DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

This groove was composed spontaneously at the drum kit. To me it is a great example of how a simple change to a straight-time groove can establish an entirely new feeling.

  1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +     1/4 = 110 bpm
4 x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x 
-     O       O         O    o  O
4 o  o      o   o o  o      o  o

Patronize these links, man:

• Virtual Drummer loop
• MIDI
• MP3

Several years ago, Intel fired an employee named Ken Hamidi, who responded by repeatedly spamming thousands of Intel employees with anti-Intel emails. Intel sued to ban Hamidi from sending bulk email, and won.

Hamidi has nothing, and Intel is a huge corporation, so some people see this as a David vs. Goliath issue, and side with ‘David’. For example, Chronicle columnist Tom Abate wrote in 1998, “Not since David faced Goliath has there been a more unequal contest than that between the bankrupt Hamidi and the $26 billion Intel. And now this corporate giant wants the courts to take away Hamidi’s slingshot.”

Abate continues, “If Intel succeeds in shutting off the flow of e-mail it doesn’t like, it will set a precedent for other companies and other groups to muzzle all manner of annoying electronic communications.”

The way Abate’s argument is phrased, Intel’s suit sounds like a threat to free speech. But this is not a free speech issue at all — it is not about what is said but how the message is delivered. The issue is theft of service. Intel pays for bandwidth and disk space for its mail servers, and therefore has a right to determine how these are used. Sending bulk email (spam) is roughly equivalent to sending paper junk mail postage-due, except that the USPS provides us with a way to avoid paying for snail-mail we don’t want: we can refuse delivery. There is no equivalent for email.

Ryan Waldron wrote an excellent rebuttal to Abate’s article. It’s too good to excerpt, so you’ll have to read the whole thing: Hamidi, Intel, and Spam.

Anyway, this is all old news. Today’s update is that the California state appellate court upheld the lower court’s decision: “Intel is as much entitled to control its e-mail system as it is to guard its factories and hallways.”

Again, self-declared free-speech advocates are alarmed. ACLU attorney Ann Brick is quoted as saying, “This was not a case about protecting a computer system from harm. It was a case about Intel’s use of the courts to silence a speaker it didn’t like.”

Where did she get the idea that email transport is guaranteed? How does it seem right to her that the courts can force Intel to pay to have a third party disrupt Intel’s business, at the discretion of the third party?

The issue was that Access-Inter.net runs an open relay. An open relay is an email server that has no restriction on who can send mail through it. To spammers, finding an open relay is like finding money on the ground. An open relay allows spammers to send email to you but blame it on someone else. The company that runs the open relay then gets blamed, and has to deal with thousands of complaints from spam recipients — and the spammer is rarely even discovered, having already moved on to the next open relay.

In this case, Access-Inter.net’s open relay was discovered by a spam blacklist before it was discovered by spammers. The open relay was added to the blacklist as a preventive measure, on the reasoning that any mail coming from it might be spam. But this prevented some non-spam emails, including Theatre Bay Area’s, from being delivered.

This is unfortunate, but avoidable: there is no reason to run an open relay. Access-Inter.net’s techs were just rushed, lazy, or uninformed (and have since corrected the problem, proving the point that the entire episode could have been avoided).

The spam blacklist in this case is run by an engineer in Southern California. In the sense that he operates a blacklist that is subscribed to by large ISPs, he wields some power — enough to be classified as a ‘Goliath’ by some people, e.g. Chronicle columnist David Lazarus, who accused the engineer of “behaving like a schoolyard bully.”

But what Lazarus does not understand is that it is not the fault of the blacklist that Access-Inter.net got listed. Access-Inter.net was irresponsible in hosting an open relay; the blacklist simply called them on it. That hosting an open relay is dangerous and irresponsible is not news — EFF co-founder John Gilmore was shut down by Verio for the same thing back in March.

But Lazarus seems to think that email transport is some kind of guaranteed mechanism, and that anyone who interferes is breaking the law. In fact, anyone who receives email, or provides transport for it, can refuse some or all email at any time for any reason: if I’m paying for it, I should be able to decline, don’t you think?

Installing RAM in recent Macintoshes is laughably easy: a lever on the side of the case allows the panel to drop open, giving access to the components. The DIMM banks are not obstructed in any way; clipping in a new stick of memory takes only seconds. Reconnecting the peripherals takes another minute at most.

So I followed these few steps and thumbed the power switch on my wife’s Mac. Nothing happened. “Uh-oh,” I thought with the first stirrings of despair, “here we go again.” I must have the worst hardware karma in the state; every computer I own expires at my touch.

I checked all the connections and tried again… nothing. I opened the case and removed the new DIMM… nothing. I checked all the internal power connectors… nothing.

At the recommendation of an Apple technician, I tested the motherboard battery. To my great joy, the battery was completely drained — the needle on the multimeter did not even twitch.

