The Unix Curmudgeon

Labor Day is just another workday when you work from home…

Here we are, on the first Labor Day weekend since our “non-retirement” nearly a year ago, also the first anniversary of unloading at least some of our “stuff” at our new home and close to the second anniversary of the official start of the Great Recession.  It is becoming increasingly apparent that the era of the traditional “retirement” that folks born before the Great Depression have enjoyed is over.  Those of use between the Greatest Generation and the Boomers are in a kind of limbo where expectations and reality are diverging rapidly.

A number of factors weigh in on this sea change in our perception of the “Golden Years” as we approach the second decade in the new century.  First, many of us in our seventh decade of life are much more active and healthy than were our parent’s generation.  In the mid-twentieth century, retirement age was very close to the average life expectancy of those entering the workforce.  Statistically, only half of those entering the workforce would survive to see retirement, and those who did were not expected to be productive workers by that time, and live in retirement only a few years.  Today, the average life expectancy of someone entering the workforce as a young adult is in the mid-70s.  Those of us already at retirement age can expect to live another 16 years–on average!

This is no surprise, as the life expectancy has been increasing steadily for many decades, while the retirement age, set in the 1930s, remained the same until recently and is only gradually rising.  ”Retirement” is no longer an extended vacation or extremely long weekend of household puttering: few today, raised in the age of easy credit and ravaged savings, have the finances to travel and play or indulge in expensive hobbies for decades, and, well, not all of us enjoy home repairs and gardening all that much to devote all our waking hours to it.  So, retirement becomes a new career opportunity, either to seek a new career or transform our old one.

In the case of the Unix Curmudgeon, our life hasn’t changed much so far, except the office is downstairs instead of across town, but we’ve been in that situation before, in the mid-1990s; the hours are a bit more flexible, but the result is that just as much work gets done, for less money and stretched across longer days.   Tasking is still driven by email and the intensity (and volume) of work varies proportionally with the urgency of server log messages.

“Working from Home” is the flip side of   “FAXing from the Beach,” the topic of an earlier post.  While the home worker has increased personal freedom, he or she is essentially immersed in work, 24x7x365. Still, this arrangement has its merits:  work gets done, but on a personal time scale.  The world of business isn’t quite ready for this transition, though.  The modern office culture, developed when communications was by memo rushed from desk to desk, is archaic when documents and messages can be instantly transmitted around the world, but is ingrained in corporate policies and procedures and the mindset that unseen workers are unsupervised workers.  Granted, telecommuting doesn’t scale well to many jobs, though it is surprising how many it does cover well.

System administration and programming are nearly ideal candidates for remote work, except for those rare times when a certain amount of “laying on of hands” is necessary, like installing, removing, or repairing hardware.  Installation and removal can be largely scheduled well in advance.  The computers I tend most of the time are physically 600 miles from my home-based office, sometimes further if I am traveling: I have made in-person appearances several times over the past year, sometimes just to remind the community-at-large that I still do work there, and sometimes to man-handle the hardware.

My last trip to the client’s site involved shutting down and removing an old server, a more or less symbolic act, since I had, over the previous few weeks, migrated the functionality to other machines and even changed the identity of the machine on the network.  The other part of the equation, repair, becomes almost a non-issue with the proliferation of virtualization and high-availability clustering.  As long as there are enough hosts to handle all of the services needed, the virtual server images can be moved from one to the other and computing loads balanced among the remaining servers in a cluster, almost behind the scenes, so that even repairs can be scheduled at a convenient time.

So, this Labor Day, as I monitor the migration of hundreds of thousands of files to consolidate several older, smaller servers’ data into one, and draft a quote for the next year’s contract with my primary client, I realize that retirement is a relic of the past: the private and public pensions available to persons of a certain age only serve to supplement the uncertain income of hourly contract fees and permit a slightly more relaxed work schedule (though when projects dictate, the workday sometimes runs well over eight hours and through the weekend).  Labor Day is a celebration of continuing to be a productive member of the workforce, at an age that previous generations of workers were expected to cash in and step aside.  That was a noble idea when social security was invented, to make room for younger, more able workers in an age when unemployment was more severe than it is today.  But, today, skill and experience counts, too, and age is not a factor for knowledge workers, as long as their minds are agile and accepting of new ideas.  We’re used to that–in the 45 years since we’ve been in this business, the only constant has been the rate of change, governed by Moore’s Law.  Ever increasing speed and capacity opens new avenues for change.  Some of those changes have been waiting years to be practical to implement: for instance, microprogramming, the principle on which most modern computer architectures is based, was invented in the early 1950s, but had to wait until the development of the large-scale integrated circuit chips in the late 1970s to become realizable on a practical basis.  Multi-processors and distributed clusters, once reserved only for vital scientific and military purposes, are now affordable to everyone, but only a few of us have long experience with programming and using them.

The exuberance and curiousity of youth is a great boon to business, but so is the calculated patience of us elders.  The curve of Moore’s Law is flattening–the secret to speed and capacity in the future lays in the techniques of the past, by which we wrung performance out of those early, limited systems, with slow processors and small memories.  Old is useless only if what it does isn’t needed anymore (if it ever was) or superseded by a paradigm shift.  Who knows paradigm shift better than those of us who have lived through the entire history of computing?

After 4700 miles in three weeks of “Road Tour 2010,” we are back at Chaos Central, with our wired (and optionally, wireless) network, and can resume full-contact computing. The Unix Curmudgeon has been itching to reconfigure the Nice Person’s new HP Mini to run Ubuntu, but the hard facts of life are, you need to have a wired connection to get wireless working on an HP, with the Broadcom chipset, or find some other way to get the STA package loaded.

We did load up Ubuntu Netbook 10.04 on a USB stick, and it looks great, though slow in the “live CD” mode. The menu is a lot more full-featured than the otherwise excellent HP QuickWeb interface. But, to be useful for work, the system needs to be installed on the hard drive.

