world gone mad

In Smithville, N.J., a group devotes itself to looking for the elusive Jersey Devil, said to have haunted this area for centuries.

Camping beside a windblown lake or a tundra riverbank, where the wind never really stops, is hard on tarps: grommets blow out, seams pop, and there never seems to be enough spots on the tarp to attach a line. Tundra Tarps are terrifically versatile, stout tarps. Instead of grommets the tarp is ringed with 3/4" nylon ribbon with loops sewn in every two feet on the outer edge and interior seams. The sil-nylon material is stitched together using a single needle lockstitch with double stitched lapped ends -- in other words, the cloth will fail long before the seams. The most delightfully ingenious innovation is a central "quad loop" that captures the end of a pole, staff, stick or paddle and hold it firmly in place so that when the wind lifts, the center support does not fall out.

After three years of canoeing, camping and backpacking with the Tundra, the tarp is still one of my favorite pieces of gear. I originally purchased one 10' x 16' tarp for a canoe trip to Canada with a crew of nine Boy Scouts. The tarp has sheltered a crew of nine in violent thunderstorms and been a palatial home for one on backpacking trips. There are cheaper options out there, but from my experience, none matches the true versatility and quality of the Tundra Tarp. Weighing a mere 2 pound 10 ounces, it does not add substantially to the load; there is also a 1 pound 10 ounce version available for an additional $80.00. Each tarp ships with 80 feet of polyester cord, a tube of SilNet sealant and a stuff sack. They are sized from 8' x 10' to 15' x 15'.

The company will also sew your choice of colors, either a single color for the whole tarp or multicolored panels. My tarps are multicolored -- orange, red, blue, and yellow -- which makes them very easy to spot when canoing back to camp. I purchased a second tarp this summer when we added a second crew to our annual canoe trip. We're going to get three more to outfit our entire Scout Troop this fall.

-- Clarke Green

Tundra Tarps
$80+
Available from Cooke Custom Sewing

Manufactured by Cooke Custom Sewing

Quad Loop

Related Entries:
Flea Market Canopy Tarptents

Still no official news on the rumour that Monty Widenius has left Sun, but Dave Rosenberg confirmed over the weekend that he is leaving MuleSource, the open source ESB vendor he founded in 2006 with Ross Mason, creator of the Mule project.

“After two and a half years I’ve decided to transition out of my operating role at MuleSource and will be devoting my full time efforts to a new company I have been working on,” he wrote on Friday. “I initiated a CEO search in June and we expect to have a new person in place by the end of the year at the latest.

“I started the search because I felt like a more ‘professional’ CEO would be able to take the company to the next level–basically I felt like the opportunity was bigger than me and wanted to grow faster. Now that all the pieces are coming together I feel like I can step out cleanly, setting the stage for continued growth,” he added.

On the recent CAOS podcast we discussed Doug Levin’s departure from Black Duck and noted that it would not be surprising to see a number of open source CEOs shifting seats in the forthcoming months as the vendors they have created look to transition to the next stage.

As well as Levin, EnterpriseDB’s founder Andy Astor recently made way for Ed Boyajian, previously vice president and general manager, North American sales at Red Hat.

The only thing about Rosenberg’s announcement that does seem a little strange is the timing, given that the search for a new CEO has been underway for some time but has yet to be completed.

As for his new job, he notes that “the new company will be in stealth mode for a little while, but if you read my blog consistently you should be able to glean some clues.” He certainly has been writing a lot about online video games.

The call for papers for the MySQL Users Conference and Expo 2009 is open. Proposals are accepted until October 22, 2009.
This post will tell you how to get your proposal accepted.
First: READ the following posts. I mean it!

• Baron Schwartz's advice on how to write a great proposal. If you follow these guidelines, you can't be wrong.
• Colin's list of 10. If you still had doubts after reading Baron's post, this one will clear your mind.

Sorry is we sound harsh, but we have the responsibility for the quality of MySQL UC sessions, and the only way to ensure quality is to be picky in our choice. Here are a few more rules of the game for the next conference.

Make sure you know the subject you propose.

