There were a handful of talks on the subjects of DNS and IPv6.

The hacker Jeopardy session was a lot of fun. I think the audience got more correct answers than the panel. I was impressed with the software somebody wrote to show the game categories – very convincing. Afterward, the EFF had an interesting fundraiser (your photo beside a “model”.)

The weather was hot but clear. The McDonald’s across the street is open 24 hours and has free WiFi.

I walked over to the Fashion Show Mall (about 1 mile.) It has a variety of restaurants on different levels, including a Maggiano’s, the Capital Grille, and a gourmet burger stand.

theregister.co.uk: Defcon speaker calls IPv6 a ’security nightmare’

It was a good conference, and we had beautiful weather all week long.

Executive Summary

The themes promoted by the conference organizers were Cloud Computing, NoSQL, Emerging Languages (Scala, Erlang, Parrot, Go) and Android phone development.

The @oscon twitter channel was heavily used to coordinate amongst organizers and attendees. I used the TwiXtreme twitter client program on my BlackBerry.

Plug Computers were very popular in the Expo area. They are 5 watt ARM-based computers running Debian Linux that fit into a power brick-sized case and cost $99 to $129 depending on features. The Marvell booth had a few models on display, from GlobalScale (GuruPlug) and Ionics. High-end models have dual gigabit NICs, multiple USB ports, a WiFi access point and other expansion ports.

There was also continuing buzz regarding Facebook’s Flashcache SSD module (GPL v2) for linux, and also ZFS snapshots.

Tutorials

I went to the Gearman Cookbook tutorial, the first half of the Chef tutorial and some of the Cloud Summit talks.

The Gearman Cookbook tutorial was excellent. After a detailed overview of the Gearman architecture and implementations in Perl and C, a number of use cases were explored in detail, including before and after code samples. The talk was both easy to listen to as an overall survey, as well as providing immediately useful info for those wanting to deploy it.

The Chef tutorial was very detailed – too much so perhaps. I went to the first half only, since I am not planning to implement Chef soon (I use PXE and anaconda/kickstart with CentOS), and did not need that level of detail at this time. cfengine, puppet and chef are ops tools for configuring servers. Chef uses Ruby data structures for its configuration files, and has include files and other useful syntax. Basically, users can “code” server configuration, as if they were traditional apps.

I went to some of the Cloud Summit talks and BOFs, but found that anybody who has done a simple project using EC2 knew as much or more than the speakers, some I would call blowhards.

Marten Mickos, president of Eucalyptus, is refreshing in that he is always clear about being in it for the money, while also promoting Open Source.

Sessions

Some of the most memorable sessions to me were:

Introduction to MongoDB, Kristina Chodorow (MongoDB)

Kristina is the maintainer of the Perl and PHP drivers for MongoDB. She gave an overview of MongoDB, a NoSQL document store, and its command-line interface, which uses JavaScript.

Some day she will release a sharding tool for MongoDB.

Scaling SourceForge with MongoDB, Nosh Petigara (10gen), Rick Copeland (SourceForge.net / GeekNet)

Nosh and Rick gave an excellent review of incorporating MongoDB into the SourceForge site.

- SF query load is mostly read-only
- ops team benchmarked a few NoSQL candidates, and MongoDB won on performance
- original MySQL servers had 64 GB RAM. After migration to MongoDB, same server machines but only 8 GB RAM
- backup dumps are verified to be bitwise the same as masters
- have to be careful not to dump all documents in your database to the network or it will max out switches
- SF relies on first-class data centers and replication slaves, less worried about MongoDB mmap (not crash-safe)
- I personally looked at their performance numbers and site graphs (on an iPad), and the end result was impressive.

Perl Lightning Talks

As always, the Perl Lightning Talks are a highpoint of the conference.

The “cartoon” of Vincent Pit’s remarkable CPAN module(VPIT) contributions was both informative and hilarious. Vincent is a French Ph.D. candidate in advanced geometry.

Cloud BOF (3 Hours)

The Cloud BOF was disorganized, starting 30 minutes late and for some reason was subdivided into 4 audience groups. Startups and vendors trying to make a cloud sales push led the BOF, including cloud and DNS service providers.