Our preference, of course, is to build a machine from the ground up with Linux or FreeBSD or Solaris on it, but there aren’t too many laptop barebones kits available, so for our mobile computers, we start with a machine that has Windows pre-installed. Being frugal as well as curmudgeonly, it seems a shame to throw away something we’ve paid for, so we don’t usually take the wipe-the-disk option when installing Linux on an existing Windows machine. Besides, as a software developer and occasional consumer of Windows-based software that simply won’t run under WINE, it’s handy to have Windows available when we absolutely can’t avoid it, so we opt for a dual-boot system.

There are two ways to relegate the Microsoft Tax penalty to a no-interest savings account: either repartition the hard drive to squeeze the Windows installation aside to provide a Linux native partition, or use Wubi (if Ubuntu is your distro of choice). On my development machine, I took the repartition route, since Wubi wasn’t integrated with Ubuntu when I started, and I need all the performance I can get. For most users, Wubi is the way to go, as there is no scary repartitioning, and actually no need to burn an install CD, as Wubi can be downloaded as a small EXE file.

The Nice Person asked if we had to keep Windows: I said we might need it, “just in case,” so she agreed to leave it in place, as long as it didn’t sneak up on us and boot when we didn’t want it (which it does do “out of the box” if you boot the machine and don’t click somewhere on the HP Quickweb screen before the 15-second countdown ends).

Wubi works by creating a large file in the Windows NTFS file system that has a Linux ext4 file system built in it. Wubi adds itself to the Windows NT boot loader, which when selected at Windows boot time, loads GRUB for the Linux boot, for alternate kernel or recovery options.  [There are some more details that make all this possible, but that's the principle.]

The problem with installing Ubuntu using Wubi is, of course, that you do have to install it under Windows, with all the frustration that entails. Since we only boot Windows when we absolutely must, that chore becomes an ordeal of warnings about virus protection out of date, missing updates, and so forth, which take an hour or two to resolve, along with several reboots and “Do not touch this machine” admonitions before we can actually get started with our own work.  I did take the opportunity to install ClamAV for Windows–no need to subscribe to the paid anti-virus and spyware suites if Windows will be rarely used.

At this writing, we have, squirreled away in hard disk partitions on machines that came with it, and in virtual machine loop-back files on the native Unix/Linux systems, at least one copy each of Windows 98, Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7, so we are pretty  much covered for any software testing we want to do, or for the handful of programs we can’t get to run under WINE on Linux.

The Wubi install went well, except Windows went to sleep during the download, which delayed things.  Despite having a bootable “live” USB drive, Wubi downloads the ISO via a torrent, so we had to not only be wired but enable high-order portmapping through the firewall to the netbook during the install, not something with which we’re comfortable while using Windows, but at least the privileged ports are still protected.

Of course, after installing, it is necessary to run the Update Manager.  When updating a Wubi installation with a new kernel, it is important to check the “no, I don’t want to install GRUB” box when asked, if you want to keep the NTloader for the initial boot screen.  At some point, Ubuntu realizes it doesn’t have a driver loaded for the Broadcom wireless, so it will try to get one from the ‘Net.  This driver is available on the alternate install CD, but it is easier to install it through a wired connection.  Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10 didn’t work with the STA driver provided by Canonical, either downloaded or on the alternate install disk, so you had to obtain the source package from Broadcom and compile and install it with ‘make’, but the STA driver package provided for 10.04 worked just fine.  After installing, just click on the network icon on the task bar to look for wireless networks.

We’re used to working in a network, so having an SSH daemon and other networking packages is handy.  Accordingly, I allocated a lot more space for the Wubi disk, to make sure I had enough space for extra packages.  However the netbook is just that–a modestly-powered Internet “terminal”–so we don’t expect to do any heavy lifting with the device.  Having Ubuntu installed in addition to the HP Quickweb will make road trips seem almost like being at home.

One last chore is to boot to Windows once more and change the boot order so that Ubuntu is the successor to HP Quickweb instead of Windows, to satisfy the Nice Person that she won’t have Windows foisted on her by accident.  In the start menu, right-click on “Computer”, click on “Properties.”  In the window, select “Advanced System Settings,” then the options for Startup, select Ubuntu as the default system to boot.  In the “old days” of NT4, we used to hack the boot.ini file, but that seems to have been folded into binary format in later versions.  And, it works! Windows doesn’t boot up by accident, now.  Life is good.

A number of years ago, a forward-thinking company (I forget which one) put an ad on TV that zoomed in on a tablet-looking device on the arm of a beach chair. The punch line was, “FAX from the beach? You will.” Well, that was a long time ago, before the dot-com bubble burst and before the Internet turned FAX into one of those quaint twentieth-century technologies that nobody remembers fondly. And we did FAX from the beach, just not quite that simply. Even before the now-archaic ad broke, we were dragging thermal-paper FAX machines and luggable computers with modems off to time-share escapes. The extension cords and phone drops didn’t quite reach to the beach, but we could see it from our room.

Today, the “FAX from the beach” mode is the art of remote computing. If you have a Unix system, or the right combination of Windows applications, and the blessings of the Network Police at $WORK, you can “be at your desk” from almost anywhere on the planet, thanks to WiFi almost everywhere. But, technology is, as we all know, not always infallible. Cell phone coverage isn’t everywhere for every carrier, and WiFi systems get overloaded at inconvenient times, or the hotel or coffee shop decides your time is up and logs you off their system until you refresh your login. And, at best, shared WiFi connections are slow, compared with your network at work or even at home.

Graphical user interfaces are all the rage, but waiting for a Virtual Network Console (VNC) session to crawl down the screen and fill in the detail is painfully slow. Most of the time, VNC works pretty fast, as long as you are on a local network, or there are no firewalls between you and the remote host. Since running without a firewall is corporate and financial suicide, regardless of your base operating system, the only safe way to run VNC is either through an SSH tunnel with port forwarding, which is an incredibly complex process, or to run the viewer on the remote host with X11 forwarding, which SSH handles internally. Unfortunately, X11 is way too chatty to use over a slow link, so the initial display creeps down your screen, taking several passes before it is ready to use. Then, the mouse tends to react sluggishly, making the whole experience a bit less productive than desired.

