How things go… (car camping)

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As a kid my parents shared their love of the outdoors, passed on I’m told from my grand parents, and while we as family never did more than day hike together, some how that lead to my love of backwoods hiking and camping. I’ve since sectioned hiked the AT a bit, “bike” camped, and now, in my latest incarnation car camped.

I never would have thought it.

But my wife is more of a city girl, and so far my son is a city boy as well. Now he’s young, and there’s plenty of time for him to develop the put it on your back and walk aesthetic I enjoy so much, but I recognize that if I’m going to maximize my own outdoor time, it’s going to be with necessary compromises on how I go about that… so car camping it is. Recently, The Kid slept in a tent all night with me for the first time and loved it. He’s hiked up various paths in NY, ME, and NH… and loves rock climbing (like many kids). I appear to be off to a good start.

Some unexpected additions?

A solar chargeable battery arrangement that allows my son to use his devices. We also have the ability to recharge it from the car, and or run various things while in the car. There’s more LED lights than I would have expected, but they do make it easy to see. There’ll be more cooking related things than I would have thought. We have an excellent cooler that will hold ice for days (or other things frozen or cool).

In short, there’s way more gear than I ever considered in my light and ultra-light days. but it sure does make it homey regardless of where we hang out.

If anyone cares for details about what gear we’re using… feel free to get in touch.

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Microsoft, IBM, & Docker jump on Google’s Kubernetes project for managing app containers anywhere

Microsoft, IBM, & Docker jump on Google’s Kubernetes project for managing app containers anywhere:

Now several companies that deal in managing infrastructure at scale have stepped up as contributors to the Kubernetes project, namely IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, Docker, CoreOS, Mesosphere, and SaltStack.

Take the development as more proof that technology can now span a very wide variety of computing environments. Docker and its container technology have grown popular based on the notion that containers could be the basic unit of computing, and Kubernetes could be the tool to orchestrate all containers at the same time.

The new backing of Kubernetes could also be a turn away from more segmented and often proprietary hypervisor technology that sits on top of server operating systems and creates many virtual slices for running applications within each physical server. As developers and companies begin to try it, companies that sell hypervisor software, including VMware, could start to wonder how they should participate in the containerization movement.

[Like wildfire…]

Mesosphere to Bring Google’s Kubernetes to Mesos

Mesosphere · Mesosphere to Bring Google’s Kubernetes to Mesos:

The big trend driving containerization is a fundamental shift in the way apps are built. Today’s apps need to ingest big data. They need to connect to millions of devices. They need to scale out, elastically, in real time to handle surges in usage. They need to be highly automated, with no human operators. And they need to be fault tolerant and self-healing, so that zero downtime is the new normal. In this world, the old way of doing things simply—building ever bigger monolithic apps that run on ever bigger machines—simply does not work.

Building apps today means building them like Google does—or like Twitter, Facebook, and Airbnb for that matter. As the early pioneers of the “always on, always connected” world, these companies had to invent new ways to build apps. An “app” at one of these companies is not a single “binary” running on a giant server; it’s comprised of dozens (or hundreds or even thousands) of composable services running on fleets of servers, distributed across entire datacenters and clouds.

Building an app out of many composable services, distributed across just as many machines in a cloud or datacenter—stitched together using technologies like Mesos—is how apps are being built today. If you are not yet building apps like this, you will be. This is the new way to build apps. This is the new way to deploy apps. And this is what is truly driving the container revolution.

[I was wondering if there would be contention between these products. This is a good sign. And I agree that while one will probably bleed all over this stack for a while, it would indeed seem to be the way of the future. If you disagree, I’d love to here why.]

Jonathan Ive on Apple’s Design Process and Product Philosophy

Jonathan Ive on Apple’s Design Process and Product Philosophy – NYTimes.com:

The benefit of hindsight is we only really talk about those things that did work out. You have this sense that you’re working on something incredibly hard. When working on projects, you have this determination. You just keep going. If doing anything new, you’re very used to having insurmountable obstacles. At some point you have to make a call — at some point you have to say, “We’ve stretched this and we’ve come up against laws of physics, which we cannot change.”

[The first sentence is what caught me. in my daily life my company works on a lot of things and many don’t work out. And at times we get a bit unsettled about that. As if we were “better” more things would work out. But I doubt that’s the case when you’re doing things that are new, hard, and with incredible challenges. We’re probably have a really excellent ratio… but it’s easy to lose sight of that. Allez!]

The Internet With A Human Face

The Internet With A Human Face:

Public and private surveillance are in a curious symbiosis with each other.

A few weeks ago, the sociologist Janet Vertesi gave a talk about her efforts to keep Facebook from learning she was pregnant. Pregnant women have to buy all kinds of things for the baby, so they are ten times more valuable to Facebook’s advertisers.

At one point, Vertesi’s husband bought a number of Amazon gift cards with cash, and the large purchase triggered a police warning. This fits a pattern where privacy-seeking behavior has become grounds for suspicion. Try to avoid the corporate tracking system, and you catch the attention of the police instead.

As a wise man once said, if you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.

But there are also dangerous scenarios that don’t involve government at all, and that we don’t talk enough about.