We may ask you to prove your claims. We have had a few surprises during the last conference, with a couple of sessions lasting 20 minutes because the speaker had exhausted the topics. We are going to be stricter in our acceptance. We will accept some proposals conditionally. If that happens, we will inform the authors that we need more material before the final acceptance. If the material is not provided, we replace the session with some other proposal.

Always assume that someone else has proposed the same topic.

The competition is fierce. We usually reject two proposals for each one we accept. If you want your proposal to be selected, don't be lazy. Write a comprehensible abstract and a good bio. Work hard on it. For each subject, there are probably two or three more people who have spent days polishing their proposal. We will be only too happy to choose the best one! If you put together a half baked proposal in 5 minutes, you won't get in. Period.

A good abstract is not too short.

If your abstract is just a few lines promising the wonders that everyone knows you can deliver, that won't do. You may be a well known big shot in the field, but we won't default to "accepted" if we recognize your name (see what Colin says about rock stars). If that's the case, prove your status by writing a superb proposal.

A good abstract is not too long.

If you have written an article on a given topic and you simply cut and paste 13,000 words in the abstract box, it will only show us that you can't summarize, and your session would be unbearably boring.

Don't even try to advertise your company in a proposal.

The review committee is full of open source enthusiasts and technology lovers. We smell a stealthy marketing message a mile away. If you want to boost your company business, don't propose a session, but look at the conference page for sponsorship opportunities.

Read the above posts by Baron and Colin again.

Seriously. If you want that pass for the conference and a podium to greatness, you need to work hard. How hard? well, consider that, according to Damian Conway, you need to prepare from 10 to 50 hours for each hour of presentation. Some of this work must show in your abstract. If you read the above posts and follow the advice you are given, some of the hard work will show for sure.

All done? Sure? Have you read all the above twice? Good. Then, SUBMIT A PROPOSAL!.

If you are security conscious and nowadays who isn’t?, you may have pondered over ways to make your external SSH connection safer.
Of course there’s always One-time Passwords and Public Keys, but if like me you watch the daily barrage of brute force attacks you may be thinking it’s only a matter of time…

That’s what I was thinking at about the same time an SMS arrived on my mobile….then it hit me….I take my mobile everywhere, if only my server could call me and ask if it is really me trying to log in.

My first instinct was to try and insert a Perl or Python script into the login process. After all Clickatell have several libraries that you can use to send SMS messages. How hard could it be?
Well for starters it didn’t feel right relying on a script that runs within an interpreter that is running within a shell, but how else could it be done? Pluggable Authentication sprang to mind but that’s hard right? Wrong!.

Hitting the FreeBSD handbook I was able to gain a decent understanding of PAM functionality and even managed to find some sample code. Shame the programming section had not yet been written. O’Reilly to the rescue. After reading a few articles on PAM it wasn’t long before I had a working prototype, in fact most of my time was spent deciding upon the right library/s to use.
The end result is a pam module that can be dropped into the authentication chain for any PAM aware application/service - think SSH, FTP, POP3 etc.

Upon successfully entering your Username/Password the pam_codemein module uses libcurl to send an HTTPS request via Clickatell, my preferred SMS gateway, which then forwards the random Code to your mobile before prompting you to enter the same Code at the prompt to gain access. Of course there are issues with using SMS, such as mobile reception and timeouts, but in testing I didn’t notice any.

If you are concerned over the cost of SMS messages, Clickatell are a bulk SMS provider so rates are good, and if you prefer to be contacted via some other method the code can be adapted to any other service e.g. XMPP via TLS, you could even GPG encrypt the Code in an email if you prefer.

It was only after I had the fun of writing this module that I stumbled across this blog post. Shame as it may have saved me a lot of time, but hey where’s the fun in that? I’ll just have to get cracking on the XMPP method - either that or search deeper within Google.

Have you seen RT 3.8!

It’s been a long time coming but after 2 years in the making the enterprise-grade ticketing system that is RT has had a well earned facelift, and what a difference!!.

