The first afternoon talk was on thin clients. You remember those tiny Sun Java Boxes? Or other weird, little, expensive boxes with no disks, that just ran on the network? Those are thin clients. But they need not be overpriced. An ancient pentium can become a thin client. It’s recycling and with no disks, it’s pretty energy efficient. Ergo, this is a green use of tech. And anything that resurrects useless hardware into a tool is fucking cool.
I forgot to save the notes I took. Um, ok, so thin clients obviously depend on a server. They do something called a PXE boot, where they ask for their OS across the network via DHCP and TFTP. After they figure out what servers they needed, they do some more TFTP until they get an adequate OS running on a RAM disk. So the operating system and an X server are running locally. (The terms “client” and “Server” are reversed in X, which is annoying. The server serves the graphics. (Don’t think about this too hard.)
When you launch an application, like OpenOffice, or firefox, that runs on the server, but is displayed on the client. These apps don’t have a lot of extra overhead if more than one person is using them at a time. There could potentially be security issues, because every keystroke is being transmitted across the network. Part of what you want to do is make sure that nobody bad can get between you and the server. Therefore, it’s best to run wires rather than wifi. Also, you want the thin client to have access only to the server. The server can get to the internet, but the clients cannot. Finally, risk is mitigated through ssh tunneling, which is now standard in many thin clients.
Edubuntu, an ubuntu distro does thin clients out of the box and is an easy solution. This whole setup is really great for NGOs since a lot of the hardware is findable via freecycle. Every edubuntu release gets three years of security updates, so you can set this up and not have to upgrade the server for three years. I want to help put together an NGO-ready-to-go set, and I think this model makes a lot of sense.
I wish I hadn’t lost my notes . . .
You can also do slightly thicker clients, where some apps are sent across the network to run locally, on the client. This is related to my plan to get cheap multi-channel audio for installation. What I want to do is get a bunch of motherboards that all have on-board audio. I want to stick them in a box together, with a giant power supply, where one of them would have access to a disk and the others would not. The disk-enabled one would be the server. I would hookup a screen, mouse, keyboard etc to the server, because in this case the clients are providing only the audio. They would PXE boot from the server, but instead of loading and starting X, they would load and boot the SuperCollider audio server (now you can see how the X windows stuff got to be backwards). The server would load the SuperCollider language. It would access all the clients (aka SC servers) via OSC. It would tell them when to play and what to play, load SynthDefs and Buffers, etc. Every client motherboard in this scheme is 2 channels of audio. So three motherboards is 4 (or 6) channels. Four provide 6 (or 8) channels. Etc. Ideally, all this hardware would be free (as in beer). I think I’m going to wait until my lease is up to start combing freecycle in earnest. But it would be so brilliant being able to drag a free box into a gallery or something and have all open source and a load of speakers. It’s not the most gigable solution, but yeah, brilliant for installations.
Um, anyway, if you want to get rid of p400 or better motherboards with on-board audio, drop me a line. I’ve got £0 budget, but I will generate a howto, so think of it as giving something to the FOSS community.
Tag: con
BrumCon07 – lunch
. . . continuing in too much detail . . .
After the first talk, came the Break for lunch. I took advantage of the gap to do my sound check. While I was trying to do it, three teens, two boys and a girl, approached me to mock me for using a mac. About half the computers that were used on the stage were macs, actually, a number that surprised me. I was somewhat annoyed with the teens as I was trying to do a sound check. They told me that they liked to spend their free time going to the Apple store to start arguments. Part of what was especially amusing / annoying is that I had exactly the same attitude at their age! I also liked getting into arguments with mac users! Gah, karma!
Mac users are fun to argue with because they’re so religious about their computers. But, of course, it was completely different when I used to do it. Because it was me and anything I do is justifiable because I do it.
When I was a young’un, PCs ran DOS and Macs ran MacOS. If you liked to do strange things to the operating system on your computer or to type rather than mouse around and generally try to cause small disasters, DOS was way better. Really. It was so clear at the time. Looking back, though, I’ve lost a lot of certainty. But, now Windoze is the hugest piece of crap ever excreted from a software company and OS X is unix.
I explained that when I started doing Pro Audio, linux’s support for it was not adequate and it’s gotten better lately, but I’m still on a mac. I also said that I was born and raised in Cupertino, California, so it was the home team for me. And anyway, it’s unix, it’s not like I’m running windows or something. “It’s BSD” the girl said, as the boys seemed confused by unix != linux. And I wondered why the right speaker was silent. They regrouped, it was the BSD that nobody wanted, shoved out the backdoor. I became satisfactorily annoyed and they wandered off. I went to find food ASAP, to become less peeved.
This was too funny. Anyway, for the record, there are some pieces of software which are not implemented well in FOSS, including score notation. I need to run mac or win to run Sibelius. And I’m sure as hell not going to run windows. Unix is better than Windows. Any Unix is better than any windows.
