Loopback Filter with Truman Boyes

currently we have a sublet in Murray Hill, otherwise known as Curry Hill for the plethora of Indian restaurants in the area. In this area you have to try “Curry in a Hurry”, which when we lived here (full time) was a decent dive for combination platters of various north indian cuisine that works well when you are, well, in a hurry. I used to live on 27th and 6th ave which made a quick walk to the East side worth it for the cheap and chipper curry meals. Now that we are back for a bit, I am having a great time enjoying NYC, walking around and taking in the summer sights, smells and sounds.

Tonight we met up with Paul and Kathy at City Crab (19th and Park Ave South) and enjoyed a nice prix fixe dinner that ended up nicely with a key lime pie and a Brooklyn Pilsner.  I was impressed with the Nikon D300 that Paul was snapping up pics with. For the longest I have been hemming and hawing about making a SLR purchase, and the time is about right; now the kicker — will it be the Nikon or Canon and then which models are worth it for a hobbyist that will likely snap about 3000 photos a year, likely a significant number of them all while self-learning the style. It’s hard to say at the moment, as I read through reviews here and there.

Back at the pad now, and hacking away at some JUNOScript automation in SLAX which takes some getting used to, but produces some really useful functionality that network engineers and operators will like. One of the coolest features in JUNOS 8.4+ is that you can use the jnxUtilityMIB to set information into your own MIB with arbitrary (but useful) information which you can then retrieve via SNMP on NMS systems. Why would you want this? Well let’s say for example that you have a very basic network management system (think MRTG graphing) that you want to graph a particular object and Juniper has not yet created a MIB to expose this information to your SNMP poller. Well, you simply write some basic XML parsing in SLAX or XSLT and then call a XML-RPC command that populates the MIB with the necessary value. It’s not as hard as it sounds, and there are even some examples in a Whitepaper entitled, Increasing Network Availability with Automated Scripting. Take a google for it, or even try out Cuil (pronounced Cool) — this looks to be a good start for a competition to Google. Even Clusty looks pretty good.

So why would someone want to choose another search engine at this stage in the game? I mean if you think about it, for the last 5+ years there has been very little reason to use something other than Google. I remember switching to Google back when they were google.stanford.edu, this was an interesting time; we had Yahoo, Altavista, and I think webcrawler although that might have been acquired by Yahoo at that time, and then along came this prototype web search engine that was simple, no banner, and it just worked well. Well the web may have become too big for Google and now with the focus that google has taken on it seems to me that they are moving into more things and search (although they still are the best) is starting to become not as good. This is a moving target of course, because the thing they are trying to perfect is always growing at a rate that they can not control. More CPU / algorithms / etc may not be the deciding factor is the success in future search engines, it may be the function and interface that they create. But complex systems and interfaces that may be better in refining results are usually less friendly to the user, and thus they lose in design. Time will tell

Credit cards are convenient to use, ubiquitous in many regions and in some circumstances they can be beneficial to the consumer when used with some programs. Today there is an article on the NY Times that discusses the current state of affairs with the US Federal Government looking to heavily regulate the practices in the credit card sector. While I understand and believe that the current situation with lending practices has given way to some lending sectors targeting the lower economic bands of the population, this has also created a situation where a form of equality has been reached: we can all have debt together. It sure is not desirable to have debt, but one of the major factors that holds back economic growth in “developing nations” is the lack of credit, which is based on the fact that there are millions of people in the world that do not have documented earnings. In no way am I suggesting that documented earnings are a necessity or good, I am simply stating that without this information it becomes difficult for lenders to lend, and therefore for borrowers to borrow. In today’s world market that uses credit cards for nearly every type of purchase, it has become increasingly clear that those whom benefit the greatest in commercial deals would be the credit card companies. The 1-4 percent charges that the credit card companies apply to merchants are rough, with the major 3 credit card players ( Visa, Mastercard, American Express) [is it worth it to mention Discover or Diners Club?], all price fixing and AMEX charging near the top end of the surcharges, it looks clear to me that the only way a consumer and merchant will be able to see a benefit in this area is for a stimulus in innovation for competition on transactions, but not necessarily another credit card.

In New Zealand and Australia (but much more in New Zealand) the ETFPOS (ie. debit card) system is cheaper for merchants and consumers, and it competes with credit cards. The shopping and eating atmosphere in these countries has adapted to the use of ETFPOS as a means to pay for coffee, McDonalds, petrol, and even a fancy restaurant for dinner in Melbourne. In the US restaurants would rarely accept debit cards; note: I am not referring to debit credit cards but rather a financial banking card that allows for direct transfer of funds.

