The Journal of William M Butler

FreeTDS / MSSQL optimization

2012-11-05T20:31:00.000-08:00

As our php -> mssql (SQL Server 2008R2) application has grown, we started to see bottlenecks in the number of concurrent queries sent to the server. They seemed to be queuing up like crazy. At times I was seeing 300-400 concurrent connections from my Linux Server. My port number for accessing the database has been changed to 5200. Use 1433 in place of that if you use the standard port.

# netstat -n | grep 5200 | wc -l

# 323

I tried a few things after some light reading. One in particular was to substitute persistent connections. My thought here was that if my application could reuse open connections, I'd gain some speed. After some reading, I decided against this.

I finally decided to take the problem seriously and happened upon what seemed to be a rather obvious and silly solution. Substitute the IP address of my server in the freetds.conf file for the dns name. I would have expected that my Linux box would cache the name for future lookups. I'm honestly not sure why it doesn't unless it's just some incompatibility with freetds.

I made the switch and the difference is staggering. I'd suggest that you try it. Please leave your comments. Honestly, I'm only 30 minutes into the solution, but it appears to have done the trick. I'd also love to see any links to potential solutions that anyone may have. Here is what my freeTDS.conf file looks like:

[prod]
host = [ip address here]
port = 5200
tds version = 8.0

[dev]
host = [ip address here]
port = 5200
tds version = 8.0

48 Hour Launch

2012-11-04T17:50:00.000-08:00

I had a great experience attending the collaborative effort between The Entrepreneur Center and Vanderbilt University this weekend.

The weekend started at 5pm on Friday where a dozen undergraduate teams pitched their ideas for 4 minutes. Most teams ran out of time and were rather disorganized in their presentation of the facts. All were extremely light on the details surrounding their target customer and financials.

Michael Burcham and Nick Holland were also on hand to give advice and guidance on the 10 minute pitch that they would be giving 48 hours later.

At this point, it became less formal and mentors were available to discuss and refine ideas brought forward by these teams. I became keenly interested in a project by Max Gillett. He had a solid workgroup collaboration idea for technical teams and had already created a rough prototype. I was impressed with his recognition of the need and we quickly morphed the idea into an incredibly useful tool.

I left at around 9pm and rejoined the next morning where Kate O'Neil gave a solid talk on using available analytics tool designed to identify (on the cheap) if your product or service has a willing audience. She walked through the various collections of interest, from those vaguely interested in something similar to your product to those who are looking specifically but do not know your brand, to those who know your brand and bring more business and the value of catering to each crowd with effective search terms.

Max and I spent most of the day refining the pricing model, marketing model and laid the groundwork for the 3 year projection.

I left at 6pm and returned at 8am on Sunday morning where David Frederiksen, the CEO at PatientFocus (where I am acting CFO), took over the financials and produced P&L, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow. We also finished up the business model and Max had created an excellent series of slides that emulated a typical interaction between 2 users.

At 1pm the presentations began and the difference was staggering. Every speaker had a linear format that informed, educated and persuaded the audience. It was a strictly enforced time limit of 10 minutes each with no Q&A.

I learned that talent is hidden everywhere and this experience underscored that cloud services are beginning to unleash a floodgate of talent. Now that talented programmers can easy prototype and even scale their prototypes, ideas can be made reality in months rather than years. I'm more energized than ever about technology, innovation and the entrepreneurial spirit.

Viva Nashvegas!

mssql driver for osx and php

2012-04-15T09:18:00.000-07:00

This seemed hard and then became incredibly easy thanks to the fine folks at MacPorts.

Step 1 is to install MacPorts (see the link above).
Step 2 is to install the ms-sql driver from the command line

port install php5-mssql

Step 3 is to edit this file: /opt/local/etc/freetds/freetds.conf

[prod]
host = your.servername.com (ip or dns to your server)
port = 1433 (or whatever port your sql server users)
tds version = 8.0 (set this to 8.0 for 2008R2)

MacPorts installed the mssql driver in a directory deep in the php extensions area. I'm not sure where yours will get installed, but you may want to look in this general area. Make sure you get the exact path and then add this line to /private/etc/php.ini I just added this after dynamic extensions:

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

; Dynamic Extensions ;

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

extension=/opt/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626/mssql.so

Restart the OS X web server from the sharing control panel and create a file in the web root directory to test. You can create it here: Library/Webserver/Documents/index.php

<?php

phpinfo();
?>

Now open a page to your local machine: http://localhost/index.php

Scroll down and you should see mssql as a loaded module. It should be listed before the mysql module. If you do not see it listed, it's not properly installed. It's probably just an incorrectly referenced path. Keep chugging until you get it listed in phpinfo(). Then you can continue to the next step.

