Notes In The Margin

While I was at ApacheCon, I had an interesting conversation with a newspaper reporter. Presumably, he was interviewing me. He had been assigned this Free Open Source Software thing, and was very new to the concept, and trying to understand what it was about.

We were talking about the fact that FOSS allows countries like Sri Lanka to build software businesses, with very little startup cost, that could legitimately compete with Microsoft, at least for business outside of the USA. It also allows these non-USA countries to be, as much as possible, independent from the USA for their information/computer/software industry.

I talked about how, in particular, I'm very interested in African nations being able to stop sending millions of dollars a year to Redmond, Washington, but be able to keep those dollars in their own country, paying local programmers, investing in local businesses.

It was at this point that the reporter observed that I was being very unpatriotic in promoting FOSS to developing nations.

This was a very interesting notion to me. I wonder if it's accurate. However, I don't think so. I think that being monopolistic, as a nation, is unpatriotic. Allowing the rest of the world to suffer, economically, in order to promote our own economy, is unpatriotic. Sure, it may seem patriotic, but that's a grossly short-term vision. Because at some point, we kill our markets by forcing them into poverty. And, too, pushing other nations into poverty has unintended side effects. Like, for example, we end up exporting all of our jobs, rather than all of our products, because labor is so much cheaper elsewhere.

It turns out that if we make everyone wealthier, we make everyone wealthier. But if we make everyone poorer, we make everyone poorer. The spiral goes both ways, and our foreign policy had more influence on the direction than we like to think about. If we continue to force the spiral to go down, rather than up, at some point, some other nation (like, say, China) is going to decide that enough is enough, and that we're far too irresponsible to be allowed to have that kind of power anymore.

So, no, I don't think I'm being unpatriotic. I think I'm thinking globally, and long term, and that folks who try to frame FOSS as being communist and unpatriotic are being myopic.

More than once in the last two weeks, I have heard someone quip as follows:

When we were kids, our mothers said "eat your vegetables, some kid in China would love to have them." Now we say to our kids "do your homework, some kid in India wants your job."

I find this us-vs-them mentality to be grossly short-sighted. Until we can learn to cooperate on a global scale, we're dooming our kids to a future of economic downturns and wars.

Someone has *finally* come out with exactly the product I want. A company called Ion has announced a USB Turntable which lets you play an LP directly into your computer. They apparently ship Audacity with it, to make the process easier. Although Audacity doesn't do the greatest job of removing background noise.

These things are just $139, which, although hardly free, is far less than the combination of gear that I was considering buying to convert the stack of LPs I have to CD. And it's much more what I actually want than hundreds of dollars of stereo equipment that I'd hardly ever use.

They will be available on tax day, so I've got a little while to save up. I suppose I should wait for a review or two, but I probably won't. At least, unless the tax fairy is particularly hard on me this year. ;-)

I've been looking for some recording equipment, in order to improve the quality of my recordings. However, during the process, I was listening to some of my earlier recordings, and I'm really quite amazed at how much better the quality is now than it was when I first started. Between actually learning how to use Audacity, and, I guess, learning a little bit about what the recording levels actually should be, it seems that I've greatly improved. Still not perfect, of course, but better.

Anyways, I found this microphone, which, according to various reviews, will make my recordings better. They also recommended several recording software packages, including Audio Hijack Pro as one of the top contenders. I'm not sure I would know enough about it to use it to much effect, but the little bit I've learned about Audacity has helped a lot, so maybe it would.

Meanwhile, as you may have noticed off to the right side of the page (assuming you read this on my website, rather than in some RSS reader) that I'm doing two other podcast sites. JWHughes.org is, for the moment, the autobiography of John Wesley Hughes, who founded Asbury College. And the other site is the weekly (and, as time permits, the daily) readings of the Episcopal Church. In addition to all other considerations, the Bible contains some of the lovliest poetry around, and is great reading/recording material.

And my recording of A Christmas Carol is coming along nicely, although I'm having a really hard time figuring out a time to do my performance/reading of the whole thing, due to annoying schedule conflicts. And time's running out.

I just got done reading "Podcasting: The do-it-yourself guide" by Todd Cochrane. For the most part, a lot of good information, and very helpful on certain matters, such as hardware and software recommendations.

