Noughts

I was reading an article the other day on Digital Life. I thought the article brought up some interesting points.  Below is an excerpt of the article.

DIGITAL LIFE * APRIL 1, 2008 * THE STRAITS TIMES

Open‑source talent: Dearth or ‑plenty?
One firm moves to Windows while another stays its open‑source course, IRENE THAM reports

WHILE more users are going down the open‑source path, one Singapore firm will be ending its nine‑year journey on that route. Its grouse ‑ a lack of open‑source talent here.

The company is Virtual Map, which provides road maps through its streetdirectory.com website. It also develops and hosts Web‑based map applications for corporate clients.

Since its founding in 1999, the firm has been hosting its map applications on open‑source operating system, MandrakeSoft,  renamed Mandriva three years ago.

All was well until last year, when its IT administrator left. “We couldn’t replace him,” said Eugene Lim, director of business development at Virtual Map.

The firm ended up hiring someone well‑versed in another Linux operating system called Fedora Core.

Eugene said because skills are “not portable”  between the different open‑source flavours, his company had to move its map applications to the new operating system.

“We spent three weeks doing that all because of one guy.”

The firm’s frustrations did not end there. Recent , it found itself repeating the three‑week exercise, moving applications from Fedora Core to yet another Linux distribution,  as “the open-source community has decided to end support for Fedora”.

What this means is that the community will no longer develop security patches and feature improvements on the Fedora operating system.

In October last year, the firm turned to mainstream software vendor Microsoft for help.

“It would be great if we could have only one server operating system running all the time and one neck to choke if things don’t work,” said Eugene.

Although I’m not a system administrator, I’ve done some administrative tasks before on different Linux distros.  So I do find the following comment quite strange.

Eugene said because skills are “not portable”  between the different open‑source flavours, his company had to move its map applications to the new operating system.

I think stuff like quota management, user/file permissions,  network configuration, email/web server configuration, setting up cron jobs, etc are pretty portable skills.  Even though certain specifics might differ, it’s very likely you can take your set of skills (and looking up some man pages) on one distro and work comfortably on another distro if you’re working on the same tasks. Only potential problem is package management but it’s nothing so major that Google can’t handle.

Another comment that appears to be problematic is this.

… as “the open-source community has decided to end support for Fedora”.

Erm…I checked the wiki on Fedora Core and guess what the actual scenario is? Fedora Core 6 has reached its end of life, but 7, 8 are still supported.

 A reminder to users: Fedora Core 6 will reach its end of life for updates on
Friday, December 7, 2007.

Fedora 7 will remain supported until one month past the release of Fedora 9
(as things stand, this would be roughly through the end of May, 2008).

 

 - The Fedora Board

Lastly, do I see some management problems here? I mean, if you are having so much problem with the departure of a staff, to the point of having to change the OS multiple times, clearly there is some problem with the human resource management and ops and support planning. Is there any plan on the course of action to take to keep the system going in case the system admin is down? Is there no person who can cover for him? In response to the comment “We spent three weeks doing that all because of one guy,” I’ll say that the guy is not the system admin, but his manager.

Tags: Linux, Management, Sysadmin

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First S’porean charged with using another’s wireless network

TodayOnline, 20 Dec 2006, http://www.todayonline.com/articles/161861.asp

The details surround this case is finally out.

IT WAS 2am and his mother had told him not to use the Internet.

.

Determined to log on to chat with his friends, Garyl Tan Jia Luo, 17, left home with his laptop and wandered around the private estate in Nemesu Avenue where he lived in search of a wireless local area network (wLAN) he could tap on.

.

Shortly after, his laptop picked up the signal of an unprotected wLAN outside a house on a neighbouring street. Tan then sat on the curb and logged on to the network.

.

But a resident who was driving past spotted Tan and confronted him when the teenager tried to walk away. An argument ensued and the resident called the police.

.

Tan was arrested and became the first person here to be charged with encroaching upon someone else’s wireless Internet connection under the Computer Misuse Act.

Now that we are given the full story, it clearly is not a case of the networking making it’s way to the user, Even if it is the case, if the user knows that he is leeching another’s network, he’s probably guilty as well. While the owner of the Access Point has the responsibility to secure it as well, not doing it doesn’t mean one has the right to access it. After all, one can be stupid and not lock one’s door but a thief cannot use that as a reason to absolve himself of any blame.

