The Loopback Filter with Truman Boyes

I finished reading Netherland by Joseph O’Neill this lazy Sunday afternoon – and thing about this book if that there is a voice ( Hans van den Broek ) that just stays with you. You want to know what is happening on each page, you want to understand the complexities of his marriage that is now strained by geography, romance or lack thereof, and a basic sense of loss.

Loss from 9-11-01, loss of family and his wife taking his child back to London, and while he remains in NYC he has nothing connecting him to the city. This changes when he meets Chuck Ramkissoon.

The beauty of the English language is nurtured, the eloquence of the arranged words and time shifts are handled with care and passion. This book jumps into situations, places, people, that are difficult to properly capture – but O’Neill invests in capturing the moment, the characters, and transporting the reader. When the story takes the characters to a West Indian dance party, you can simply hear the soca music, you can see the Dutch man quickly taking his drinks before he goes to try and fit in and be part of the gyrating momentum of the dance hall locals. The author captures the emotional complexity of being lost for direction, clinging to things that are known, and then the sort the acceptance and change of character that comes with understanding the truth about yourself.

This book is about New York, about Holland, London, Cricket, about being American or maybe about the Immigrant communities of NYC that have become in some ways, more American than those natively born. Netherland is a book that will quite possibly educate you on the Dutch history of New York, on Cricket as an American game, and on how it felt to New Yorkers in post-9/11 times. It’s a beautiful book that is worth re-reading from time to time. At least when you need to feel painfully alive.

I worked in New York City when the twin towers fell. I have lived in NYC, I have commuted from New Jersey into NYC, and I used to work in a building on the Jersey City water front (Pavonia Station), and have direct sight of the towers. When working on late night projects in the office, I would look out the window and watch the lights go on and off on various floors of the towers.

In 2001 I built a network for a financial company on the 25th floor of the South Tower. I still have the building pass for WTC today. There is a deep excitement in me about the new construction in Battery Park and WTC, however there is a realization that these amazing towers that once stood on the skyline of New York City will never be there again. But wait?! Maybe occasionally they will be; this iPhone application – to create a augmented reality and super impose the towers on the skyline is a ray of sunshine to my spirit.

I have been watching Kickstarter.com for a while now, and finally found a project that is calling out to me to help fund and push towards a future. There are eight days left to get $25k to launch the application, and “we” are at 23k. I have selected the $75 pledge, and I hope to sport the cool T-shirt as well as use the application next time I am in NY or NJ, and I look at the souther tip of Manhattan and look up to see 110 stories in their glory.

More details: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/110stories/110-stories-augmented-reality-twin-towers-iphone-a

Checking some logs I realized that comment spam was originating from a host in Japan at: 2001:2e8:626:0:2:1:0:b7.

With the plethora of IPv6 addresses, it will only be a matter of time before we see massive comment/email/and web spam originating from IPv6 address blocks.

And what exactly is this machine that is sending comment spam?

Why, it’s a default install of Centos with a bunch of open ports. I am sure some not-so-friendly scripts have found their way inside this vulnerable host and have started using it to generate spam. The fact that the machine was IPv6 connected was likely a coincident, but a useful one (to the spammer).

I have now blocked the /64 of that range to prevent such annoyances.

“FRANCE HAS BANNED the use of the words ‘Facebook’ and ‘Twitter’ from being spoken on radio or television unless they are part of a news story in accordance with an old law.”

While the Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel has indicated that France is purely upholding it’s laws (a 1992 law that limits the advertising of organizations on media), it appears France has allowed legislation to get in the way of common sense.

Yes I understand that there is some connotation in “Follow us on Twitter” in that is can show support for Twitter or other commercial organizations. But frankly, denying the existence of a medium that is having far more relevance than traditional print and television organizations; a medium that is changing the politics of regions, countries, and administrations, is going to do more harm than good for the public.

I personally find that the “eggs in one basket” idea that twitter and facebook have created on the Internet is a very worrying situation, but there is no denying the power and usefulness that social media has created in the last 5 years. The Facebook phenomena among businesses is to create their branded page, and have followers where they can direct market the individuals. From the selfish interests of a company it’s perfect, especially when you look at the information that you get when you have people simply ‘follow or join’ or page.

From the Internet-centric perspective it’s no different than the mess we had when AOL or even Compuserve had when they have provider-specific services. It’s lame. It’s against the real power of the a decentralized Internet that survives critical destruction; yet, everyone is on it, so you might as well join.

Will there be a point in time where we all move again away from these organizations. For anyone that says, “remember MySpace or Orkut?”, these are different animals. Sure there were plenty of bands on Myspace but it was hardly adopted with the same magnitude nor as useful as Facebook or twitter. What we need to think up is the generic terms for Facebook’ing and Twittering. The equivalents of “photocopy this” instead of “Xerox this”, or “can you get me a tissue”, instead of “can you get me a Kleenex?”. These technologies are interesting, but surely there are generic ways to describe their function in our lives. Think of ‘texting’ or ‘emailing’; we don’t refer to these as “AT&T Short Messaging” or “Outlooking”.

It’s been close to a year since I had a functioning wordpress system setup. I finally spent an hour to get the system installed on a new KVM instance. Over the last year I have been using twitter more often as a quick way to post things I am thinking about or find interesting. It’s quick, it’s useful, but it lacks context. There are so many interesting things that I come across that I want to jot down notes (and share) and I find wordpress to be good for this type of activity.

I like writing. I like composing information, and I like reading other’s information on technical material, travel, and general thoughts.

This time I tried out FreeBSD inside a KVM VM; the lastest 8.2 is pretty awesome. Lot’s of good features that I hope to get some experience with at some time. The multiple routing table sounds interesting, although I doubt I have a real reason to even turn this on. This is a stock standard system that is running some basic daemons for web and some media streaming. The system is dual stacked (IPv4 and IPv6) and I have published AAAA records for all the domains hosted on this system.