Here is a sample page you can use to test connectivity. You will need to change certain pieces of info to match your system. Be sure to substitute a real columnname and table for the values below.

<?php

$username = "yourusername";
$password = "yourpassword";
$sdb = "Your Database name";
$server = "prod"; // This is the name in brackets from the freetdsconf file
// Authenticate to Server
$session = mssql_connect($server,$username,$password)
or die("Unable to connect to server: $server");
// Choose Database
$db = mssql_select_db($sdb,$session)
or die("Unable to open DB: $sdb");
echo $sql = "select columnname from table";
$result = mssql_query($sql);
while($row = mssql_fetch_array($result))
{
echo $row['columnname'] . "
";
}
?>

I hope this has been helpful. lLet me know if I can improve upon these instructions

NFSv4 nobody nobody permisions

2012-01-28T14:59:00.000-08:00

Wow, what a bitch. Finally figured it out though. My installation was on an Amazon stock Linux Box. I used Yum to install nfs and rpcbind. Easy as can be. The real problem came in after I had the mount in place. between the 2 servers. I could set privileges on the server, but regardless of what I set, the client side privs were nobody nobody. There are 2 key pieces of info that took me forever to piece together.

In /etc/exports make sure you use (no_root_squash)

/p client.domain.com(rw,sync,no_root_squash)

On all machines that plan to participate in mounting your NFS server (including the NFS server), be sure that their domain names match up. Mine match up in DNS, but this wasn't good enough for NFS. Specifically, add the hostname and FQDN to /etc/hosts as follows:

127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.localdomain
42.3.4.50 nfs nfs.domain.com

Basically, NFS v4 passes username info across with a user and domain and if they don't match, you are out of luck. There was a lot of talk about rpc.idmapd handling this. I noticed something odd about that service. First of all, it starts up when you launch nfs (service nfs start), but when you shut down nfs, it doesn't go away. It keeps running. So I killed it manually and then it came back up again after I started the nfs service back up. Not really sure why, but I thought it might be helpful to someone.

Who really missed earnings? Apple (AAPL) or the analysts?

2011-10-18T22:51:00.000-07:00

DISCLOSURE (I am LONG AAPL)
I've been reading a lot today and it's amazing to see how analysts pumped up Apple projections over the month leading up to the Oct 18, 2011 earnings announcement. Many blatantly ignored Apple's hint that sales slow prior to a new product announcement. Apple's guidance, granted they are always low, was EPS $5.50. In July, analysts were tracking this around $5.85. Through August and September, the targets kept rising. For those who got it right ($7.00 - $7.10 EPS), kudos! The amazing part of this is that we all have watch the frenzy because of those who got it wrong.
What I am seeing develop right now it pretty amazing though. Analysts are now looking at their numbers and starting to make sense of their reasoning for the euphoria. Since I'd imagine, many read the tea leaves through overseas production clues, etc, I have a theory as to what happened.

Analysts expected a different form factor iPhone but since the 4S uses a lot of the same components cosmetically (not necessarily internally), they were mistaken for iPhone 4 parts rather than a build-up of inventory for iPhone 4S parts. Logically, analysts would assume that they would be sold in the JUL-SEP quarter instead of the OCT-DEC quarter.

Hindsight being 20/20, it's pretty clear to me that we are simply deferring revenue from last quarter for revenues in the next quarter. It will be interesting to see what more analysts say to their readers over the next few days. Personally, it's all a big sigh of relief. There are fewer unknowns now and Apple has guided to $9.30. Remember, Apple beat their guidance of $5,50 by posting $7.05. They guided to $5.50 for a reason, because they had a legitimate concern about the new launch and it's impact on sales for last quarter. Analysts threw out guidance on average of 34% higher than Apple's own guidance. Maybe we should be asking them why they missed earnings instead of the other way around.
Already, we are seeing some interesting signs of analysts who seem to understand what is going on here and are even upgrading their targets for Apple. The fact is, Apple is just beginning to touch on their global market and when push comes to shove, you can't really argue with their numbers. The only thing (someone) can really argue about it the P/E. It's a high growth tech stock. Anyone can see that it's absurdly low, but seems there's not much we can do about that now is there?

