Todd's TechnoGeek Journal

I'm staying at the Pacific Inn again this week. For those in the know, the Pacific Hotels chain provides an excellent value when traveling to the San Francisco Bay area. They're relatively inexpensive, and they feed you twice a day as part of the standard package--a major plus when traveling on per diem. Overall, I've been very happy with the various Pacific Inns I've stayed at over the years.

Having said that, I've been very unhappy with their "free broadband Internet access." Their Mountain View location implements this with wireless-to-Ethernet bridges. They're some sort of white-box unit with a slot for a wireless PCMCIA card at one end, and a standard CAT-5 Ethernet cable sticking out of the other.

The obvious goal here is to provide guests with wireless access without having to provide them with SSID or WEP information. I don't really have a problem with that; the difficulty comes from being unable to troubleshoot the units directly when there are connectivity problems. And boy, are there connectivity problems!

Firstly, this being Silicon Valley, there is a tremendous amount of radio interference. Signal strength between my room and the base unit 60-90 feet away often drops below the critical threshold. Secondly, being Silicon Valley, the 300+ rooms in this hotel are doubtless filled with people actively using the system, which makes it completely unusable between 6 a.m. and 11 p.m. daily. And thirdly, the DHCP server appears to suffer from chronic resource exhaustion, often requiring multiple reboots throughout the day.

There are several notable points here for the frequent traveler:

• Always bring your modem dongle; sometimes 26.4 kbps dialup is faster than "broadband."
• Install AirSnort, Kismet, or something similar so you can troubleshoot your wireless connection. Hotels almost never know how to support their own equipment.
• Run sshd with a ClientAliveInterval, since KeepAlive is insufficient to keep the client from getting all bollixed up when network latency and packet loss get excessive.

And for IT managers and business owners:

• DHCP lease length and address pool should be appropriate for the network you're running. A 300+ room hotel should not be running on a single Class C network.
• Don't offer services which don't work or which you are unable to support. From a customer service point of view, doing something badly is often worse than not doing it at all.

So go ahead, stay at the Pacific Inn; it's a great value. But you'll be leaving the Infobahn behind you--probably at the last Holiday Inn Express you booked into.

The problem with being a traveling consultant is that one has to travel. Even when you know that it comes with the territory, the effort and stress involved in travel takes its toll eventually.

Yesterday, I successfully wrapped up another project under time and under budget. Yay! But then, of course, it was time to hop into the car and make the four-hour drive back to Reno.

As luck would have it, it was raining heavily in California on my way back. So, what's a little rain? Well, as you climb into the Sierra Nevada mountains towards Donner Pass, the rain quickly turns to snow. At 8,000 feet, one is constantly reminded that there was a reason the Donner party turned to cannibalism--and it wasn't the lack of a nearby McDonald's Drive-Thru.

As I went through the pass, the salt trucks and plows were already making their rounds. If I'd gotten on the road an hour later, I probably wouldn't have made it over the pass before chain controls were enforced--and who carries chains in late March? So, despite the weather, I consider myself fairly fortunate on the trip.

Nevertheless, I was tired and sore from the trip by the time I got home. Four hours in a car seat can have that effect, of course. While it's nothing compared to the agony of a full day in a cramped airplane seat, I still wouldn't recommend it for fun.

So, what does this relatively uninteresting travelogue have to do with consulting, or technology in general? I suppose it's really a glimpse at the lifestyle. There's very little work in a town like Reno for highly-skilled technologists. So, to live here, one has to travel to where the jobs are.

With airline insecurity programs and Passenger Annoyance Programs (tm) in full swing, I often choose to drive as the lesser evil when I can. But whether I'm driving or flying, I have to account for the hours of my life lost to travel, and bear with the discomfort, exhaustion, and bad food that are an inevitable part of the package.

All in all, I enjoy working in other towns and cities around the country. I just wish I could do it without actually traveling back and forth.

I was at boarding school when I was first introduced to an archetypal anti-hero, Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. A school counselor was reading the series, and brought me copies to read when I was sick. I remember that I tried--and failed--to get through the first book several times. It was a difficult book to get into for many reasons: the unsympathetic character of Covenant, the frequent use of uncommon words and complex phrasing in Donaldson's prose, and the plot itself.