One thing that does help is to use the -C option on the slowest of the SSH links to use compression on that link. And, there may be multiple links, since a really secure connection will relay through a gateway server straddling the corporate firewall. But, this becomes an extra planning process and procedural step, complicating the process. But, if you need a 24×7 connection to a remote host, this might be your only option. One advantage to using VNC is the persistence of the remote desktop, which can be a representation of the actual console display on the remote, or, in the case of Unix, a separate login display. Unix, being a multi-user system, has had the capability of multiple graphical desktops over the network for decades, but VNC transmits a single window containing a “picture” of the desktop instead of dozens of window and widget objects that compose an X Window desktop.

In recent years, vendors have employed remote-host initiated connections, using HTTP to exchange host display information with the support technician’s computer. This technology is also available through third-party services, where both the remote and local hosts connect through the external service. To securely effect this type of remote connection, the connection information must be passed from the operator of the remote host to the operator of the local host, so this method is also limited in scope. But, when it works, it is adequate, as compression is built into the connection protocols.

For Unix administrators and programmers, there is another method of connecting to a remote computer with the safety of a persistent remote process: the ‘screen’ utiitity program creates virtual command-line text terminals. ‘screen’ allows multiple terminal sessions to be run on the remote host under one remote login session.

One of the big advantages of using persistent remote connections is the ability to connect, say “at the beach,” or in a coffee shop, start up some processes, then disconnect and reconnect later from another location, even from another computer. Most servers now have “Lights Out Management” devices built in, so we can even turn the power on and off and monitor the start-up processes remotely. These tools enable us twenty-first century leisure-seekers to work from the beach as if we were in our windowless cubicles in the basement next to the data center. At least we have the satisfaction that, if we had looked up from our computer, we would have been able to see a spectacular sunset. Hey, it’s dark out! When did that happen? Hmm. Tomorrow night, we’ll be in a different city, but the view will be the same–unless I change my desktop background picture…

A week into Road Tour 2010.  After a few days, we found sharing one laptop computer just wasn’t working.  Getting too fat in coffee shops, reading too many magazines in public libraries that we wouldn’t ordinarily read, etc.  We each needed a computer.

Hanging out in coffee shops waiting for the computer

We’ve been budgeting for a netbook computer for just this purpose for some time.  Obviously, the time is now.  On our way out of Montana, we stopped at Costco, picked up an HP Mini, and tossed it in the trunk.

That night, I fired it up, upon which it went through the excruciating and dreaded Windozews 7 setup procedure.  After grabbing all the updates and replacing Internet Explodrer with Firefox, I backed up to external disk, shut it down and packed it, since the Ubuntu laptop had been thoroughly shared while I was occupied with the onerous Windows task.  Meanwhile, I downloaded the Windows 7 recovery disk ISO (since Microsoft hasn’t figured out how to make a recovery flash drive: Windows can only deal with CD/DVD drives) to write onto a memory stick, and the Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook edition ISO, expecting a few days of fiddling to get things right.

But, the next night, we broke out both machines, turned on the HP Mini, and something called HP QuickWeb came up, with a desktop menu that offered Mail, Web, Photos, etc.  Down in the lower corner of the task bar was an icon labeled “Boot Windows.”  We didn’t click on that one.  There was a familiar-looking antenna icon, which we did click, getting a list of wireless networks, and with one click, we were on the ‘Net, with a Firefox-looking browser, all we really needed.

The Nice Person was delighted, quoting the line from Jurassic Park paraphrased in the title, and the Unix Curmudgeon was delighted to not have to spend evenings repartitioning, installing, and tweaking Ubuntu.  The amazing part of all this is that HP QuickWeb is a carefully kept secret, as if HP doesn’t want Microsoft to find out that the machine is really a Linux machine that just happens to be able to dual boot Windows.  The automatic firstboot setup of Windows is a red herring.  Why would anyone want to click on the Windows start button if they can do everything they need to do with a Netbook within a few seconds of turning on the machine.  And, like Ubuntu, if the wireless network you connected to last is still detectable, it quietly connects you without asking.  It simply does not get in your way, and when you are ready to move on, it shuts down promptly, without the “do not touch your computer while Windows is installing and configuring updates” that we’ve encountered the few times we had to use Windows.

I still have the Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Edition flash drive to fall back on, though I need to get a bigger flash drive to make it useful as a stand-alone system. HP QuickWeb is adequate.  Thanks, HP.

We’ve just started on Road Tour 2010, at the first stop in Montana to take care of business before moving on to Albuquerque for Convergence 2010, a conference of the Handweavers Guild of America.  Summer also being Road Maintenance in the American West, I was struck by the similarities between computer networks and the highway system.

Most people assume the Interstate Highway system is a High Performance system, since it has multiple travel lanes in each direction, permitting parallel travel at different speeds without “blocking.”  Parallel computer systems, whether Symmetric Multiprocessors (like multi-lane highways) or clusters (like the street grids in cities or concentric beltway systems) provide multiple paths for program execution, so there is no waiting in queues or waiting for an opening in the opposite lane to pass.

But, during Road Maintenance season, it is painfully obvious that the Interstate highway system is High Availability instead.  High Availability systems do some load sharing, so appear to be High Performance, but the real purpose is to carry on the job if one of the nodes fails.  A lot of our four-lane interstate highways end up being alternating sections of two-lane highways, as road crews perform necessary repairs to and replacements of paving and bridges.

Interstate 90, which traverses the northern US from Seattle to Boston, suffers greatly from the fierce winters in the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains.  In the long winters, heaving asphalt, spalling concrete, and cracks from the inexorable slip of the roadways downslope result in poor traction indeed as your tires hover a fraction of an inch above the rough surface.  After a few harrowing S-turns through steep mountain canyons, the narrow two-lane corridors through the construction zones are most welcome.

