Aehso’s Output

My first experience with Linux was a Slackware 2.x distro that I must have re-installed/re-compiled a hundred times via 20+ 1.44Mb floppy disks. Back then, and since then to be honest, I have always had problems getting the kernel to detect and load drivers for peripherals but for a computer geek that’s half the fun of using linux. (The other problem I had back then was bad floppy disks – there was nothing more depressing than hitting 19/20 disks and getting a read error!).

I’m now running Ubuntu Karmic Koala on a little Acer netbook and so far everything I’ve thrown at it has Just Worked.

My latest test was plugging a Huawei E180 3G modem into the netbook. I almost did it just for kicks as I had no idea that it’d show up as anything other than a mass storage device.

Silly me, Ubuntu allowed me to run a ‘Create A Mobile Broadband’ connection wizard and 10 minutes later I was online.

Why 10 minutes? It appeared to connect just fine but it wasn’t resolving any hostnames. For some reason the DNS server settings were not automatically set correctly when the connection was dialled up. Anyway, manually setting the DNS server to 212.129.64.220 (via Network Connection ->IPv4 Settings) fixed it.

The only other thing I had to do (which the wizard didn’t prompt for) was enter my PIN in the Network Connection -> Mobile Broadband -> Advanced settings section.

So, Kudos again to the linux community, setting up a mobile broadband connection, even without a vendor supplied installer, is now as easy as doing so in Windows or OS X!

aehso broadband, linux

There I go again tweeting, when I should have been blogging.

For a long time I was using a Mac Mini (an early model Core Duo 1.66Ghz) as my living room media center but alas it just didn’t have enough beef to playback HD content. Mac Mini’s have integrated graphics (mine has a Intel GMA 950) which basically means that when you playback video on them the poor little CPU ended up trying to shift about huge data streams that only dedicated GPUs can really handle.

So I ended up buying a Popcorn Hour A110 which is designed for just that. The Popcorn box is a great little device – the remote is great, the playback capabilities are great but the media management and 12-foot UI are a weaker than FrontRow. Still, my Mac Mini was stored away.

Until now. When XBMC.org recently announced support cross-platform hardware decoding of mpeg2, h.264 and VC1 video content up to 1080p, well it piqued my interest. It turned out that these builds of XBMC can use a Broadcom Crystal HD PCI Express card to offload all the heavy lifting from the CPU.

Now it just so happens that the Mac Mini has a PCI Express slot but it is occupied by an Airport card. Thing is, the wifi signal in my Mac Mini has always been next to useless and besides, my living room has an ethernet router in it so I could ditch the Airport card.

Getting the Crystal HD
I bought mine from an Ebay store for about €20 – just make sure you get a BCM970012 card. Some speciality websites sell them for €80-100 but meh, I was willing to take a punt on €20.

Installing the Crystal HD
This is a little tricky since the Mini wasn’t designed to be user serviceable but if you are patient (and gentle with a putty knife) it is do-able. Just follow this dis-assembly guide and you’ll have it done in less than an hour. The only confusing parts I found were

1. the four screws he refers to are the ones holding the base of the black plastic frame onto the motherboard frame. They are not the ones screwed into the DVD drive! In my defense, 3 of them are hidden in long sleeves which made them hard to spot!
2. the wifi antenna is un-clipped by squeezing in the two black tabs that enter it from underneath.

Once you get the black frame off it’s a no brainer, just be careful not to pinch any wires when fitting it all back together later.

Installing the OS X Crystal HD Kernel Extension
There is a OS X Crystal HD “kernel extension” project – download their binary release (I took 1.0.1). NOTE that at the moment, they only advertise compatability with OS X 10.4 and 10.5 and as my Mini was running 10.5.6 I still have no idea if the kext works on 10.6.

Unpack the binary distribution and open a terminal window in that folder. Once in the unpacked folder enter:

sudo mv BroadcomCrystalHD.kext /System/Library/Extensions
sudo chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/BroadcomCrystalHD.kext
sudo chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions/BroadcomCrystalHD.kext

Kernel extensions won’t run unless they have the above owner/permissions. Ignore any error that OS X pops up at this stage.

Then run
mv libcrystalhd.dylib /usr/lib/
mv bcmFilePlayFw.bin /usr/lib/
sudo chown root:wheel /usr/lib/libcrystalhd.dylib /usr/lib/bcmFilePlayFw.bin
sudo chmod 755 /usr/lib/libcrystalhd.dylib /usr/lib/bcmFilePlayFw.bin


These libraries are required by the kernel extension (and again need to be permissioned/owned properly.

