February 2006 Archives
I have not been a big fan of wikis - some of the projects I've been associated with have used wikis for managing lots of project information, and they always seem subject to the digital equivalent of southern California suburban sprawl - pages proliferate beyond any control, and it's very hard to keep a grasp on where the current discussion is within all those pages.
But lately I've been working on a couple of projects that call for some collaborative editing, so I thought I'd try out using a wiki.
I went looking for a lightweight wiki to install on my UW staff web publishing account. I was hoping to find something that was easy to install and worked within the file system, without requiring the support of a database. I also wanted a wiki that has an active community around it, and one that might have a hope of integrating with UW NetIDs. Doing a completely non-scientific and not comprehensive survey by browsing the Wikipedia article Comparison of wiki software, I decided to try Patrick Michaud's PMWiki.
After a few hours over three days of tinkering, I now have PMWiki installed and working under UW NetID authentication on staff.washington.edu. My current setup requires everyone who wants to view my wiki to do a UW NetID authentication first, and any editing or authoring of content has that UW NetID recorded as the author. I've been very pleased by the quality of the documentation - the install is straightforward, and there's a great Cookbook full of all sorts of "recipes" for how to accomplish different things with PMWiki.
I make no claim for this being the best wiki in the world, nor do I know if every function will work with the UW NetID stuff, but it's at least good enough for my current purposes.
At some point we may very well put some instructions on how to accomplish this on the Do It Yourself section of Creating and Publishing Web Pages, but if you're interested in how I did it, read on.
Basically to install PMWiki, I followed the excellent installation instructions -
First I downloaded the latest version of PMWiki into my web publishing space. Working from a terminal window logged into my public_html directory, I used this command:
wget http://www.pmwiki.org/pub/pmwiki/pmwiki-latest.zip
Then I unzipped the software - the unzip process automatically created a directory named pmwiki-2.1.beta25 and placed all the files and subdirectories within it:
unzip pmwiki-latest.zip
Then, for ease of reference, I created a symbolic link (that's like an alias) to that directory called pmwiki:
ln -s pmwiki-2.1.beat25 pmwiki
That was enough to get PMWiki running on my account at http://staff.washington.edu/oren/pmwiki/pmwiki.php
Following the instructions on the Initial Setup Tasks page I then started editing (using pico, of course) a config.php file in pmwiki/local to get the configuration options I wanted to start with. I've done just the bare minimum of configuration for my purposes - I gave the wiki a title (Oren's wiki) and gave it an administrative password.
Then, following the instructions for Password Protection by UW NetID, I put a .htaccess file into my pmwiki directory that requires a valid UW NetID login for all users of any part of the wiki - whether viewing or editing.
Then, using the Cookbook recipe for RequireAuthor I changed the config file (pmwiki/local/config.php) to automatically set the author name to the HTTP authenticated user (in this case the UW NetID).
That worked ok yesterday, but overnight a new (more secure) version of PubCookie (the software used by the web servers for UW NetID authentication) went into production, and this morning my wiki couldn't find any of its formatting information. It turns out that I had to explicitly set the ScriptUrl and PubDirUrl paths to use https instead of plain http.
So in the end, I ended up with a config.php file that looks like this:
<?php if (!defined('PmWiki')) exit();
$WikiTitle = "Your wiki name here";
$DefaultPasswords['admin'] = crypt('YourPasswordHere');
# $ScriptUrl is your preferred URL for accessing wiki pages
# $PubDirUrl is the URL for the pub directory.
$ScriptUrl = 'https://staff.washington.edu/oren/pmwiki/pmwiki.php';
$PubDirUrl = 'https://staff.washington.edu/oren/pmwiki/pub/';
## Require an author name.
$EnablePostAuthorRequired='1';
## If no $Author is set, set it to the authenticated user name
if ($action == 'edit' && !@$_COOKIE['author']) {
if (@$_SERVER['REMOTE_USER']) {
$Author=@$_SERVER['REMOTE_USER'];
setcookie('author',$Author,0,'/');
}
}
?>
I use Firefox as my primary browser on all of my systems, Macs and PCs.
I've been using del.icio.us as a place to store my links to things on the web that I'm interested in for over a year now, and that works great - plus I use a feed from del.icio.us to generate the list of "Recent links I'm Tracking" on my Recent links of interest and blogs I read page.
