Preston Hunt

Good article from Clayton Christensen on IEEE Spectrum a ...

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:58:28 PST

Good article from Clayton Christensen on IEEE Spectrum about the application of the Toyota Production System to the semiconductor industry: The New Economics of Semiconductor Manufacturing. >

The other day, while waiting for my train home, I spent ...

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:11:46 PST

The other day, while waiting for my train home, I spent the idle minutes reading the fare information sign at the station. Portland's public transportation uses a three-zone system with different ticket prices depending on how far you travel.

Due to reasons unknown to me (but undoubtedly involving politics and gerrymandering), when the light rail was extended to Hillsboro several years ago, everything west of the zoo was put into zone 3. There are no zone 2 stops between the last stop on the west side (Sunset transit center) and the zoo stop halfway through the west-side tunnel (which is in zone 1).

What this means is that anybody buying a ticket out in Hillsboro is going to need either a one-zone ticket or a three-zone ticket. There are no possible destinations from Hillsboro that would require a two-zone ticket.

However, the ticket machines at these stops only sell two- and three-zone tickets! I hope there's some other explanation, but it certainly seems like Tri-met is ripping people off. The amount is small (the one-zone ticket is only five cents cheaper), but the principle of over-charging is the same nonetheless.

I need to purchase a three-zone ticket anyway so this doesn't affect me directly. But I am curious as to why such a blatant error/oversight persists. >

A very interesting post on the mathematics behind fuel e ...

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:30:05 PST

A very interesting post on the mathematics behind fuel efficiency calculations: Miles per Gallon vs. Gallons per Mile >

Where the Hell is Matt: Guy dances all around the world ...

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:13:49 PST

Where the Hell is Matt: Guy dances all around the world. Brought a big smile to my face. (Thanks Steve for the forward!) >

Back when we designed the security for Wireless USB, one ...

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 23:28:13 PST

Back when we designed the security for Wireless USB, one of the attacks we protected against was the man-in-the-middle attack. From a product marketing perspective, this was one of the hardest features to get agreement on because it requires the end user to perform a manual verification step.

Many people think that manual verification hurts usability unnecessarily since, in their eyes, MITM attacks are very difficult to do. Their reasoning is as follows: It's extremely unlikely that an attacker would be present at the exact moment in space and time when the end user performs the security pairing. Therefore we really don't need MITM protection.

However, the more paranoid members of our team correctly pointed out that it would be trivial for an attacker to simply jam the transmission of one of the devices. The connection would then stop working. When faced with this situation, most users "reboot" the devices and perform the pairing ritual again.

We ended up including fairly robust protection against MITM attacks. Which is a good thing, since a recent article discusses how easy it is to force a Bluetooth device to dump its pairing data and initiate the rekeying process. This attacks the protocol directly and is even easier to accomplish than the denial-of-service-type jamming attack that we were concerned with. >

Story: Seattle to Portland 2008

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 00:00:00 PST

My one-day bicycle ride from Seattle to Portland.>

I finally found a decent ExposÃ© clone for Vista: Switch ...

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 08:32:28 PST

I finally found a decent ExposÃ© clone for Vista: Switcher. Yes, Mac people, no need to leave a comment about how this is built-in to Macs. I already know it's an awesome feature. That's why I want it in Vista. I'm not sure why Microsoft didn't build this feature in themselves, but Switcher seems to do the job. Of course, if anybody knows of something better, I'd love to hear about it. >

The Illusionist **** : Is there room in the world for tw ...

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 07:25:10 PST

The Illusionist **** : Is there room in the world for two prestidigitation movies that were released almost simultaneously? It appears so. While not as good as the Prestige, this movie is beautifully filmed, has great acting from Edward Norton, and is worthy in its own right. >

Three more reasons I prefer PostgreSQL over MySQL: First ...

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 07:53:28 PST

Three more reasons I prefer PostgreSQL over MySQL:

First: MySQL only supports constants in default clauses. In other words, this is forbidden:

 create table times ( time1 datetime default now(), time2 datetime default now() );

Things are even more complicated when you look into why MySQL has the very confusing situation of a datetime type and a timestamp type. And, in my opinion, the MySQL documentation on the subject is poorly formatted, at least in comparison to PostgreSQL's documentation.

Second: MySQL date/time fields don't support microsecond resolution! Aye-yah. Yet another feature that needs to be handled in application code when it really belongs in the database.

Third: The MySQL time zone support seems very clunky to the point where it's easier just to store everything as GMT and handle conversions at the application layer.

PostgreSQL handles all of these issues no problem. >

Kurt turned me on to Bikely, a sweet bike route mapping ...

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 23:06:25 PST

Kurt turned me on to Bikely, a sweet bike route mapping site. It has a great user interface, provides an elegant Google Maps mashup, offers elevation profiles, and can print out turn-by-turn directions (cue sheets). Here's an example, the Portland Century route.

Up until now, the venerable gmaps-pedometer had been my favorite way of conveying this information, but I'm switching to Bikely! It has a few areas for improvement (such as its search) but development seems active so I'm sure they'll get resolved. >

Three Cups of Tea ***** Very important book that everybo ...

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 09:31:45 PST

Three Cups of Tea ***** Very important book that everybody needs to read. Guy gets lost after climbing K2. Pakistani village nurses him to health. He pledges to build them a school, starting life-long mission to build schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan. By the end of the book, I was convinced that this is the only long-term solution to stopping terrorism. >

One of my favorite new sites is SlimTimer. It's the bes ...

