Free Airport WiFi

Last night I was in the Delta terminal 2 at JFK trying to read my e-mail. The airports I visit most frequently have free WiFi. All I have to do is turn on my computer, pull up a browser, confirm I am willing to abide by their use policy, and I have Internet access. In Salt Lake there are no strings attached. In Oakland, I generally have to watch a 30-second video advertisement. That one video gives me 30 minutes of use. If I need more, I just watch another ad. You can imagine my surprise when New York's largest airport didn't have free WiFi.

All I had to do was go onto my phone and I could read my e-mail. While the process is painless to get my e-mail, I prefer the full-size keyboard on my laptop. Fortunately I only had to respond to one or two e-mails before catching my flight and none of my messages needed to be very large.

Here is a list of airports that I have personally visited and know have free WiFi:

• Haneda, Japan
• LAX - Los Angeles, CA, USA
• OAK - Oakland, CA, USA
• SLC - Salt Lake City, UT, USA

The list is small right now, so I will have to continue to update it as I fly. Hopefully you find it useful.

Strata Conference and Hadoop World in New York

This week I get to spend a couple of days at the Strata Conference in New York. Combined with Strata is Hadoop World and that is why I chose to attend this conference instead of just waiting for the Strata conference in Santa Clara coming in February. Right now I am sitting in the keynote session where all of the major sponsors get to showcase their products. I don't really consider myself to be cynical but right now I find my eyes glazing over as I have seen way too many marketing pitches. But I won't let that keep me from giving my own marketing pitch.

So what is Hadoop and why does it matter? Hadoop is not something regular computer users will see in their homes. I'm sure there are several guys running it in their garage or basement, but that is more of an anomaly than normal. Hadoop is an open source project managed by Apache that allows users to take a bunch of cheap commodity computing hardware and combine it into a large data platform. It does this by making multiple copies (the default is three) so that the loss of hardware doesn't mean you lose data. You can also use the CPU's from all the computers in the system to process or look at the data stored in the system.

Hadoop matters to you in that companies can use it to process larger amounts of data. In the video game world, it means that companies can figure out what types of games you like to play and only market those types of games to you. It means they can figure out where you are getting stuck in a game and provide hints to help you get through those tough sections. It means that video game companies no longer rely on their gut to determine what their customers want and can analyze the data to truly see what is wanted.

This can be scary to some and exciting to others. Do we really want the companies we buy products from to know too much about us? That sounds a lot like Big Brother. However if I am in the market for a new car, automobile advertisements are seen as helpful. When I am not in the market for a car, those same advertisements are seen as annoying. Anything that can reduce the number of annoying advertisements I have to endure is beneficial. Now let us hope that is the outcome of Hadoop instead of just getting even more junk mail.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft

This evening was a monthly get together for friends from the office. We all met at a local restaurant and enjoyed catching up with former colleagues. One just happens to be working at Apple. There were several televisions located in the restaurant bar and so I kept catching glimpses of the football game going on in the background. While I enjoyed keeping up with the game, it was more interesting to watch the various commercials. They alternated between the Google Chrome book, the Apple iPhone 5S, and Microsoft's Surface tablet.

Naturally the conversation started discussing the various products in the advertisements. I talked about my hatred of the touchscreen fad that seems to be invading computers these days. One of my coworkers mentioned that I am a power user that has spent way too much time with a mouse or track pad and don't represent the masses. While I interact with my computer, most users simply retrieve information. I couldn't argue with that.

Next someone mentioned that one of my coworkers had a Microsoft tablet computer. One question I have had is if there are a large number of apps for the tablet. My coworker explained that he had the Pro model and so it was a real computer running Windows 8. Lesser version of the Microsoft tablet don't have many applications available to them and should be avoided. Everyone at the table seemed to agree with the comments. It also explained why Windows is embracing the the touchscreen interface so much.

The conversation ended with Apple. It was enlightening and my friend did not divulge any confidential information. However I don't want to go into too many details just in case I get my friend in trouble. Rest assured it was a good conversation and I was able to discuss some of my pet peeves with Apple products. I'm not sure it will do much good but it was nice to get that off my chest.

Recovering a PostgreSQL Database

A couple of weeks ago I got to pull an all-nighter at the office. This was a first for me at this job but it was necessary. It was also a first in that I lost a PostgreSQL database. Considering I have been working with PostgreSQL for over a decade, that speaks to its reliability as I was always losing Oracle databases when I worked for them.

The culprit turned out to be some maintenance we were doing on our network that caused us to loose connection with our database machines. We had to do a hard reboot on them. Normally that would not cause a problem with PostgreSQL but we were using the ext4 filesystem and that did. We lost our global/pg_filenode.map file which is a pretty bad problem. Searching through the Internet we discovered how bad. Everyone pretty much agreed that we needed to find a backup of that file or all our data was lost.

We searched high and low for a backup of the file without any luck. Our next step was to restore from our nightly backups. Unfortunately our backup had not been taking place and so that was not an option. Our last-ditch effort was to go through the data files and try to recover the information one byte at a time. At least we still had those.

