EGOPOLY

A nice summary of latency, what it means to your web business and how to attack it. Thanks Derek for the link.

http://highscalability.com/latency-everywhere-and-it-costs-you-sales-how-crush-it

Dabbleboard

iPhone:
Flight info
Hotel info
Boston Coach info
Fully charge

Computer:
presentation
verify keynote is installed on computer
verify VPN to home/work
verify iDisk sync
charge computer

Laptop bag:
Empty first
Full itinerary on a piece of paper, in outer pocket, and on fridge at home.
paper copy of conference agenda
Computer + charger
ipod + headphones
extra iphone headphones
extra ipod USB cable
ipod/iphone wall charger
camera?
2 books
medicine bag
toothbrush
mp3 cd of good music if renting a car
energy bar
pen
notebook/paper
business cards
eyeglasses case so I don’t leave them on the plane in the seatback again!

Duffle:
clothes + 1 day extra
swimsuit
dress shirt?
dress shoes?

Wear:
phone
travel watch
sports jacket
dress shirt
minimize wallet

Turn off leopard dock. Change background to solid color. Turn off Genie effect. Increase keyboard repeat speed to max.

Install developer tools (xcode), firefox, macports, mysql.

Macport installs: lynx, openvpn2, wget.

Firefox: install web developer, firebug, tamper data, foxmarks. Turn off auto update check for plugins, browser, search engines.

.mac: sync contacts, safari bookmarks, idisk.

home directory: copy .ssh, emacs files, cshrc and environments, bin directory.

Download Sprint Novatel U727 drivers.

Install IPSecuritas, configure ipsec for home, work.

It’s time for a new laptop. Should I get a black MacBook or a MacBook Air? I keep waffling. I basically use it for remote access to my work/home desktop computers, for web browsing and email.

Black:

Faster (33%50%)
More Disk Space (3X)
Faster Disk (5400RPM)
Has DVD
Cheaper ($300)

Air:

Awesome LED backlit display
Smaller

I’m leaning towards the BlackBook.

Update: BlackBook it is! What put me over the edge (aside from *cough* $300) was lack of an ethernet port on the Air. I don’t want to carry around a stupid dongle to plug in to a LAN.

oh yes.

http://videogum.com/archives/the-ultimate-argument-settler/lightsaber_010339.html

You’d think this would just be on the install DVD, but I couldn’t find it.

http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/resources/

Most firewalls now support IPSec tunnels for VPN access. My experience has been that you need to buy some client that matches the firewall, and of course that means it has to support the OS you are running. That means that Mac support is hard to come by on the vast majority of firewalls. Cisco supports Mac with their client, but there are two problems with that: Cisco is darn expensive, and their software is ugly.

A little bit of research turned up some interesting stuff. First, OS X has IPSec support (via “kame/raccoon“) built-in. Unfortunately, there’s no GUI or wizard, so configuration requires knowledge that is pretty unattainable to non-network programming geeks, and an inconvenient learning curve for the geeks. Second, there are at least two solutions available to configure IPSec on Mac with various documentation for different firewalls.

One is VPN Tracker, which is a commercial product that costs between $150-$250. It appears to have a very good UI, a great web site, lots of documentation and a responsive support staff. The documentation and support is important because there are hundreds of firewalls out there, and they all have their own specific ways of setting up IPSec tunnels. VPN Tracker seems to have pretty good coverage: every VPN-capable firewall I’ve seen is on the list. I was not able to get the trial version working with either our Fortigate-60 or our Netscreen-50 here at work, but I might be able to; their support staff has contacted me with some questions. I’m pretty confident I could get it to work.

The other solution I found is IPSecuritas. It’s totally free, which is kind of mind-blowing as the software and website is maybe 95% as nice/slick as VPN Tracker. There seems to be a lot less documentation on various firewalls, but there’s a community-driven mechanism where people can post their solutions. I was able to get IPSecuritas working through our NetScreen 50 with the help of this web page. (And, I think I’d be able to go back and get the VPN Tracker working as well. The documentation for VPN tracker didn’t include policy changes, which I thought was odd at the time. Turns out it was odd: you need to add policies to allow the tunnel from the internet to your LAN.)

One disappointment is that the IPSecuritas software promises “split DNS.” The idea is that for hostnames internal to your LAN, it will send requests into the LAN DNS server, and for others, it will use the DNS server of where ever you are. It doesn’t work for me. This seems part of the larger problem I have with DNS on Leopard: it is exceedingly difficult to override a DNS server that comes with a DHCP address. I’m trying to figure out the story behind that.

If you’re a fan of The Sopranos, and you’re still puzzling about the series finale, read this article. It’s fascinating. Spoilers galore, of course.

These instructions worked well. The one problem I had was my openssl is out of sync with the latest 8.3 version, so I just configured without ssl.

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/pgsql \
--enable-thread-safety \
--without-docdir \
--with-perl \
--with-gssapi \
--with-pam \
--with-bonjour \
--without-openssl