But I tend to use the browser bookmarks, particularly the Bookmarks Toolbar, for the pages that I use all the time - my Oracle Calendar web page, the Catalyst Tools pages, lots of UW pages, the All Music Guide, several links of mountain weather forecasts, my bus timetable, etc. One problem I've always had is keeping those bookmarks synchronized across the multiple computers I use at work and home.
Now I've started using Foxmarks to synchronize my browser bookmarks across instances of Firefox. Foxmarks is a Firefox extension that synchronizes bookmarks, storing the authorotative copy of your bookmarks on a server (I'm using the default foxcloud.com server) for the process. It's not perfect (on one machine I had to manually force an overwrite of the bookmarks from the server before it took), but it's pretty cool, and I find it very useful.
I'm listening to Terry Gray give his annual State of the Network talk at the UW Computing Support meeting.
A couple of choice quotes from Terry's opening remarks:
"sometime in the last ten years the Internet has gone from being designed to being perpetrated."
"Is there such a thing as intellectual post-traumatic stress syndrome?"
There are lots of transient problems that people encounter every day. The benefit of our dependence on the internet is enormous, but the mean-time-between-glitch may be getting worse. Terry tends to be on the side that things are getting worse.
The open internet died in 2003 at the hands of slammer and blaster, and now we have pervasive TDAs - Traffic Disruption Appliances like firewalls. It's moving to a two port Internet - port 80 and 443. Threats are moving to the inside - like phishing. Because of firewalls you can't ascertain the health of the end points. If policy enforcement points are imposed in the middle of the network then the user thinks the network is broken and calls the NOC.
There are also industry failures - like having router vendors tell you more about packets they throw away.
Some of the original design goals of the internet were overtaken by events - like having the complexity at the end points of the network and keeping the core simple, or the idea of pervasive symmetric connectivity everywhere - it came as a shock to find that not everybody wanted that. Another one is the core characteristic of the Internet as being packet switched - we're no seeing high end users with less faith that a shared infrastructure can give enough predictability and diagnosability to perform - so that's behind the move toward personal lambdas for research.
The window for super-good deals on dark fiber is shrinking as a result of mergers and acquisitions. The commodity networks are in worse shape - there is saturation of some of the commodity links, especially across the Atlantic to Europe.
On the Network Security front, there's now an Intrusion Protection System at the UW, commercial option from Tipping Point. It's gotten us out of the battles of which ports to block at the border. We also have some Intrusion Detection System capabilities out of the netflow information from the routers - detects slammer, nacho, etc and does some automatic action, like shutting of ethernet ports. Can't do it everywhere because of old switches - would like to eventually move to a more sophisticated quarantine strategy.
We have private addressing in the P172 project, now with NAT. We're doing vulnerability scanning - 80% of hosts appear to be behind some sort of firewall and not available to the scan.
There will be more work on the security tools portal that allows people to do self-scans.
As far as campus network status goes, we still have buildings with cat 3 wiring which limits our performance. There are nearly 100k hosts on the network these days. There are roughly 1000 subnets - many in the data center. We have access to multiple 10 Gbps research nets via the PNWGP.
C&C manages approx 5,000 network devices (routers and switches).
We're replacing Foundry routers with Cisco 7600.
Our next generation network architecture work is going on - allowing partitioning for new features for minimum risk. Phase 2 will move to a 10GigE backbone. The Med Centers are now more isolated and there's lots of upgrade work going on in both UWMC and Harborview.
We now have more than twice as many network devices as phones, and now slowing of the growth. For outbound traffic we're getting perilously close to peaking at 1.5 Gbps. Inbound traffic is about .5 Gbps - so we're a 2-to-1 producer of bandwidth.
For the SC05 show this fall at the Convention Center we supported some novel research network applications, including world-wide multicast videoconferencing at 1.5 Gbps. We also did a lot of work to support the event itself - provisioning 50 10Gbps optical fibers into the convention center - half a terabit per second of bandwidth!
The UW gets both its commodity and research connectivity through the Pacific Northwest GigaPop.
Future issues - What's the future of perimeter defense when all traffic is encrypted and tunneled over ports 80 and 443?
