I’m not willing to pay today for the privilege of waiting two weeks for the phone to arrive.

Given the feeding frenzy that occurred at the introduction of the original iPhone, I’m surprised that Apple didn’t do a better job of stocking the stores this time around.  Perhaps they think that the limited supply will add to the hype and eventually generate more sales.  Or perhaps they simply don’t believe that a customer that wants to buy a phone today might choose a different brand.  Certainly the AT&T salespeople were quick to recommend other phones that they actually have in stock.

Do you need anything from me?

I replied:

World peace, or failing that, maybe some whirled peas?

And his response was:

I do not currently have the resources necessary to overthrow the current US government and re-instate the Constitution, which would contribute to a more stable world order, so I will procure some whirled peas for you.

For a long time, I’ve had a directory on my web server containing local copies of DVD images of various Fedora Linux distributions, for convenience in local installs.  There aren’t any links to the directory, and the parent directory isn’t indexable, though some years back it was.  Inktomi found it in 2003 and started indexing it.  Their web crawler did download the files once, but after that they only asked the server if the files had changed.  Inktomi was later acquired by Yahoo.

What I found was that on June 4, Yahoo started indexing them.  Since there is no current link to the files, they probably got the URL from an Inktomi database.  That would have been fine, except that they started downloading all of them every day!

While the public is generally authorized to download any of the content of my web server, downloading the same large files on a daily basis is abusive, and constitutes unauthorized use of computer services and  unauthorized access to a computer (California Penal Code sections 502(c)(3) and 502(c)(7), respectively).

I’ve taken steps to prevent this from happening again.

I would demand that Yahoo reimburse me for the bandwidth fees that they caused me to incur, and pursue legal remedy if they refuse, but as it turns out when I explained the situation to my ISP, they agreed to a one-time waiver of the overage fees.

It seems bizarre to me that any web crawler would actually download ISO image files even once, let alone repeatedly.  Yahoo probably pays less than 1% of what I pay per megabit per second of bandwidth I use, but even at low rates I would have expected that they would not want to download content that is not suitable for indexing, or would only download it once.

Air conditioners designed for horizontal sliding or casement windows tend to be more expensive than for vertical sliding sash windows, presumably only because they are less common.  I was amazed that despite its shipping weight of 95 lb., this air conditioner was eligible for Amazon Prime shipping, so I was only charged $4 for overnight shipment from Dallas (in addition to the Amazon Prime annual fee).

Today at home I’ve experienced two power outages, apparently due to utility transformer failures, and an unrelated internet outage.

Of course, personal computers are now ubiquitous in many parts of the world, generally have more spare computing power than the hypothetical chip in the television, and have two-way communications via the internet. SETI@home started in 1999 as a way to take advantage of this excess computing power to further scientific research. It was followed by Folding@home, and now there are a whole slew of widely distributed computing projects, also known as “grid computing“. There are now general-purpose volunteer grid computing platforms, such as Fedora Nightlife, so that you don’t even have to choose a specific project to which to donate your spare cycles.

One might question whether donating “spare” cycles is really a net benefit; no matter how worthy the project taking advantage of the cycles, it is using more electric power and thus in most cases harming the environment in various ways. There may be other, less obvious reasons to question the benefits of donating compute cycles.

Volunteer grid computing power can reasonably be anticipated to grow substantially in the near future, as more PCs are equipped with graphics cards having GPUs supporting general-purpose computing (e.g., OpenCL, Brook+/CAL, and CUDA), and the grid clients start taking advantage of them. It is reported that the Folding@home client already is able to use Brook.

The volunteer grid computing platforms generally select only certain projects based on their merits, but there are also commercial grid computing platforms, where projects pay for use of the grid, and grid participants get paid for the computing they perform. In the commercial scenario, presumably the grid administration and grid participants don’t care what the computation is used for, as long as it is purchased.

The government has long been the primary user of supercomputers for various military purposes such as weapons design and cryptanalysis. One of the most recently purchased supercomputers, the IBM Roadrunner, sold for US$133 million and achieves sustained performance of just over 1 teraflop. By comparison, the Folding@home volunteer grid has sustained performance slightly under 2 teraflops, and yet cost the project very little since the equipment costs are borne by the volunteers.

Provided that they decompose problems into work units that don’t in and of themselves reveal any classified information, the government might be able to use a commercial grid rather than purchasing a supercomputer. The main advantage would be paying for the computing power only on demand, rather than as a fixed asset.

But could they do that using a volunteer grid?

Here’s the thought experiment: if the nature of the work units can be made sufficiently abstract, they could perhaps be disguised as serving some other purpose that is supported by a volunteer grid. When you’re contributing to a volunteer grid, how do you know that your work units are really serving the project you expect? Perhaps you’re actually running NSA@home or Nukes@home, without even knowing it.

Note that this type of clandestine grid computing is most plausible with general-purpose grids or with grids that use closed-source clients. Although the major dedicated grid computing projects have resisted the idea of releasing their client code as open source software, concern over this possibility might influence their position in the future.

[The basic idea came out of a conversation with a friend who probably prefers to remain nameless. "NSA@home" is in reference to a hypothetical clandestine project, not to this.]

Personally, I’m in favor of women’s suffrage.

I’m really glad that they used Cairo and Pango for the rendering. I haven’t dealt with writing code to print from a GUI application since the early days of the Macintosh, and that was really ugly.

I haven’t yet tried printing from Windows, but Cody Russell committed patches back in April to make it work. Thanks, Cody!