But, I really want to build something special to play. I love Telecasters, so I’m planning on building a custom Tele. In this category I’ll be posting my progress as I select parts and eventually when it comes time to put it together and start playing.

Anyway, this post was really poorly written wasn’t it…

Well, I don’t have a lot of tolerance for frustration, so after a few months of struggling to learn Linux and Ruby at the same time, and trying to find a decent editor for Linux that I liked I ended up buying a MacBook Pro so I could “just use Textmate.” I wanted my tools to be out of my way and everyone was telling me that the Mac was the way to do it. I RVM’d it up and installed a Textmate trial. Of course, I also had to install XCode so that I could get a working GCC and homebrew to get some other dev tools.

Textmate, it turned out, was too slow and clunky for me. I traded it in for MacVim + Janus for a long while, ran RubyMine for a while, tried emacs a few times and am currently using SublimeText 2. I didn’t find what I was looking for in an editor completely, but being on the Mac made trying many different editors an easy task.

Everything was going pretty well, with the occasional hiccup until I started really pushing my system. I started running into issues with memory management (inactive memory, ahem) bringing my system to a grinding halt right at a critical moment. I’ve got an SSD in my computer, but moving large files takes hours because of TimeMachine and Spotlight.

It seems that one of the biggest features of OSX is designed to sell newer hardware. Which frankly sucks. Not only do you have to pay a huge premium for Apple hardware to run OSX, but then critical components of the operating system prevent you from being able to take advantage of that overpriced but pretty piece of equipment you bought.

But the thing that really grinds my gears is Lion. Or more specifically XCode 4. Or even more specifically this:

% which gcc
/usr/bin/gcc
% gcc --version
i686-apple-darwin11-llvm-gcc-4.2 (GCC) 4.2.1 (Based on Apple Inc. build 5658) (LLVM build 2335.15.00)
Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

If you look closely, you should notice that GCC is in fact, not GCC. /usr/bin/gcc on Lion is actually the busted and unmaintained llvm-gcc. The amount of things that won’t compile against that is staggering, and I can’t really put the blame on the developers but it sure makes compiling new gems, rubies and updates to things from Homebrew a hassle.

It really just makes me want to go back to Linux. The high level stuff may have lacked polish (though I didn’t look everywhere I could’ve), but at least the stupid compilers work. And I’ve yet to run into a Linux distro where /usr/bin/gcc wasn’t GCC.

© CBS

My brain has become kind of an amorphous blob of mush recently and I though I needed to change things up a bit. Apparently I’m not one of those people who can productively code for 10+ hours a day. (What did you think I did after work?) Anyway, I wanted to get back to my roots as a network admin and do something different so I decided to pick up a few inexpensive MicroTik routers and learn some advanced routing.

Anyway, while waiting for the gear to arrive I decided to watch this excellent training video and then decided I needed to design a “network” to route. The network I designed loosely resembles a real datacenter style network but much smaller. In fact, small enough to fit on my desk. Like a miniature train set.

Anyway, here’s the plan. I’m going to configure the routers first and then I’m going to try and get them to distribute their routes via RIP, then OSPF, then BGP. I’ll try configuring some HA stuff and testing what happens in various situations and maybe later on even play with VRRP. Here’s a diagram of the network topology I’m going to use first.

You might think it odd that I decided to handle all of my “peering” on a switch instead of with routers, but really this is pretty common. Since all those routers are “ISP” routers, they can be trusted to some degree so the additional flexibility and performance of using a switch should be nice. For example, to upgrade the TRANSIT router or to increase capacity, another one can simply be added to the switch and the full bandwidth becomes available to the mesh. Also, it allows me to plug one cable into my computer and run WinBox to manage all these things via MAC ;-)

Oh, and the 192.168.x.x addresses are “customer” addresses. That’s just so I’ll have something to ping and traceroute to.

http://www.dnswasher.org

Well, I got to thinking about it and decided “It can’t be that hard to implement DNS filtering, surely I could write a little filtering DNS server and hook it up to a blacklist and that should get people through for a while.” And surely enough, in about 20 lines of Ruby and about 15 minutes I had a fully functional recursive resolver with caching and filtering built right in.

My project for the weekend is going to be to write a web app to manage various filter lists and expose a basic HTTP API so that I can release the whole thing as a working proof of concept and get some feedback. I expect the way I’m going to implement this performance won’t be that good but it should be totally usable by the end of the week. The reason I chose this option is because I can throw a basic web app up on Heroku for free and that will mean the whole project can operate indefinitely at no ongoing cost to me.

But, what I really want isn’t a set of programs that work together to handle this simple task. Ultimately, I’d like to have a great database of community maintained and owned domain categorizations with real process and policy behind its maintenance. Once the database is mature enough for production usage I think the best way to share it would be using BIND RPZs per category and probably also dnsbl style.

Anyway, I’m going to put together a website for the project and start thinking about policies before I write the actual database app.