The Health Regulations subgroup came up with a couple ways to make the Cloud palatable to regulators by using encryption on all data due to the multi-tenancy issues with sharing public VMs.

I was in the NoSQL group, which discussed general issues and particular successes. Memcached was the clearest winner, while some people also had success with MongoDB and Redis.

My neighbor was an engineer at Postrank.com. He said that they were happy with HAProxy, but much less happy with the unpredictable IO available when running MySQL on EC2. He also said to carefully look at storage volumes available to your instance, as one is a useful tmpfs. They use AuthSMTP to get around EC2 being generally blacklisted for outbound email.

Database BOFs

MySQL BOF

The MySQL AB engineering staff has left Oracle. Monty Program AB (21 staff) has the core developers, and Percona Inc. (32 staff) has the consultants. Oracle still has some of the InnoDB programmers.

The business plan for Monty Program AB is 60% commercially-sponsored MySQL development, and 40% community-request development. Monty would like commercial users of MySQL to sponsor patches that would benefit them.

Mark mentioned that using Nehalem instructions for CRC were much faster, and that Facebook was using partitions for truncating tables instead of doing multi-record deletes. (See his blog for more details.)

One person mentioned using a commercial backup tool, R1Soft, that inserts a linux kernel module to allow filesystem snapshots. He said to carefully test backup and restore in your environment, especially for filesystems greater than 1 TB which may exceed certain block counter limits. Peter said that some of his clients had used it with varying success.

It worked for him in his environment, and the file browser allows selective file restore (he uses it to restore by priority where a system runs multiple applications.) It starts at $299 for the Standard Edition, and also has MySQL Add-on and Enterprise Editions.

PostgreSQL BOF

The PostgreSQL BOF talked about 30 or so changes that went into version 9.

One of the most exciting new features is a native replication feature, called streaming replication (block-based.) The advantage over Slony-I replication is that Slony-I is trigger-based, so has a variety of issues included inability to replicate DDL commands.

Some of the developers mimed replication events, which was rather amusing to watch. Yes, it was taped.

PostgreSQL is released under the PostgreSQL Licence, which is BSDish.

Peter Zaitsev, co-founder of Percona, organized 3 BOFs, including XtraDB, XtraBackup, Maatkit, Percona Server, Sphinx Search and Running Databases on Flash Storage.

Sphinx Search BOF

Andrew Aksyonoff, the original programmer of Sphinx Search (GPL v2), couldn’t make it to OSCON (the good excuse was that he was busy coding), so Richard Kelm (Sphinx sales/customer support honcho) and Peter filled in (Percona is a business partner with Sphinx, and many of Percona’s clients use it.)

Some of the attendees were existing users, like myself, and some from HP and other companies were looking for a large-scale search solution or alternative to Lucene.

Monty mentioned that the latest MySQL 5.1 should be used, as there have been a number of performance and reliability improvements. Full-text search is supposed to be 10x faster than 5.0, and replication is nearly bug-free by now.

Sphinx Search now has real-time index updates in version 1.1.0 beta. Another very nice feature is SQL+FS indexing.

Here is the full Sphinx 1.1.0 changelog.

Running Databases on Flash Storage BOF

The Running Databases on Flash Storage BOF had a combination of MySQL and Postgres users who have tested or used most of the SSD products: FusionIO, violin, Intel, OCZ, etc. Everybody was happy with SSD IOPS performance, but less so with cost and metadata RAM requirements with the add-in boards (FusionIO may require 4 GB RAM for metadata.)

Peter said that 20% to 30% of his clients are already using SSD – across the spectrum of vendors and models. Some are also trying “massive RAM” solutions, like Cisco servers with 384 GB RAM.

Some users had 1+ TB Postgres databases with very thorny backup and mgmt. issues. One solution was to start a snapshot, but not do the copy operation.

Expo Notes

I had an enjoyable talk with Austin Hook, who has operated the OpenBSD Store for many years. He lives near Calgary, the center of OpenBSD/OpenSSH/PF development. He mentioned that some perennial financial contributors had stopped because of the recession, so here’s the donations link.