There is a utility for PostgreSQL called pg_filedump that allows you to go through your data files and browse their contents. I located a series of scripts that helps you find the data files that contain table data. We really only needed to rebuild 2 tables and they were not very large.  The pg_filedump program helped us locate the data we needed. It took a while but we were able to get everything back.

There were a number of problems that all cascaded together and caused me and my coworker to stay up all night. While it shouldn't have happened, it did. The trick to getting our data back was never giving up.

Hand-Written Notes

I can't remember where I was told to send a thank-you note after going to a job interview but it is good advice. Lately I have been looking for some people to join my team and I am more impressed with someone after they send me a note thanking me for their interview. Sometimes it is the important difference between a successful job-seeking candidate and another. So far, all of these thank-you notes have been via e-mail. Perhaps I am showing my age when I remember that these notes should be hand written.

Back in 2003 I found myself looking for a job without much success. I was invited to attend a conference for C-level executives in high-tech companies. The main person putting on the conference was an old family friend and I explained that I would like to attend but could not afford the very high conference fee. The friend understood my situation and allowed me to attend free of charge. I made a number of significant contacts and so I scribbled a hand-written note and dropped it in the mail to my family friend. The day it arrived, I found out that the friend was appreciative that I would take the time to write something down. His comment was something along the lines of how e-mail is great but a hand-written note is more significant and sincere.

Right now my youngest daughter is in North Carolina and very homesick. This is the first time she has been away from home for more than a week or two. I make sure to send her a weekly e-mail and do a good job keeping in contact with her. Two weeks ago she was really depressed and so I made the effort to write her a letter every day. Yes I had to go buy stamps (did you know you can get them from ATM machines? I didn't until I was getting cash one day). Yes it took a lot longer to write out the letters and the spelling is very questionable. It also took longer for them to arrive. However my daughter thanked me for those letters. She is keeping them and re-reads them almost daily. It has also helped with her homesickness and she is doing much better.

I still prefer to use e-mail and hate texting but tolerate it. However every once and a while it is important to sit down and write something out. I think whoever receives the note or letter will overlook any grammar or spelling mistakes as something hand written is much more significant than electronic characters on a screen.

Dead Battery

This morning I had a very important doctor's appointment that involved being put to sleep for the procedure. I have never had any serious surgery and being put to sleep was a first for me. Needless to say, I was a little nervous but am happy to report that everything worked out fine. Last night I didn't know how it would turn out and found it tough to fall asleep.

I awoke at 3am but didn't know what time it was. I heard my dog get up and walk down the stairs. Normally that means she wants me to let her out. It didn't take long for me to figure out why she left the comfort of her dog bed: she was hiding. A battery in one of our smoke detectors had died and now the detector was chirping. Since I was awake, there was no way I could get back to sleep until I fixed that high-pitched beep.

I went down to where we keep the spare 9-volt batteries and grabbed a handful. Then I headed to the central part of my house where most of my smoke detectors seem to be located. I replaced one battery but the chirp continued. I replaced the next one with the same result. Then I started going through the bedrooms. I could still hear the chirp in the first bedroom, but it wasn't from that smoke detector. I finally heard it in the second bedroom and could confirm I found the bad battery. I put in a new one but the alarm chirped again. My replacement battery was also dead. I was out of batteries at this point and so I returned to where we kept extras. I pulled one out of the packaging and put it in the offending detector. Once again, it chirped.

At this point I was getting ready to pull the smoke detector from the ceiling but decided to hold out for a minute or two more. It must have taken a bit for the smoke detector to figure out the battery had been replaced because the noise it was making stopped. I could finally go back to bed. I tried to coax the dog to come back upstairs but she was comfortably asleep under the desk in my office and didn't trust that the painful noise was silenced.

Sometimes it is easy to fix technology problems. If the designers of smoke alarms had put in a simple red light to indicate which alarm had a dead battery, my searching would have been much more simple. In my case, I had to pull an "Edison" and test a number of devices before the problem was solved.

Stupid Technology

Last week I was riding from the office back to my sailboat when I passed a fellow cyclist on the bike path. As I rode past him, I noticed he had earphones on and a mobile phone mount on his handle bars. As he was on a bike path, I didn't fault him too much for the earphones. Then I noticed he was watching a movie as he rode down the bike path. At that point I was extremely glad to get around him. What kind of moron rides his bike in public and watches a movie at the same time?

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy watching a movie and riding a bike. In fact it is the only way to get through a workout on my indoor-stationary bike. When I am on a real bike and I am out in public, I feel it is critical to my health to devote 100% of my attention to my surroundings. It keeps me from getting hit and hitting other things. I'm sure this guy justified his actions because he was on a bike trail. The problem is that the bike trail is used by people walking, runners, rollerbladers, and other cyclists.  It is not a question of if someone will get hurt, it is a question of when.

Computers and technology have a place in our lives. Let's be sure to use them appropriately and not to create any unnecessary hazards.