So, too, do computer systems need maintenance.  The roads in Montana require it so frequently that the department of transportation has constructed the equivalent of hot-swap disks and power units, great paved permanent X’s between the numerous  overpasses and bridges to facilitate switching traffic from four to two lanes and back.  A high-availability computer system includes not only fail-over standby and load-sharing systems, but redundant components that can be replaced without ever turning off the system.  The system administrator’s job is to monitor the internal failure sensors and replace failing items before the fall-back components also fail.  Information must flow, even as the daily commerce of the Interstate highways must keep flowing.

In the Rocky Mountain West, there are often no parallel paths for detours: keeping the roads open in bad weather and during maintenance is as essential to commerce as keeping the company web server online 24x7x365.  Those fast four-lane highways are really just redundant two-lane roads: take time and enjoy the scenery.  Oh, and do check on the server status back home when you get to the next WiFi hotspot.

In the summer of 2010, we were invited to spend a day visiting with a friend who was house-sitting on Vashon-Maury Island, a semi-colon of land hanging below the exclamation point of Blake and Bainbridge Islands in the middle of the Salish Sea southwest of Seattle. We immediately accepted, of course, as it was a chance to revisit the site of a major turning point in our life and careers, more than 20 years ago.

In the spring of 1988, we decided we’d like to consider an island lifestyle. We were, at the time, living in the heart of downtown Bremerton, an industrial community framed by the U.S. Navy’s Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, U.S. Submarine Base Bangor, and the Naval Undersea Warfare Engineering Station Keyport. I was, at that time, a systems engineer, mostly working on systems life-cycle engineering support at the submarine base, but had worked at all three facilities. The other half of the family had recently moved from the hospital and surgery center surgical suites to a claims analysis job at a major insurance company in Seattle. Our last child at home was about to enter college in Seattle, and I, in my mid-40s, was about to start long-delayed graduate studies.

In 2010, the Country Store and Farm on Vashon sells bumper stickers that read, “Keep Vashon Weird.” Vashon, once a major fruit and vegetable supplier to the Seattle metropolitan area in an age when the Mosquito fleet put the islands at the hub of the Puget Sound transportation system, had, by the late 1960s, become a haven for hippies seeking the idyllic pastoral life and yuppies seeking cheap waterfront properties. The island is no longer cheap, and the counterculture has evolved into a community of artists, writers, and folks interested in sustainable green living. The Vashon-Maury atoll still stands out as an island of cultural leftism as well as a physical island, accessible only by boat or airplane, and not very, at that. The single short grass-runway airstrip deters most sky-borne visitors, and the only safe public anchorage is within the lagoon of Quartermaster Harbor, with its entrance facing Commencement Bay in Tacoma, to the south. The Washington State Ferries serve the island at north and south ends, where the island rises abruptly from the deep waters, as it does along most of its perimeter.

We moved to the island in the fall of 1988, found the real estate market rather restrictive, and ended up building on a secluded mid-island site with a peekaboo view of 14,410-foot Mount Rainier, 70 miles to the southeast. For the first nine months, we commuted in opposite directions from the north ferry dock from various rentals while we prepared to build. My commute was convoluted by evening graduate school classes in Seattle, resulting in a clockwise grand tour of the archipelagos of the Salish Sea. Driving around Sinclair and Dyes Inlets north to my office near the Hood Canal in the early morning, I left work in the afternoon and headed north around Liberty Bay, onto Bainbridge Island to catch the ferry to Seattle in time for class, then south to West Seattle and the westbound ferry to Vashon. To save a few dollars, on the days I didn’t have school, I parked the car in the commuter lot on the Kitsap Peninsula side of the Sound and walked on the ferry, meeting at the commuter lot on Vashon, where the other car was waiting.

After nearly a year of this personal madness in pursuit of “the good life,” a collective madness took hold of the corporate world in the pursuit of higher profits: the “angel of downsizing” visited us in the summer of 1989, and I found myself prematurely retired at the age of 45, with a new house under construction and no prospect for re-employment soon. I had spent 24 years in the world of proprietary software and hardware systems, compounded by serving in a niche of that world where almost everything was classified in the interest of national security. I had no discernible job skills. I was an expert in the details of designing and analyzing distributed parallel programs in high-availability compute clusters on multi-processor systems, about 20 years before anyone in mainstream information technology realized this was a valuable skill or desired to build such systems. I had, according to my resume, worked on systems XXX, YYY, and ZZZ, programmed in the ABC and DEF languages. I had learned to program in Prolog on a PC to support my projects, but logic languages weren’t then and still aren’t mainstream outside academic research. If I got an interview, the first question was usually, “And, what makes you think you are in our line of work?”

Cast loose from a 24-year career in a highly specialized niche, our move to Vashon was truly a life-style-changing event. The new house was completed, thanks to wiping out the rest of our meager retirement savings. Graduate school tuition, paid the first year by corporate reimbursement, got paid with credit cards. Meanwhile, I was learning a bit about Unix on Seattle University’s system, spending time before and after class in the terminal room.

By spring, I found a job–of sorts–on the island, at Software Research Northwest, which later became part of Bi-Tech and is now Sungard Educational Systems Division. After avoiding COBOL for 29 years since it was developed, I found myself in a crash course in COBOL programming to prepare me for a job as an entry-level COBOL programmer. The operating environment was HP’s MPE. Meanwhile, I converted our 80286 Sperry PC-IT computer from Windows 2/286 to Coherent, a Unix System 7 clone, and starting learning Unix in earnest, along with C programming. The job didn’t pay the bills, and I couldn’t work long hours because of my almost daily commute to Seattle for school, working on a Unix-based (SunOS) Master’s project, so advancement was out of the question.

As graduation loomed, I found a better-paying job, but back in the old military-industrial complex, managing a test engineering group contracted to write system test procedures to certify naval combat systems after overhauls and upgrades. Once again, we were back to the daily opposite-direction commutes and the problem of staging transportation. An opening for a key medical review position at another insurance company opened up a few blocks from my new job, so soon we were both commuting westbound in the morning, though we now spent little more than a few hours a night on the magic island that was to have been our forever dream home.