I also talked to some reps from a Brazilian outsourcing firm, ActMinds. They currently have 400 employees across Brazil and a sales office in Philadelphia. Brazil is only 2 hours ahead of EST. They said the minimum project size is 2 developers and developer turnover a low 5%/annum. Their pricing is $35 to $45/hour.

And I had fun handling the plug computers on display at the Marvell booth. The Ionics boards are amazingly densely populated.

Discussions

I had the opportunity to talk to a long-time Portland resident who works as a computer consultant. He said that the Portland economy is not doing great, and really hasn’t done well since old-growth logging was stopped after 90% of the forests were cleared. And although hundreds of miles of fiber optic has been laid downtown, it’s not available for residential use. However, the Beaverton area does have ubiquitous FTTH.

I also talked to somebody who attended the Emerging Languages talks. He’s working on his M.Sc. in Computer Science, so found those talks fascinating.

Twitter Humor

There were some humorous tweets:

- “my MongoDB and CouchDB mugs are fighting each other.”
- “I got one MongoDB mug, but need two to safely store coffee.”

Notes

Note to self: skip the nightly parties unless you have a date. The bars are too loud to talk to anybody.

Note to the O’Reilly conference organizers: use meetup.com for the BOFs like ApacheCon does. The average audience was about 10 people, and with meetup it would be 4x that.

OSCON 2010 Slides
Tim Bray: Desperate Perl Hacker
Youtube: OSCON 2010 videos
blip.tv: OSCON2010 videos
wikipedia: Plug Computer
Jeremy Zawodny: MongoDB Early Impressions

Easier said than done.

What drugstores and office supply stores call a “first aid kit” is just a box of 100 bandaids and 100 tylenols – totally inadequate for any kind of trauma.

It ends up that anything useful is called a “trauma bag” or “EMT first responder kit.”

Those have basic surgical tools, such as shears for removing clothing, bandage scissors and forceps, gloves, epi for allergic reactions, in addition to bandaids and tylenol.

Beyond that, your trauma kit needs to be customized for the expected environment.

Hikers need a light-weight kit than contains blister and snake-bite aids.

Airmen can carry a heavier kit that contains burn aids and splints.

Make sure your kit, like any luggage, is adequately secured in the aircraft. (In Cessnas I use a seatbelt instead of dumping items in the rear baggage compartment. Otherwise in a quick deceleration, such as a crash or noseover, heavy objects will strike the pilot and front seat passenger. Ask Martha King what a toolbox to the head feels like.)

And last but not least – don’t forget training on what to do with all that gear when the occasion arises.

In the past, Bali was regarded as an inexpensive place for young Australians and others to vacation.

For the first time however, I would have to say that is becoming a memory of the past.

There are the occasional local hotels still available for under $25/nite, but none of the newer hotels, which are aiming for $100 to $200/nite.

If you can afford it, the new Holiday Inn Baruna Bali in Tuban at $120 to $200/nite is awesome – opening right onto Tuban/Wanasegara Beach. The style is more modern than Balinese, but you can visit the Risata Hotel Bali down the street and see lush Balinese gardens and stonework.

Taxis have greatly increased in price recently. The fare used to be an afterthought, typically less than $1 within a city.

There are 2 classes of taxis now:

1. Bluebird – great service and fair prices – old (cheaper) argo meter settings, worth calling in
2. other companies – average service and high prices – new (higher) argo setttings, or even 40 ribu minimum pickup fare from Galeria Mall. Indonesian visitors are scared of these prices.

To save money, use an ojek (motorcycle taxi), or try carpooling and scheduling multiple stops on the same trip.

Or pick a hotel within easy walking distance of sites that’s also near a major travel artery. In Kuta, that would be at the exit of Jl. Legian near Jl. Pantai Kuta (easy walk to the Legian nightclub scene, memorial and Kuta Beach as well as near taxis to Tuban or Denpasar.) In Tuban, that would be on Jl. Wana segara or Jl. Kartika Pl. (easy walk to Tuban Beach or Discovery Mall/Mal Centro.)