What's the future of VoIP or even desk phones, when everybody has cell phones? What does it mean if the cell phones come with pretty good data service? Would we still need WiFi?
Do we need Network Admission Control, where you have to authenticate to get on the network? Why do we want this? For traceability and increased scanning access. In some contexts people do asset management - there are a bunch of tradeoffs.
Network convergence - could mean using the same network over a wide geographic area, or a different classes of service for different uses. For instance, only a certain kind of traffic without authenticating. The motivation is to save money by avoiding building up separate networks, but is it worth it? For instance, should we use the same network for monitoring patient care traffic as we do for student labs?
Is it going to be important to offer organizational subnets?
Should we keep over-provisioning network capacity, or do we need separate classes of service?
CALEA (the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act) - last fall the FCC decided to update the CALEA rule to account for Internet technology. There are lots of scary possibilities here - the answer to all questions are "we don't know yet." There are lawsuits and discussions galore.
Our colleagues at the Open Source Applications Foundation are looking for a few good interns. This is a great opportunity to work with some really great, smart people on interesting open source projects - If you apply, tell 'em you saw it here!
OSAF is looking for interns in the following areas:
* Software Engineer Intern - Chandler project
* Software Engineer Intern- Cosmo or Scooby project
* QA Engineer Intern
* IT Sysadmin Intern
Basic requirements include:
* Computer Science students enrolled in a 4 years program. Junior and Senior prefered for Engineering positions though we are open to talented candidate of different background.
* Legal right to work in the US (we do consider one foreign student a year on a J1 visa but this year this spot has already been allocated).
* 3 months minimum commitment
* Must be able to work locally at OSAF's San Francisco office
Benefits:
* $1000 weekly stipend
* Two free lunches a week, free snacks and soft drinks
* Great location in downtown SF in the only "green" building of SOMA, 2 blocks from Moscone center and SF MOMA
For more information on the requirements for each position and application process visit our employment page < http://www.osafoundation.org/employment.htm >
I wrote back in November about how I was changing my job focus, and turning over the reins of the Client Services part of my job to Tammy Stockton.
Now I have an official new title, Director of Emerging Technology, within the newly named Technology Engineering group of Computing & Communications. In my new capacity I'm reporting to Terry Gray, which is great - I've been a huge fan of Terry's for many years now, and I always enjoy working with him (though I'm a little sad to no longer report to Ed Lightfoot, who I have learned a tremendous amount from over the years).
I'm already immersed in lots of interesting ventures in this new capacity - the last two weeks alone brought meetings with Apple about the iTunes U program, Google about their Google Search Appliance product, and Xythos about their products, along with meetings about local projects well under way, like the UW Wireless Initiative, and some brainstorming with colleagues about possible future services like content management, windows authentication services, and wikis.
It's already clear to me that the number of opportunities are close to boundless, and the trick will be in getting some staff to help with these efforts and to figure out effective processes for deciding which efforts to pay attention to.
And, of course, I'll be attending the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference next month - it's in my job description!
This article by Rep. Rick Boucher (D, VA) on network neutrality, is really worth a read -
Recently, executives at some telephone companies have indicated that their business models for providing broadband service include not only charging their end-user customers for an Internet connection but also assessing a fee on websites for users to reach them more quickly. They claim that to offer advanced content such as multiple video-programming channels in competition with cable they need to prioritize their bits to deliver quality programs. They then propose that they will give the same priority access to other companies that pay them for it.
Essentially, what these executives are proposing is the creation of a two-lane Internet where larger, more established websites with financial resources could squeeze out smaller, emerging websites. One clear victim will be the innovation that has thrived on the open Internet. Startups simply could not afford to pay for fast-lane treatment nationwide. One must ask where the next Google or Yahoo will come from if new innovative companies can receive only inferior, slow-lane Internet access.
Internet2, a nonprofit partnership of universities, companies and affiliate organizations, including federal agencies and laboratories, has been studying this matter and has demonstrated that a multitrack Internet model is unnecessary to assure quality of service. Internet2 has for the past seven years deployed an advanced broadband network to more than 5 million users and has learned that in a network with enough bandwidth there is no congestion and no bits need preferential treatment because all of them arrive quickly enough to assure excellent quality, even if intermingled.
