Cognizant Transmutaion » How the World Works

National Shame: Swaths of Non-Rural US without Broadband; Time for Re-Divestiture

Robert J Berger — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 09:36:16 +0000

I live in Saratoga, CA, part of “High Tech” Silicon Valley. And my neighborhood STILL does NOT have ANY broadband services.

None! (I don’t count unreliable wireless with less than 1Mbps for more than $100/month a viable consumer broadband offering).

AT&T and Comcast are the “franchised” service providers (I.E. monopolies) for the area and they have no plans for covering this neighborhood.

Areas that do have “broadband” are at 3rd world speeds. Worldwide speed tests don’t even have the US in the top 10.

The US is no where to be seen. But Russia, BULGARIA, LATVIA, ROMAINIA!! Where’s the US? I know I don’t have ANY broadband in my house HERE IN SILICON VALLEY….

My startup’s office is in Mt. View California. Right in the heart of Silicon Valley. The only “high speed” service we could get is 1.5Mbps down / 512Kbps up ADSL. To get anything significantly faster we would have to pay thousands of dollars a month. WTF!?

This should be considered a National Shame.

Its time for re-divestiture. AT&T / Verizon should never have been allowed to reform the Bell Monopoly. Comcast and Time Warner should never have been given exclusive franchises and allowed to grow so big.

This time lets do Divestiture the proper way: horizontally. The physical plant is a natural monopoly (there is no marketplace for multiple last mile capital intensive physical plants with fleets of men in trucks) and a societal common good (the value to society is high) that can not be paid for by normal corporate ROI. (See the slightly dated, but still accurate Paradox of the Best Networks)

We need to treat telecom physical plant (rights of way, conduit, dark fiber, utility poles and physical meet points) like we do roads, water and sewers. Sometimes called the “LoopCo”, it could be government owned, community owned and operated or be a regulated monopoly that is mandated and overseen to operate for the common good as open access common carrier. The Singapore National Broadband Network has it close to perfect as far as I can tell.

The upper layers can be competitive vibrant marketplaces, enabled by a societal common good physical infrastructure.

This is being done in other countries. Similar concepts are being pioneered in Sweden, Netherlands (Now testing 1GBps!), Singapore, Canada, and Vermont (they keep threatening to succeed, so they can count as another country) as well as many other places even in the US.

The fundamental axiom of Telecom must be Structural Separation: the entities that own/operate the transport layer must not have any say or vested interests in the Content. Some countries are making it the Law such as New Zealand, Singapore, Europe (to some degree)

We can not allow Big Telecom (along with Big Media but that’s another rant) to continue to warp the fabric of free speech, commerce, arts and culture.

Its time to start pestering your Congress-Critters, City Hall, State Legislators and Governors. Create Meet-ups, organize your neighbors. We must take back OUR communications. And learn about those who are making it real around the country and around the world. Tell them its time to break up the monopolies again. But this time lets shut them down for good.

Where’s MY Bailout?

Robert J Berger — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 08:11:40 +0000

Ok, so there are at least 100 jobs directly or indirectly dependent on my being kept financially viable. I am just TOO BIG TO FAIL. So its time that I get MY Bailout from the government. I don’t need too much, a simple $1M will do for now. That’s about the same ratio as the amount being asked for by the Auto industry vs. the amount of jobs they say it will protect. I’ll pay it back someday I’m sure…

Well, if you won’t bail me out, then check out Larry Lessig’s rant on all this (as seen on Boing Boing:

These bailouts are an awful idea — the worst of K St. capitalism (== kapitalism) inviting an insanely bad future for the industries affected. If there’s one thing worse than Detroit managed by the managers who have been driving the American auto industry into the ground for the past three decades, it is Detroit managed by politicians.

I’m not against all bailouts. I think it was appropriate to save the airline industry after 9/11, for example: That was an unexpected shock that produced a failure not directly related to the bad management of the airlines.

But these bailouts are not that. Both the auto industry and the banking industry are insanely inefficient. They have been for decades. And rather than being saved from a shock, both need a significant shock to management to radically change how they do business.