2010 Q4 $6.43
2011 Q1 $6.40
2011 Q2 $7.79
2011 Q3 $7.05
Total: $27.67
P/E 15x: $415.05
Cash: 81.6 Million = $104 per share
Stock Value: $519.05

In closing, I'll post links to the analysts who I found, as of the evening of 10/18/2011, actually increased their guidance based upon the numbers posted by Apple.

BTIG $500 -> $550
Eric Savitz also posts an excellent article with a voice of reason noting that Apple providing higher future guidance than the analysts $9.30 vs $9.13 is just about as rare as Apple coming in under current guidance. This serves as additional evidence to the lopsided nature of iPhone sales.
Darcy Travelos doesn't offer any specific target but does make a great case, that this isn't an earnings miss, it's an exuberant analyst miss.
Lastly, let's put this into perspective: Apple earned 1.39 billion less than anticipated, basically earning 26 billion instead of the analysts exhuberant predictions of 27.39 billion for the quarter.

Update from Bloomberg about the Analyst misses:

‘Clueless’

“Shame on me and other investors who got lulled into complacency based on how much they’ve beaten estimates in the past,” said David Rolfe, chief investment officer at Apple investor at Wedgewood Partners Inc.
Apple had said in July that it expected sales and profit to fall because of changes to its product lineup.
“It’s not the company that missed, it’s the people who follow Apple that are clueless,” said Trip Chowdhry, an analyst at Global Equities Research in San Francisco.
Analysts may revisit projections that Apple will continue to grow at a record rate and exceed estimates, said Michael Obuchowski, chief investment officer at First Empire Asset Management.
“That the company can maintain the growth rate that some of the analysts envision is not very realistic,” he said. “There will be a reevaluation of the analysts’ expectations.”

The eCommerce ATM

2011-10-15T11:44:00.000-07:00

Here is the slide presentation from my Barcamp talk. Thanks for coming everyone.

eCommerce ATM

View more presentations from Bill Butler

AAPL Options strangeness

2011-10-05T19:58:00.000-07:00


AAPL Option Chain 10/5/11

Notice the Nov 10, 2011 440 call. This reflects AAPL at around 377, last sale at $3.80 about and hour before the announcement of the death of Steve Jobs. Yesterday, the option was at about $6.50 at 377. I was totally baffled looking at this. Stock was up 4.27 for the day and yet the options tanked. I was convinced that something crazy it Implied Volatility hd happened and it does appear that the VIX was at 46% Monday compared with 39% today, but it still didn't explain a $2.70 difference. If this trade comes out above water, I'll be amazed, but I'm going to wait it out. Something tells me that Steve planned to leave an amazingly successful company to the world and for his family. Icing on the cake would be a deal with China Mobile. They have over 600 million subscribers. It would make Sprint's 33 million subscriber deal look like child's play.

uStream Equipment

2011-08-28T18:54:00.001-07:00

I had a great conversation with one of the partners at CakesWeBake.com pertaining to the promotions side of Jay Qualls Cake Supply. They run a groupon of sorts for cake related items and we, of course, have Fondant Fabric. I asked about running a special on their site, and to my surprise, they had heard of our product and more importantly felt that we could both benefit by promoting a live cake event in which Jay would build a 4 tiered wedding cake.

So on Wednesday at 5pm central, we will be broadcasting on uStream on their site. I started looking for appropriate gear for the webcast last week and was floored by how little there is out there. You heard me how little there really is.

No medium end streaming gear

there are literally hundreds of camcorder and cameras on the market. It seems that every one of them has USB out and HDMI out. The problem is that the USB out is just for transferring photos and video, while the HDMI out is just designed to go to a TV. I did read about a device called BlackMagic that would allow the import of and HDMI signal, but it was overkill for what I wanted. You should have seen the look on the Best Buy reps face when I said the word firewire. I was an instant relic.

So the plus side, is that even if I wanted to drop $300-$500 on a low end HD camcorder or camera, it wouldn't have mattered because you can't stream to a computer for live broadcast. Even as I type that, I'm shaking my head at the stupidity of an entire industry.