I talked to some merchants in Tuban, and asking rents for storefronts have doubled in the past 12 months.

All of the computer stores selling PCs in Kuta, Tuban and Sanur have closed, likely due to high rents, low margins and lack of capital. There are a few Mac stores, such as PC Max and one in Carrefour. Otherwise, you must go to the large Rimo Computer Mall in Denpasar. Rimo is pretty good for basic parts, with new releases lagging Jakarta by 2 to 3 weeks.

The most comprehensive selection of DSLR batteries and accessories in Kuta-Tuban is in the Zoom Digital Kiosk in Discovery Mall, Tuban.

If you’re a computer or business person and need to stay in touch online, visit Internet Sartika at Jalan Wana segara No. 29, Tuban. It has dual broadband connections (1 Mbps DSL and 1 Mbps fiber optic) and new 3 Ghz Intel Duo Core 2 computers, for the quickest Internet connections.

Several tourists asked me what’s worthwhile to see in Bali.

One of my favorite places is still GWK Cultural Park, which has massive stone monuments, great views overlooking Kuta and local dances starting at twilite. It’s a photographer’s paradise. GWK is only 30 minutes from Kuta or Tuban by taxi and can take anywhere from 2 hours to a day to appreciate.

Executive Summary

Most of the attendees that I talked to were primarily interested in search technologies, or were Apache project comitters. The search users were already using either Lucene and Solr, or were using commercial software and evaluating Lucene and Solr.

Also a lot of interest in Hadoop, Zookeeper and NoSQL projects.

I added a wikipedia NoSQL project features table after the NoSQL BoF.

The conference was very well-organized, with tutorials, BoFs, a BarCamp, and sessions. Meetup.com was used to generate the highest BoF turnout that I’ve ever seen – close to 100 at the Lucene and Hadoop BoFs. (O’Reilly Conferences can learn from that.)

The Oakland Convention Center was a good venue for this conference, though the attached Oakland Marriott hotel is $$$$ and fond of surcharges, like $33/day for parking, $5 draught beer and $3.75 for a bottle of water in-room.

The keynotes and one track per day were recorded and are available for $99 at Linux Pro Magazine Streaming.

StoneCircle Productions was the conference organizer.

Conference Notes

Monday

Although I live in San Jose, Oakland is far enough away that I’ve never been there. Oakland has a compact downtown full of historical-era buildings, and Alameda is also nice, but things get less pretty at night.

I went to the Lucene tutorial on Monday.

Lunch Conversations

- awesome views of Bay Area past Golden Gate bridge from 21st floor
- FAST pretty good indexing and search solution, but bought by Microsoft recently (going to continue linux support or not?)
- FAST has FQL (users pronounce it fecal) query language
- 150 FAST servers replaced by 40 lucene servers by 1 company
- FAST4 to FAST5 upgrade tough, similar to port to say lucene, forced upgrades for support
- linguistics is 60% of value of Fast according to Monster, 13 languages supported
- “bad stems” can be a nightmare
- SOLR gives you 90% of what you would need to program in java, built on top of Lucene
- Open Source search is not really about price, but about control and flexibility

Monday Afternoon – Lucene Tutorial

- user-assigned document id not mandatory, but great idea for many reasons, including after an index-rebuild
- lucene-assigned id only valid for that snapshot (life of score doc)
- parameter to keep or delete old index directory
- StringBuilder is more efficient than strcat
- populating title column is a good idea
- results boosting handy for ecommerce, specials, etc.
- LUKE – handy tool for index statistics, etc.
- Searcher class, snapshot in time, won’t see new merges
- contrib/ has more analyzers
- snowball stemmers
- use 1 tokenizer and 0 or more token filters
- precision-recall curve ??
- n-grams and shingles (”the president”, “United states”)
- pre-2.9 lucene, numbers and dates really strings
- 2.9 NumericField builds tri structure, help optimize range queries
- SOLR analysis tool apache-solr
- relevance feedback with MoreLikeThis

