it was much more powerful, and very very handy when OSes crashed. I remember using a monitor on Vaxes and NeXT boxes. All of the Sun workstations that I had experience with had them as well. With a monitor, you could interrupt the OS, and then do simple operations like:
- investigate the CPU or memory
- run a debugger or attach to an off machine kernel debugger
- reboot the system
Usually, all of this could be done over a serial interface, and it was Extremely Handy when the OS wasn’t responding and it was Very Far Away.
The Sun monitor system was pretty much state of the art, as far as I have experienced. They had all sorts of powerful systems built in. You could peek at or test hardware, do simple network operations, and even sync pages to the disk before a reboot (wow!). I think they even had the ability to view the current process list or the thread list (or maybe it was old NeXT hardware?)
I am not sure, but I think all of the Apple PowerPC systems may have a monitor lurking in their ROMs. Maybe someone who reads this will let me know.
At any rate, systems like this were very important for systems management and OS development. Without them, you had to do a power-off reboot all the time and depend on a lot of kernel printf’s to the console in order to determine the state of the system when it was crashing. The BIOS on a PC was just barely enough to start the host OS. When the OS on a PC crashed, that was pretty much it. So, although PC’s are cheap, they were painful to develop OSes on.
January 26, 2005 at 11:46 pm · Filed under General
I was one of the first members of the Computer History Museum (well, I tried to be #256, but I got some number slightly higher 
). Anyways, I get emails about their upcoming events and I decided to go to the one tonight given by Whitfield Diffie of Diffie-Hellman fame. I really really enjoy computer history, especially when it is recited by those who actually made history.
It was a nice, non-technical talk about his life when he was working for McCarthy (of Lisp fame) and trying to figure out some of the tough problems (The Paperless Office, the Internet, etc) that they were thinking about back in the late 60’s. He gave a good talk and has an amazing memory for events.
Someone asked him if he used encrypted email. He replied that he did back in his days with Northern Telecom (essentially pre 1990), but he hasn’t gotten around to it since
… he does however still use voice encryption systems on telephones!
January 26, 2005 at 3:00 pm · Filed under General
Well, I need to move my machine to a colo somewhere. I have a 1U computer.
Does anybody out there know of a really cheap colo spot? I don’t use that much bandwidth.
If not, I will be hosting my popular sites and hosting the smaller stuff and email on my box on some static IP somewhere.
ALSO, I will be turning comments back on this blog soon.
January 18, 2005 at 9:10 pm · Filed under General
Just today, someone was trying to find my house, who has never been here before. They were trying to do it at night and there aren’t that many street lamps. I live in one of those neighborhoods where the streets all have names and the numbers are painted on the curbs.
It just got me thinking. With good GPS systems, people won’t get lost nearly as easily. I can’t wait till it is so inexpensive that it is everywhere. It will probably show up in the real mass market via Cell Phones. When that day comes, it will be great.
January 18, 2005 at 11:26 am · Filed under General
Like a lot of other tech people, I still get a kick out of taking apart devices. I’m sure this goes back to when we got a screwdriver for the first time when we were 5 years old.
Recently there were some interesting disassemblies, so here are some links:
Apple iPod Shuffle
Apple Mini Mac
None of the above really label the parts or gain any insights into the design of the deive and an electronic level. This is a shame. Even the later Byte magazines used to show all the different parts of a system when a new computer came out. They would show the pc board (printed circuit board or motherboard) as well as all the wiring and various chips or components of the board. They would then draw boxes on top of all the different sections and label them: CPU, video memory, ROM, dynamic ram, video controller, sound chip, etc. It was cool.
These days, the closest you can get to this is the ‘Under the Hood’ column in EE Times. The columns are mostly teasers for the author’s business, but they do the old Byte style pictures with labels. It would be nice if they had an RSS feed.
January 17, 2005 at 12:42 pm · Filed under General
In line with the previous post, here is an interesting project called Xen. Essentially, it is the result of years of OS research on virtual machines and nano-kernels. It is a VM or monitor that allows other, properly written, OS’s to run on top of it. This allows one to run more than one OS on the same machine, with excellent performance.
This has some obvious benefits. The biggest one that I can think of is security. If you divide your applications correctly, you can provide excellent containment. For example, if your web server gets hacked and it is running in a very limited hosted OS, the hacker cannot compromise your database OS and your email OS.
With CPU’s going multi-core, and CPU vendors working towards providing hardware support for this functionality, I expect this technology to become common in all hosting and corporate IT departments.
January 17, 2005 at 12:34 pm · Filed under General
The field of ‘computers’ tends to hype things way before they are ready for prime-time. Way way before. For example, I remember lcd’s, wireless, parallel processing, etc. being discussed usually about 8 - 10 years before they were ready for the masses. If you don’t understand this, it is easy to get jaded or bitter about the field.
Another interesting aspect is that the bad designs, ‘usually’, get worked out of the system. It just takes a long time. For example, the whole industry goes crazy for ATM networking. Billions get wasted on this, but eventually it just goes away. The same thing happens with programming languages. Sun and Microsoft declare that Java and C# are ‘the only languages worth knowing’. Yet, most apps on Windows and the Mac are C++/Delphi and Objective-C respectively. Add to that the growing popularity of Python, Perl, Ruby, and PHP and you can easily see that, although it takes a while, the right ideas strive to come out eventually. If the past is any indication, expect some major changes in languages in the next 10 years.
So, enjoy the amazing computers we have now, but keep an eye on the future. If I’m right, displays, storage, networking, and processing power will continue to get better and better
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