In the early summer of 1992, we sold our custom home on Vashon. Like Brigadoon, the isle faded into the mist over Puget Sound, and we rejoined the hustle and bustle of fast-paced, fast-food, and bright-light life in a rapidly-growing industrial city. Later, when we both got new jobs in Seattle, she in medical policy and case management with her old employer and me in my first full-time Unix system administration job, we commuted across the Sound, with only brief glimpses of the fair island in the distance to the south in mid-passage. By this time, I had been teaching Computer Science nights at Chapman University’s branch campus on the submarine base, to pay off my tuition bills, so we were tied to the Peninsula. Vashon was lost to us.

When I was in my mid-50s and it was time to look for another job, the Salish Sea had become the heart of Microsoft country; Unix jobs were scarce, and age-agnostic jobs even scarcer as the dot-com boom propelled eager young turks into the computer field. We started building a fall-back: a primitive cabin in the mountains of Montana in which to retire if necessary. As luck would have it, Unixers were scarcer than jobs in Montana: we stayed there ten years building yet another lifestyle as quilting replaced case management and Unix became a tool for genomic research rather than an end in itself.

Returning to the Salish Sea, where we had forged our careers and raised our children, we, now in our mid-60s and battered by the housing slump recession, dismissed the idea of island life, choosing instead to live between the Olympic wilderness and access to civilization, within sight of saltwater. But, Vashon still beckons, at least for a weekend excursion. Like all small communities, many of the businesses depending on steady sales have turned over, but other island institutions have survived and prospered. The custom home we built has been expanded and transformed, and now houses law offices. The trees and bushes have grown to obscure the view, as they have in our new mainland home, perched on what was once a neighborhood with a view and is now a secluded forest hilltop.

Ship traffic and Mt. Rainier, the scenery from Gold Beach, Maury Island

Today was the first nice day in a long time.  It didn’t rain during the day, and the sun came out off and on, and the temperature hit 70F, after a couple weeks in the 50s.  I didn’t mind the cold and rain so much while working on migrating a web applications server from Solaris 10 to Linux (CentOS5.5) late last week through yesterday.  After replacing the SPARC binaries with Intel binaries for Linux, updating Ruby from 1.8.5 to 1.8.6 so I could load rubygems and the database gems, and adding the Perl modules needed for the spreadsheet generators, I tweaked the scripts and Apache configuration for the new disk layout and lit off the new system.  It works!  So, I decided to take advantage of the nice day and take an afternoon bike ride.

Working from home on hourly contract does have its advantages, one of which is being able to mow the lawn or go for a bike ride in the middle of the day.   I’ve been having bike withdrawal lately.  It’s June, after all: prime bike season in the Pacific Northwest, but colder and rainier than usual.  Going to the gym and pounding on the stationary bike just doesn’t seem right in June, so the weight goes up and the leg muscles go slack.   Time to ride.

Lately, I’ve been riding one-way, with the destination being somewhere my tandem stoker has gone with the car for some other activity, but the out-and-back in Montana a couple weeks ago whet my appetite for a round trip.  Besides, the car went off too far today: she’s off to the islands for an overnight, so I’m on my own.  There’s not a lot of short loops in our hilly town on the bay.  I’ve been meaning to check out a relatively flat route between the Sound and the Hood Canal, so plotted a course for Mason Lake, a large fresh-water lake northeast of town, 17.2 miles one way to the county park at the east end of the lake.

I’m on my old commuter bike, “Rocky,” a bare-bones Specialized Hard Rock I picked up in ’97 to commute to my job in the Seattle industrial district and rode for ten years in Montana.  It isn’t fast, but it handles hills and rough roads fairly well.  A fast downhill into town, then a long climb traversing the north hill, and soon out in the country, on two-lane roads with fairly heavy traffic and no shoulder.  I hug the fog line and roll with the hills.  Past the congested Lake Limerick area, the traffic thins out and the road travels through the farmlands of Mason County, where the crop is Douglas Fir, and the growing season is 70 years.  Between the mature stands and the clearcuts are the 25-year-old, recently cultivated fields of thickly-set poles.

It’s good to be back in the Pacific Northwest, where I put the bulk of my bike mileage behind me in the 1980s and 1990s.  The summers are mild, if you don’t mind a little rain; the rich smell of the deep forest greets you in the shady stands, and sometimes the clearcuts offer views of distant mountain ranges.  I haven’t ridden enough this spring, and the legs and seat  start complaining about the 15-mile mark.

But, it is always so.  Today’s ride, almost 35 miles, is the longest of this season, but I’ve found if you can ride 35 miles, the pain settles into a constant and your body adjusts to the energy output, provided you eat and drink moderately and often to match.  I think about another day near the summer solstice, 27 years ago, when “Big Red,” my 1979 Fuji Grand Tourer, and I hung together as a transportation machine for nearly 15 hours, riding from the Seattle City Hall to the Portland City Hall, a bit over 200 miles on the back roads of Washington and east on US30 through Oregon from Rainier to Portland.  Back then, I was a year older than Lance Armstrong is this year, but never a racer.  I started commuting by bike half a lifetime ago, at age 33, and became an accidental bike tourist while training for the Seattle-to-Portland ride. After 33 years, bicycling has become part of who I am, and riding to the horizon and beyond is like walking out to the mailbox. You just have to keep doing it in order to be able to keep doing it.

Just about 90 minutes after leaving home, I arrive at the county park at the east end, after riding what seems endless road through the forest after coming to the west end of the lake.  It is warm and sunny, and I take a few minutes to eat and drink, watching a couple of guys wrestle a power boat up the boat ramp.  I’ve made it this far, now all I have to do is reverse course and ride home.