Monday BoFs

Couchdb

- “ground computing”
- “offline by default”
- now an ubuntu service
- mozilla raindrop to combine chat client msgs
- lockless
- append-only btree
- rsyncable since append-only, also replication
- checksums everywhere
- windows not first class yet, mozilla improving it

@mozilla

- browsercouch
- don’t like sql
- brasstacks test tool storage
- store now, index later
- replicate to handle large indexing load
- testbot ci

Marklogic

- commercial
- xml-centric
- great for articles, books
- transactional
- search-centric
- structure-aware
- schema-free
- xquery-driven
- extremely fast, largest 200 TB xml, 166 on hosts
- clustered
- database server
- 180 clients, 150 employees
- markmail.org demo contains 42 million email messages, very impressive performance with 5 views in almost realtime. Search is distributed across 160 nodes.

JCR in 15 minutes

- Bertrand Del
- JCR is JackRabbit,
a fully conforming implementation of the Content Repository for Java Technology API (JCR). A content repository is a hierarchical content store with support for structured and unstructured content, full text search, versioning, transactions, observation, and more.
- the ultimate content store
- content repo, union of database and filesystem, best of both worlds
- full-text search combined with structured search

Solr Flair

- information forage
- “resume-driven design”

Lucene Numerics

- available in 1.4
- tune by modifying precisionStep

HBASE

One bewildered attendee wished for a NoSQL product matrix, so I added that to the wikipedia NoSQL page.

Wednesday Sessions

Becoming a Pig Developer, Alan Gates

- Apache Pig is a sub-project of Apache Hadoop.
- this talk was really how to use PIG as an end-user, not to become a Pig project developer

Apache Hadoop in the Cloud, Tom White

- general comments on using EC2 with Hadoop mostly

Practical HBase, Michael Stack

- Apache HBase is the Apache Hadoop database, similar to BigTable.
- HBASE usage

mod_jk / mod_proxy and others, Jean-Frederic Clere and 2 others

- mod_jk, mod_proxy, mod_serf and mod_cluster original topics
- mostly focused on mod_jk, mod_proxy and isapi_redirect
- good talk by 3 long-term project contributors
- jk is kind of Java-centric, with support for Apache JServ Protocol (AJP) only available in Java back-end servers for now, like Tomcat
- isapi_redirect is primary way to do redirects on Windows IIS
- survey of audience showed several mod_proxy users, maybe one intentional mod_jk user

Thursday Sessions

“Apache Lucene and Apache Solr Performance Tuning with Mark Miller” was packed, so moving along to a different room …

Scalable Internet Architectures, Theo Schlossnagle

- amazing and thought-provoking talk, also one of the most popular
- think about performance from network packet level to application level
- carp, vrrp, whackamole
- alterdns, neustar
- dynact
- anycast (shared IP), geoip (but need actually accurate database)
- activemq, rabbitmq instead of Spread
- “memcached is the worst thing that ever happened to our industry – it solves a problem, just not the original problem”

- many apps today are so poorly designed that network issues never become scalability concerns – ie. RoR applications
- max out at 500 requests per second across 40 boxes – RoR
- firebug and yslow have been fantastic at making front-end engineers aware of networking performance
- 10 gb nics suck
- instead of one big 20 Gbps loadbalancer, use anycast from core router to 5x 4 gpbs cheaper load balancers
- spiky load or DDoS – announce a /32 to separate load balancer, use symmetric return path

- jms, aqmp, spread

durable message queues

- activemq (java)
- openamq (c) – hard to use
- rabbitmq (erlang) – nice except in durable mode because erlang disk io blows

- most common protocol Stomp is awful and slow (hard to read 100k messages per second) and not binary, but lots of clients exist.

- activemq and stomp is a good start.
- rabbitmq and native connectors are better, but no perl client.