Upgrading from 3.6.3 would have been straightforward if it was not for the fact that I also decided to upgrade to MySQL 5.1 at the same time. The final product made the pitfalls worthwhile however and RT is now slicker than ever. Plus I got know RT better along the way - bonus!.

If your thinking of upgrading to RT 3.8 / MySQL 5.1 just remember to use the MyISAM engine for the Attachments table (It’s worked so far for me with around 84k tickets). Failing to do so will result in slow response from the UI on certain actions due to MySQL failing to select the correct index on certain queries:

ALTER TABLE Attachments ENGINE=MyISAM;

It looks like the optimiser is broken for the InnoDB plugin, however if you check out this bug it may have been fixed by now (I was using FreeBSD port: mysql-server-5.1.26).

All open databases are equal in front of the developers community. This is the message launched by Baron Schwartz in his announcement of the first Open SQL Camp.

After the last MySQL Users Conference, there were some talks of alternative conferences organized by the users for users. This is the first such event. It will be held in Charlottesville, VA, USA, November 14-16, 2008.

Users, in the context of databases, especially open ones, means developers. Do you feel like hacking some database project? If your database of choice is open (MySQL, PostgreSQL, JavaDB, SQLite, Firebird), you may give the OpenSQLCamp a try!

In order for their case against the family of a U.S. victim of terrorism in Israel to be re-examined, Palestinians must post a bond for the amount of the initial judgment, a judge said.

The surge in elevator violations in the city’s public housing projects in the past two years began after the city began double-checking the work of Housing Authority elevator inspectors.

Given a ticket for drinking a beer on his stoop, a Brooklyn resident is contesting his summons, questioning whether a stoop can be considered “a public place.”

Candidates for Congress and the Legislature made a final push for votes on Sunday before Tuesday’s primary elections throughout the city and the state.

An artist’s project involves giving some New York City residents colorful garbage bags, to create an urban art installation that is best observed at the curb.

Sometimes, soft and cuddly kittens can be found on the New York subway.

An elite undergraduate program of the City University of New York is being taught for the first time this fall in a majestic four-story brownstone on the Upper West Side.

Lubix in cooperation with Skinit gives you a new possibility to express your inner world with the help of a picture on your headset. Skinit offers the Scotchprint Graphics 3M logos of the highest quality in the existing market. They use a special 6 color high resolution process to assure bright colors, as well as clear and accurate implementation. Skinit Skins provide a thin, photo quality protective membrane - be sure your device won't be occasionally scratched.

And now you can win a Lubix headset with a Softick logo!

All you have to do is

• to install Softick Audio Gateway (either registered or not) and
• send us a Device code in form (01234567:89ABCDEF) displayed in Softick Audio Gateway registration window (read more in Contest Rules, p.3).

The winner will be announced on the Softick.com site on September, 30, 2008.

Individual winner will be notified by e-mail. Winner have 14 days from notification to claim the prize. Prize may be claimed by return e-mail. Unclaimed prizes will not be awarded.

Senator Barack Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., had kind words in Newark for Mr. Obama, who once called him “divisive and destructive.”

On the last day of Astroland, an amusement park that has been a fixture on Coney Island’s Boardwalk since 1962, visitors reminisced while trying to soak up a last bit of fun.

Building MySQL on Windows - MySQL Forge Wiki

This one covers running mysqld in the VisualStudio debugger, which can be useful.

I have no special ndb_mgmd.exe or ndbd.exe in debugger instructions or wisdom (running them from mysql-test-run.pl at least). I’ve attached debugger to already running (started by mysql-test-run.pl) ndb processes, but haven’t made any changes to mtr to make it like the mysqld of “go and enter this”.

Lottery numbers for Sept. 7, 2008 for New York state, New Jersey and Connecticut.

It's been over a month (and three hurricanes in America) since I've posted a blog. More than a few of you've noticed - thanks for the prodding...

It's been a busy summer, on nearly every front. Customer activity hasn't slowed down, and the good news surrounding the (otherwise unfortunate) economic crisis embroiling many customers (especially those in the financial services industry, a heavy concentration for Sun) is that it's whipping up the winds of change. Customers facing spending pressure, or tiring of vendor price increases have new options, and there's a new appetite to explore those options (nothing like mandates from the CEO to reduce spending by 50%).