The fun part of out-and-back rides is you get to spend time admiring the scenery you missed on fast downhills and skip the scenery you spent too much time passing uphill on the way out.  Somehow, the first half seems shorter, but then stretches out.  In my one-way rides, I’ve taken the north route out of town several times, but this is the first time I’ve returned this way.  On the dive down into town, I’m on par with the cars, and even have to slow down as I spot a police car ahead.  The road is rough and grooved from the wet spring, so a fast downhill is a bit dicey; I catch the right turn on the yellow at the bottom of the hill.

Unfortunately, we picked a decidedly bike-unfriendly town in which to spend our golden years.  Angry shouts from a couple of cars back greet me as I wait in the through-lane at the cross-town traffic light, “Get off the road!”  It takes him almost two blocks to pass me.  In Missoula, Montana, I used to be able to cross the city from east to west faster than the car traffic, by using bike paths and secondary streets.  Still, automobile drivers are too often unwilling to share the road.

Across the Simpson mill railroad tracks, I shift all the way down and hit the hill head-on, but quickly grind to a halt on the double-digit grade.  I alternately push and ride up the steeper fork of the Y, as the shorter route has no shoulder, fast, aggressive traffic, and blind curves, no place for a bicyclist to assert road rights.  At the top, it’s a shallow downhill back three blocks to home and a quick left turn in front of the blind curve and the stop sign that no one actually stops at: most just slow down for a quick glance left, ignoring the driveways on the right.

One of these days, I may make it to our hilltop home on my wheels, but not today.  But, at 66, with over 45,000 miles of road behind me since,  I’m still stronger than I was that summer day in 1976 when I saddled up for that first 4-mile commute to work, after which I fell down when I got off the bike because my legs were run out.  But, I got back on, and rode farther, until that day seven years later when 200 miles passed under the wheels before I was done for the day.  Biking keeps you young.  Today was a training ride, so this fall, I can hope to ride my birthday miles, as I have for the past five years–a one-day ride as many miles as you are years old.  I haven’t ridden a full century ride since 1987 (We switched to fat tires in 1986, so a 60-mile day loaded for touring is like 100 on a racer, and we’ve done lots of 100KM days), but I’m working toward my next one, in 34 years.  Maybe on a lighter, faster bike.

When I first saw the Mel Gibson film, “The Road Warrior,” it was one of those moments when you knew it would be a classic.  Lots of symbolism, among a violent tale of post-apocalypse survival.  What makes it classic is the hero’s vulnerability, despite all his bravado and ingenuity, standing alone between those clinging desperately to order and building a new future and the lawless determined to get what they can before it is gone forever.

Working “on the road” in the Internet Age isn’t Mel and the Humongous cruising the Australian outback looking for fuel, but it’s close.  I spent most of the week near a small lake resort town in Montana.  We have an off-the-grid primitive cabin in the mountains nearby, and I  cruise into town looking for Internet access from time to time.  In most towns across America today, there is plenty of Internet access.  The coffee shops and libraries are the most reliable, and you can usually get a signal parked out front even if they are closed.  So, the Information Highway (as it was called, briefly, in its infancy as a world-wide phenomenon) is accessible and relatively open.

The real problem is fuel supply.  Few of the places I stopped this week had power outlets.  One of my colleagues says they would never get rid of us if they did, so maybe he has a point.  My point, not having a source of electric power at the cabin, was, I needed juice to keep the computer running.  I’d been thinking of putting in a solar panel, but it rained all week, so good luck there…  I had a car-starting battery and an inverter, but had foolishly let the thing sit in the back of the car without recharging it from the last trip, and it was flat.  Inverters are inefficient power hogs, so running the computer off the car while parked in range of a good wi-fi signal wasn’t attractive.

I did get the local library to take pity on me and unplug something non-vital long enough to get a full charge.  I forgot I carry a double-outlet compact surge protector, or I could have split the line.  Complications, complications.  In our former home town, the library has plenty of electrical outlets at the study carrels and even in the stacks near tables, and the coffee shops are similarly equipped, but not here.  It could be the tourist thing–a town weary of the onslaught of sun-and-fun seekers for the short Montana summer might consciously or unconsciously discourage the tourists from camping out in their favorite winter haunts and sipping power (which, by the way, comes from a large hydroelectric plant just downstream from the lake–no short supply there).

My old laptop came with double batteries, but both together had less capacity than the modern ones, and they needed recharged eventually and had a relatively short service life.   The increasingly mobile Internet access needs a reliable source of fuel.  What good is wireless Internet access if you need wired power to use it?  Cell phones and computers are rapidly growing in capacity to be able to run most of the day on one charge, with the assumption that you will have a ready source of power for recharging while you sleep.  A few years ago, there was some briefly serious look at fuel cells, but they were never perfected, and the post-9/11 security put an end to the possibility of toting a liquid-fueled computer on an airliner.

In my travels, I’ve spent too much time sitting on the floor in the waiting areas at airports just to get close enough to the rare electrical outlets there, and had queues form, fellow ‘Net addicts desperate for a quick charge before boarding (where was that multi-port surge protector then?).  I haven’t traveled by air lately, but I understand that some of the international carriers have put power jacks in the seat consoles for long flights.  But, for the rest of us internet road warriors, it’s a desert out there, with the inevitable clashes when we come across a lone vacant power jack.  Battery’s fading.  Gotta go.

The Unix curmudgeon and the nice person are on a road show again, traveling back to Montana to take care of business:  real estate, visit clients, and taking care of the off-the-grid cabin.  As usual, we make space in the car for the computer, as we have for more than 20 years.  In the beginning, it was a business necessity, but now having a computer or smart phone is almost essential for the traveler.

My first traveling computer was a TI-40 Compact Computer, a one-line LCD display programmed in BASIC, not much bigger than a large calculator, that I bought in an after-Christmas closeout in January 1985.

