Angelo DiNardi

So last week I made the journey from Pittsburgh, PA to Foster City, CA via car. I’ve made this drive two other times, though the destinations were Mountain View and Sunnyvale. This time I ran the Instamapper GPS tracking app on my iPhone most of the way. This yielded 3,642 data points along the way with longitude, latitude, speed, heading, altitude, and a time stamp.

The guy who rode with me, Scott, decided it would be fun to try and visualize this data with Google Street View to “watch” the trip without us ever having to actually record it. After a couple of days of processing, downloading, and building the end result was this video he posted to YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2d-VAAyB9c.

Coming soon: pretty graphs of the data. Need to have day where I can actually sit down and work it out. There’s way too much involved in moving. Way too much. Like a day spent in the DMV (but hey, I’m a CA resident now!).

So since we CSH sys admins are getting rid of old stuff we’ve got laying around (anyone want a Sun E3000 server?) I grabbed one of the Sun Netra T1 150’s we had. It’s a nice little machine (1U of solid metal) with a 440Mhz UltraSPARC-IIi processor and 1 Gig of RAM. So I figured what the hell, let’s install Solaris on this thing, it is a SPARC!

Now you have to understand, this thing only had the following connections to the world:

• 2x Serial Console ports
• 2x Ethernet (10/100)
• External SCSI
• 120v Power
• 2x SCSI hard drives

Yeah. Makes it a little hard to get anything installed. I ended up first trying to do a network install of Solaris 10 from a Ubuntu linux machine I have. An evening of failure later and I still can’t get the Netra to net boot. I had done this before, by the way. I set up a “Jumpstart” server for CSH before to install these Netras years ago when we got them. It was running Solaris 10 since Solaris has nice tools for setting up a net install server. 

I said to myself, “Self, why the hell don’t you just use a Solaris machine to install this other solaris machine!?” Realize though, CSH has gotten rid of most of it’s Solaris machines — since it’s arcane and a general pain to administer compared to Linux or even FreeBSD. So I picked Tonka, the CSH web server, to give this a quick test from. I ran the server setup script and in about 10 minutes I had my netra net installing from it. It was late and the version of Solaris that the disk image on Tonka was of was a few years old so I decided to kill it and try again the next day with a newer image.

So today I said to myself, “Self, don’t risk doing something stupid on Tonka, install Solaris 10 x86 on a VM and net install from that on to the Netra.” I wasn’t going to argue with myself so that’s what I did. It took me all afternoon to install Solaris since apparently VirtualBox on my Windows7 machine (it has a lot of RAM) and my Linux desktop machine didn’t want to actually do bridged networking or actually run the solaris install. Enough wasted time, and I just did the install on my MacBook Pro (4 gigs of RAM is nice for VMs). I set up a net install server on the VM and installed the Netra.

So now I have a Netra running Solaris 10 with an amazing 9+4 gigs of disk space. I’m still deciding what to do with it. Right now, I’m generally just figuring out how to actually set up a Solaris machine from scratch. I know enough to generally administrate Solaris when I have to, but it would be good to know more.

I might get around to posting some more of my Solaris explorations down the road. Since this thing has ZFS I might look in to an external SCSI caddy and use it as a backup server. It’s a thought.

I found this post (http://leavingcorporate.com/2008/12/30/i-have-a-startup-midwest-vs-bay-area/) interesting. It’s two conversations about this guy and his startup. One with someone in the Bay Area and one with someone in the Midwest. There’s reasons I’m planning on heading out to the Bay Area. This is definitely one.

Plaxo: once a nice, simple, useful service gone the way of craptastic social networking. Maybe I’m not like most people but I don’t need EVERY SINGLE ONE of my web services to be a social network. I don’t want connections and invitations and sharing. I got plaxo to solve a need: having my contacts when I’m away from my main machine via the web. Secondary was as a backup if something happened to that machine. It worked and did the job well.

They had a method of syncing your contact with the person’s actual contact info if they had the service. Ok. That’s reasonably useful. And it was on the sidelines. Storage of contacts was still first and foremost. Then they started adding things like calendaring and connections. A mini-feed kinda thing that’s just as useless as facebook’s. And on and on. Pretty soon the contacts storage was on the sideline and the rest of their social features were in front. When I got a connection request from someone I knew that was it — I didn’t like the service anymore. I haven’t really used it in months because it was more annoying every time I logged in.

So since I just got MobileMe and everything seems to be working better (not perfect yet — but generally usable) and I have the iPhone with my contacts synced to MobileMe and my computer I decided to rid myself of Plaxo. MobileMe’s address book app is just like using the OS X address book, simple and useful. It stores contacts — nothing more, nothing less. It does it’s job just fine.

Thanks for trying, Plaxo. Like everything else you had a good service then screwed it up with social crap. I may build and use web apps for pretty much everything if I can, but I never caught on to the social thing. I want simple, useful services and that seems to be the thing slowly becoming more rare on the web. Of course, that’s probably a big reason I love Apple products. They do what they’re supposed to do well, and not much more. And that’s fine with me. If it fits my need I’ll use it and if not I’ll find something else that does. 

So in an interesting turn of events I bought an iPhone 3G on Friday. Got in line at the Stanford Mall Apple Store at 6:15am. I was out the door of the Apple Store with a new iPhone at about 9:30am. I was around the 40th person in line, give or take a few. I’d say it was a pretty good morning (Yeah they couldn’t activate me in store and it took me a while once I got back with it… ).

I was also interesting in MobileMe (because I like synchronization and push) so I bought it with the iPhone for about 30% off. Although it’s been through some rough times.. and still isn’t *perfect* yet.. it definitely works when it does. I’m sure it’ll improve once things settle down and Apple fixes whatever issues are plaguing it.

So this leads me to LifeSync. The point was to sync my Google Calendar to iCal. Well now I don’t need to. I’m using MobileMe as both online calendar application and the sync tool between my Mac and iPhone. Although I don’t need it myself anymore I’ll definitely try my best to make sure it keeps functioning for those that will continue to use it.

Back to playing with iPhone applications.

Earlier this week I helped to bring a Computer Science House tradition back to floor. CSH was long known for it’s huge consumption of Jolt Cola. For years there hasn’t been Jolt in the CSH drink machines on floor because they weren’t selling a container which the machines could vend, until now.

We finally realized that Jolt is now selling 16oz cans which are the same size as a standard soda can except that in height. After some work on Big Drink (the larger of the two old vending machines CSH has which can drop cans or glass bottles) I was able to make slight modifications (remove some parts) which allow us to now have Jolt in the machine once again! Awesome indeed. 

I’m hoping CSH can live up to the past and once again consume huge amounts of Jolt. Perhaps one day we’ll be able to have a sales representative at Jolt once again (or so the story goes…). 

Over the weekend I was at the RIT Innovation Fair with the Computer Science House showing off our networked vending machines Drink and Snack. I was interviewed by RNews. I was quoted near the end and I’m in the video too.

R News: ‘Imagine: RIT’ Fest Draws Thousands

The music video to “Here Comes Another Bubble” by The Richter Scales.
Internet bubble? Ha.

Update: Apparently the video was issued a takedown request and removed from YouTube. Great. And it was good too.

Starting Sunday I’ll be in California for the AJAX World Conference. Expect to see some posts related to the conference.