Immediate transfer of available funds and the concept of a PIN reduces the risk to the merchant and the bank, and the transaction cost reflects this.

Here is a good post that explains the way that credit card companies create incentives to  sub-optimal behavior.

There are a few things that I want to see adopted in the US banking and merchant sector:

• Easy to use Bank to Bank transfers between people.
• Safe Nationwide acceptance of cheap and easy to use debit card services
• Virtual credit card numbers that allow users to set the amount of credit, the expiration, and max charges per transaction.
• Mortgages that function similar to HELOCs but designed for primary mortgages. The intention would be to have a checking account that is secured against a property and the repayment against the principal could be achieved by depositing a salary directly into the account.
• The ability to open various sub-accounts under a primary banking account for specific purposes (ie. account to receive funds via other banks, video game spending account, etc

Replaced the superdrive in MacBookPro; finally! The factory DVD burner slowly died last year. At first it stopped reading DVDs, then data CD’s had issues, and finally it gave up on reading any media. I was able to get some cash back from AMEX since they match warranties on hardware; so AMEX paid for the cost of replacing the drive and labour.

However, I noticed that it made sense to make the replacement myself with an OEM drive ordered from powerbookmedic.com. The ordering process was easy and I was able to get the drive sent out to Australia via Fedex. In less than a week I had the drive in hand and was able to follow the step in opening up the case, removing the ribbon cable, replace the mounting brackets, and finally replace the drive. All screws are back in and it is working well. Played a CD of  cesaria evora and all sounded brilliant.

The lovely state of Victoria enjoyed Labour Day, this Monday the 10th of March. I had the opportunity to spend the beautiful blue sky day walking around Melbourne, taking a tram with Jenny to keep the temperature down, and I also finished reading a book about the story of Lonely Planet. Coincidently, the story of Lonely Planet, publishers of guide books and language books, involves Melboune as this is where the authors decided to build the base of their company and where they decided to live.

I resumed a post that I never really finished because, as it seems, I was far too tired to write with any style:

“just gave a talk on intro to mpls. over in taiwan. very jet lagged. taiwan is exciting and hoping to see more of it this week.”

Well, I did see Taipei as we went up there for APRICOT 2008, where I ended up presenting a talk on MPLS that my colleague was scheduled to present, but he needed to fly out early so I filled in to give the morning talk. I think it went rather well considering that I had little time to prepare for the talk, but I was able to clearly explain the benefits of deploying MPLS and I think it spurred some thought around how the different technologies stack up and form provider provisioned VPNs.

(listening to Clay your Hands Say Yeah) … inspiring polyphony with a multitude of layers of audible vibrations. I picked up “Some Lound Thunder (2007)” probably in late July 07, and somehow it was lost in my archives of stuff, and at some point I dug it out and began to enjoy the album, song by song. “Goodbye to the Mother and the Cover” is a radiohead-esque melody that contains emotions that seem to pour from all directions, with a steady marching drum beat that leads the listener to a crescendo.

Now about these email addresses. It seems that some of the large companies out there have poor policies regarding privacy and protection of email addresses of their customers. There are 3 companies that have breached my own trust:

1. Ticketmaster
2. Delta Airlines
3. Mac Warehouse (now CDW)

I used unique email addresses with each one of these sites, as I do with many sites, and I have now found that random spam is coming in from random spam sources with a target of the unique email addresses that I provided to the above mentioned sites. I will write their customer service and see if they will provide an apology and explanation for what has caused my email (that I provided them) to become a litter-box.

 Here is what Ticketmaster policy says about sharing of information:

With whom we may share information we collect   (Read More)
We will not share your personal information with others except as indicated below, or except when we inform you in advance and give you the opportunity to opt out. We may share personal information with:

• Event providers, such as the venues, promoters, artists’ representatives and fan clubs, teams, leagues and others who are involved in, produce or bring you events;
• Service providers, such as credit-card payment processors, performing services on our behalf;
• Other IAC businesses;
• Other businesses with which we partner or which we carefully select to offer you products, services, and promotions through our website or offline; and
• Other third parties in limited circumstances, such as complying with legal requirements, preventing fraud, and protecting the safety of our users.

We may share aggregated, non-personal information in any of the above situations and also with advertisers and others.

The Power of One is a fantastic book that I have been paging through for the past few weeks although it has been on my reading list for 3 years. Anton, when he was living in NZ, before he packed up and moved up to Iceland, had given me the book on my 25th birthday. For some reason or another I kept the book on the shelf and thought that some day I will read this book, but from the cover it didn’t jump out at me.

