EDGE to the rescue and a new abode
We moved into our new house on Friday with the help of friends and family; by late evening Saturday we were already enjoying the place, some old and new furniture, and our little boy was having a good time checking out the new sceneries. In the spirit of keeping all the excitement going we hosted a small event (13+ people) for some pasta, bread, y ensalada; and we did this on Sunday afternoon. An exhilarating and eventful weekend, where we really didn’t get a chance to study our surrounding in detail. So far everything is going well.
Quite possibly Verizon FiOS is available, and if it is I will likely order the business grade version of it to accommodate some of the servers that I will migrate onto Virtual Machines and move to our house. It’s always easier to have direct access to the server to do something new and exciting to the server; while on the other hand the idea of cloud computing seems to have taken off and I do like the idea of buying exactly the resources on shared infrastructure that I require, its just that I have not yet resolved the security concerns that I have with cloud computing. I don’t find a new problem with cloud computing when compared to managed or shared virtual machines or FreeBSD jails, it’s just that the idea of having a single entity having the ability to possibly analyze the contents on the machines raises a few questions and concerns, especially when some of the work that I do is research related and may contain intellectual property.
While we wait for Verizon FiOS or a Cable Modem I have been able to get online, albeit slowly with the help of Bluetooth modem support in the Blackberry 8800 paired to my Mac Book Pro. It’s working well, but EDGE is still very slow when I have 2 bars of service in the house. I have unlimited data with the Blackberry service and the feature of phone-as-modem (PAM) is really useful when traveling in airports instead of buying another datacard or hopping onto a wifi access point for 10 dollars at a go.
If you are interested in setting up the Blackberry 8800 to “wirelessly tether” you need to install some scripts, the fine webpage at fibble.org (http://www.fibble.org/archives/2007/10/updated-modem-s.html) will do the trick. There are some strange quirky things that I experience from time to time, such as the system not properly disconnecting or realizing that the modem has already disconnected; but it works enough to recommend that you try it out if you have a blackberry, a mac, and you travel.
I have also been hacking with Ruby on Rails 2.X and enjoying the features of Ruby, Scaffolding, and basically building useful applications with less code. I am still a bit of a skeptic on how Ruby scales; I am not a programmer by profession so it is hard for me to really know the ins and outs of a programming language, but I have a good feeling so far with the very simple RoR application that I have built. It certainly beats some of the more esoteric coding efforts that I have undertaken back in the day, such as coding CGI applications in C, and writing billing systems in PERL.
More travel coming up next week!
Originally published on truman.net. See the archived copy.