Perhaps the shock to banking would be too great just now. I’m willing to be persuaded that intervention is necessary there. But the more I read about the auto industry, the less I am convinced.

People speak about this as if not bailing out Detroit means automobile production in America ends. That’s not what failing to bailout Detroit means. Not intervening now would be these automakers would enter bankruptcy. And bankruptcy means the assets of these dinosaurs get reorganized: Someone else buys these companies, at a price the market sets, and runs them profitably, because of the price the market set.

- snip -

Installing a git client on a shared host with no compiler

Robert J Berger — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 05:51:22 +0000

We are using Git to manage our deployments, but have some clients that use shared hosting services that don’t have git installed (in particular Hostgator.com).

Most of these shared hosting services do allow ssh shell access but don’t have compilers available on the shared hosting account. So I couldn’t just build git on the shared hosting account.

Many hosting services do offer webdav access to the account’s filesystem. I tried pushing git trees to the target filesystem over https/webdev, but couldn’t get it to work even if I first copied a bare git directory to the target.

This left me with the thought that maybe I could build git on another host that I controled that had the same type of Linux environment that was running the target shared host environment. Once I built it in the environment I controled, I could then copy it to the shared hosting account and use it via ssh shell access.

In the particular case of Hostgator, they were running CentOS 5.2.Thus I needed a CentOS 5.2 machine to build Git on. I didn’t have one lying around, but I do have an Amazon EC2 account!
(You should be able to modify this to work with other Linux versions pretty easily.)

Create a CentOS 5.2 instance on Amazon EC2

Used the Amazon Machine Image ami-0459bc6d described in CentOS 5 i386 Base AMI posting which includes instructions on how to instantiate and update to CentOS 5.2.

I used the fabulous ElasticFox extension to Firefox to instantiate and run the base image.

Documentation on using ElasticFox can be found at Elasticfox Getting Started Guide. Documentation on using Amazon EC2 can be found at Amazon EC2 Getting Started Guide.

I won’t repeat those instructions here, you’ll have to get the Amazon EC2 basics from those docs.

One you have the base ami-0459bc6d instance running, there are a few things you must do to to the stock CentOS 5.1 image to get it ready to build git:

Update the CentOS image from 5.1 to 5.2

yum -y upgrade
reboot

Install gcc

yum install gcc

Install zlib-devel package

Noticed that zlib-devel was needed by the git install process when I first tried to run configure on the git distribution.

yum install zlib-devel

Install curl-devel

Needed if you want to use http/https/webdav access to git repositories.

yum install curl-devel

Build Git from Source

Once you have got your CentOS 5.2 system running, you can build git from the source tree.

Download git

wget http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.6.0.4.tar.gz

Unpack the Git source tree

tar xvzf git-1.6.0.4.tar.gz

Create a build target path

You will need to have a build target directory path on your build machine that is the same as the path to your home directory on your target virtual host account. In this example we’re calling it
/home/clientname.

Replace clientname with the name of your home directory on hostgatore which is usually the same as your domainname.

This is where the build/install process will end up “installing” the compiled and other run time files:

mkdir /home/clientname

Run Configure on source tree

Change directory on the build machine to the top of the git source tree. (Where you unpacked the tar file git-1.6.0.4.tar.gz it does not have to be in /home/clientname)

cd git-1.6.0.4

Configure and set the prefix to the home directory that is your home directory on the target virtual host.

./configure --prefix=/home/clientname/git_root

Build the code and have it be installed in the directory that you defined in the –prefix line above
make make install
Assuming all goes well, it will build the code in the directory

git-1.6.0.4

and install everything in the directory

/home/clientname/git_root

It will automatically create the git_root directory but you have to have created /home/clientname

Tar it up and scp it to target

cd /home/clientname
tar cvzf git_root.tgz git_root
scp git_root.tgz userid@clienturl:

Unpack it on target

ssh userid@clienturl
tar xvzf git_root.tgz

Set up environment to use the newly installed git

Add the path to the newly created bin to your path:

Edit your startup file such as ~/.bash_profile and add:

PATH=/home/clientname/git_root/bin:$PATH

You have to log out and log back in or source .bash_profile to update the path. You can also type that line into your current session at the prompt and have it immediately active.