Our first true full “portable” computer was a luggable 8086 Sperry Portable, which had a 5-inch CRT and weighed about 40 pounds.  It spent a lot of its life with us as an RS-232 serial terminal, but worked fine with a modem, too.  It spent so much time at the project room in grad school that the University slapped a property sticker on it, because I couldn’t lug it back and forth all the time.  For some reason, we never got around to giving it a name.  It ran MS-DOS4 and had only floppy drives.  I bought it used–it had belonged to a computer training company and they stripped the hard drives out before liquidating them.

The second portable was duncan, an NCR pen-top computer that ran Windows for Pen 1.0.  It was a 386 machine, with a 20MB hard drive.  I packed a full-sized keyboard and a Telebit QBlazer modem on road trips with that one.  Airport security didn’t like it very much, because it was odd.  It got a name because I used UUPC, a shareware port of UUCP to MS-DOS, so it sent and received email over the modem, exchanging with our Coherent (Unix ‘clone’) machine at home.

Our first true laptop computer was darek, a CTX700 with a 200MHz Pentium MMX, 40MB of RAM (a major upgrade from 8MB),  and a 2GB hard drive.  It came with Windows 95, but spent most of its life running Red Hat Linux 5 or SuSE 6, so it was our first Unix machine  on the road.  It went everywhere, and I even used it in flight a few times, but, I had to put the screen on my lap and touch-type with the keyboard against my chest.  It got too small to run regular distributions anymore, so had to be retired, finally.  It had a 56KB modem internal and a 10BaseT Ethernet, with interchangeable CD, floppy, and battery modules.  You could run it with the CD, with a Floppy, with both on AC, or with two batteries for extended run and no peripherals.

With no budget for a new laptop, I built a Mini-ITX-based portable, named “nikita,” with a CD and 80GB hard dirve, using a 15-inch LCD monitor and a laptop-sized USB keyboard,  but the VIA C3 chipset DMA was unstable, which meant it couldn’t run a lot of things at the same time without crashing.  The machine got FreeBSD installed on it, a second Ethernet card, and became the router for our home network, which it handled quite well.  After five years of faithful service, it did not survive the move to Washington.  Sometimes hard drives seize up if allowed to get cold.

Our current road machine is an HP Compaq Presario 714NR, which came with Windows Vista on it, and now runs Ubuntu 9.10, having been upgraded every six months since Ubuntu 7.10.  It has had a bit of memory transfusion, too, up to 2GB and begging for more.  It’s got 100BaseT Ethernet and an 802.11G wireless, and an 80GB hard drive, with DVD-R/W.  The big issue with this machine is the Broadcom wireless, which has been problematic for Linux, but finally seems to be under control.  Having a dual-core CPU helps a lot, but more RAM is needed.  The laptop has become a primary machine, at least until the recession recedes, but it is essential to have everything available on the road.

Travel in the 21st century means staying at motels that have free wi-fi, seeking out coffee shops with wi-fi, and war-driving in small towns while on the go or staying at places without network connections.  I’ve been writing this in motels and by grabbing wireless where I can.  It has become inconceivable to travel any distance without having access to the Internet and one’s files.  The cloud is becoming a repository for a lot of data that we used to have to synch between machines before going off on a trip.  As much as I use the laptop as a primary computer, I still need more power in my office to do “real” work, i.e., clustering, testing with alternate OSes, etc.

One issue with travel is keeping track of your things.  Like our tandem bicycle, I never let the laptop out of my sight.  There’s a lot of data in there, and a lot of inconvenience to lose your computing power.  I do a backup before heading out, but that doesn’t help on the road.  A better solution is to have a portable backup disk and keep it separate from the laptop.  Our situation is a bit peculiar, too, as we can’t readily replace a Linux laptop if it fails or goes on walkabout without permission.  Keeping a distro CD handy (again, in another bag) is an option, but inconvenient.

The Internet is essential business and situational intelligence.  The ability to look at real-time weather condtions on the mountain pass ahead is invaluable, as is the access to up-to-date maps and geographic databases.  I searched in vain for a place that wasn’t listed in my 3-year-old GPS database (too cheap to upgrade–bad mistake), but readily found it once I was able to “jack in” to the Internet on the laptop.

It’s been a strange 25 years to go from having essentially a programmable calculator to help with fuel and schedule management to running a business on the road out of a briefcase stuffed with what would have been a large mainframe in 1985.

Picture this scenario:   a typical family on a Friday evening, Dad relaxing before tackling those term papers for college classes, oldest son on the computer, Mom finishing up in the kitchen, the toddlers fussily wearing down into that cranky, tired but not yet bedtime limbo.  Then…

“Mom, there’s something wrong with the computer.”   Mom picks up the youngest and looks over Junior’s shoulder.  There’s browser windows all over the screen.  Nothing is happening.  Junior clicks on the corner of one.  Nothing.  It’s frozen.

“Just shut it off,” she says.  He clicks on the Start icon.  Nothing.  So, she reaches down and unplugs the computer.  She plugs it back in, and it boots up. To a blank desktop.  The on-line tickets she purchased a few days ago, Dad’s college term papers, all the familiar icons, gone…  This is not good.

She calls her aunt, who is always on the computer.  She’ll know what to do.  ”Ah, that sounds bad,” says her aunt.  ” Maybe you should call your grandfather.  He’s a real computer expert.”   Now, you don’t hear that very often: usually it’s the grandkids helping grandma with her email.  But, she does, anyway.  Call her grandfather, that is.

The phone rings, and I pick up.  It takes a bit to connect the dots, because she’s in a panic, and I have to switch from my business voice to my “papa” voice.  The kids and grandkids hardly ever call–mostly we email and exchange pictures on Facebook, that sort of thing.  After a few niceties, she relates this tale of woe.  The “user-friendly” computer has turned nasty.

Like a lot of Unix users and system administrators, I dread these calls. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I love hearing from kids and grandkids, but I don’t do Windows.  Our relatives know we speak in binary to our computers, and will just gesture hypnotically at the recalcitrant machine and it will suddenly behave.  Clarke’s Law at work, I suppose–”Any technology sufficiently different from your own is indistinguishable from magic.”  And computers are just, well, computers, aren’t they?  Windows is the computer as far as they know.