Solution: get a high res webcam that connects to USB 2.0 ports. I tried to get the iSight at Best Buy, but they didn't carry it so I found Microsoft's LifeCam Studio 1080p HD. Pretty slick. For audio, I went to guitar center and looked at Lavalier Mics. The Audio Technica was nice at $200, but then I'd still need to get it into the computer. I decided to try the Blue Yeti with USB. It had 4 different audio patterns with one being directional so I figured this would work since our broadcast will be relatively stationary.

uStream just released uStream Producer. It's a nice little (un-intuitive) app. It's fairly easy to add video shots, but managing the audio was tricky. Actually, due to a quirk with the M$ camera, the video was quirky too. When I first plugged in the M$ camera, it did not appear. I ended up quitting uStream Producer and opening Photo Booth on my Mac. Tadaa! the M$ camera was recognized and I was able to quit and relaunch uStream Producer and then add the camera on the left. The audio is the real tricky part. Basically, uStream treats the pane at the bottom as your video sources. Then, after you select a video source you can use the pictures on the left to assign relevant audio to the video/picture tracks. For instance, you could have music playing over a graphic, or a microphone input assigned to a graphic. Then, whenever you switch to a new graphic, whatever audio you pre-assigned to it, is the one that plays.

The Yeti mic by Blue sounds great. Minimal hum. I'd advise pumping up the microphone volume in your sound control panel to give you broader range for the gain knob on the Yeti Mic. The mic has 4 settings for omni, one way, two way and something else I can't remember. It also has a very handy mute button and even a build in 1/8 jack to monitor audio directly.

I chose the LifeCam by M$ because it had a threaded tripod mount. Nobody else had that and it was important that I wasn't 'rigging' things in a way that would cause problems on the big day. I'm happy with the solution. Major con is that I cannot directly control the iris on the cam nor can I zoom. easily solved for this application, but I'd love to hear if anyone has a good solution for the camera end (with a current camera under $500 streaming to a Mac).

Products Discussed

Spotify, You Rock!

2011-07-21T13:55:00.000-07:00

Dear Spotify,

Thanks. I could stop there, but I'll elaborate. You let me have all my music and playlists come from the cloud and optionally allow me to cache the music locally for offline listening. I can dynamically discover new music by searching for it and then adding it to whatever playlist I want. Switch devices and my playlists are all in sync. And you do this for $10 per month!

I had one problem early on as I was trying to figure out how to transfer my iTunes playlists to you. Then I realized that all I had to do was drag and drop my itunes playlist onto you. You automatically recognized the majority of my music and made it available for me to listen to.

I only have a couple of gripes. They are fairly big gripes but not showstoppers because I'm confident you'll figure it out:

When I plug my iPhone into my Alpine car stereo, it accesses iTunes and not you. Apple may not want to play fair for you on this point. Sure I can just use the mini plug out, but control of my playlists from the headend unit would be awesome.
A better strategy for you might be to support airplay. Then I could purchase an airplay compatible car unit, boombox, or home stereo, Airport, etc and enjoy you wirelessly.

You even have a couple of remote control apps that let me control Spotify on my Mac mini which is wired into my A/V system at home.

In summary, add Airplay and let's start this revolution. I wonder how Apple's iTunes cloud strategy is going to affect you. My guess is that your product is their inspiration. I hope you can keep your head above water for the next 12 months.

Thanks again,

Bill

Shopping Carts and Account Packages

2011-07-16T11:47:00.000-07:00

It's 2011. Why is this still so hard? I'm starting a store that's going to sell real stuff. Fondant to be exact. It's exciting and a little daunting, but the rubber is about to hit the road and my clients need to be able to order product and have it delivered reliably. It's also critical that our back-end accounting get the data with complex imports and exports. Add to that a need to be able to ship and track orders reliably.

I'm a Mac guy and therefore wanted to be able to perform every function from a Mac. My first iteration involved finding an accounting program called AccountEdge, formerly MYOB for the Mac. Pluses included incredibly tight inventory management with build capability. Add to that an elegant but minimalistic web store called enStore, and I was captivated. "Could it really be this easy?" I thought to myself. The answer, after several days of rationalizing, was "No." For all the beauty of being able to push products and pull inventory between my accounting system and my online store, there were many many missing features including but not limited to: customer management, order fulfillment, shipping, inventory management (customer could order even when no product was in stock). Even AccountEdge stores the customer data on the export in bizarre fields (city, state zip are all stored in 1 field). I ask again, "What year is it?" While accountedge had extensive Applescripting capabilities, I was tearing my hair out with the thought of exporting my orders to shipping software and returning the tracking number to the order. There was also no real customer login system for managing repeat orders. It was quickly becoming a nightmare. On the plus side, enStore is elegant and light. Play with a demo store and you'll see what I mean. It's made by the guys at Sofa and as of Early July 2011, they were bought by FaceBook. Strike 3. Looks like the Acclivity people are going to take over the development of enStore.