Use Git as normal!

I found that I can now use Git as normal except that with Hostgator they seemed to be blocking the git protocol or something. I could not say:

git clone git://github.com/rberger/project.git

But I could say:

git clone git@github.com:rberger/project.git

(assuming I had my ssh keys setup to access github as git)

git clone http://github.com/rberger/project.git

Note that you do not say ./git. We are assuming that you added git to your path and you can just say git and it will find the executables via the $PATH

If you didn’t want to change $PATH, you could give a full path like:

/home/clientname/git_root/bin/git clone git@github.com:rberger/project.git

Save your CentOS 5.2 Amazon Image

If you want to, you can save the CentOS 5.2 customized image you created on Amazon EC2.

Ssh into the root account on your running CentOS amazon instance, copy your Amazon EC2 certificate and private key to the home directory of root on the running CentOS instance and run the following commands:

Build the new AMI

Replace cert-your_cert_sig.pem, your-private-key-sig and your-amazon-userid with the appropriate values for your EC2 certificate.

ec2-bundle-vol -d /mnt --cert cert-your_cert_sig.pem --privatekey pk-your-private-key-sig.pem -u your-amazon-userid -s 3096

The -s 3096 tells it to create an image that is 3GB big. You may have to make it bigger if the command fails. You can check that this is the problem by adding the –debug flag to the above command.

Stash the image into your S3 account

Use your own ws-access-key-id and aws-secret-access-key

ec2-upload-bundle -b centos-5.2-git -m /mnt/image.manifest.xml -a aws-access-key-id -s aws-secret-access-key

Git to your hearts content!

Here is the gzipped tar file of git built to run on hostgator. I don’t know if it will work in any other directory than the one it was built for though.

git_root.tgz

Great Story on Shorting the Financial Apocalypse

Robert J Berger — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 03:43:46 +0000

An amazing article about those who saw the financial apocalypse coming and actually shorted the whole thing.

The End

by Michael Lewis Nov 11 2008
The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.

Photoillustration by: Ji Lee

-snip-

On July 19, 2007, the same day that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told the U.S. Senate that he anticipated as much as $100 billion in losses in the subprime-mortgage market, FrontPoint did something unusual: It hosted its own conference call. It had had calls with its tiny population of investors, but this time FrontPoint opened it up. Steve Eisman had become a poorly kept secret. Five hundred people called in to hear what he had to say, and another 500 logged on afterward to listen to a recording of it. He explained the strange alchemy of the C.D.O. and said that he expected losses of up to $300 billion from this sliver of the market alone. To evaluate the situation, he urged his audience to “just throw your model in the garbage can. The models are all backward-looking.

The models don’t have any idea of what this world has become…. For the first time in their lives, people in the asset-backed-securitization world are actually having to think.” He explained that the rating agencies were morally bankrupt and living in fear of becoming actually bankrupt. “The rating agencies are scared to death,” he said. “They’re scared to death about doing nothing because they’ll look like fools if they do nothing.”

On September 18, 2008, Danny Moses came to work as usual at 6:30 a.m. Earlier that week, Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy. The day before, the Dow had fallen 449 points to its lowest level in four years. Overnight, European governments announced a ban on short-selling, but that served as faint warning for what happened next.

At the market opening in the U.S., everything—every financial asset—went into free fall. “All hell was breaking loose in a way I had never seen in my career,” Moses says. FrontPoint was net short the market, so this total collapse should have given Moses pleasure. He might have been forgiven if he stood up and cheered. After all, he’d been betting for two years that this sort of thing could happen, and now it was, more dramatically than he had ever imagined. Instead, he felt this terrifying shudder run through him. He had maybe 100 trades on, and he worked hard to keep a handle on them all. “I spent my morning trying to control all this energy and all this information,” he says, “and I lost control. I looked at the screens. I was staring into the abyss. The end. I felt this shooting pain in my head. I don’t get headaches. At first, I thought I was having an aneurysm.”

And on a similar note we see that Peter Schiff has been pretty right on in his predictions of the Economic Calamity we are now experiencing. He kept on giving clear warnings even while being literally laughed at on National TV.