Now your Broadcom driver is installed. Load it up as follows

sudo kextload /System/Library/Extensions/BroadcomCrystalHD.kext

You should get a message saying the kernel extension was successfully loaded. You’ll only have to do this once as after reboots it’ll automatically be loaded.

Installing XBMC
The easy bit, just take the latest nightly build (I took r26715). Don’t take the Camelot build as it doesn’t have the Crystal HD support.

And that’s it. When you fire up XBMC, go to Video -> Playback and in the Renderers list, you should be able to select “Broadcom Crystal HD”. And more importantly, you should be able to enjoy full 1080p video playback without even getting close to maxing out the CPU. My little box could play back a full 1920×900/H.264 encoded stream at a full 24fps without using more than 50% of the two CPU cores.

Cheapest upgrade ever!

aehso broadcom, mac, xbmc

Until now it has only been possible to transport images and data using fibre optic networks. Intune has succeeded in making the fibre optic network programmable. This breakthrough innovation allows the possibility of sending, switching and collecting digital data and images in a single optical infrastructure.

(exerpt from the recently published “Technology Actions to Support the Smart Economy” Report)

Anyone who can write something as dumb as this should not be writing a government commissioned report that will be circulated to the EU and OECD with the intention of “attracting foreign direct investment by promoting Ireland as a test location for new Information Communications Technologies (ICT).” This report makes us look like gombeens.

First: a tiny request. When publishing a report on the internet, especially about one about how your country plans to become a internet powerhouse, how about publishing it as a web page? You could even go a bit mad, stick a few hyperlinks into it. God forbid that it’d be easier to access that way.

But my issue isn’t really about the format of the report. The whole “Exemplar Smart Network” idea that is contained within it is terribly flawed.

It is hard not to be dubious about the prospects of one company putting a new whizz-bang new switching framework into our national backbone in order to fix all our “image and data transfer” problems. This is just incredibly foolish and quite a bit silly. Quite why our government are willing to let them play with the nation’s vastly underutilized fibre backbone is really of no practical benefit anyone. Perhaps they have so much spare bandwidth in that network that they can carve a lump off and give it to InTune and nobody will notice.

The “smart network” thing bugs me too. I sincerely hope that InTune are not going to attempt to build anything more than a faster packet switching network that can shunt IP traffic from A to B. There is a principal that the internet pioneers stuck to when designing the Internet Protocol(IP). It’s called The End-To-End Principle. Eamon Ryan and whoever wrote this report should read about it – it basically says “don’t try build smart networks because they are too inflexible for long terms use by different generations of network clients”.

The other huge issue is that even if we had the best/smartest/greenest[?] fibre backbone in the world, all of the network clients in this country won’t be able to transfer the “images and data” at the rates they need to in order to provide value to their users. Why not? Because they won’t have a decent connection into the fibre backbone.

All that fibre in a MAN network with exotic switches supporting even the most exotic protocols won’t do anyone any good if the population cannot get broadband connections from fat local loops into their homes. Period. Forget about trying to build an intelligent network out of unproven technology, even if they are waving “potentially thousands of jobs” in your face.

Invest in the local broadband loops where most of the bandwidth contention occurs instead. You’ll end up creating thousands of job for the very people who need them – surveyors, architects, builders. Implement this as a massive public building (capital investment) project and it pay for itself in spades within a decade.

Oh, and what he said about the rest of the report.

aehso broadband, government, irish ireland broadband mans fiber endtoend

I tweeted about this yesterday but it’d still on my mind. This type of thing is driving me to despair about working in the technology sector in Ireland:

IRMA, which represents major music groups EMI, Sony-BMG, Warner and Universal, is to begin compiling lists of websites that it claims are damaging its business. It will then apply for a court order, requiring Eircom and other internet providers to block access to these sites…

Under the terms of an agreement between Eircom and Irma, Eircom will not oppose any court application, meaning that the orders will be automatically granted. A spokesman for Eircom confirmed that Eircom ‘‘will not oppose any application [Irma] may make seeking the blocking of access from their network’’ to blacklisted websites.

I do not endorse illegal distribution of copyrighted material but I am very, very much against censorship of the internet in any shape or form.

Either I am missing something or this SBP article is incorrect but if not is this the most extreme form of legalized private industry censorship that exists in any country in the world? Civilized, democratic nations do not allow private industry association to dictate what information their population can/cannot read.

Irish government, you should be absolutely ashamed of yourselves for not defending the rights of your population against private industry censorship. If you wanted to show the entire world that the legislative and judiciary process in this country cannot keep pace with advancements in technology then congratulations, job done. I can only imagine that internet multinationals now have yet another reason to establish their European bases elsewhere instead of in this “knowledge economy” of ours.