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 11:35:42 PST

One of my favorite new sites is SlimTimer. It's the best time tracker for tasks that I've found, either as a online Web 2.0-ish service or an offline installable application. SlimTimer offers a basic mode for free and premium services for a small fee.

I am hooked after using it for a couple of months. When I free up some project time, I am going to contact the author and see if he is interested in some collaboration opportunities. One thing I could help out with is a Windows Vista sidebar companion gadget. >

After reading a glowing review from Wired, I finally got ...

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 22:05:16 PST

After reading a glowing review from Wired, I finally got around to signing up for an Amazon Web Services account and playing around with Amazon EC2. It's cool!

At first, I didn't understand what exactly EC2 was. The Amazon promotional material could be a little more clear in this area. It's a virtual machine (what I refer to as a slice, Amazon calls it an instance) that is billed out by the hour (real world time, not CPU-used time). It has an impressive set of client command-line tools that let you control your slices from any Windows or Linux box on the Internet. Everything uses public key cryptography.

To get started, Amazon has an online forum that offers free, pre-configured instances. They have all of the Linux flavors, Solaris, OpenBSD, etc. I found a slimmed down version of Gentoo enabled with PHP and Apache2 and was up and running in under 5 minutes.

Another cool concept that Amazon has is the ability to purchase IP addresses and them route them to any machine on the EC2 network. Amazon calls this concept "elastic IP addresses". All of your instances run with private IP addresses on the Amazon network. For them to be accessible to the outside world, you use the client tools to connect your public IP address with the private one. One of the obvious advantages of doing this is that it makes it extremely easy to re-route your traffic to a different instance any time you want with zero DNS downtime.

Getting back to instances, they are ephemeral in the sense that when you shut them down, they are gone forever. I figured this out the hard way when I configured an instance to serve up a custom web page, shut it down, and then started it back up again and discovered that my changes were gone. If you want to preserve any changes you made to the pre-configured image, you need to store them on Amazon S3. Luckily, Amazon provides tools to make this very easy to do.

In addition to getting up and running very quickly with minimal capital, AWS provides essentially unlimited scaling. Read this blog post about Animoto's launch of their Facebook app for a case study. SmugMug is another good case study.

One interesting facet of Amazon's web services offerings is the ecosystem that's starting to build up around them. Look at RightScale as one example of a company offering value-added services to AWS.

All in all, a very impressive offering: compute, storage, queue, database, and (with third-party help) scaling. Everything you need to launch whatever you want to.

But you do pay for everything: Instance time, data transferred in/out of AWS, storage. I estimate the minimum monthly cost of a basic instance at around $100. Still dirt cheap compared to buying your own equipment for colo, but not as cheap as Slicehost or some of the other VPS vendors (around $20 including quite a bit of bandwidth and a fair amount of storage).

Interested in starting your own EC2 instance? These may help: link1, link2

Next up on my to-investigate list: Google App Engine. >

I finally made the upgrade to Firefox 3. The speed enha ...

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 22:44:33 PST

I finally made the upgrade to Firefox 3. The speed enhancements are incredible - it screams! Other notable improvements include an incredibly improved address bar (it's very Apple-Spotlight-inspired), a very nice new download manager, and some significant usability enhancements to the add-on manager. MozillaLinks has a thorough review of the changes.

Unfortunately, like all Firefox upgrades, there are quite a few of my favorite add-ons that are no longer compatible. Hopefully they will be updated soon, because now that I've used FF3 for a few days, there's no going back now! >

Charity Navigator just released their report on the fund ...

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 19:58:54 PST

Charity Navigator just released their report on the fundraising efficiency of the top 30 metropolitan areas. Portland was ranked 26th - doh! >

From CNN online video: Man biked 42-mile work commute ev ...

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:15:10 PST

From CNN online video: Man biked 42-mile work commute every day in May - each way! >

Anchorman ** : A little too zany for me.

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 23:10:14 PST

Anchorman ** : A little too zany for me. >

I picked up a Navigon 2100 GPS for $120 off of bensbarga ...

Thu, 29 May 2008 08:44:57 PST

I picked up a Navigon 2100 GPS for $120 off of bensbargains.net last month. This is the least expensive GPS that I know of that will read the street names to you. Other low-cost models just say "turn right", "turn left", etc. Some online reviews said that the Navigon has a slow user interface, but I didn't think it was bad at all.

Two unique Navigon features are lifetime free map updates and an awesome highway interchange mode that makes it easy to determine which lane you should be in. It also has an excellent three-dimensional "reality view" which is extremely intuitive.

This unit pretty much does everything that I would want a GPS to do. Some more points of interest would be nice, but at this price point, I really can't complain! Highly recommended if you are in the market for a GPS unit for your car.

Update: Oops, my bad. Turns out the Navigon doesn't have free map updates after all. It does have free software updates, but probably most of the other GPS manufacturers offer that also. >

You want to print to PDF and you don't want to mess with ...

Wed, 28 May 2008 14:54:17 PST

You want to print to PDF and you don't want to mess with ad-supported drivers with pop-ups and you don't want to pay for Acrobat from Adobe? (Or you're like me and you did pay for Acrobat, but the overly aggressive licensing server keeps deactivating your product?) BullZip PDF is the answer. >

The Mexican *** : Better than I expected!

Mon, 26 May 2008 15:47:51 PST

The Mexican *** : Better than I expected! >