The Ivory Tower of Pure Thought

Interesting experiment

vinnyt — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 20:44:20 +0000

I am an avid watch collector but the idea of expensive watches has never crossed my mind. I stumbled across this site http://rolexperiment.blogspot.com. If the guy is legit I think I’d give a couple of bucks towards the cause. I want to see what he finds out.

My iPhone Review

vinnyt — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 04:20:59 +0000

I am about 1 year into my Mac vs. PC experiment. As of right now the Apple has won this one hands down. I am not a fanboy by any stretch. I am however a UNIX person from and so maybe I am somewhat biased. Any way, when the iPhone was announced I was stuck in the throws of a Sprint contract that I couldn’t escape. However, the weeks and months passed slowly. The announced price drop made wait that much more excruciating. The year soon passed, and my contract ran out. So I picked up my shiny new iPhone, and after 5 months here is what I have to say.

First and above all else this device is hands down the best mobile/smart/portable/phone I have ever used. Over the years I have been lucky enough to have to carry many of the devices that enable constant contact. None have been as feature rich, as easy to use or as powerful as the iPhone. Furthermore the iPhone is tough as hell. I have dropped this phone several times, and once into an icy puddle. So far the device has a few minor dings on the metal shell but beyond that it continues to function as well as the day I bought it.

The software on the phone out of the box was adequate, but there where several features I was missing, but shortly after my purchase the hacking efforts where in full swing and in a matter of minutes I was using all the tools that I was missing when first using the device. The most important to me is the terminal. I spend many hours of my day SSH’d into machines and being able to continue this from my phone is very crucial to my businesses success.

The UI is straight forward and allows me to hand the phone to my technically challenged mother who can navigate the phone with ease.

I have one negative comment and that is around future software for the device. My hat is off to the hacker community, they have created a system of organization and deployment that is as elegant as I have ever seen, and I believe it is better than something Apple could have created. My fear is this community is going to disappear next month when the official SDK hits our hands. I pray Steve Jobs will allow this thriving community to continue to push the boundry on this device because what is there near is but a scratch on the surface of what this device is capable of doing.

My recommendation go buy one.

Homebrewing

vinnyt — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 19:47:16 +0000

So a good friend of mine recently moved back home and he needed a place to stay. I had a spare room and figured he could crash out there for a while. Well, he and I both are deeply interested in chemistry and biology and we like beer so we figured it would be interesting to explore all these areas and brew our own beer. I had read quite a bit of documents on the subject when it first perked my interest some years ago, and I was somewhat discouraged by the seeming complexity that these materials described. This being the case I didn’t explore the subject much further. Once my friend returned to the city between the two of us and his formal background as a chemist I felt tackling brewing might become a little easier. He and I made a trip to a local brew show where we purchased a starter kit. This kit included several key items that make the process far simpler than what I had read about so many years before.

This being said you will need the following equipment: a 5+ gallon plastic bucket, with a spigot at the bottom if possible. A glass carboy — this is the fermenting vessel typically made of glass with a capacity of over 6 gallons. You need bottlecaps and a capping tool. A hydrometer, thermometer, and a whole mess of brushes for cleaning everything. In addition, for the most simple of brewing you will want to identify a large stock pot for boiling. The key to successful brewing is strong attention to cleanliness. Above all, else keep everything clean, clean, clean.

The process of brewing is simple: Get sugar, let yeast feed on this sugar, and drink!

Next article will be about how we made our first beer.

[tags]Brown Ale, home brew, homebrew[/tags]

Setting up a Web Farm using FreeBSD & lighttpd

vinnyt — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 14:51:31 +0000

In creating high performance, heavy load websites network administrators are faced with the challenge of creating a system that can handle a heavy load and deliver pages in a timely manner that people have come to expect. There are 2 schools of thought on the subject, one school believes in buying the fastest possible hardware and hoping this will stand up to the load. While the other feels lots of small cheap boxes working together can achieve the same or more than the single large machine. I tend to be of the opinion cheap is good, and it seemed to work for google so it can’t be all bad. Now lucky for use we live in the day and age when a fast computer can be bought for cheap, and there is some advanced software that is free. So building a cluster is now something that can be done dirt cheap and very simply.

In my setup I chose FreeBSD as my OS. I believe what I have done can be achieved as easily with most modern UNIX systems. However, since I’ve used FreeBSD the most it was my first choice. There are 2 things I would recommend, first use boxes that are identical, this will ease the installation process and make sure you can take the boxes apart as needed.

The first thing to do is assess what your web application will need. In my case I needed 2 things, First a fast database which I happened to already have established on my network, and second a big file store, again just my luck this was on the network ready to go.

Next step is to design a network architecture this will vary widely depending on the capabilities of your hosting facility what equipment you have at your disposal. My decision was to create 2 private networks so as to isolate data and to maximize bandwidth usage for each specific type of traffic. This means on one network there is only HTTP traffic, and on the second network there is only DB and NFS traffic. This means these two will not be interfering with each other when it comes to bandwidth resources.

In the next article I will cover how to setup the firewall and load balancing, and finally I will cover how to setup the actual webservers that will be used in the cluster.

[tags]FreeBSD, lighttpd, NFS, mysql[/tags]

OpenGL For the Rest of Us.

vinnyt — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 16:56:49 +0000

I started programming OpenGL in 1998 as a project for fun. I was really interested in computer and math and graphics programming seemed to be the best way tease both those interests. At the time I don’t think DirectX was an option and besides the majority of my coding was being done on UNIX platforms so OpenGL was the best option. Graphics programming on the face of it is somewhat intimidating, and especially in a windowed environment it becomes even more problematic. To remedy this common problem a developer created a framework called GLUT. This framework concerns itself with the details of windowing, and windowing across platforms for that matter so all you as the developer have to concern yourself with is the complexities of your OpenGL application. The other great thing is you can write your code and with no modifications just a simple recompile it will run on each platform that has existing implementation of GLUT. An explanation of GLUT is beyond the scope of what I have to say in this series of articles, but suffice it to say, it works, it makes you life easy and there is more than adequate documentation on the internet if you need to looking anything up.

Programming OpenGL is relatively simple. In this series I’m going to start by showing how to work in 2D space by drawing a simple line, then moving to a grid, then a 2D maze and then evolving that to a 3D maze.

[tags]OpenGL, C, OS X[/tags]