I’ll use Facebook as my example. To make the argument stronger, let’s assume that everyone currently at Facebook is committed to user privacy and doing their utmost to protect the data they’ve collected.

What happens if Facebook goes out of business, like so many of the social networks that came before it? Or if Facebook gets acquired by a credit agency? How about if it gets acquired by Rupert Murdoch, or taken private by a hedge fund?

What happens to all that data?

[Great piece. Beautifully expresses so many of my worries about the current trend in technology.]

Anti-Net-Neutrality “Fast Lanes” Are Bullshit

Anti-Net-Neutrality “Fast Lanes” Are Bullshit:

Be honest.

This is not building anything new — it’s discriminating and restricting what we already have.

This is not making anything faster — it’s allowing ISPs to selectively slow down traffic that they don’t strategically or financially benefit from, and only permit traffic from their partners to run at the speeds that everything runs at today.

It’s ostensibly the FCC’s job to see through this bullshit language and do what’s right for the country and the people, but only the fool who believed that ISPs are trying to build something beneficial here would believe that the FCC gives a damn about what’s best for American citizens.

And 52.9% of us were that fool for believing in another big, empty political marketing campaign.

[Our government is so biased.]

TV Done Right: Still A Dream

TV Done Right: Still A Dream:

As a sharp-witted Be engineer liked to remark: “It costs more… But it does less.”

Carriers take too much money for a user-hostile experience simply because they can. In most locations, cable companies have little or no competition, so there’s no reason for them to do anything more than milk the most profit from a cheap infrastructure. As Apple Insider’s Neil Hughes reminds us, the user experience isn’t a priority for cable providers. Indeed, as I write this from Paris, I have to juggle set-top box restarts and malfunctioning secondary content subscriptions only reluctantly allowed by the main provider.

It doesn’t have to be that way. No miracle is required to make our Cable TV experience easy and gratifying.

[Maybe the Comcast deal is good one if they really want to be a technology company. They would grasp at the upside of delivering services this way and go nose to nose with Google, Apple, etc.]

Telecom Giants Drag Their Feet on Broadband for the Whole Country

Telecom Giants Drag Their Feet on Broadband for the Whole Country – Newsweek:

For almost 20 years, AT&T, Verizon and the other big players have collected hundreds of billions of dollars through rate increases and surcharges to finance that ambitious plan, but after wiring the high-density big cities, they now say it’s too expensive to connect the rest of the country. But they’d like to keep all that money they banked for the project.

In 2010, the Federal Communications Commission announced the National Broadband Plan, which promised to provide 100 million American households with high-speed cable by 2020. Verizon has been expanding FiOS in major markets, and AT&T has been expanding its U-verse service. And now, instead of spending that war chest digging up streets and laying fiber cable, the cable and telephone companies have invested in a massive and very successful lobbying push. They are persuading state legislatures and regulatory boards to quietly adopt new rules—rules written by the telecoms—to eliminate their legal obligations to provide broadband service nationwide and replace landlines with wireless. This abrupt change in plans will leave vast areas of the country with poor service, slow telecommunications and higher bills.

This is good news if you own stock in Verizon, but very bad news if you have a small business that’s not in a city already wired up.

The federal government’s official broadband map shows vast areas of America still have little or no service, and many areas will never get it under the current plan. “Small business customers, people who work at home and rural communities across the country need to wake up before it is too late,” says Regina Costa, telecommunications research director for the Utility Reform Network in California. “Verizon and AT&T are aggressively moving to dump a large percentage of their landlines and force customers to wireless networks [that] are expensive, restrictive, incompatible with medic-alert services, less reliable for 911 calls and will not hold up during power outages—and in a lot of places wireless just won’t work.”

[It ought to be criminal, but it’s nothing if not corrupt. I’m not a big fan of the Feds taking on projects, but this is one they should. Take the money back form the telcos that aren’t interested, and like the rural telephone work, get the whole country wired with fiber. Probably can be done with a rounding error off the budget… how stupid can we be?]

Haunted Empire review – great title, shame about the contents

Haunted Empire review – great title, shame about the contents | Technology | theguardian.com:

I found the bizarre attribution of meaning to events which didn’t seem to have meaning more and more intrusive. I also found it incongruous to have an American journalist from the WSJ offering her own interpretations; I thought it was an article of faith in that trade to get someone else to express your opinions – just choose carefully so they’re the ones you wanted to express anyway. But hardly any experts are quoted in the whole book; a pity, as they could have provided a narrative framework.

More to the point, didn’t any of Kane’s 200 interviewees or her time on the WSJ team reporting on Apple uncover anything about the tension inside the company about the iPhone 5? It simultaneously changed the screen size and dumped the 30-pin connector it had used since 2003, replacing it with a thinner 8-pin one that was incompatible with hundreds of millions of third-party boom boxes. For third-party developers, it meant rewriting their apps just to fit the iPhone 5 screen, which was longer but not wider. For makers of music players, it meant redesigns and inventory headaches. Would Steve Jobs have done that? Post-Jobs Apple did, with the same lack of compunction with which Jobs used to hand out mandates. Does that mean it’s haunted by the spirit of Jobs (would he had done it)? Or not?

[Clearly… not a fan.]