Archive for January, 2008

A cable (perhaps several) cut by one or more ships anchored off Egypt in the Mediterranean has reduced Internet access in to India and other countries in the Middle East to a crawl. The quote in the article from the Register says the services may be out for 10-15 days. With so much work being outsourced to places like India, this could really cause some havoc. We have connections with a company in India and we haven’t heard from them in 2 days. Fortunately, the work isn’t crucial or too time sensitive.

It’s just another reminder that stuff happens and we need to do everything we can locally to protect our stuff from the stuff that happens. More and more of our economy, education, government services, and health care are becoming dependent on reliable broadband service and connections to the world.

Technorati Tags: fiber, redundancy, redundant fiber

We’ve got a bunch of old computer stuff laying around and I have been lazy about getting rid of it. I want to do the right thing, of course, by recycling this stuff. Among other things we have 3 old CRTs taking up a lot of space. Well, it turns out Staples will accept CRTs for recycling for free. When I first heard about this I called to make sure, and today I dropped off one of the monitors. And guess what? They made it easy!

They take other computer parts for $10 each. But since you can recycle them for $.10/lb at the local recycling centers it’s probably cheaper to go there for the rest of the stuff..

There are a lot of open source projects that are starting to attract big dollars. Drupal has recently pulled in $7 million and MySQL was just purchased by Sun for $1 billion. And now Wordpress has attracted $29.5 million.

This is an exciting transition for these entities that have produced tremendous software that we have been using for years. This blog is powered by Wordpress, we have developed several sites using Drupal and all of our database driven projects have used MySQL. This open source stuff has enabled us and millions of others to produce powerful sites at a fraction of the cost that would be required if we had used proprietary software or built everything from scratch.

It will be interesting to see how this influx of money will transform these projects.

Technorati Tags: drupal, mysql, wordpress

I didn’t go to Macworld, darn it. But I did read stuff and watched the keynote. The new MacBook Air is cool looking but way too expensive. I don’t own an IPhone so the new stuff for that didn’t hold much interest. I just got a Tivo so I’m not about to switch to Apple TV at the moment. So, was there anything unveiled this year that floated my boat?

Well, yes, although it hasn’t been released yet. Leopard, the latest release of the Mac OS ships with a pretty nice piece of backup software called Time Machine. I recently bought a new MacBook Pro that came with Leopard so I have this great software. But I haven’t used it because I don’t have a convenient way of backing up to an external drive. And in our household we have more than one MacBook. So, the one thing Steve Jobs did announce that made my wallet flippity-flop was Time Capsule. It’s a hard drive (in either 500 GB or 1 TB models) with a built in wireless card. You can set it up so your MacBook automatically connects to the Time Capsule drive and gets backed up using Time Machine. Stick the thing in your office. Walk in with your laptop and open it up and you are being backed up over the wireless network. Just the thing to make my life a little easier. Sweet.

Technorati Tags: apple, AppleTV, Ipod, leopard, mac os, Time Capsule MacBook Air, Time Machine

After the City of Eureka postponed acting on a wireless network feasibility study, partly, according to Councilmember Mike Jones, because there was no crowd shouting for it (although several speakers voices very strong arguments and only one person spoke in opposition), a bunch of people turned out at the Planning Commissions meeting to speak on behalf of re-instating a free standing Telecommunications Element in the General Plan Update.

Led by Tina Nerat who wrote the initial study that was supposed to be used as a basis for the element, the list of speakers who urged the Planning Commission to reinstate the Telecom Element, included Connie Stewart, special assistant to Patty Berg, Peter Pennekcamp, head of the Humboldt Area Foundation, Sean McLauglin, head of Access Humboldt, John McBrearty from Humboldt State University and yours truly.

The strong showing seemed to work. While it’s not clear exactly what will happen the Planning Commission will be looking at re-instating the Telecom Element. According to this quote from the Eureka Reporter:

Girard said the discussions of how and if a standalone telecommunications chapter might be added to the ongoing general plan update will be brought before the planning commission and possibly the Board of Supervisors in the near future when they discuss possible changes to the general plan’s overall timeline.

You can be sure when the City Council brings back the wireless project for discussion in a couple weeks, we will work on getting the crowd there.

Last night the City of Eureka put off approval of funds to conduct a feasibility study for developing a wireless network. It’s the right approach in that the study would provide necessary information on what’s possible, how to create it and how to sustain such a network. Due partly to an earlier decision in the meeting that gave Eureka Police and Fire Department employees a raise, the council felt budgetary constraints and asked staff to look for alternate funding for the project.  The folks who have been working on this idea for over a year now have to go back, look for funding sources and retool the proposal. It’s a shame that short term budget problems will delay a project that could, for relattively low cost, benefit so many people socially and economically. But, the story is not over. Just delayed. Some more…

On another front as the county’s General Plan Update grinds on what was supposed to be a Telecom Element seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle. The Planning Department apparently mistakenly left out what has been considered landmark language that would set a tone for and a priority on telecommunications infrastructure. Indeed, Humboldt County has been touted around the state as being visionary enough to be the first jurisdiction to formally recognize the need for secure and widespread broadband services. Apparently the oversight by Planning Dept. staff, it that’s really what it was, means that the Board of Supervisors will need to approve a structural change in the General Plan in order to accommodate a stand alone Telecom Element. In order to avoid this step, staff is planning on slipping in language here and there under different elements, thus diluting the impact and diminishing the importance of telecommunications to the future development of the region.

