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This post is a follow-up to Dynamic DNS

When last I left you, we had basic updateable DNS running and could update it from OS X. I've been a bit busy since then, but thanks to some prodding from @Loredo, I got back in and started looking at. What follows is the exciting story of how I got things up and running — by the end of this post, you'll have access to a working copy of dnsextd for linux, and a client application that updates SRV and IP (A/AAAA) leases. Woo.

So, yesterday was the big day. The Coming of The Tablet. I'm not exactly a big tech pundit. I've never seen an iPad in person. I haven't even played with the emulator yet. But I thought I'd still post my immediate reactions.

The Name: It's not that bad. It doesn't trigger the same juvenile "feminine products" joke urge in me that that it does with all of the commentators on Slashdot. It kind of reminds me of PADDs from Star Trek, which is a good association for a high-tech device. It's better than "iSlate" would've been. I think "Apple Tablet" would've been better, but I don't know that it'd be trademarkable. Not that "iPad" is exactly easy from a trademark standpoint...

The Hardware: Looks gorgeous. ARM Cortex-A9, which is about what I figured. For you people that have never designed an ARM before: that doesn't mean that ARM designed the chip and Apple/PA Semi just slapped their design down. Given Apple's propensity for attention to detail, I'm sure they didn't just use the synthesizable core from ARM and put it in an SoC — I'm sure that they took the architectural/micro-architectural IP and built their own chip.

The non-ultranerd parts of the hardware look nice, too. People online are complaining about the bezel, but I think it looks about right. John Gruber agrees. The screen isn't OLED, but I have a Sony NWZ-X1061, and I can personally attest that the screen technology is not useful in bright light. OLEDs now are where LCDs were 10 years ago — completely transmissive (well, actually emissive in this case, but it's the same idea). Somebody somewhere will come up with a way to make transflective OLEDs like they did for LCDs, and then we'll have reasonably usable OLEDs. Then the price can come down about 90%, and Apple can put one on an iPad. Until then, a big IPS LED-backlit LCD is the way to go.

The Software Ecosystem: This is the biggest point of contention. It's true: Apple is deploying another closed ecosystem. Like the iPhone, this product will not encourage tinkering. I'm sure somebody will jailbreak it. I'm equally sure that it won't matter. I have a few different responses to this issue:

1. It's as open as the web. Yes, you can't run native code on it without getting it through a barrage of Apple testers. You have a first-class web browser which seems to be much better at handling multiple open pages than Mobile Safari on the iPhone is. I see this as no different than WebOS or ChromeOS. Apple has no problem making useful APIs available through the browser (like Geolocation). Hell, with things like Bespin, you can even do development through the web.
2. The iPad isn't going to replace tinkerer's computers. If I could move my parents away from full computers to iPads today, I'd do it. The safety of a managed platform far outweighs anything else, given how much important stuff people are putting on their computers nowadays and how dumb most people using computers are. Yes, I've heard the argument that without being able to tinker with the inner workings of your OS, you can't grow up to be a proper hacker. Well, I never really tinkered with the inner workings of my OS until I was old enough to buy an old desktop and put Red Hat 5.1 on it. That ability won't be going away.
3. It doesn't matter what I (or anybody else reading this blog post, probably) think. The 3 million people that will buy iPads this year (my personal guess) don't give a crap whether or not you can deploy unsigned applications to it.

The Audience: This is going to be big. Not as big as the iPhone (at least, not right out the gate). But big. It kicks the crap out of Chrome OS and netbooks in general (the idea of a cheap netbook-level device with decent industrial design and fabrication is amazing). I'm going to want one. And you're going to want one, too.

Hey all. One of the sysadmins at Mudd, Claire Connelly, pointed out that there's a widespread bug in SpamAssassin that might cause large numbers of false positives on mail sent after 2010-01-01. Apparently, the "date in future" rule is hardcoded to look for years after 2010. You can read more at LWN; the short of it is that you probably want to add the following to your SpamAssassin config:

score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.0

sa-update may or may not be pulling down updated rules. You can find the relevant bug at the SpamAssassin Bugzilla (#5852). Anyhow, something fun to be aware of.

Happy 2010.

This post is a follow-up to Real-Life Update

Well, it was brief but exhausting. My job search has now come to a close. I interviewed at a large number of companies, got offers from a smaller number, and accepted an offer from Yelp. I'll be starting in June on the Infrastructure team, doing something between software engineering and system administration. Which sounds, you know, awesome.

For the unaware, Yelp is a local search company based out of San Francisco, CA. They've got a pretty large userbase, and lots of views, and, in general, interesting problems to work on. There's already a Mudder there. Plus, it's a really small company. Should be a great atmosphere to work in coming out of Mudd's tight-knit community. And, of course, San Francisco is an awesome city.

