Month: October 2003

The Inquirer has two interesting articles from the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose.  The first is a good roundup.  No major announcements from Intel or AMD, but it covers Transmeta’s Efficeon, IBM’s Power5, and the Fujitsu SPARC64 VI.

They also show a picture of an 8 way power5 MCM with a total of 144MB of cache.  That’s a monster!

Clearing the tabs at the end of the day:

• Newsfeeds.com is for those who download lots of Usenet stuff.  I get a Giganews account with my Comcast account, but sometimes you need to leech (er download) more than a gig each month.
• What kind of snake is that?
• Ian Bicking dislikes the unittest module.
• Gizmodo notes new GPS-enabled phones from Moto for Nextel.
• BBC: the knife find is kinda scary.
• What do you mean Klingon is not unicode?
• Keith Ray: how to go faster.
• Must subscribe to Steve Olechowski’s blog.
• Shawn Honnick grew up in Kensington.  Must subscribe to his feed too.
• According to Rob Flickenger (blue hair) iTunes uses _daap._tcp. to announce itself in Rendezvous-speak.
• The Feature: “American Teens: Stupid or Spoiled?”
• I did a good bit of moblogging today.
• iTunes takes up a good bit of resources.  I’m not complaining, and I don’t really notice it on my laptop.  iTunes works fine on my laptop, but it refuses to allow me to add MP3 files or play from the CD-ROM on a desktop machine that I have it installed on.  It’s pretty much unusable on that machine.
• Jim says Zinf works well and is lightweight.

osViews remembers Multics, which went to the big scratch disk in the sky last year.

I did most of my picture taking at foo camp with my mobile phone.  Most of the pictures are on my moblog.  I did take a few pictures here and there with my Sony DSC-U20.  You can find them at my foo camp gallery.

Some personal favorites: My campsite, gadgets galore, Russ’ hand in my picture, and Halo at 37,000 feet.

I had some extra time to kill before class, so I decided to drop by a Borders on the way. After firing up my aggregator, I found some interesting links:

• CNet covers the offspring of the Opteron.
• CNet also covers the addition of fee-based customer support to the latest rev of Mozilla. There’s nothing wrong with that IMHO.
• Greg Klebus ponders the viability of using a Wiki for technical documentation on a software project.
• Jason Alexander explores the concept of “Mono Aware.”
• BSDatwork notes that OpenBSD 3.4 has begun to ship.
• CNet: Some T-Mobile Sidekicks have faulty hinges.
• Jason Kottke looks at the Segway as a personality tester.
• Slashdot wonders if Bluetooth is dead. I think not. It cites an EETimes article announcing its death. Whutevah!

I apologize in advance if this entry is malformed (from an HTML perspective). I’m putting it together by hand and don’t have a whizzy HTMLArea to double check it.

Pardon the meta-navel-gazing, but I don’t recall hitting the Popdex Top 100 before.

I’m getting ready to hop on the plane. I’m sitting at the gate here at
SFO. There happens to be a closed starbucks about 50 feet behind me.
Luckily they don’t seem to turn off their t-mobile hotspot when they shut
down. This is a good thing, as I have a 2 megabit connection here at the
gate.

Sounds like they’re calling my flight.

It’s going to be weird going from a place like SF which is just awash
with Wi-Fi to the DC area where coverage is spotty at best.

–Matt (SFO, gate 89)

I’m on my laptop. Using Wi-Fi. At McDonald’s. I’m across the street
from Fry’s in Palo Alto. Sometimes technology just RULES!

Sorry, I had to get that out of my system. I’m down in Palo Alto after
doing chowder, Fleet Week featuring the Blue Angels and seeing San
Fransisco with Russ.
It’s been a long but wonderful weekend. I’ve got to head back up to SFO
to hop on the redeye back to the east coast. I’m not looking forward to
that part.

I picked up Halo for $39.99 today at Fry’s. I almost picked up a used
beat Zaurus 5500, but they wanted freaking list price for a beat up one
with all kinds of stuff missing. Oh well.

The best part is that I didn’t pay for it. I asked if I could purchase
wireless access at the counter or if I had to do it online with Wayport.
The person behind the counter gave me a coupon for free access. I don’t
remember which number it is, but I bought the two cheesburger meal. I
think I’ll get a shake to go.

I’m going to finish my fries and head out, but hopefully I’ll be able
to hop online at the airport. I don’t leave until after 11:30pm PDT and I
don’t get back to DC until after 8:30am EDT. After hearing about Russ’
flight, it does not seem as painful.

–Matt Croydon (Palo ALto, California, in a McDonald’s. Rawk!)

Here is a snapshot of the Rendezvous discoverable sites and servers during the afternoon.

There are a lot of default Powerbook G4’s with Apache displaying the default page.

Of course there are many other rendezvous discoverable services that I do not have access to because I am running the wrong operating system (Windows).

Windows really needs tighter Rendezvous integration.  Things like finding local devices, printers, and music could be so much easier if Rendezvous was integrated into the OS.