At one point, I put the book down, and didn't pick it up again for six months. Instead, I turned to the more-accessible Apprentice Adept series by Piers Anthony. Eventually, though, I picked up Lord Foul's Bane again, and started over from the beginning. This time, I made it all the way through the book, and by the end, was eager for the subsequent novels.

Whatever difficulties I had in finishing the first book never applied to any of the others in the series. I devoured them, one after the other. I spent many nights reading into the small hours of the morning, sharing Covenant's journey through the Land.

The series, especially the Second Chronicles, had a profound impact on me at that time in my life. The books forced me to confront a range of philosophical issues which few 12 year-olds grapple with. On an emotional level, the books imbued me with a belief in individual empowerment and a sense of commitment and determination in a way that few other novels ever have. At the same time, the books provided me with a context against which I could measure my sense of personal ethics, and which allowed me to examine my own beliefs and morality more closely. To this day, I still find new inner truths whenever I re-read White Gold Wielder.

And so, it was with great excitement that I learned that a third and final series in the Covenant saga is currently in production. According to one source, the first book, entitled The Runes of the Earth, will probably be published sometime in 2005.

If true, this is truly one book I would willingly stand in line for to ensure I got a copy hot off the press. There are many authors whom I enjoy, and from whom I eagerly anticipate new releases. However, Donaldson's work is in a class by itself. I am hopeful that, like the previous books, the new one will be filled with big ideas and large issues; and as they play out in the hearts and minds of the principle characters, I can share that journey of self-examination with them.

While it's probably not a big security hole, I dislike the fact that Blosxom flavour files and raw directories can be read by Apache in the default configuration. Since the raw directories should never actually be seen by Apache (just by the CGI script), it's possible to lock this down with some simple Apache directives:

    <Directory "/path/to/blosxom">
        <Files ~ "\.(gif|jpe?g|png)$">  
            Order allow,deny
            Allow from all
        </Files>
        Order allow,deny
    </Directory>

What we're doing here is preventing Apache from displaying anything in the Blosxom data directory except images. Note that it might still be possible for an evil-doer to gather some information about your directory structure from the IMG tags in your markup, but it makes for an excellent start.

I looked into quite a few blogging tools before settling on Blosxom. Most were too heavy-duty for what I wanted to do. I've been using my own PHP and bash tools to do a bit of blog-alike work for my site's news section, but I wanted something a bit more integrated, but still simple and light.

A lot of the blogging tools out there are really content management systems in disguise. The rest are purely for coders. The simplest ones I could find to fit my requirements were Blosxom and PyBlosxom. I actually tried PyBlosxom first, since I personally think Python is a better language. After struggling with it until 5 a.m. yesterday, I decided to forget it. PyBlosxom just caused me too much grief. Instead, I tried Blosxom itself.

Blosxom wasn't a whole lot better. It's a little more mature, and Perl tends to attract bigger development communities for some reason. But it is still poorly documented, and the instructions don't really work "out of the box."

After spending two or three hours trying to get themes to work, I decided to give up. If something doesn't work properly, there's usually an easier way. Luckily, the Blosxom code itself is pretty readable for Perl. I managed to hack in a few of my own variables, and doctor up some of the default "flavour" files to create a very basic, but reasonably presentable, look for the site.

I plan to look deeper into themes and plugins, and see if I can't determine why they aren't working. But in the meantime, things seems to be functional, so I'll try not to screw anything up.

This is my new web log. There are a zillion web logs out there, only a small handful of which are interesting as anything other than a vanity piece. This web log hopes to be one of those interesting ones.

It has been said there is nothing new under the sun. This is doubtless true, especially in blogspace. My web log is probably not going to break new ground, or attract hordes of rabid fans. Instead, it is designed to be a chronicle of my explorations of interesting technology, and other subjects which are often of interest to technologists.

If that's you, great! I hope you find something useful here. But if you're not a technologist or a pure-bred geek, feel free to use this web log as a sleeping aid. No extra charge! :)