OS X does have a kind of reject history, though. It started out life as the Mach Kernel, invented at Carnegie Mellon. That kernel was not BSD, but was faster because it emulated BSD in an efficient manner. NeXT used it for NeXTSTEP, their weird operating system. This OS was used in some minor advances in Information Technology, like the invention of HTTP (aka, the World Wide Web). The first web server ran on what would become on OS X. MAX was invented on NeXTSTEP. Along with many other things. It’s hard to overstate how fucking cool NeXT boxes were when they first came out. By the time I got a job being a sysadmin on a NeXT cluster, though, the glory had faded completely and NeXT OS was about to die. It had such obvious faults. Like the totally proprietary windowing system. Why didn’t they just use X windows like everybody else?
Steve Jobs founded NeXT, so when he came back into Apple, he killed the plans to use the (far superior) BeOS, and switched directions so that the new OS would be NeXTSTEP. It’s fortunate that this did not turn into a disaster, since it certainly looked like one from the outside. Anyway, OS X is a respectable OS with a respectable history. Although it still has a propreitary window manger. bah.
BrumCon 07 – Morning
Yesterday was BrumCon07(.5). It was supposed to be in October, but was delayed. They plan to also have a BrumCon08 next October. So, when I arrived, I expected complete disorganization, but this was not the case at all. I plugged in all of my cables in the morning, but didn’t get to do a sound check right away as they were showing Pink Panther cartoons, which were the cause of much hilarity.
The room would probably have been slightly too big for my monitor speakers. But, during the Pink Panther cartoons, it was clear that something was deeply amiss with the PA. The MGM lion roar was deafening, and the incidental music and dialog was barely audible. The bass levels might have been perfect for a dance party. But then when people started talking, later, with a mic, it was ok sounding. I was concerned, but not alarmed.
The first talk was about hacker stereotypes and hacker ethics. The speaker had been famous when he was a teen for being Britain’s youngest (arrested) hacker. At 13, he was committing credit card fraud to feed his family. He didn’t divulge too many details, but it sounded as if his parent(s) had drug problems and neglected him. He had a computer, though. At 13, he couldn’t get a job, but he could use stolen credit cards to get groceries delivered to his house. He got arrested and tried for that. I think this would have been a really good time for social services to step in. I know we English speakers are very keen to punish everybody and make sure that people who do wrong suffer harm. But really, in this case, a kid stealing money for food? That’s a good time to look at food stamps (or whatever they’re called here) and foster care and whatnot.
Incidentally, this is why it’s not entirely unfair for Americans to think of the UK as being set in Dickens novel. (Just like you lot think we’re a cowboy movie.) Because leaving a kid in that situation is Oliver Twist like. Really, everybody, social services are good things. They help people get their lives together. They give a smart kid a future. But no, the British state sent him back home, where he kept doing credit card fraud, eventually getting less altruistic about it, until the point where, as an adult, he stole £750000 ($1.5 million) by breaking into unsecured e-commerce servers and now has an adult prison record for hacking.
Alas, he fails to distinguish between his actions at 13 and his actions at 18. Anything he did was justified simply because he did it. Now tech companies are reluctant to hire him and this is totally unfair!! Right, step 1, lose the attitude. The banks he broke into, let him fix their problems for them. The movie Catch Me If You Can was based on the memoirs of a kid who did a lot of fraud and then started working for banks. That’s probably the best future for this kid. But seriously, what’s putting people off as much as the prison record, is the whiny, self-righteous attitude. You don’t have to actually be sorry about breaking into wide-open servers. But you could perhaps try to create that impression?
I think morally, there’s a big difference between ripping off a bank and ripping off a person. Breaking into a server hosted in somebody’s living room is different than breaking into a small company’s colo, is different than breaking into a big company’s server farm. The bigger the target, the less moral trouble, imo. This didn’t come up at all, even in a discussion about the morality/ehtics of breaking in. I would think the Robin Hood model would be fundamental to such a morally murky area.
So the speaker was whining about how his juvenile record is permanently available via Google. Which is why newspapers shouldn’t reveal the names of minors convicted of crimes. It’s meaningless to seal juvenile records if it’s going to be so easy to find them. The speaker seemed to think he was special in this regard. Imagine a group of people whose private business and embarrassing past was so easily available to anybody with a computer! Why, that’s never happened to any sensitive minority group ever before! I can’t think of a single other highly obvious example!
Yeah, I’m starting to have mixed feelings about search engines. Google has taken over a lot of government functions in the Silicon Valley. But this particular function is one that has more home in a police state than the benevolent, Medici-esque system that California and Google seem to be blundering in to.
More later . . .
offline blogging: austria
I am in Vienna. I met many Wieners when I was in Linz and am staying with a woman I met named Marty. Many people who went to the conference in Linz flew in through Vienna, so last night, we had a small party. Several members of the vegetable orchestra were present. This legendary group’s shows include making instruments out of vegetables and then playing them. One of the folks last night apparently has a technique where she can get a zucchini to sound exactly like a tuba. They used to follow up the performances with stew made from the instruments, but this was time consuming and also kind of gross, so now they pre-cook their stew with other vegetables.