It’s a rather meaty read approaching greater than 500 pages, and I read in a very detailed manner, slowly taking in each sentence and exploring what it means, and all the little quirks about the writing style. There is much dialog in the book and at times the language switches to Afrikaans and sometimes to other African dialects. This adds for much curiosity to me because I love languages and the semantics of written language interest me the same way that (network) protocols work.

Suid-Afrika is on my list of places to visit. Ja, it is a place that I would really like to explore.  As a child, I attended a broadway performance of Sarafina in NYC. This must have been in 1988 or so when the play first opened.

I used google’s trend engine to see a few comparisons on searched terms over time:

• The word “sleep” versus “tired”. The Winner is “Sleep”
• OpenBSD versus NetBSD
• St. Thomas versus St. John
• ipv4 versus ipv6
• fire versus ice
• stress versus anxiety
• stock market versus currency market

The google trends function is pretty neat to visualize popular search terms. Here is an interesting one, where the popularity of two search terms becomes close to equal over time:

• mpls versus ipv6

Then taking a look at the how national news stories raise huge search volumes on some rather low volume key words:

• coal mine versus gold mine 

Then I just tried a few interesting comparisons:

• Myanmar versus Burma
• Ron Paul versus  Huckabee
• Freedom of speech vs. Gun-rights

And here you can see that the term ‘Apple’ is getting searched almost as much as Microsoft:

• Apple versus Microsoft

For the fun of it, I have also plotted a few semi-random terms against each other:

• Whale versus Squid
•  Web 2.0 vs. 3G
• commodore 64 vs. atari st

 I was browsing through todays news from news.google.com, when I stumbled upon a story saying that Juniper Networks stock falls on CEO leaving; this is obviously not the case; the COO (Stephen Elop) has taken a job at Microsoft as the new business division leader. News agencies like RTTNEWS which in this article clearly wanted to get the news out quickly instead of accurately. A public spanking is deserved for RTTNEWS.

Take a look at the following recent errors that RTTNEWS has issued as market alerts.

1. On Jan 8 2008, RTTNEWS issued a headline and then a correction to a previous story about the CFO  leaving Force Protection.  This is then updated as the CEO.
2. On Dec 31, 2007 RTTNEWS issues information about Ninetowns Internet Technology, and indicates that revenues for a current qtr are US $.1 million instead of $3.1 million. A correction follows.

These “market alerts” with incorrect information can and do cause significant concern and the slight difference in detail can mean a lot to market watchers. For example, the departure of a COO in a company that has been with the company for less than 3 years versus a CEO that build the company, can have staggering different sentiment to the investment community.

Taking a bit of time to ensure the information is correct is far more valuable than being the first one to issue a story. At least it means more to me; because the more invalid information that I receive from a news source the more likely that source is to be blocked from my RSS feed. (ie. the same way Fox news has become the blocked from my reader).

This recent article about the loan industry is quite interesting and paints a considerably miserable outlook for borrowers or stock holders of the Countrywide / WM / ETFC / Chase/ Wells Fargo, etc.

http://blogs.marketwatch.com/greenberg/2007/12/straight-talk-on-the-mortgage-mess-from-an-insider/

Second mortgages are defaulting all over the place and Moody’s is expecting a 15% default rate. Values are dropping in property around the country; except on a recent article I read indicated that the average real estate sale in NYC is 1.4 million. Of course this takes into account an abnormal number of extremely high priced (ie. $10M+) properties that skew results.

Pretty soon I really need to sit down and figure out the internals of Wordpress enough to construct my own theme that looks how I would like to format the site. In the mean time I found these decent theme and decided to use it, as it looks like a notepad, and I have been using these pages for some of my notes.

Summer is certainly here in the southern hemisphere. The temperature has exceeded 40 degrees in some  parts of Southern Australia and Victoria. Thank god for waterparks. AdventurePark was certainly worth the drive from Melbourne; the cold water showering down in blasts and buckets was not only refreshing, but it was fun as well to splash around.

A quick run down of what I have been up to:

1. Drove out to the Otway National Park in Victoria.
2. Camped in Otway National Park near Lake Elizabeth.
3. Took a early morning (5am yikes!) canoe trip with a guide to see a few platypus in their natural environment.
4. Drove over 1000 kilometers in a week.
5. Saw the 12 Apostles, geological structures in the Southern Ocean. (or what is left of them).
6. Was swarmed by flies at Port Campbell.
7. Went to St. Kilda Beach and brought an awesome inflatable raft to float around on.
8. Got a State of Victoria drivers license valid for 10 years.