However, Todd seems to make certain assumptions about the potential podcaster. Specifically, he seems to assume that everyone is just like him. As such, much of his advice seems a little odd. For example, I don't feel the need to plan for 5,000-plus visitors. I don't expect I'll ever have more than a few dozen. And he seems to assume (at least in some places) that we all have a news show of some kind which we need to research and interview for. So a lot of his tips seem like they will never apply to me.

Of course, if I start having tens of thousands of visitors, and make a lot of money on advertising, that would be fine. I think.

Of great use were Todd's tips on using Audacity to edit the podcast audio, as well as tips on recording in the first place. I realize that I'm still just guessing when it comes to audio quality. Partially this is because I'm half deaf. Not a lot I can do about that. But part of it too is because I just have absolutely no experience with this sort of thing. I was amazed, however, with just how loud my house is, and how difficult it is to find a quiet place. Maybe if I shut myself in the closet ...

For the most part, I recommend this book for folks that are interested in podcasting, but have no idea about the audio side of things. You can sort of get started with almost no initial investment, but it's becoming quickly obvious that I'll get a far better outcome if I can get a little recording equipment, like a decent microphone.

Oh, yeah, and I realized that I really have no idea what a mixer even is, let alone how to choose one wisely.

After long, arduous hours of research:"(Which is to say, I came in a half-hour early on Friday)": the crack:"(Or, possibly, on crack)": research team at the Asbury College office of Information Services has assembled a fully funcioning Redundant Array of Independent Coffee Machines (RAICM).

[Complete photo gallery here]

Constructed of 6 coffee machines, and one emergency backup unit, the RAICM array is able to churn out more than 50 gallons of coffee an hour. The machines are interconnected via CAT5 (CAT stands for Columbia, Antigua, Tanzania), through a 10/100 MBPS switch, communicating by RCP (Remote Coffee Protocol). Each coffee machine was retrofited with one PCI (Percolation Control Interface) slot into which we could wedge an ethernet card for this purpose. The smallest coffee maker was too small to get the PCI card into it, so it was forced to communicate over PCP (Parallel Coffee Protocol).

On the cluster there is also a wireless access point, so that coffee may be obtained wirelessly. We recommend the use of SCP (Secure Coffee Protocol) for this type of access, to prevent injection attacks, which the FDA may well consider illegal.

Controlling the entire array is the CPU (Central Percolation Unit) which was constructed from a very elderly Toshiba Satellite laptop, sporting a 386 processor and a whopping 4MB of RAM. From this unit, the coffee pots can be monitored, coordinated, and scheduled. Alas, for our demo, we had a hard drive failure, and the CPU wouldn't boot. We suspect that it had consumed Juan cup of coffee too many. After all, it was, by then, pretty latte in the morning.

However, we can let you in on a few little secrets about the CPU and how it works. All of the controlling software is, of course, written in Java. The scheduling engine, rather than using cron, is done via a Java Script. And communication between the CPU and the various members of the array is done exclusively via Net Beans. The user interface that was designed relies heavily on the CSS standard (Cream, Sugar, Stir).

Several of the units, as you can see in the pictures, had updated processors installed for this experiment. And we even installed two hard drives on the array, so that it can store preferences for each coffee maker. These drives are, of course, IDE drives (If Decaf, Eject). We did experiment briefly with a CD drive (Caffienated/Decaffienated) but found that most of our engineers were so hopped up that they were spinning faster than the disks. Note also that several of our colleagues experimented with DASD (Decaf And Semi-Decaf) but we think that's just silly.

Several of the coffee makers are directly interconnected to provide full failover in the event that someone discovers one of the coffee makers to have run out before they get their third cup.

The conclusions of our experiments are as follows:

1) Geeks with too much time on their hands are likely to spend it doing very silly things.
2) Certain persons should not be entrusted with delicate equipment
3) When something stops working, you probably should go ahead and throw it away, even though, to quote one of our esteemed colleagues, "We might could fix it some day!"
4) No matter how fine the equipment is that you give people, some folks will still insist on drinking bad coffee.

Other gratuitous remarks

* It is important that you have good filters in place.
* Notice that the CPU has a cereal interface
* This picture illustrates the cafe press
* Always choose the right tools when performing case modifications
* This series of pictures illustrates the well-known "blinking 12" problem
* Always wear appropriate safety gear
* This picture shows two of the non-volatile off-site backup storage units.