AgPerson

Sun Microsystems just released their newest server systems, and they once again look totally kick-ass. In particlar, the Sun Blade 8000 Modular System sorta rocks my world. I’m just thinking — Harvard Law School has seven racks of servers. I’ll bet using this system you could easily fit it into one. One 19u Blade 8000, fully loaded, gives you something like 40 processors and 80GB of RAM with six redundant power supplies, gobs of expansion bays thanks to the really unique design, and tons of gigabit ethernet ports. Fill the rest of the rack with Sun’s storage servers and we’re talking terabytes, we’re talking as many virtualized servers as you could possibly need and storaged sliced however you want it with the ZFS file system and ultimate flexibility with power usage that is pretty darn reasonable. Why spend all this money buildling out a new data center and buying more cooling and bringing in new machines and racks when you can take your whole operation and boil it down to 42u?

Cut your UPS load and apply that $50k previously budgeted to HVAC and consolidate to one rack and throw out sixty machines? The economics are changing.

Placing an online transaction today, I was unexpectedly transferred to a shady-looking page titled “Verified by Visa” that asked for personal details in order to setup some sort of password that I could use to verify my identity when using my Visa card online.

First off, the page was ugly and badly designed, leading me to believe that it was itself fraudulent. Secondly, the linked information about why the system would be beneficial to me was in legalese and very confusing, I was unable to ascertain why I would want to participate in such a system, except that I was apparently being forced to. I tried a few ways to back out the transaction to complete it without the Verified By Visa screen, but was unsuccessful. I ended up just using my MasterCard to make the purchase.

Then a few hours later I received a call from Visa’s fraud department, concerned about fraudulent activity on my account. I had to verify several bits of personal info, answer multiple choice questions, and wait on hold, all for the privilege of being read my transaction and asked to verify that it was, in fact, mine. After that, the card was “unblocked” and the transaction — which I no longer wanted, seeing as I had already used my MasterCard — was put through.

Thanks Visa. Lesson learned? Use MasterCard for online purchases. And don’t trust the Visa card for anything important.

Tim O’Reilly is the latest to pick up on the migration of a few prominent geeks from Mac OS X to Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a really marvelous Linux distribution that I just adore and use on all my servers at work, and used to use on my desktop as well. However, a few months back I spent some time mulling over all the options and made the decision that the best choice for me was to go with a Mac. There are tradeoffs, to be sure, but on the whole the Mac better serves my needs.

Now, however, we have a few prominent geeks very publicly choosing Ubuntu over the Mac, and one has to wonder how this will influence others in the community. Jason Kottke (linked in the O’Reilly post) calls these switchers canaries in the coal mine, and suggests Apple should be worried about the trend. While I find it unlikely that Apple will pay this much mind, I would be thrilled if Mac OS X was improved to respond to some of the criticism being leveled.

Much of the criticism deals with proprietary file formats, which I find disingenuous. The Mac does use proprietary formats for many of their applications, such as how Address Book records are stored, how emails are catalogued, iTunes libraries, calendars, and photos in iPhoto. But all of these apps give the user the ability to export their data into a more standard format (such as vCards for Address Book and iCalendar files for iCal), and most of them also provide an XML representation of their data as well. I’m not terribly afraid of “lock in” with most of these apps, but I would be very happy if Apple were to better document its formats, make them more open, and, most importantly, allow third party developers to interface with them without having to hack other parts of the operating system.

And the reason I stick with the Mac really has to do with all of those apps, and that’s why I decided to stay away from Ubuntu. The way that Address Book is integrated into all the apps that deal with addresses, and iCal takes invitations out of Mail, and the global spell check lets me use the same dictionary for every app, and the way that third-party tools like Quicksilver and Growl work so wonderfully and feel so integrated and are so slick, and the power that Spotlight is slowly bringing to organizing information, these are the reasons I’m sticking with the Mac — for now.

I don’t consider myself a crazy Apple loyalist. I stick with the Mac because in general it works better, it is more innovative, more useful, more friendly, more polished, and makes me more productive. Yes, many of the Mac apps I use are open source or non-Apple, but that’s fine, because they work well and integrate well into the environment. On Linux there is still a mess of competing way to do things, different apps that use different frameworks and look different and have different keyboard shortcuts and use different dictionaries and behave in different ways. There are apps that are only half finished, ideas only half realized, functionality only half implemented.

I use my Mac because it gives me the power to do Unixy things and use the command line but it also gives me the power of the integration of base level stuff in ways that other OSes don’t give me. It provides the glue that links things together and then gets out of the way. And when Ubuntu surpasses the Mac, I’ll gladly switch. I don’t expect that to happen soon.

Today my sister Shaina came into town to start her orientation at Northeastern University. At the dorm she’s staying in, which, like much of the campus, is very nice and modern and in good condition, the prefrosh are given key cards. They swipe the card with the proctor when they enter the building and then, to get into their rooms, they put the card in the door slot and type “9999” on the keypad. Genius! Three factor authentication! Here is how I presume it works during the actual school year (assuming everyone and everything is doing its job):

# *Something you are* – You have to be a resident to get into the building (verified by proctor, with a photo that pops up on the screen when you scan your student ID card)
# *Something you have* – You need to have your unique key card (student ID) to put in your door
# *Something you know* – You need to enter your unique (or semi-unique, if it is shared with your roommate) four-digit authorization code

In theory this setup is very, very good as far as security goes, because in order to break into your room an attacker would need to gain entrance to the building (or already live there), steal, find, or clone your key card, and also know your secret code. I suppose there were probably also security cameras around, although I didn’t look too closely, and in fact if they made the decision to *not* put cameras in residential buildings, I’d think that was an excellent move on their part.

Two-factor authentication is considered much more secure than traditional single-factor methods like an ID card or a password. Three-factor is better still. And at NEU it is being done is an intelligent, straight-forward way that serves to increase security while minimizing inconvenience. Very cool.

On the “something stupid” side, on my drive home I was going down route 16, a well-trafficed, badly-lit road, and I saw two kids riding some strange sort of miniture bicycles that were low to the ground, lacked reflectors, and were not outfitted with lights. The kids themselves were wearing dark clothing which was completely unreflective. I only saw them because I passed them as we were both near the end of a parking lot that was lit, and I saw their vague outlines next to me. To add to the complete idiocy of all this, they were riding the *wrong way* down an unlit road with no bike lanes. Into oncoming traffic. At midnight. On mini-bikes. Morons. If they got hit, I’d call it Darwin at work, and wouldn’t shed any tears.

On Tuesday, the parents arrive!