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I have my DSL through Blarg also. They are a great company. By the way, they run their whole business on Linux.

I have the "SOHO" DSL service. The terms of service are basically "it's your bandwidth, do whatever you want with it as long as it's legal". I have an email server, ftp server, etc.

Verizon keeps sending me offers to switch to their DSL service. No, thanks.

http://www.blarg.net/

Sigh. A bit more than the $80 I budgeted, but O.K., I'll bite.

They refused to sell me the service even though I was willing to pay for it.

Turns out I got a better deal taking their DSL link backhauled to Blarg! for around $10 less.

Of course, that's DSL, and the person here is stuck with Cable, and so probably won't have the chance to split access and service providers. Besides, I didn't know that Cable broadband providers even offered commercial-grade service.

I would suggest, though, that people who are moving scope out the ISP and broadband provider scene before they settle on a place. At least try to live somewhere where you can chose between cable (ugh!) and DSL (there are some good providers out there, even if the access lines from the "telco" (cough, customer non-service, cough) might be expensive.

This is espescially important if you are buying a home, and found the perfect one, but broadband availability sucks: "$20k off the offer for the house being in the unfashionable part of the internet".

This is misleading. I have Verizon service (POTS and DSL) in Monroe, WA, and they don't touch my traffic and don't give a fig about what servers I run.

See I have DSL service from Verizon, but they are not my ISP, so I don't have to put up with assanine ToS. I get my internet connectivity from blarg.net. Verizon just provides the backhaul from the DSLAM to Blarg! And, to their credit, Blarg! doesn't use MTU-mangling PPPoE. Just one long virtual circuit private "electonic highway" onramp for me (well, a dedicated lane on that onramp, if you really want to push the analogy -- work with me here :-)). My "always on" connection is very much always on.

Verizon sucks rotten eggs, as far as serivce is concerned (took 'em forever to acknowledge that, yes, I had an international long distance plan, and no, my calls to Canuckistan were not to be billed at $0.75/minute), but I'm stuck with them as a telco. So, I subscribe to what little I can. In this case, that means just the data pipe from me to my ISP.

There is a bit of a downside, of course, and that is price. But, it is not unreasonable: instead of some $30 a month for neutered dynamic IP access, I pay them closer to $40 a month just for the pipe and another $35 a month or so to Blarg!. Static IP? No problem (well, it costs a bit extra, included in the above price). NATed hosts? No problem. Inbound SMTP? No problem (but don't relay please: the IP address is ours and we like to keep a clean anti-SPAM reputation). Inbound telnet? Hey, it's your security, do what you want. Sure. Inbound HTTP? It's your box you're Slashdotting, not ours.

Now, of course, there are a few things I shouldn't do that'd hurt Blarg!, like run a busy site at the end of a DSL link, but those kinds of things would be bad to me too. Still, no one is going to cut me off for opening up port 80 for a day or two of private testing.

So, yeah, sure, sell me a fatter cheaper pipe Verizon. If all you can do with a modest degree of competence is sell pipes, do that.

Um, I am familiar with the kana sets, and I just saw the logo for the media company that owns godzilla, but I do not see the resemblance between this and their logo. Although if someone did see the character, and the Kanji compound, I am sure that they probably couldn't see the irony you are after as well. considering that Gojira looks like the writing on this poster.

"Oh, yes, a positive large integer. Is this as opposed to a negative large integer?"

cdrecord for windows
Unxutils for windows (Includes tar, no cygwin, native)
zsh for windows (no longer maintained)
And of course, cygwin comes with bash, there are probably others...

My wife and I are serious bicyclists. This year, we are attempting longer and harder rides than ever before, with more elevation gain. So we got new bikes.

My wife's bike is built on a frame by Wylder, called the Queen of the Road. Wylder is going out of business; when they were in business, they charged $1800 for that frame, but they are selling the frames they have left for $750. (Their web site says they have 42 cm, 45 cm, 52 cm, and 55 cm frames left. If you know a woman who wants a ti bike and can fit one of those sizes, send her this link!)