I decided to approach the problem by finding the hosted store with the most widgets. Shopify stood out. So now I had to see if shopify could talk to any accounting systems. I had a hidden agenda that involved never using Quickbooks again in my life. Apparently quickify links shopify to Quickbooks but that was out for said reason. I found a really cool little accounting site called LessAccounting. Friendly, small, eager outfit. received incredible email and phone communications from them. Unfortunately, the biggest issues with this software were fundamental. For example, there was no equity GL. How do you account for owner's capital contributions....uh, you dont! There was literally nothing even approximating a way to create multiple CGS or sales categories. The integration to Shopify was tight but their "Less" was just too little for my needs.

Browsing through other Shopify partners, I found Xero. Where have you been all my life?? Really...What a great great great accounting package. It's the Quickbooks killer. API's out the freakin wazoo. Integration to shopify for order import via CarryTheOne. Live import from your bank account and Paypal with the smoothest reconciliation process I have ever, ever, ever used. Totally web based! Fast and streamlined. So with Shopify, CarryTheOne and Xero, I can sell stuff and get my orders into Xero. But now I have to fulfill them.

Enter OrderCup. It's a shopify plugin that links to all your Fedex, UPS, or USPS accounts, sees the shopify orders, prints labels, packing lists and then shoves the tracking number back in the order. It even supports all the fancy Zebra printers etc. Done!

So I can do this from any computer, anywhere in the world. Added options include Shipwire or Amazon Fulfillment services native to Shopify. once our volume increases, we can just bulk ship our stuff there and then they can pick and pack it for us for around $2 - $3 per order plus postage and shipping supplies.

Another route for the shipping is Paypal believe it or not. They have a feature with their Web Payment Pro package that will pull the orders as they are paid for through paypal's credit card service. You can suck the orders in and queue them for fulfillment. Looks like a good standby method in case we have ordercup issues. Paypals Merchant rates seem competitive with everyone and the funds end up immediately in your paypal account. I had a dedicated rep throughout the application process who nudged things along as they got stuck.

The system will be in production by around the first of August. I'm excited to see how it goes. It all feels very solid right now, but the real world may have something to contribute after we get rolling.

May 21: End of TImes...NOT

2011-05-16T06:25:00.000-07:00

I read an article today that genuinely disturbed me. This poor guy, Robert Fitzpatrick, has been convinced through the collaboration of Harold Camping and his own deductions, that the end of times will occur May 21st at midnight. He is so convinced, that he has liquidated his 140K retirement fund and has purchased ads with NYC Transit with all of those funds.

Sadly, on May 22, this guy is going to be broke. I was completely surprised by my own reaction to the financial angle on the article. Essentially, the NYC Transit Authority said that people are entitled to spend their money in any way they see fit. As a capitalist, I understand that logic, but something still rubs me the wrong way. Honestly, as an atheist, I expected my reaction to be, "Serves the dumbass right". A fool and his money are soon parted.

A few things bug me. Religion brainwashes in such deep ways to certain people. Some people have chemical compositions or life events that make them especially vulnerable to the magic often associated with religion. Some are exposed to it so late in life that they have no time or mentor to help them separate valid life lessons present in the Bible from the trite dogma known as the Old Testament.

Essentially, the world ends up with half trained Jedi's. These are people who think that they are servants of God, when in fact they are half-schooled judgemental servants of the Evangelist du jour. They thrive on binary categories of right and wrong, good and bad, black and white, life and death. The idea of gradients in everything is a completely foreign concept. They are essentially unable to look at an event from another person's perspective. I'm going here, because this perspective starts a pattern that eschews logic in favor of faith at all cost. It ruins lives by endorsing brainwashing.