Irish businesses, if this censorship is allowed then is “Ireland Inc” a viable base for technology leaders? Or is Ireland a luddite nation that restricts access to information at the behest one industry sector who cannot adapt to technological progress? I hope this doesn’t impair your ability to trade and build up your company here but I doubt your foreign partners will look on this as a positive development for your operating base. If your business website contains any user generated content (and I mean any) then you could be blacklisted with no avenue for recourse. Is that a risk you are willing to take?

Is there any move afoot to organize (or engage with an existing organization like the Electronic Frontier Foundation) to defend Irish free speech, privacy and consumer rights? We are clearly not explaining to both legislators and electorate why agreements like this are modern day luddite fallacies. This couldn’t happen if we were.

aehso censorship, eircom, isp

@paddyb just tweeted an absolutely superb piece written by Michael Lewis about The End (of Wall Street’s Boom) that anyone with even the mildest curiosity about why the investment banking sector is imploding will enjoy, though maybe ‘enjoy’ isn’t the right word to use in this context given the consequences for us all.

Of course the investment bankers are primarily to blame but the rating agencies didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory in recent years. One particular paragraph from the article really sticks in my head:

But he couldn’t figure out exactly how the rating agencies justified turning BBB loans into AAA-rated bonds. “I didn’t understand how they were turning all this garbage into gold,” he says. He brought some of the bond people from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and UBS over for a visit. “We always asked the same question,” says Eisman. “Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.” He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says.

(That Steve Eisman guy seems like a legend, his career history in the article is class)

Michael Lewis is the author of Liars Poker, a book I first read many moons ago when I was working for Iona Technologies. The book is superb if even for only for bringing terms like Big Swinging Dick into the common vernacular. Funnily enough, I bought the book in Dublin airport back in ‘97 while on my way to Wall Street to train up a bunch of IT guys in a large investment bank (right across the road from the US Stock Exchange) on using Orbix and OrbixWeb as the middleware for some of some new internal systems. I had the book finished long before the week was out and it turned into a pretty lively topic of conversation when the guys on the course saw it on my desk one morning.

Ah, they were the good days, unfortunately the investment bank bull appears to be about to be slaughtered.

Anyway, what was the point of this post? Oh yeah, Irish default rates – does anyone truly believe that they will stay as low as the 1-1.5 point levels that the Irish bank management teams are publicly quoting?

I wish there was a ‘zero probability’ smiley I could tack onto the end of this post.

aehso banks banks, liars poker, michael lewis, wall street

(No, not this CGI, that CGI! The above pic is only slightly relevant but someone sent it to me a few years ago and I just thought it is too funny not to reuse.)

My blog is staying right here but I am moving on from nooked. It’s been great fun and a tremendous experience building out the new nooked service with Fergus and the team. The new service backend is now very much alive and kicking and in use to deliver products to lots of shopping widgets. Building it with Ruby On Rails and basing it on the Atom Publishing Protocol (and other RESTful HTTP APIs) should allow it to facilitate nooked in releasing many more future product offerings to make feedcommerce a reality.

Meanwhile, if you need the services of a web service architect/engineering manager/multi-language developer then feel free to get in touch.

aehso nooked, work

I believe the national government is obliged to intervene to stabilize key sectors of the economy. However, I think we’ve gone about this the wrong way.

The Irish economy is only a small part of the larger European economy (we contribute a minuscule 1.2% of EU GDP) which has no restrictions on flow of capital. Our cute hoor politicians have burned a bridges with Europe in passing this legislation. If the EU/ECB do produce rescue packages to preserve the larger EU economy in the near future how high do we think the Irish state will be in the receiving order?

Rushing this legislation may end up destroying trust in the credit rating of the Irish state. May is not a satisfactory qualifier given the amount of money involved and the potential long term damage this would do to future moves to pull this country out of the recession that it is already in. The state would possibly have to borrow for capital expenditure (to kick start the economy) at much higher interest rates while also servicing a much larger existing national debt.

I don’t buy the ‘it’s only a guarantee’ party line. Equivalent guarantees are implicitly provided by the governments of most western economies and in recent weeks we have seen a slew of nationalizations and forced mergers. Making the guarantee explicit via national law draws clear lines in the market that can be manipulated by vested interests (bankers, & investors).

I don’t buy the ‘this won’t cost the taxpayers’ party line. The banks that being protected are constantly revising their bad debt provisions upward and independent analysts believe they are currently understating their positions.

The legislation was drafted with the participation of the chief executives of AIB & BOI. Shouldn’t the Central Bank be advising the government on these matters rather than having PLCs directly bend the ear of the government in private meetings?