It's nice to have DNS records for all of your computers. It's a giant pain in the ass to remember IP addresses, especially if you're on something like a cable connection, where the IP address is dynamic (but only changes every month or two). Now, you could go ahead and use DynDNS or No-IP or something. But those are lame. You have to use a subdomain of one of their domains, and you have to use their software to update. You might be wondering if there's a better way. Well, there is. Standard DNS supports updating, it turns out. In BIND, this is managed through the allow-update parameter. I had some free time this week after I finished finals, so I went ahead and set it up, along with the other trimmings required for Wide-Area Bonjour. It's cool, so I thought I'd post a bit.

The most important resource for all of this stuff is dns-sd.org. Aside from a couple of minor errors that I corrected and an update for OS X 10.5+, this Tip will be based off of the guides from that site. So credit to them.

I'm about to finish my second-to-last semester of college. That in and of itself is perhaps a somewhat stunning thing to think about. Equally important, of course, is the question of what I'll do once I leave. I've been interviewing with a half-dozen companies, and just got back the other day from a trip up to the Bay Area to do in-person interviews with Yelp and NVIDIA. I'd forgotten how nice the Bay Area was. I stayed in downtown San Francisco, at The Mosser Hotel, and it was, well, really nice. Caltrain is also an awesome commuter rail system.

The interviews were the usual, intimidating technical interviews. Six hours with a series of engineers and managers. Programming problems on the board (none of them terribly difficult, but all of them rather harder to solve when you're under a time constraint and being watched). I think I did okay, though. Hopefully they liked me. crosses fingers

I should start hearing back from them (and hopefully the other companies I've been talking to) in the next week or two, which is very exciting. I'll be sure to post and update when I have some idea what I'm going to be doing in the real world. Until then, ciao.

I picked up a new "computer" last week. A virtual one, that is. I ran into this site called prgmr which offers very low-cost, bare virtual private servers. So far, so good. Got Debian set up all the way I like it. Now just to find something fun to do with it. :-)

Okay, so this is maybe a little unusual, but today's "*nix Tip of the Day" isn't about Unix/Linux/etc. at all. Instead, it is about their antiquated archenemy: VMS. First, a little bit of history:

History

Way back in 1970, the PDP-11 was hot stuff. Ken Thompson, Dennis Richie, Brian Kernighan, and others at Bell Labs were writing what would become Unix for the PDP-11 (well, for the PDP-7 at first, but nobody talks about that). Unix was a huge improvement over what DEC shipped with the PDP-11, DOS-11 and RT-11. This couldn't stand, so Dave Cutler at DEC designed VMS. It was a new operating system, with lots of fancy features, like networking and, uh, lots of upper-case letters.

VMS and Unix sort of battled on. Or so some people would have you think. Really, Unix won early on and VMS stumbled along with corporate financing and an obnoxiously difficult-to-use interface. It passed from DEC to Compaq to HP, from the PDP-11 to the Alpha to the Itanium. And it still lives on, churning away in scary back-rooms here and there.

Current Events

So, why do I bring this up? Well, as some of you may know, Harvey Mudd College has a few VMS machines around. The most well-known of these (to students) is thuban, which is a 667MHz DEC Alpha running OpenVMS 7.3-2. Today, I had the, uh, interesting experience of using it, and thought I'd share my impressions with my readers. You can see the proof of my VMS skills at my VMS homepage. That's right, I'm on the Internet. And on DECnet.

Hello gentle readers... You may be surprised to notice that this website has had a redesign. I was on earlier and noticed that Srini's Fluid-Blue WordPress theme had been updated to F2, which is newer and shinier. So, of course, I had to install the new one and redo my customizations of colors and such. And once I'd done that, it was really worth my time to do some additional customization, like adding a Google Custom Search box. Ayuh.

You also might have noticed the new logo. Yes, I know, it's not very good. Oh well. If you didn't notice it, it looks like the following (click for a nice SVG version that I wanted to put on the site proper, but didn't out of sympathy for old browser users):

It's just the letters "RL" (for RogueLazer, not for any silly clothing manufacturer) in GTS. I don't really play Vendetta Online much any more, but I do appreciate that it's an awesome game and I support the devs. Plus, I was on the team of players that deciphered GTS back in, um, 2003? So I feel that it is useful for a logo.

Anyhow, feel free to let me know what you think. Or not, if you prefer. The redesign was definitely a better way to spend an afternoon than doing homework, no matter whether it's any good or not...

There's currently something going on in Washington that Twitter has called "912dc" (New York Times story); it's a protest against not any particular act by government, but against government itself. More Jeffersonian than anarchistic, though.

This protest bothers me a lot, and I thought that maybe if I wrote down my ideas as to why, it'd bother me less. There are a few reasons why people protest what they call "big government":

1. They feel that they don't need the services provided. — This covers a lot of the rich-white-libertarian group and doesn't get a response
2. They feel that private industry can provide the services better than public government.
3. They actually only disagree with some action of the government, but are protesting the whole thing anyway. — The foreign-born-Obama and 912dc intersection falls here
4. (most rarely) They actually think the government is too big.

I'm sure that there are people at this rally for all of those reasons (and probably a few that I haven't considered), but there's really one that bothers me, and it's one that I hear espoused a lot.