I already poked Scoble about it via IRC.

I didn’t recognize Doc Searls passed out in the back of the room last night.  It was late.  My body was still on East Coast time.

Rich Brunner at AMD is giving a quick talk on AMD 64 bit architecture.  They’re going to demo the new SuSe running on AMD 64.

Of course, AMD’s x86-64 works in compatability mode for full 32 bit and also long mode, either in mixed 32/64 bit or pure 64 bit flavours.  They just extended the 32 bit space by adding another 32 bits to integer registers, as well as adding on to the SSE registers and GPR registers.

They’re going to demo a dual proc 64 bit system with 8 gigs of memory.  The default data size is still 32 bits while allowing you to address 64 bits of memory.  Code bloat for x86-64 is about 20% more than x86.  Not bad.    Default data size helps that.  The added just two new instructions.

The adoption curve will look like this:

• First OSes get ported over and are adopted.  Now SuSe works, WinXP soon, etc.
• Apps will be 32 bit for awhile, but will eventually be ported to 64 bit and will be purchased/upgraded when they require replacing.
• Many apps will remain 32 bit for quite some time, so 32 bit performance is important.

Hammer == K8 == core that’s in an AMD Opteron, AMD Athlon64 and AMD Athlon 64 FX.  Got it?

AMD64 == x86-64.  Athlon’s marketing department likes AMD64 better.  I like x86-64 myself.

Hypertransport is important for speed increases.  Memory controller is run at processor clock frequencies.  The latency to memory is reduced significantly.

HyperTransport rules.  It removes bottlenecks between processor and memory.  This is good.  Right now it’s clocked at 800MHz, but that will ramp up and increase throughput with it.  Hypertransport is point to point.  Legacy south bridge, PCI-X 1.0, and eventually a PCI-X 2.0 tunnel.  Supports a 2GB/s (8x) AGP interface.  PCI-Express.

Hypertransport scales quite well to mutliprocessor systems.  With HT, as you add processors, you add memory to hang off them.  Each processor has access to their own memory.  As far as they’re concerned, memory is globally addressable.  Each processor gets three HT links, so it can link to two other processors and an IO bridge, or whatever is neccesary.

Be afraid.  It’s easier for your phone to get owned than you think.  I’m listening to some Shmoo gurus on Bluetooth discovery.

Finding a device

• send out inquiry, who’s out there?
• devices report back in, “Hey, I’m here”
  • you can set your device to be undiscoverable
  • you need to find a specifi MAC address to send a connection request to
  • it’s good for security but a pain in the butt for usability

Bluetooth is spread out throught the spectrum.  To find a device, you have to hop around the spectrum sending out requests and waiting for responses.

Pairing

• first steps of bluetooth security.  It only happens once.
• Shared secret (PIN) on both sides
• PIN search space pretty small (4 digits), manufacturer defaults are usually pretty insecure (0000).
• If you can intercept pairing transaction, you’re golden.  You can then brute force crack a small set of keys, one of which will work.
• You can do authentication on a little bit or a lot of your communication.  It’s pretty flexible.
• Why is security always optional?

Defaults

• Manufacturer defaults are stupid and insecure

Profiles

• Good for interop
• For a specific device, talk like this.
• Anyone can create a bluetooth profile.  Differences between Hands free and headset profile kill interop.

Embedded Devices

• if you use too many resources on an embedded device, it’ll bork out and you’ll have to reboot (aka 3650)
• It’s great for tracking, and that could be good or bad, depending on how you look at it.
• Tracking executives.  All the VP’s head into a conference room at a weird time, who’s cheating on whom in the office, etc

Finding Undiscoverable Devices

• Redfang: Older but the pioneer of the idea.
• Fine Tooth Comb (bluesniff): brute force scan, low hanging fruit (discoverable) and the app itself is discoverable but not connectable, and snags you when you try to browse it.

A little online note taking.

What is social software?

• Livejournal
• Friendster
• Advogato
• Instant Messaging/IRC/email
• stuff that analyzes your personal social network
• Meetup
• Upcoming

I’ll be collecting links gathered during the various talks/sessions here:

• The Music of Sound
• HyperSonic Sound is amazing.  A babbling brook was projected and reflected throughout the room.
• Aura: annotate everything.
• Socialtext
• BitTorrent
• Dashboard

There is a good collection of people listening to a talk on Rendezvous.  It was nice to see a somewhat mid-level discussion of it, and it looks like we’re about to dive a little deeper.

Links:

• Zeroconf on the spack.org wiki is a good list of sites.
• Howl by Swampwolf gives you a Rendezvous browser in IE.  There are lots of default apache installs on Powerbooks and Linux laptops here.
• Zeroconf.org has some more details.
• Apple ships an open source Rendezvous implemetation that works on Darwin, OS 9, OS X, Windows, and others.
• zeroconf.sourceforge.net has zcip, which is another partial open source implementation of Rendezvous/Zeroconf that allows you to obtain an IP address.
• Rendezvous under OS X from Apple.com