At least two of these banks (AIB & BOI) are still planning on paying out dividends to their shareholders this year. AIB raised their interim dividend last summer in a bid to bluff the market. Firstly, does it make any sense to be paying out cash to investors at a time when a liquidity crisis is threatening your ability to survive as a going concern? Secondly, given bluffs like the above, what other ‘risks’ are the senior management of the banks taking in their negotiations with our government?

Incidentally, this legislation effectively allows practically insolvent property developers to continue to negotiate with their existing banks rather than face the music with a bank liquidator. Given the economy is in recession and house/property prices will continue to fall for the foreseeable future, I wonder did the threat of having a sharp implosion of our over-bloated construction sector weigh heavily on the governments thinking?

Is it really worth exposing the Irish state to this risk in order to drag out the inevitable equalization of the Irish construction sector?

aehso banks, economy, ireland, irish

[Also see follow-up Part II post]

I was tweeting about this last night and this morning but I realized that really isn’t the right medium for such a complex topic and I needed to read a little more about what exactly the Irish Government are proposing to pass into law today.

Of course it still all seems to be up in the air but I still wanted to write down some observations:

• I can understand the need to guarantee deposits, but guaranteeing debts? As well as owing record amounts to banks are the Irish population now to act as guarantors to these same institutions for these same loans?
• Where did they get this magical €400 billion figure from? This figure, an order of magnitude greater than our national debt, seems recklessly high for a nation of just over 4 million people in the context of the free movement of capital within the EU, even more so at a time when EU markets are so unstable.
• These are ISEQ listed public limited companies. Some are also listed on foreign stock markets and no doubt they all have foreign investors. So, in the age of multinational businesses and free trade (and free movement of capital) within the EU, how Irish are they, really?
• Will the Irish State have any oversight/control of bank operations during this two year window? Do we continue to entrust this responsibility to the Central Bank or other financial regulatory authorities who have allowed these banks to generate record profits while overextending themselves?
• Statements from banks like the following ring hollow when words like ‘normal’ is used as a qualifier. These are not normal times
  

  We will pay the Irish taxpayer for the privilege of using Ireland’s balance sheet to allow us to borrow internationally and the capital which is in banks, the equity capital, will absorb any losses which arise in our normal course of business lending

  (emphasis mine).

• Did anyone in our government stop to think what position this places other European states, our primary trading partners, in? It would seem not.
• Last but not least – how is it that the Irish government were the first to introduce such a guarantee? I always get worried when Irish politicians think they’ve found a different way to tackle a problem that the whole world is struggling with. The usual ‘Ireland is different’ (as we are used to hearing during our recent property bubble) won’t work here. Also of concern was the the implicit assurances to investors that this legislation will be passed, and in a rushed manner.

Hopefully more information will be revealed about this legislation and the thinking behind it but from where I’m sitting it does doesn’t seem to have been thought through – and the risks to the Irish State are too great for that.

aehso banks, economy, ireland

I previously criticized a post by Dion Hinchliffe’s on WOA/Client but to be fair to Dion I have to compliment him on his latest post about the SOA world beginning to consider the Web-Oriented Architecture(WOA) in earnest.

Dion has continued to do some very deep thinking and about *OAs and this post reflects this effort – it should be immensely useful for anyone looking at how to evolve existing SOA systems over to a resource oriented architecture. I’m well past the ROA vs SOA debate (a ROA is a subset of SOA) but one lingering concern that I have about this and other discussions is this distinction between ROAs & WOAs.

I’m not quite sure that I can see a clear distinction between the two and I think having two TLAs for what may be the same underlying architecture type may be hindering understanding. Almost every core feature of WOA systems is derived from the underlying RESTful constraints. I’d imagine that if we could do away with one of these TLAs then the underlying concepts, and the differences from big-SOA, will become more accessible to all. (Note: I accept that there are non-RESTful anomalies out there mixed onto the www substrate but these edges always seem to fall by the wayside as the www has evolved.)

When I get chance I’ll try write up something more detailed on this but in the meantime if you have some clear examples of use cases where a WOA is a distinct superset of ROA then I’m sure they’d help my thinking.

aehso architecture, enterprise, rest, roa, soa, woa roa, soa, woa

“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist”

Kenneth Boulding

If you want to understand how the global economy got into the mess that it is in, you could do worse than spend 45 minutes of your life re-learning more about how money is created. At the very least, it will remind you of some of the fundamentals you may have learned in Economics classes of old. Be warned, you’ll probably get a distinctly queasy feeling @ about 22 minutes in.

(see Money As Debt site for references)

New word of the day for me: Usury

aehso banks, economy, global, money