In countries such as Japan and Korea, network speeds over the last mile of 100 megabits per second (mbps) are common. In the United States, our typical speed is less than 1 mbps. If broadband providers would increase their network speeds to approximate those in other countries, all content would reach consumers with assured quality. No prioritization of bits would be needed.
Thanks, Doc!
This should be worth a listen - register at http://www.educause.edu/RegisterNow%2521/9988.
Scott Bradner
University Technology Security Officer
Harvard University
Topic: The Myth of Network Neutrality
Date: February 15, 2006
Time: 1:00 p.m. EST (12:00 p.m. CST, 11:00 a.m. MST, 10:00 a.m. PST);
Duration: 1 hour
At a recent Senate hearing, Vint Cerf said that "nothing less than the future of the Internet is at stake" in the government's decisions about network neutrality. Meanwhile, the managers of the country's mega-ISPs assert that they can't continue investing billions of dollars in high-speed Internet infrastructure without the freedom to explore multitiered services and other nonuniform business models.
During this presentation, we'll discuss the pros and cons of network neutrality with Scott Bradner, a well-known network activist who’s been involved in the design and implementation of the Internet from its earliest days.
Mike Tung, a grad student at Stanford, was fed up with US News's ranking of America's Best Colleges - so he did his own. building a quite interesting statistical analysis using Google to rank the US's best colleges and Universities.
The factors he used to determine "best" were:
1. Peer assessment [link:www.stanford.edu] - This is how some search engines approximate "peer assessment", by counting the number of other pages citing you
2. Size [site:www.stanford.edu] - a larger school would have a larger web, right? =)
3. Number of faculty [dr. "home page" site:www.stanford.edu] - hopefully those professors have websites that mention "dr." and "home page"
4. Scholarly Publications["Stanford University" in scholar.google.com]
5. News mentions ["Stanford University" in news.google.com]
The bottom line - the UW came out #1! Very cool, not just for that result, but for the methodology of data mining the Web for this kind of purpose.
Technorati Tags: academia, statistics, University of Washington, UW
Just in case anyone thought Seattle is too sophisticated a place to be excited about the Superbowl....
My son's usual ski lessons are on Sunday's from 11 am - 4 pm. This week Powderpigs has changed the time of the lessons to 9:30 am - 1:15 pm, so that everyone can get their lesson in and get home in time for the 3 pm game. The forecast is for good snow, so we're looking forward both to skiing and getting to my parents' condo in time to watch the game!
I've been fortunate to have seen the great Allen Toussaint perform live a couple of times - once in a solo show in Washington that was a benefit for the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, and once in the late '80s at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival
The other day I heard him playing an astounding solo piano piece on the radio - it was called Tipitina and Me - a slowed down, minor key version of Professor Longhair's trademark tune Tipitina, and I had to go out and buy it. It's on a CD called Our New Orleans, and the whole CD is a gem. In addition to Tip and Me, Toussaint does a hard grooving minimalist version of his Yes We Can Can, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band has a good rockin' thing called My Feet Can't Fail Me Now, the Wild Magnolias do their Mardi Gras Indian version of Brother John Is Gone, and the great Irma Thomas does a nice blues.
It's also got the Preservation Hall Jazz Band doing Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans? (all of these songs take on such added poignancy now), and it ends with Randy Newman doing a hearbreaking rendition of his Louisiana 1927 with the NY Philharmonic.
Not only is the music great, but the proceeds go to Habitat for Humanity to help with Katrina rebuilding efforts. What more could you ask for?
Go out and get this CD.
I've been too busy with work and life to blog much lately - not that there's any shortage of interesting topics. But I couldn't let this one go by without noticing it.
The Canadian artist management company Nettwerk, which represents punk-pop star Avril Lavigne, among many other Canadian artists, is paying all of the legal fees of the family of a 15 year old being sued by the RIAA for downloading music including Avril's tune "Sk8er Boi".
Nettwerk CEO Terry McBride says "Suing music fans is not the solution, it's the problem", and goes on to say "Litigation is not 'artist development.' Litigation is a deterrent to creativity and passion and it is hurting the business I love," insists McBride. "The current actions of the RIAA are not in my artists' best interests."
Those Canadians are sure spunky, aren't they? And sensible too.
The complete press release is here.