Robert Fitzpatrick will wake up on May 22, 2011. He will have no money. NYC Transit will have his money and his ad campaign will be over. Whose fault is it? Some might blame NYC Transit. It was my first impulse. Don't take the crazy man's money. As I thought about it, they have to take his money. If they refused, religious groups would accuse them of prohibiting freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Robert Fitzpatrick is a victim of a crime in the same way that people are victims of credit card companies with small print in the contract. The bullet points look appealing, but once you read the fine print it gets a little messier. My guess is that Robert will start reading the fine print on Sunday morning at church. I wonder if Harold Camping has prepared a sermon for May 22 (just in case he's wrong)?

Google Notifier for Mac

2011-03-22T14:12:00.000-07:00

Just discovered this great little piece of software called Google Notifier for Mac. It's really cool. It lets me quickadd events from a menu on my Mac. It also lets me view my agenda. Perfect for me since all I ever want is an agenda view. It installed quickly and works as advertised. Oh, and it was free.

iOS 4.3

2011-03-20T11:14:00.000-07:00

Apple,

Thanks for FINALLY allowing the iPhone to act as a WIFI hotspot. This is easily the most sought after feature for me. It breaths new life into my WIFI only iPad. I've jumped through all sorts of hoops including jailbreaking in an effort to have this capability over the years. So glad I don't have to do that anymore.

Cisco 504g tftp Firmware Upgrade Procedure

2011-02-07T09:47:00.000-08:00

Took me forever to find this. It assumes that you have an operational tftp server with the firmware in place.

https://supportforums.cisco.com/docs/DOC-9941

Wi-Lan Settlement details

2011-01-31T17:29:00.000-08:00

Good news for Wi-Lan. Looks like all infringers have settled (including a few small companies like Apple, HP, the list goes on). It'll be a few days until financial details are revealed with forward guidance, so the stock may wait, but tomorrow should be interesting to see if people begin to jockey for position.

http://tmx.quotemedia.com/article.php?newsid=38021362&qm_symbol=WIN

WIFI Patent Juggernaut

2011-01-26T07:11:00.000-08:00

What if I told you that every home wireless router past and present has technology that infringes on a key patent? Add to that ADSL modems, WiMAX and even LTE gear. It's amazing, but true. One company holds a gigantic set of keys to these patent portfolios and they've been quietly setting up to sue the b-jeezuz out of names including Broadcom, Atheros, D-Link, Intel and Apple.

It gets better. The case has been jockeying for well over 18 months and is set for jury selection on Feb 2, 2011. But it gets better. Broadcom, Intel, Atheros and other big players have reached a settlement agreement prior to trial. In other words, the evidence was such that Intel did not see the possibility for a win in court and decided to take a less egregious settlement.

If you understand what WIFI has done for home networking not to mention hundreds of other applications, you understand that Wi-Lan, the Canadian company who owns these patents has the potential to be the equivalent of Qualcomm but in the OFDM space.

I write this now because it's an opportunity to get into Wi-Lan at a reasonable price. The stock had gone from .50 to $6.50 over the past 3 years and it's likely within the next 2 weeks we will see prices of $8-$10. Settlement announcements are coming out every day. Wi-Lan just completed a bought deal for $6.60 per share to raise another $75 million. This will settle on Feb 3. That is likely the only thing suppressing the price right now.

An Apple settlement announcement would probably have a huge impact on this stock even prior to the bought deal settlement. I like companies that are responsible for products that I like. I love WIFI and I think that it's time that the inventor of OFDM get what's due.

Wi-Lan
PK: WILIF
TSX: WIN

Oil Spill in the Gulf

2010-05-03T21:33:00.000-07:00

This disaster underscores the real cost of fossil fuels. In addition to the so called "debate" centered around global warming, it's now clear that there is a more direct impact when shit goes wrong. I find the spill particularly interesting because for the first time ever, the beachfront property owners (typically moderately wealthy right leaning individuals) and the environmentalists, share a common sentiment, anger. The shared emotion is for completely opposite reasons, but do we really care? Wealthy property owners care because it's going to hurt their rental income and their vacation time. Environmentalists hate it for well, the environmental impact.

I write this to underscore the notion that leaning towards Green can actually cost less over the long haul regardless of your political persuasion. The long term side effects and the catastrophic unknowns of business as usual are beginning to amplify with population density and the need for ever increasing quantities of fossil fuel.