My bike -- I'm still amazed, I feel so lucky -- is a Colnago Ovalmaster. It's 6/4 titanium, the extra-stiff kind, and it has oddly shaped tubes; the shaped tubes help make the bike very stiff in the ways I want it to be stiff (when I hammer on the pedals, the frame doesn't flex) but still light and springy when I go over bumps. I love it.

I was able to afford my frame because I got it used on ebay. You can get some great deals on bike stuff on ebay.

Anyway, our new bikes have really helped us improve our speed. I didn't realize how much my wife's old bike was holding her back, until she got the new one. Her old bike is comfortable and stable, but it's six full pounds heavier than her new one, which matters when you are spending many hours climbing tall hills. And a lot of the weight savings is in moving parts: pedals, cranks, wheels. (The rule of thumb is that rotating weight counts double, so you should sooner get a lighter wheel than a lighter saddle.)

For me, the biggest improvement with the new bike is not the climbing, but the descending! My old bike was not stiff enough for me, and I got very nervous going down a steep hill. My new bike feels rock-stable under me when I am descending. I am still not a speed demon on downhills, but I'm a lot happier and a bit faster.

The metric I like to apply to bikes is dollars per mile. We ride enough miles that even just this year, both bikes will drop to well under a dollar per mile. If you only ride 10 miles at a time, don't spend serious money on a bike; get an inexpensive starter bike. (But don't buy a $200 bike from Wal-Mart. If you are considering buying a new bike, please read my thoughts on my personal web page about bikes.)

When you think about it, there is a lot of technology going with us on bike rides. We have heart rate monitors that also record speed, distance, and altitude changes (Polar S720+). We have technical fabric clothing, such as CoolMax jerseys or microfiber polyester rainwear. We have helmets that can save us in a bad accident, yet are light and don't make our heads overheat. We carry cell phones while riding, in case a bike totally breaks down and we need a taxi, or in case someone needs medical help.

No matter how much technology I buy, the pro riders could still ride me into the ground on a low-end bike. But our titanium bikes, and our other gear, let us ride up to our ability and have fun doing it.

steveha

And don't forget it survived King Kong climbing on it too!

So did the WTC. Here's the proof! We would have been prepared if the terrorists would have used giant gorillas. =)

• "Electricity is metered. Broadband is not (yet)."

1. When I signed up for 768/128 ADSL, the agreement specifically stated "unmetered transfers." While I was specifically prohibited from reselling the service, I could (and did!) give away access. (I only noticed one other person use my wireless -- perhaps there were more, but I only actually "saw" one.)

2. Verizon (who was NOT my ISP) certainly didn't give a hoot about how much data crossed the physical line.

   Now, about that "metered" part...

3. The amount of data that can be pulled through a 768-Kbit DSL line is finite. If your ISP charges you what it will cost them to route that much data, you aren't likely to hear complaints if you fill your pipe. (Though JWZ did, and he was using Covad at the time.) Worst case in my situation -- 31-day month with 100% usage 24/7 -- works out to ~280 Gigabytes in a month. MAX. In a conversation with one of the Blarg techs, I learned it costs ~$110/month to route 1 Mbit/sec through a Tier-1 US backbone. That's not including physical circuit fees.

4. The electricity argument is valid beyond the metering issue as well -- circuits (and transformers) have limits. If you provide one 15-amp circuit there is no danger of someone running their whole house off it, or setting up an electric-arc smelting operation (well, one of any size, anyway...) A flat-rate charge based on (120v X 15A)/1000 X 744 (hours in a 31-day month) X $0.10 (cost per KW/hour) means $134 will completely cover unmetered use of that 15-amp circuit.

Rather interesting, really... it seems the DSL providers have a more enlightened view of this issue than the cable providers. It shows the difference in culture and levels of greed. Also, my cable provider charges $15/GB for every GB (or fraction) over 10 GB/month. If I wanted to move as much data over cable as I could have on my DSL, my monthly cable bill would be ~$4100!!

Perhaps prices need to rise somewhat for "free wireless" to be ignored by all ISPs, but unlimited internet access is most definitly feasible.

What I was referring to, though, was Blarg's "Primary or Secondary DNS for two domains" service that comes with my account. (I'm using Verizon's 768/128 line rate -- that's the fastest I can get at my distance.)