One of my more interesting recent meetings wasn't with a customer, though, it was with an equity analyst from a global financial institution. Equity analysts publish research that feeds the investment community - their (free) research and financial analysis accompanies buy/hold/sell recommendations to investors (who hopefully generate trading fees for the analyst's employers).

This one analyst hadn't historically followed Sun, and was in the process of developing his first rating. He wanted to focus on our storage plans - more and more of the customers whom he interviewed were focused on storage, and many were talking up a specific open source software technology: ZFS. (Before meeting with me, he'd talked to colleagues in his own IT shop, and was impressed to find some who admitted to running ZFS at home - nothing like touching your customers where they live... if you'd like to have ZFS sent to you, click here or on the LiveCD shown at right.)

Granted, you can see an increasing focus on storage at Sun - the acquisition of MySQL is as much a storage acquisition, as an enhancement to Sun's developer offerings. Discussions of flash memory, the economics of archiving, the Lustre parallel file system, all point to an increasing focus on what Sun sees as an exceptional opportunity for customers (and thus, investors). Storage and computing are converging - and we're about to bring the trends that transformed the server industry a few years ago (mass engagement in open development communities, and scale achieved via clusters of commodity parts vs. proprietary technologies) to the historically closed and proprietary storage industry.

Now, the notion of "engaging customers in open development communities" doesn't sit well among some traditional storage analysts (or our competition) who believe "Storage is too mission critical to tolerate open source software." Although I appreciate that wisdom and experience, I think the market's more nuanced than that - mission critical environments don't tolerate unsupported software, true, which is why we offer 24x7 commercial support for ZFS (on Sun hardware, and Dell, even). But broad global adoption of key open source projects will continue to drive change deep into the world's datacenters. Gartner's prediction that 90% of world's companies will run open source software didn't specify where they'd be running it - "everywhere" is the safest bet.

But back to the equity analyst - he patiently asked, "Great theory, but when will you see revenue results?"

"Last year," I responded. "You're seeing it accelerate."

As many folks know, we shipped our first ZFS based storage systems in 2007 - known as Thumpers. Thumpers finished up this last year generating around $100m in billings, up 80% year over year. From a capacity perspective, we delivered roughly 90 petabytes of Thumper storage in FY2008, to some of the most demanding storage installations on earth (up ~200% y/y). What's fueling the growth? Adoption of ZFS is a clear driver (this chart gives you a sense of where we're seeing adoption - thus revenue opportunity). But ultimately, customers are recognizing they can save money, space and power. Thumpers are roughly twice the capacity in half the space at half the cost of the competition - $1.20/Gigabyte. (They also run Windows and Linux with the same hardware economics).

Now, our view is "OpenStorage" (systems built from commodity parts and open source software) will grow far faster than the proprietary storage market. We plan on driving that growth, and over the next few months, you'll see a tremendous amount of storage innovation targeting the growing breadth of customers wanting better/faster/cheaper/smaller options. Expect to see flash, zfs, dtrace, and good old fashioned systems engineering play a very prominent role in an aggressive push into the storage market.

And in case you missed our announcement last week, our progress was validated by industry analysis - IDC said customers are growing their disk storage business with Sun far faster than with any of our proprietary competition. And at three times the rate of the overall market's growth. A great place to start.

If you'd like to know more, and might be interested in taking a Thumper system for a free trial run, just click here and pick the country in which you're located. We supply most systems at Sun for free trials across the globe (yes, we even cover shipping to you). If you like the system, please buy it. If not, we'll take care of getting it returned to Sun, you owe us nothing. (That's the closest we can get to free hardware downloads...)

As I said to the analyst, you need only look to the results we're already delivering to see the linkage between open innovation and revenue growth. ZFS won't transform demand for our legacy products, but it'll certainly transform the opportunity and industry unfolding before us. But don't just get our opinion, the best folks to validate our approach aren't at Sun, they're among the storage buyers finally feeling the winds of change - at their backs.

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