Last night was some of the most fun that I’ve ever had. We were artists and geeks and sex workers and Europeans and Americans and all feminist / progressive. Austria has its political problems, certainly, but the indie scene is great. We were hanging out at the queer center. There was spray paint on the outside wall that said "gender queer." It made me feel very happy. I really like that term.
The last day that the con was going in Linz was unbearably hot. There were my last minute workshops. A quick intro to svn, how to podcast, etc, but it was all so hot, the entire building emptied out and migrated to the bank of the Danube. I was not the only one who went skinny dipping in the (brown) Danube. After painting myself in thick coat of spf 50 sunblock. The current was swift. The water was freezing! So much fun.
Alas, my whole experience made me feel pangs for my youth. Ah, to be in a place where women work together and trans-masculinity is validated, and where my body is not a cultural artifact, but just the space that I inhabit, without expectations written across the shape of my chest.
Linz was home to some important historical figures. Bruckner used to play the organ in the town’s cathedral. Some of you will recall that Bruckner wrote for the wagner tuba and thus is important in its history. Also from linz was Adolph Hitler. He went to a real schule near the haupt schule where we slept. One of the people in my room attempted to determine whether he attended the school that we slept at. Since he was an art student and this was the arts magnet, it was a possibility. Anyway, she failed to find out. Maybe i slept in hitler’s homeroom?
I think that I am now involved in the european feminist forum. We are going to set up a wiki (or drupal) which has a bunch of howtos for activists and non-profits. Leftists simply should not be giving their institutional funds to microsoft. If they’re in to people power, they should use free software. Also many outside the first world don’t have the luxury to buy buggy bloatware because it costs too much. Our documents will hopefully be useful to folks worldwide. What do orgs use computers for? Their website, email, spreadsheets, documents, making posters and officy stuff like that. These kinds of applicstions work very well under ubuntu and don’t require much computer power. Old computers can be turned into powerful tools for activists.
We need a parallel structure. Anti-capitalists cannot depend on for-profit enterprise to solve their problems. This is a clear use for self-help and anarchism! Amyway, I’ll set something up when i get home and then make an announcement and then go away again. The intended audience is computer novice activists, so part of the issue is trust. It’s ok to link to other howtos, but its essential to gain their trust. They’re often suspicious of new technology and wary of geeks, so even if this project is redundant, the feminist perspective will help.
In Linz
I’m in Linz and darn tired. Wrote some music on the train. I’m doing almost all new stuff, but re-using the second half of my first supercollider piece. The piece is kind of klutz and doesn’t work well in stereo, except for the second half, which is cool on it’s own. I got a new joystick two days ago. It was really great when I first plugged it in. 0-255 for real. 10 bits. 4 channels of analog stick action. woot. But it’s become flaky. Sometimes the range of the sticks is cut in half. Sometimes the buttons have different IDs. It’s making me a little nervous. I thought I was buying a name-brand joystick, but the name is actually just similar to what I thought I was buying. Oh well. Maybe I’ll get a third soon and in the mean time, I’ve got a bit of a challenge. Usually unplugging it and replugging it works. Or I could put my awesome joystick brain in it.
In other news, if you plug a Dell laptop into a step-down voltage converter, it fucks up the screen in MS windows. (wtf?)
MY clothes are mildewy. meh, I say. Also, I feel a bit weird about being in a women’s event, even if the sponsoring group is called “gender changer.” Hello, I am twice the gender changer that you are.
Overheard this morning: “somebody was playing the digeridu at 10 o’clock last night!” la la la.
The conference fees include food and lodging, which make it a really good deal, although I was kind of surprised not to be comped in, given that I thought they were going to pay me. We’re staying in a haupt schule. This is a kind of elementary school. They have very thin matresses on the floors of the classrooms.
“Haupt” means half. It’s a half-school. In Germany, and apparently also in Austria, they have really extreme tracking. College bound kids go to something called Gymnasium. At the end, they take a test. If they pass it, the can go to a university. If they don’t pass it, the have they still have their high school diploma, equivalent to those who graduated from a real schule. They just get a diploma and don’t have to take a test. Finally, there exists haupt schules. In high school, these kids go to school part time and spend the other half of their time apprenticing to be things like florists or auto mechanics. If you were going to try to figure out what was the most valuable part of every kind of schooling, the big test result is the payoff for the gynasium. The diploma for those in real schule. The apprenticeship for those in haupt shule.
The one that we’re at is an elementary school. The tracking starts very early. Transferring from one track to another is virtually impossible. Unless you go to gynasium and pass the big test, there is no way that you will ever go to a university in your country. The American in me rebells to this. But the same sort of tracking also exists in American schools and is more subtle and probably, therefore, more evil. Also, we track kids straight to jail rather than in to apprentice programs, so we suck worse.
Interestingly, the school is an arts magnet. The kids must go on to art academy. I always wondered about the liberal arts value (or lack therof) of conservatories. This seems to confirm my suspicions. Also, I’ve seen the alphabet posted in all the classrooms, but not a single math-related thing. Maybe it’s all on a different floor.