Much in the same way the public water utilities fail during a toilet flush during Super Bowl commercials, it's difficult, if not impossible, to engineer for the unthinkable mechanical failure. We as a society must start thinking in terms of the worst possible outcome and then rethink before doing. Capitalism will surely take care of BP, Halliburton and Transocean regarding this particular event at least in the short term.

Stirling Engines

2010-02-15T18:27:00.000-08:00

I find myself returning night after night, to the topic of Stirling Engines. They are closed and elegant and IMO technology seems to be reaching a point where they can generate enough power to not be looked upon as a complete joke. Infinia seems to have a pretty nice lock on the 3kW version and a very elegant solar array and tracker. I've got what I think is a pretty good idea, but I can't seem to find anyone who is willing to part with the engine. All companies involved like to either bundle the engine with their solution or sign a lengthy partnership agreement. Whatever happened to, "I give you money and you give me your product"? It's funny how new technologies are all bundled. I suppose that when the Model T arrived, Ford made every single part.

As I buzz through in my head about the potential for the Stirling Engine, I can't help but forsee hundreds of niche markets being created. Stirling Engines need heat (more specifically heat differential) in order to operate. They love 900 deg C. This is pretty easy to get to with fire of most sorts. It's also not that hard to get with solar. My point here is that this opens up a market for a device that can essentially be a heat switching station smoothly transitioning between solar generated heat and natural gas or methane or wodd chips. It really should not care. It would be relatively sophisticated and could transfer the heat produced to the Stirling engine though air, oil, or some medium.

The stirling engine drives an alternator to make electricity, but there would clearly be times when the alternator could be driven by something other than heat, say wind at night saving a fossil fuel burn since solar power is a no-go. The vision here is for an alternator that can be driven by the cheapest fuel source (capable of generating the needed current) at any given moment.

It's time like this when I wish I knew how to lathe and use a welder.

POSTAL

2010-02-10T10:50:00.001-08:00

Sweet...

G.729 Codec (Free development version)

2010-01-11T16:55:00.001-08:00

I've been toying with the idea of implementing the G.729 codec on asterisk. I tried to purchase it from 2 different sources and it was a true pain in the butt. Fortunately I found a development version, with a variety of Linux Binaries here. Installed into /var/lib/asterisk/modules and then added the appropriate include in /etc/asterisk/modules.conf and then set the priority for each phone and it worked like a champ! I have polycom phones which have that codec built-in. We have limited bandwidth on the island, so this should hopefully improve the situation for VOIP.

Nashville.Net Hotel Reservations

2009-12-07T07:11:00.000-08:00

Just updated the Nashville.Net hotel listings site. IHS has built in a number of features to improve the reservation system. Hopefully this will improve the number of reservations we receive through the site.

Automatic Projector Calibration with Embedded Light Sensors

2009-05-19T21:10:00.001-07:00

Very slick way to project video onto arbitrary surfaces.

Oracle running under Railo

2009-05-12T17:58:00.000-07:00

I have successfully installed Railo with the free version of Oracle XE. I have also gotten both the Oracle Thin Client and OCI drivers working. I'll let you know what I did to get each working, although, I think that the thin client is sufficient for most needs.

If you installed Oracle XE, the ojdbc5.jar driver is at:
/usr/lib/oracle/xe/product/11.1.0/client_1/ojdbc5.jar

Just copy that file to:
/opt/railo/lib/ojdbc5.jar

Your driver should work now (from the server administrator).

If you prefer to use the OCI driver, I had to get the 11g client from the Oracle website. Installing it was a bear because it required X11 and I am using Amazon EC2. Then you have to copy 3 different files into /opt/railo/libexec/

/usr/lib/oracle/11.1/client/lib/libclntsh.so.11.1
/usr/lib/oracle/11.1/client/lib/libnnz11.so
/usr/lib/oracle/11.1/client/lib/libocijdbc11.so

Hope this helps someone...

Rewarding Failure?

2009-04-17T14:36:00.000-07:00

So Obama fires a CEO who is a failure. Sounds like Melva Fried is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Another protester, 38-year-old Melva Fried, said the forced ouster of General Motors Corp. CEO Rick Wagoner was the last straw for her -- a symbol the federal government was moving toward socialism.

"When a president can fire the head of a company, that's too much," she said, holding a sign that read "Stop Rewarding Failure."

This is getting awfully real

2009-03-16T09:20:00.000-07:00