Radio Shack stocks this part, so I was able to repair the system quickly. The new DIMM worked fine, of course. I did a little jig of relief.

Then, feeling high on accomplishment, having banished at least a few of the hardware gremlins that have set up residence in my office, I eagerly leapt into the stack of parts that will comprise my new webserver — I installed the CPU, cooler, SCSI card, and RAM on the motherboard, and set the board into the case. I mounted all the drives and ran all the cables. I double-checked every connection, wired up a monitor and keyboard, and with anticipation thumbed the power button… which did nothing. The computer was DOA.

Imagine my surprise.

The bin is huge, like a squat refrigerator, except it’s blue. It is designed to hold 1 week’s worth of recyclables for a single family, although in some cases it has room for the family too. It’s that big.

Single-stream recycling is an amazing thing, really and truly. Quick, call your county supervisor and ask for it now. Go ahead; I’ll wait.

The great thing about the blue bin, in addition to its size, is that I can put just about anything inside: paper, aluminum, glass, those funky juice-box packages (is it paper? is it plastic? Yes.), six of the 7 types of plastic, even aerosol cans. I don’t need to sort or separate my recycling — just dump it in the bin and let the single-stream gnomes work it out.

Glass, aluminum, and paper recycling is old news these days (to our great fortune and health), so it is the plastic recycling that is really exciting here. Previously our curbside program would accept only plastic #s 1 and 2, PETE and HDPE — but now, as a part of the single-stream initiative, the whole gang is invited: V, LDPE, PP, and PS. Take a look around today; you’ll be surprised at how many of these products you consume. Grocery-store salsa, hummus, sour cream containers: polypropylene, #5. The squeeze bottle of honey, and the bag the newspaper was wrapped in: low-density polyethylene, #4. The fancy shampoo bottle in the shower: polyvinyl chloride, #3. Last week, these would have gone into the landfill. This week, they get recycled.

In related news, the Bay Area Recycling Outreach Coalition provides this nifty poster promoting paper recycling. It is yours for the cost of a download.

(For my analysis of the needs that provided the basis for this specification, see the mail-order server, I: the problem.)

In an attempt to avoid hardware gremlins, I decided to stick with reputable vendors. Such hardware costs more, but for me, a few hundred dollars in hardware is cheap compared to the cost of stability problems in the future.

I think both AMD and Intel make reliable CPUs, but AMD units have a reputation for running hotter. While there may be exceptions to this general statement, I decided to focus on Intel products. I found a CPU that intrigued me: the “Tualatin” series of Pentium IIIs. These chips are built on a smaller process than most: .13-micron rather than .18 or .25. The smaller scale translates to a lower voltage requirement and/or higher clock speeds. The 1.13GHz/512k cache model, considered by Intel to be a “server” CPU, can be had for about $225.

Sticking with Intel, the motherboard choice was easy, because Intel only makes one affordable board that is certified for use with the PIII-S: the S815EMB1 — about $150. Note that this is a micro-ATX board, with integrated video and Ethernet, designed to fit into a 1U rackmount case.

I purchased a near-silent power supply from quietpc. These units run at about 26dB(A), as compared to the better-known “Silencer” series (34 dB(A)) from PC Power & Cooling. (As of this writing, Enermax has not published noise measurements for its “Whisper” series.)

System cooling presents a problem, as there is a tradeoff between cooling efficiency and noise. I will not be running this system very hard, so I opted for a CPU cooler that seems to offer the best passive cooling, the Zalman 3100-Plus. The reviews of this cooler were mixed, but I believe it will work best for me.

Be sure to read this 46-way shootout of CPU coolers.

RAM is somewhat easier to select, as it is more of a commodity item. I opted for Mushkin’s “high-performance” variety.

The storage system consists of an Adaptec ASC-29160 and a pair of Quantum Atlas V 9.1db drives, purchased from Hyper Microsystems. I picked those drives because I’ve had good luck with them before, and because Hyper Micro had a great deal on them ($90 per). Subsequently I was pleased to see these drives rated very highly at StorageReview.com.

All together I spent about $1400. The result will be a quiet 1.1 GHz PIII-S with 9Gb of fast, mirrored storage, in a desktop case.

After all the parts were ordered I checked out what a comparable Dell solution would have looked like. Dell happens to offer something similar: the PowerEdge 1400 with a single 1.13 GHz PIII-S, onboard ethernet, onboard SCSI controller, 2x18 Gb U160 SCSI… for about $1400. This machine would have twice the storage space as mine, which is a plus, but the drives are 10K RPM units, so they would run hotter than mine. Also the case is a tower, which I don’t want. And this machine is likely to be louder than mine.

On the positive side, I wouldn’t have to build it.

I was surprised to see the near-parity in price, though.

This concludes what must be the driest pair of journal entries I have ever written. Tune in tomorrow for something altogether more interesting. (Note to self: postpone that thermal-grease performance comparison you’ve been planning.)