The problem is that most end-user DSL (and all consumer cablemodem that I've seen!) Acceptable Use Policies explicitly prohibit reselling the service!

I'm signed up with a Washington State DSL ISP that has been incredible --

1. They got me installed when Verizon said I wasn't in a servicable area
2. I have their SO/HO level of service
3. I can run servers
4. I can host my own domain (two, actually!)
5. I can NAT and firewall to my heart's content
6. I don't have to deal with PPPoE (straight bridge config)
7. I get 5 IPs...

   (Can you tell I like this company?)

Personally, I don't think Blarg would have kittens over this. They're not "like that." Object, yes... charge me more, yes. Call in the National Guard... no. However, I can see other ISPs (Comcast comes to mind, with their NAT inquisition) that will scream that this is the end of the world.

There is a native Zsh port for win32 that works very nicely

You can read more about it here. You can get it by FTP from ftp://ftp.blarg.net/users/amol/zsh But you will need a gzip decompressor.

It happens randomly (it's an ad, after all), in the fart^H right column, so here's a screen shot.

That does not appear to be an advertisement, even remotely.

You can always download the z shell for windows at ftp://ftp.blarg.net/users/amol/zsh/zsh.exe.gz. I also have the GNU tools for windows, as well as some self-compiled extras such as dig and whois. Cygwin sucks.

This reminds me of another dispute where Kellogg's cereal tried to block a band from trademarking the name "The Toucans", claiming that it infringed on their "Toucan Sam" trademark and also claimed damages as a result of the band's name! They claimed the band's name confused their customers. More details of the dispute.

This reminds me of another dispute where Kellogg's cereal tried to block a band from trademarking the name "The Toucans", claiming that it infringed on their "Toucan Sam" trademark and also claimed damages as a result of the band's name! They claimed the band's name confused their customers. More details of the dispute.

You must answer some or all of the questions

I have prepared a fill-in-the-blanks file based on the questions. I took the questions, formatted them nicely into paragraphs, and put notes in angle brackets where you should enter text. I made two versions, an RTF file and an HTML file, so no matter what you use you can probably import one of the versions.

By the way, I used Microsoft Word to prepare these. I formatted the sections and questions with Heading styles, and the answers as Body Text, which means that the Outline view will work; you can browse the document as a collapsable tree. Also, I formatted all the government text with the "no proofing" language attribute, so Word will not put red or green squiggles (i.e. text flagged by the spelling checker or grammar checker) under any of the questions. If you use Word, definitely open the RTF version rather than the HTML version.

If you use Word 2000 or Word 97, be sure to save with the Save As... command, and choose the "Save as Word 6.0/95" option. They prefer PDF, but Word documents 7.0 or earlier are okay. (Word 7.0 == Word 95, and the document format is identical to Word 6.0.)

"dcma_cm" == "DCMA comments"

Here are the URLs:

ftp://ftp.blarg.net/users/steveha/dcm a_cm.rtf

ftp://ftp.blarg.net/users/steveha/dc ma_cm.html

You must answer some or all of the questions

I have prepared a fill-in-the-blanks file based on the questions. I took the questions, formatted them nicely into paragraphs, and put notes in angle brackets where you should enter text. I made two versions, an RTF file and an HTML file, so no matter what you use you can probably import one of the versions.

By the way, I used Microsoft Word to prepare these. I formatted the sections and questions with Heading styles, and the answers as Body Text, which means that the Outline view will work; you can browse the document as a collapsable tree. Also, I formatted all the government text with the "no proofing" language attribute, so Word will not put red or green squiggles (i.e. text flagged by the spelling checker or grammar checker) under any of the questions. If you use Word, definitely open the RTF version rather than the HTML version.

If you use Word 2000 or Word 97, be sure to save with the Save As... command, and choose the "Save as Word 6.0/95" option. They prefer PDF, but Word documents 7.0 or earlier are okay. (Word 7.0 == Word 95, and the document format is identical to Word 6.0.)

"dcma_cm" == "DCMA comments"

Here are the URLs:

ftp://ftp.blarg.net/users/steveha/dcm a_cm.rtf

ftp://ftp.blarg.net/users/steveha/dc ma_cm.html