After I get her calmed down a bit, I explain I really don’t do Windows, but I’ll think about it, meanwhile remotely booting up a copy of Windows XP in a virtual machine on a server somewhere else in Chaos Central, so I can remember what Windows looks like and where things are.  The usual and customary assumption when someone’s computer “goes south” is that it has picked up a virus or has gotten so loaded with spyware it can’t function anymore.  But this doesn’t sound like the issue.

The computer seems to be running normally.  I think about having her boot up in Safe mode, but the F8 key is marked “Terra Incognita” on her mental map of the keyboard, and you have to be fast.  She relates an error message that flashes on the screen, to the effect something can’t be loaded, whatever.  Aha, I think, this sounds more like it.  I ask her to open the “My Computer” icon, open the “Hard Drive C:” and burrow down into the Documents and Settings and look through the Desktop folders in each user.  Like a lot of Windows families, the concept of separate user spaces is lost on them: it’s just “the computer” and everyone uses it just the way it is, is defaults to the “Owner” account.

The panic strain in her voice disappears and turns to joy–she’s found the files.  They’re all there.  I’m not sure I can explain more over the phone, so we talk a bit about how her husband’s schooling is going–he’s got one more semester to finish his degree at long last and fulfill his dream of becoming a teacher.  The great-grandkids are growing, too.  the oldest girl is going to be three.  The baby is whining for attention and obviously walking, I can hear her in the background.   We’ll be down to visit before they go on the vacation she thought she lost the tickets for…

Later, I send her the “official” solution from the Microsoft Knowledge Base, so she can clean up the mess if she can wade through the arcane kludge.  Otherwise, it may just have to wait a couple months until we visit, though that’s the other pet peeve of Unix admins everywhere.  We didn’t go on vacation to visit your Windows computer, we came to see you.  And, we have our own Linux computer in the car, thanks.

And, the winning answer, from Microsoft?  The gist of it is, when this happens: create a new user account and copy all the files from the old account into it.

What?  You’re saying it actually can’t be fixed?

Yup, that’s right.  You have to start over.  But your files are still there…

So, how does this happen, that the biggest computer software company on the planet has a feature built into the very fabric of their system, one that controls the user’s view of the system, that every so often just crashes and can’t be fixed?

Well, boys and girls, once upon a time, the designers of what came to be known as Windows New Technology, or Windows NT, desiring to enter the world of corporate computing and take on the “big iron” contenders like IBM, DEC, and all the Unix vendors, built a system configuration structure in which to keep all the important information about the installed software, current state of the system.  The structure was a convoluted, distributed set of databases.  Although the organization of it was tree-like, they didn’t want it to be confused with the also-tree-like file system, so they invented a new term.  The named this structure The Registry (with capitals so we would know it was important), and called it a “hive.”  Apparently the diagrams used by the designers to describe it to the programmers looked like beehives, so the name stuck.

It is probably appropriate, then, that, when you mess with the hive, you get stung.  Now, most Windows users are blissfully unaware of the Registry and its hive-like structure, but it is there.  It turns out that one of the components of this hive is a database for each user account, a file called NTUSER.DAT (Windows has never gotten over its humble origins in MS-DOS, and still uses all-caps, 8-character plus three-character file extension names for really important files) and its associated log file.  It’s right there, in your home folder, when you logon, but you don’t see it, because it is “hidden” from the directory view.  Besides, it’s a system file, so you can’t mess with it anyway, at least not on purpose.

What users also don’t know is that the Registry, of which their very own personal NTUSER.DAT file is part, has a finite size, defaulted to some fairly low value, deemed to be sufficient until the next upgrade of Windows, or your next computer purchase, both of which happen on average every two or three years, in the minds of the marketeers, anyway.  There’s a couple things wrong with that.  Most home users keep their computers until the machine dies a natural death, which is anywhere from five to eight years, and keep the original software, and then you have those predictable delays when it takes Microsoft five years to come out with an unusable replacement that nobody is willing to replace their computer to get.

So, over that long period of time, a time bomb is slowly ticking inside the machine.  As you use your machine, that NTUSER.DAT file grows.  And grows.  When you drop things on your desktop, it gets bigger. When you move them somewhere else, or delete them, it gets bigger.  There is no way to shrink it.  Now, if you really, really know what you are doing, you can give the Registry more space, but your computer’s performance will suffer, so that’s not a satisfactory solution either (one of the signs that your NTUSER.DAT file is getting too big is that your computer is getting slower and slower).  Eventually, the sum total of the Registry files reaches the magic limit, and you can’t write any more data into it.  Usually, this happens in the middle of some transaction, which just stops, leaving the file in an ambiguous state, which means, in plain English, it is broken.  When you logon, Windows complains, and then your desktop is blank.  Game over.

In the Windows game,  you don’t get a new life, you have to get a new character, so to speak.  This is just so wrong on so many levels I don’t know where to start.  The Windows configuration is so complex that even highly experienced, certified Windows administrators and engineers have trouble dealing with it.   Some parts of The Registry can be edited, with special tools, but there are no checks and balances, so it is really easy to turn your computer into an expensive doorstop with one errant keystroke.  Oh, you do have one chance to recover, by using Safe Mode (which, as we explained earlier, is difficult or incomprehensible for the average user to do), but don’t count on it.  Windows administrators have this secret mantra they chant when users are not listening:  ”Reboot often, and, when in doubt, reinstall.”  Well, most users don’t back up their files regularly, so reinstalling is just like getting a new computer, minus all your music, photos, games, term papers due next week, and financial records.

So, when us crusty old Unix curmudgeons say, “I don’t do Windows,” we mean it.  We know it wasn’t your fault that your computer came with this abomination installed on it, so we sometimes take pity on you.  But, we believe that Windows is broken “out of the box,” and the only way to fix the computer is to replace Windows with something else.  If we get our hands on your broken Windows installation, don’t be surprised if it has Linux on it instead when you get it back.