What is interesting is why the youth resorted to WIFI mooching in the first place: his mother tried to control his Internet usage. So he just left the house at 2 a.m. with his laptop to find a network. His case is probably one of Internet addiction. With Singapore going wireless and the mushrooming of many hotspots around the island, I guess more teens are going to leave their houses, armed with a PDA or laptop, when their parents try to limit their Internet usage, since they know that they can readily find a free network to use. We could almost always connect to the Internet before while outside, but this came at a cost that is on the high side for teens, now it is free or at least more affordable. Before this, I never did think about the social problems that the wireless island concept could bring or exacerbate.

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Recently, the YUI team conducted an experiment on optimizing web page performance. Though the results are not ground-breaking, it is interesting to see the figures. Using the Pareto principle, which says 80% of the effects is achieved by 20% of the causes, the YUI team discovers where this 80% is.

Table 1 shows popular web sites spending between 5% and 38% of the time downloading the HTML document. The other 62% to 95% of the time is spent making HTTP requests to fetch all the components in that HTML document (i.e. images, scripts, and stylesheets). The impact of having many components in the page is exacerbated by the fact that browsers download only two or four components in parallel per hostname, depending on the HTTP version of the response and the user’s browser. Our experience shows that reducing the number of HTTP requests has the biggest impact on reducing response time and is often the easiest performance improvement to make.

What is network pipelining? Mozilla gives a good explanation here. One way to increase the number of pipelines for Firefox from the default of 4 is to type “about:config” in the address bar. In the filter bar, check that “network.http.pipelining” is true. Then filter for “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” and set it to a value you desire. I entered 7 and felt Youtube loaded faster. Didn’t really test the effects empirically though. It’s not always the case that a higher value is better though. It’s stated in mozillaZine that,

Higher values will cause a delay before the first request completes but will make the last request complete sooner. Higher values will also cause more of a delay if a connection fails.

Tags: Firefox, Yahoo User Interface

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News of StarHub and SingTel’s bidding war for the television rights of the English Premier League (EPL) has made many consumers unhappy recently. I’m not sure if our neighbouring countries are broadcasting it, if they are we can probably get to watch it for free. Else we’ll just have to wait and see who wins the bidding war and fork out the cold hard cash. BTW, I didn’t realise that watching those P2P streams was illegal.

Anyway, the SingTel IPTV trial has started, sign up here. I guess it’s good to have some experience with the service before deciding to sign up or not. Not sure how this is different from Ideas BroadBand though, but I signed up anyway. Just be careful handling the equipment they’re going to hand out top you, you have to pay if you damage them.

Amazon Unbox is a pretty cool alternative but it seems to be restricted to US users.

Tags: media

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Someone was caught for stealing network bandwidth recently. With wireless broadband being so popular, I guess there should be a few unsecured networks around. Below are some steps which I take to secure my wireless network from casual piggy-backers. Real hackers can overcome most of them, except maybe if you use an authentication scheme like WPA.

1. Change the default SSID and disable SSID broadcast (just found out my router, DLink DI-624+ doesn’t allow disabling of SSIDs. Oh well.)
   
2. Limit the number of IP addresses that DHCP assigns.
   
3. Enable MAC filtering so only registered wireless cards can be used.
   
4. Enable authentication scheme, such as WPA-PSK.
   

Nothing is fool-proof, SSIDs can be easily sniffed, MAC addresses can be spoofed, some authentication schemes such as WEP are easily cracked, but if we are dealing with casual piggy-backers these steps should be sufficient.

cci[RR]us talks about how the offender could have been discovered. It is interesting to wonder what if the owner deliberately opened up access to his network in order to farm the usernames and passwords of these people tapping into his network illegally, and then use this info to get the offenders into trouble.

Tags: DLink DI-624+, wireless security

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I’ve been following the news on falling public transport use , and I think of IP routing to a website. It’s the same analogy we always use in network classes. We’ve got so many packets going into the pipe, trying to reach the same server that at some point, the network becomes congested. The traffic is bursty, the network is congested only at certain times, like rush hour traffic. So what do you do, assuming the server can handle greater load just fine?