- PCI compliance requires a stateful firewall. Hard to do 1.5 million packets per second traffic for most medium-sized data centers, need to use a CDN to distribute static requests and distribute the packets somewhere else
- leaving trailing / off causes 302, doubles traffic
- Slides
- read/write ratio is 1 … likely IM or email?
- went over some networking details with Paul L. afterwards

Recent Developments in SSL and Browsers, Rick Andrews, Thawte

- 1.6 billion OCSP requests per day, need good infrastructure to support that
- intermediate CA allows root CA to be offline – chained hierarchy – SSLCertificateChainFile,
needs intermediate certificates before cross-certificates, some clients need in proper order
- EV hierarchy more complex. wanted new EV root, but older browsers don’t know about it.
- browser ubiquity problem with any new feature, hash or crypto algorithm
- logotypes – trademark and copyright issues with using other companies’ logos in a product
- Verisign does not have apache httpd committers, but should
- 1 attendee wanted to sign JavaScript files, but what does it mean if most sites link to 10 advertising and tracking scripts? what do you tell the user if 1 JS is not signed?

Subversion Meetup

Organizers didn’t show up, so spent 10 minutes talking to a handful of end-users about subversion gripes and moved along to …

Hadoop Meetup

Zookeeper

- zk is persistent to disk
- can run on one node, but 3 is minimum non-toy
- zk is popular in academia now for some reason
- avoid split-brain partitioning between 2 data centers – bad
- very recent merge to fix -368, not ready for production yet
- people using it for a message queue, perhaps more reliable than many other Open Source ones
- need 1 zk node for testing, but 3 zk nodes for non-trivial implementation

Scribe

- github
- 4x to 5x compression with lzo. similar disk bw improvement

A local owner of a gelato store handed out 6 free samples from a portable gelato freezer.

Friday Sessions

Building Intelligent Search Applications with the Lucene Ecosystem, Ted Dunnin

- some matrix math
- using his matrix math optimization, a perl program on 1 server was faster than Mahout running on a $250k cluster
- tdunning.blogspot.com

- the original LLR in NLP paper
“Accurate Methods for the Statistics of Surprise and Coincidence” check on citeseer
- Mahout project
tdunning [at] apache.org

Realtime Search, Jason Rutherglen

- many technical issues prevent Lucene from being able to do realtime search
- lots of patches done, lots to do
- audience member thanked author for great work so far

Closing Plenary: Brian Behlendorf on Open Source and Charity

Talked to Alex Karasulu a little after the final presentation. He’s a committer on the Apache Directory project. He suggested adding dbm to the NoSQL product matrix. Wants a MacBook Air with 8 GB RAM to run his Java apps.

Conference Schedule Grid

After landing in Manila, I booked a domestic flight to the island of Bohol, a quiet farming and tourism island.

The whole island is beautiful.

The government is serious about sustainable tourism development on the island, and all the roads are new (better than downtown Manila!), and sites are partially or fully wheel-chair accessible for those who need that.

I stayed at the Bohol Tropics Hotel. Very nice hotel, pretty grounds with 3 swimming pools, wifi available, one free PC at reception, and restaurant open late at night. There is a free airport and port shuttle bus.

Just outside the hotel is a minimart and laundry. There’s a port tank farm next door to the hotel, but walled off from the hotel.

The hotel is building a conference and wedding center, so it might lose its charm once it gets busy.

We took a look at the Bohol Resort hotel. They normally charge admission to enter the grounds if you don’t already have a reservation (!), but we were allowed 20 minutes to take a look. It has nice grounds and a white sand beach … but $200 night.

Down the road is the new Eskaya hotel. Same deal as the Bohol Resort. We didn’t feel like paying to enter, so we just left.

After Bohol, I took a $10 90-minute OceanJet high-speed boat to Cebu for the afternoon.

The Cebu port area and downtown looked like a grimy toilet. There aren’t many tourist attractions in downtown Cebu aside from a handful of monuments and churches.

I tried to fly back to Manila for my return flight home, but 2 typhoons moved into Manila, so I ended up buying a last minute one-way ticket for $1688 back to SFO via HK. Expensive, but I would have needed a fair amount of luck, and a few days sitting around at the Manila airport to return on a free rebooking.

Cathay Pacific requires rebooking to be done with your travel agent or local office where the ticket was purchased, so they were of no help. I’ve never heard of an airline policy like that before, and I’ll certainly keep it in mind next time I book a flight to Asia.