This is a big mistake and again very short-sighted. Fortunately we have an opportunity to correct the oversight. The Planning Commision will be discussing this area of the General Plan at tomorrow night’s meeting. If you can, pleasse attend the meeting and show your support for a free standing and clearly stated Telecommunications Element in the General Plan. The meeting is in the Board of Supervisor’s chambers in the County Courthouse at 6 PM. Here is a link to the agenda. Here is the relevant section under discussion.

For further background you can review Tina Nerat’s study from a few year’s back (PDF), part of which was supposed to be used as the basis for the Telcom Element. The most relevant section begins on page 66.

Hope to see you there!

A while back I wrote about the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) program. Originally intended to be sold in third-world countries, the company has announced they will make the computers available to poor children in the U.S. working with the state governments.

Back when the computers were available to be purchased by individuals there was talk at RTC about buying a couple and somehow getting local schools interested in the technology. But since that program ended in December there wouldn’t be any way for the schools to get them. Now that it looks like they might be made available, there is now way for RTC to buy any to share with the schools.

Given the recent budget crisis as presented the Guhvanator, California may not be lining up to buy laptops for any children, poor or otherwise, in the near future. Of course, that would be short-sighted.

-> OLPC

The last two public meetings by Redwood Coast Connect willbe held this week. The goal of these meetings is to gather information on broadband usage and accessibility to try and aggregate demand to expand services throughout the region.

Tuesday, January 8, the meeting will take place in Redway at the Healy Senior Center. Thursday, January 10, the meeting will be at the Wharfinger Building Humboldt Bay Aquatic Center, next to the Adorni Center in Eureka. Both meetings run from 5:30-7:30 PM. If you are interested in the future of our telecommunications infrastructure in the region you should consider attending. Here are the goals of RCC:

Redwood Coast Connect is a pilot project working to make broadband available to rural communities in Del Norte, Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity Counties through:

• Assessing and mapping the needs of users
• Engaging telecom providers
• Simplifying policies
• Tapping the ingenuity of entrepreneurs in the region

The preliminary results of this project is expected to be unveiled in June. I will be very interested to see how the information gathered will be used to actually affect how broadband is defined and deployed in the area.

It’s sometimes nice to have a soap box. Suddenlink’s head of technology for the western region got wind of my blog post about the problems I had with Tivo and Suddenlink (probably through Google’s News Alerts service). He followed a link to our web site and called my office yesterday. I went over what happened and he promised to look in to it. Sure enough, that afternoon I got a call from Suddenlink local and had an appointment for a service call.

It turns out, there was nothing really wrong with the cable service. Something on the Tivo box had gotten reset (must have been user error on our part). But Tivo support couldn’t help me. The “cable guy” fixed it, explained the issue and all is well. So, I apologize for dumping so heavily on Suddenlink.

However, the  real problem came when I went in to the Suddenlink office to try and get clarification and no one seemed to have a clue, provided wrong information and confirmed that wrong information with others elsewhere in the organization. So, there was really a training and communication breakdown there.

It turns out I don’t need the cable cards that Suddenlink still actually does not have in stock unless I upgrade to their digital TV service. Until then, I got my Tivo back!

Thanks, cable guys….

I was going to write something about our little adventure at the Headwaters Trail yesterday, but my wife Marianne beat me to the punch. Here, in essence, is a letter she sent in to the Times-Standard editor, somewhat in the vein of their Toasts and Roasts format:

Toasts to the Bureau of Land Management for upgrading the Headwaters Park trail into a beautiful, accessible and inspiring resource for all ages and mobilities. The wide, paved pathway through the redwoods will accommodate strollers and wheelchairs alike, while the surrounding landscape has been cleaned of dead brush and has had rain friendly culverts installed to ensure the continued maintenance of the trail. My husband, our dog and I enjoyed another visit on the last afternoon of 2007.

Roasts to the cretins who smashed the windows of our truck and a nearby van parked in the Headwaters parking lot in order to steal my purse with under $15 cash in it. Of course, it also contained many personal items as well as ID and bank cards that these scuzz bums probably ditched within a mile of the park.

Toasts to the young woman who, after witnessing the crime, took the time to walk out of the park to a nearby residence in order to report it to the authorities,  and then waited around for quite a while for said authorities to arrive.

Roasts to the nearby resident who refused to let our good Samaritan use their telephone to call 911, nor did he offer to use his phone to call on her behalf. (what was THAT about?!)

Toasts to the family who showed up to hike and instead spent their time driving back out the road to make a second call for assistance.

Roasts to the cell phone companies whose signals drop out a few miles from a major highway leaving us stranded next to the parking lot sign containing the BLM phone number to call in an emergency.

Toasts to the BLM ranger who followed up with a thorough report, encouraged us by sharing their familiarity with this particular miscreant and patiently scoured the nearby brush with us for signs of our stolen items.

Roasts to my unnamed Credit Union which hosted the only card I couldn’t put an immediate hold on, but was told to wait until after the holiday and drop by the office. (aarrgh!)

Ah, Humboldt - we love you, in spite of your shortcomings!