Tony's Links

Yes, I'm on Twitter

For those of you who've asked, I'm tsum on Twitter. I'm pretty sure I said something about this before but it may've been back in March of 2008 when I signed up.

Communications Failure - Sabotage or Warning?

Don't know if you've heard about this or not yet but there were multiple fibre cuts in at least two disparate geographic locations which cut off communications to 3 or 4 communities (Gilroy, Morgan Hill, San Martin and areas of South San Jose. The 2 sets of fibre cuts were, according to news reports, underground and at least 40 miles apart. Manhole covers were removed and the perpetrators went underground and precisely cut the proper cables to sever communications. Wireless, Internet and wireline phones were out of commission and so were police, fire, 911, hospitals, etc. Local ham radio operators are linking the communities and have been doing so since about 3AM (word is that the cuts occurred around 2AM this morning. Here are links to a couple of local news stations' stories: CBS 5 and KTVU.

I ran Internet Operations for a few years back during the boom and this type of action requires some really specialized knowledge. And the surgical precision is downright amazing. I mean, it's easy to knock down a pole or even go underground and wreak havoc but that's not the impression I got from the news reports -- the implication is they didn't just go down and do tons of damage but they selected the locations, the cables and coordinated their activities to occur pretty much at the same time. To me this says it's not just a prank. Maybe it was done to send a message?

Update, April 10: Some good links with more information on this:

PCWorld
eWeek
SFGate

There were 4 locations, 2 in San Carlos and 2 in San Jose. The two in San Jose (one at Monterey Highway between Blossom Hill and Chynoweth and the other near the old IBM (now Hitachi) plant on Cottle Road and Hayes) amounted to 4 cuts, 1 cable held 360 fibers and at each of the other 3 the cable held 48 fibers. In one report it said there were 14 cuts in one location but the SFGate piece says there were 4 cuts in each location.

Also, the two areas were hit about 2 hours apart, South San Jose first and San Carlos later.

RC33 comes out for the G1

T-Mobile began distributing RC33 on February 5th. This isn't the rumored "cupcake" update (if you're not familiar with what cupcake is in this context, do a search for cupcake and Android -- you'll find a lot of hits) and didn't contain A2DP for Android but it did fix a number of problems and introduced some new functionality (Android Market will now notify you when there are updates to your installed apps, for instance).

The stock T-Mobile builds don't allow root access to the phone but the gang over at the XDA Dream Android Development forum wasted no time repackaging the build to allow root access (the Dream [aka G1] is an HTC phone and uses pretty much the same mechanisms to boot as previous HTC phones so they've got a LOT of practice hacking them). It wasn't too long before a "rooted" RC33 was available ... and I installed it Friday. The rooted build also includes browser multi-touch support which is nice but takes a little getting used to, an updated Busybox, a terminal emulator (which you use for access to the G1's Linux command line on the phone), relatively complete versions of less and even an implementation of vi. From the command line there's a lot you can do -- there's an SSH server and an SSh client so I can SSH from my phone to my Linux desktop, there's a VNC client for Android so I can use VNC to login to my Windows/Linux desktop and add in root and you've got pretty much endless possibilities open to you -- cron, modifications to the stock mount tables and so on.

Wow, what a phone!

Linkstation Quad

Well, after that post on January 12 discussing the relative merits of low power PC versus a NAS, Fry's put the 2TB model of the Buffalo Linkstation Quad on sale for $529 and I bought it. I've been running it for a little over 3 weeks and am really pleased with it. If the Quad would've cost $600 or more, I would've bought the QNAP TS-409 Pro Turbo and outfitted it with a couple of hard drives but for $529 I didn't even think about it.

Pros:
1) Price.
2) Support forums.
3) Web access from outside your firewall.
4) The UI is the usual Buffalo NAS UI, enhanced for the additional RAID levels and the additional web access capabilities.
5) SSH server is still there and can be started if you pay attention to the howtos over at the Buffalo forums at NAS Central.
6) With a little sleuthing you can figure out how to submit cron jobs to do you backups to another Linkstation as opposed to using the web UI.

Cons:
1) Slower CPU (but still very capable in my opinion).
2) Media player isn't that cool.
3) No access via iPhone/G1!
4) Not as great a selection of pre-loaded apps available as on the QNAP.
5) Disks aren't hot-plug (but does anyone really need this?
6) Can't upgrade RAID levels nondestructively like the QNAP.

So, on the whole, I'm pleased I bought it.

SqueezeCenter on Linkstation Pro

Back in 2007 I bought a Buffalo Linkstation Pro with the intent of installing SqueezeCenter (then called Slimserver) on it. Well, I never got around to actually installing the software but last night, thanks to this post in the Slimdevices forums, I got it installed and running in less than 30 minutes! I had already installed the referenced JTYMOD firmware so that cut the install time down by at least 30 minutes but, still, it was a piece of cake. And now my music library is available all the time! If the performance remains as good as it seemed to be last night, I may not bother installing another server and just stick with the Buffalo.