Filipino gunmen kill 21 over political rivalry

1. Updating a permanently installed GPS database for IFR navigation is considered preventive maintenance and must be performed and logged somewhere, similar to a VOR check, by the appropriate person, plus an operational check. See 14.43 Appendix A (32).
   Only under Part 91, if no special tools or assembly is required, can just anybody can do it. Otherwise a technician must do it the update for operation under Part 121, 135, etc. See this article for more details.
2. Starting Sept. 28, 2009, preflight RAIM checks for non-WAAS GPS receivers are required for many GPS RNAV procedures, and likely also for WAAS receivers in areas of non-WAAS coverage.
   Pilots have reported having to print a list of RAIM data as thick as a book with their FSS briefing now.

Makes life more difficult than “kick the tires, light the fires and follow the magenta line.”

AOPA Online: Preflight RAIM checks for non-WAAS GPS receivers
AOPA Online: RAIM Issue Brief
Wally Roberts: GPS Approach Concepts
Flyer Forums UK: Compulsory for pilots to check for RAIM

Everybody was carrying a netbook, often with 500 mA USB wifi cards and 12″ external antenna. I can’t believe how many people had powered-on iPhones and Windows notebooks in a “hostile network environment.”

Some favorite talks were:

• Metaphish (Spearphishing with Metasploit, PDFs and Tor) – blended attacks are the future.
• Passwords – remarkable what a student can do with a couple home PCs and a little time. The recent FOSS dev sites disclosures provide lots of data to analyze.
• Clobbering the Cloud – lots of low-hanging fruit in cloud services.

cnn.com: story on conference

The 4 reasons are: new, affordable data plans, Yahoo Messenger and FaceBook support, and a camera.

GSM/Edge data plans have been available for years in Indonesia, though somewhat expensive per KB, flaky and with an odd signup process (find out the right sms address and send a couple requests to it and wait.)

Now cell providers are promoting all-you-can-eat data plans at 5000 Rp/day (50 cents per day).

Wifi is popular for when they are low on cash but near a free wifi hotspot, available in most offices, hotels and malls.

Indonesia is a huge cell phone market, about the same population as the USA. Less than 1% of households have Internet access, although many employees now have it at work.

The only thing holding back Blackberry penetration is purchase price. Phones are not subsidized with long-term contracts as in the West, so they’re retail priced at $350-$600 each.

All of my friends there have asked me how much a Blackberry is in the USA. It’s priceless to see their expression when I say, “free with a service contract.”

cnet.com: A more streamlined Facebook for BlackBerry
CHART OF THE DAY: Apple, RIM Swallow Mobile Industry Profits (AAPL, RIMM)
jakartapost.com: BlackBerry maker given deadline
jakartapost.com: BlackBerry maker to open after-sales service center

It was fairly quiet in Waikiki, as Japanese tourists are still afraid of the swine flu and mainland Americans do the “staycation”. Both the flight on Hawaiian Airlines and the room at the Continental Surf Hotel were quite inexpensive.

I went on a short airplane flight with a female instructor at Flight School Hawaii in a Cessna 172SP.

Blue skies, Kona winds, practise area, a couple landings at Kalaeloa Airport (formerly called Barbers Point), back to HNL 22L.

The 172SP was beautiful except for 1 interesting problem. The magnetic compass had leaked into the Garmin 430 GPS, ruining most of the LCD display. D’oh!

Otherwise I hung out in the hotel or walked on Waikiki beach (quite humid even at night.)

The huge abandoned CompUSA superstore on Ala Moana is still empty, 2 years later.

Duke’s Waikiki was 100% full at dinner time, prolly the only crowded place I saw.

The street performers were even more varied than last time. I hadn’t seen the steel drums performer or magician before.

The Continental Surf Hotel is pretty basic. It has medium-sized rooms with AC and basic cable, coin laundry, a cursory gym (3 cardio machines and a universal machine, no free weights, in a too-small room), and a jumbo flat screen TV in the lobby tuned to a sports channel. Some people rent rooms monthly. There are only 2 small elevators, so if one broke, that could be a problem. Nice view on the roof of Waikiki and Diamondhead.

cessnaowner.org: Rebuilding a Compass