A few things come to mind, buying more bandwidth, improve latency, adding more routers to prevent bottle-necks, data compression. It’s analogous to expanding roads, get faster cars or increase speed limits, build more roads, and using public transport in the transport context. But there are many constraints, such as how much land do we want to use to build roads in land-scarce Singapore? How much more accidents are we willing to risk in exchange for faster cars and higher speed limits? How many people can we squeeze onto MRT trains and SBS buses before they feel uncomfortable?

Or we can Akamaize our website. Basically that means distributing the content of the website to other servers elsewhere on the network so that clients don’t have to get all of the content from one server. Different parts of the network are being used instead as the hosts are located differently. Are we seeing this happening in Singapore’s road system? A little, but future developments will compound the problem. Ng Ka Yen states the problem clearly.

MORNING traffic patterns in Singapore are lopsided, with too much traffic rushing from the north to the south, and too much from the east to the west.

We cannot add burdens to these patterns forever. Adopting traffic minimisation and traffic diversion strategies is critical, and perhaps the only way to tackle long-term traffic problems.

In a few years, the integrated resort (IR) at Marina Bay alone will create 10,000 jobs and stimulate thousands more in other businesses in the area.

And do not forget that demand for office space in the Central Business District is always high, despite higher rents there.

Singapore Management University (SMU) is another big traffic generator.

A few kilometres away, the IR at Sentosa will generate as many jobs and tourist traffic as its Marina Bay counterpart.

There is so much development in the south, it’s going to be a traffic nightmare. It’s almost like taking two steps backward after the implementing the idea of regional centres.

How are we going to avoid this concentration? A related question is, can we put our regional centres to greater use to localize traffic usage? Of course, we’re going to have to put more jobs, schools (especially universities), entertainment and recreational facilities elsewhere. The government has to find some way to make these places attractive to businesses and users. I think given the present state of technology in Singapore and our progress towards a wireless island, we can go so far as to say that we can eliminate some of this traffic altogether via telecommuting.As Thomas L. Friedman describes in his book, Indians are already doing so much work (tutoring, doing accounts, coding, etc) from the US and Europe via telecommuting, so I don’t see it as a big problem here. There are worries about security and work performance, but these can be overcome with proper education.

A factor worth investigating is why do Singaporeans buy cars. Is it because it’s a dream, it’s a need, it’s a symbol of success, public transport doesn’t meet their requirements, etc? If it is to fulfill a psychological need, then improving public transport is probably not going to make these car-owners use public transport. Our hope is that the young no longer subscribes to such views like owning a car is necessary to be successful.

There are other solutions worth considering. Elia Diodati toys with the idea of express train service, but the cost of installing additional tracks seem forbidding. There are express buses, which I’m not sure of their effectiveness. I’ve written a suggestion to SBS about their express bus service not stopping at a particular MRT station but I’ve not received any feedback. I’m not sure how popular car-pooling is in Singapore, but such a culture can be encouraged. Or how about company-sponsored transport or private transport companies providing bus services, like what they do in Science Park or some industrial areas?

A more holistic approach is needed to solve our transport issues, because these issues also involve urban planning, our working and lifestyle approaches and the social and economic value we place on car-ownership.

Tags: cars, public transport, urban planning, Work

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There are 5 people working in my company, 3 part-timers and none of the part-timers are looking forward to staying. Other than distance, I don’t have any complaints about the job actually. Some of the more interesting things I have learnt on the job are using simple AWK and SED to do some text processing.

sed -i "s/hahaha/hehehe" myfile.txt

This replaces all instances of the string “hahaha” with the string “hehehe”. How useful is this?
Well, if I need to fit many webpages into a small webserver, you can use sed to delete all the irrelevant tags (like those that inserted by FrontPage) or comments to squeeze the files into smnaller sizes. Or if you need to add some html into many files that contain the same structured data, this comes in handy as well. For example, this shell script adds a new string tag5 after tag4 for all the htm files in the current directory:

myfiles=`ls|grep "htm$"`; for xfile in $myfiles; do sed -i "s/tag4/tag4;tag5" $xfile; done;

Most people would prefer to use Server Side Includes to avoid such a maintenance nightmare from appearing in the first place, but if you are not allowed to use that then perhaps this is an alternative.

I’ve always wondered how Windows knew which interface to use in a PC with multiple adapters. Found out you can bind certain protocols to specific network adapters such that it becomes the default interface to be used.

So it’s not too bad, at least I’m learning something while doing some mundane jobs like updating catalgoues or dis/assembling PCs.

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