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Natalie and I are in the process of packing the contents of our Monterey apartment in preparation for tomorrow's move to Piedmont/Berkeley/Oakland. Moving sucks. We've been coming up with axioms of moving while lifting, boxing and moving stuff:

• You always have more stuff than you think. If think you have a one-bedroom apartment, figure on getting supplies for a two-bedroom apartment.
• You always have more stuff than you need. In the process of moving, you will find things that you haven't used in months or, in some cases, years. This will help you question the importance of things. Also, it ties in with some of the suggestions I've learned from David Allen's book "Getting Things Done." Having a weekly review process for my work materials helps me reduce clutter in a short period, while reducing the overall review time. Fifteen minutes of organizing per week is infinitely better than 2 hours per month.
• More to come...

Posted by Scott at 9:50 PM | Permalink

For the last week, I've been staying with my sister in Walnut Creek while Natalie and I completed our apartment hunting. We found a fantastic 900+ square feet apartment in the Oakland-Grand Avenue-Piedmont area that we will be moving our possessions into later this week.

In the meantime, I've been commuting on Interstate 680 from Walnut Creek to Pleasanton for my new job at EMC Documentum. The job has been going great, and the commute isn't too bad; however, it's a far cry from the 10-15 minute cruise from Marina to Monterey when I was working at the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC). My new commute takes roughly 45-60 minutes during rush hour when it would normally take about 25-30 minutes during off-peak hours. I hate inefficiency, and this one is particularly offensive. It's been a good opportunity for me to rediscover National Public Radio (NPR), which I used to listen to regularly when carpooling from Capitola to Marina. It's one of the most thought-provoking media outlets on radio, in my opinion.

So, I've been considering the different commuting options from our new apartment to work. Since we'll be in the Piedmont area, I can ride BART from the MacArthur station to the Dublin/Pleasanton station. This is a 44 minute journey, which is respectable. However, there are some logistical problems that remain.

First, the MacArthur station is about 2.5 miles from our apartment which means that I will need to get to the station by car. Natalie can drop me off, or I can drive myself if there is available parking. Lastly, MacArthur doesn't have a good reputation for safety. So, leaving a car there during the day and part of the night might be a bad idea.

A lesser problem is getting from the Dublin/Pleasanton BART station to my workplace. There is a municipal bus line that takes about 10 minutes to travel between the BART station and my office park. I consider this a safe, convenient solution for getting between the BART station and work.

So, there are three discreet legs of my journey from home to office if I use public transportation. This complexity might result in my just driving from home to work, since it is a reverse commute and takes about 35-40 minutes by car. I regret making this decision since I am a fan of mass transit.

So, I'm spending an unusual amount of time considering commuting variables. None of these problems existed when I was working in Monterey, or from home as an independent contractor. I've heard that the population explosion in the East SF Bay Area (Pleasant Hill, Walnut Creek, etc.) occured only after the BART lines were installed. Before then, it was impractical to live in those areas and commute to SF and beyond. But now, it's just a matter of driving to a BART station and getting on board. BART has contributed to suburban sprawl. And when sprawl begins to overrun the systems that spurred it's growth in the first place, what happens next? Traffic jams, poorly connected transportation systems, and frustration.

Posted by Scott at 8:31 AM | Permalink

Natalie and I have had been enjoying our Tivo system for last 6 months. However, one of the original setup hurdles was dealing with the telephone-based setup process when we didn't have a telephone line to our apartment. Fortunately, upon completing the setup we were able to request an early-access release of the Tivo software that downloads television programming information and system updates from the Internet using a connected network adapter.

We'll be moving from Monterey to the San Francisco Bay Area soon, and will need to repeat the Tivo setup process to obtain TV programming info appropriate for our area. Fortunately, the Tivo software allows the repeated setup to be conducted over Internet connections in addition to the telephone lines. We're considering getting Vonage or another Voice-Over-IP (VOIP) telephone service provider so that we can continue to be free of Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS). Woohoo!

Posted by Scott at 12:09 PM | Permalink

Natalie and I will be moving up to the Bay Area soon, and so we've been scouring Craigslist and similar on-line classifieds for places to call home. I've lived in Monterey, Capitola and Davis and have never had as much difficulty finding a place as we are having now. I think the volume of places available is overwhelming, and the variability in quality among places is disheartening. Call me crazy, but shouldn't a two-bedroom listing actually have two bedrooms?

So, we found what could very well be the "perfect" apartment for us while in Piedmont/Berkeley on Friday. Hopefully our applications will go through and we'll be out of our current apartment that's managed by a bunch of slum-lords. I'm not too familiar with the Piedmont area, except that I know it's got some incredible old homes. I just need to keep flexing my skills at work and some day, maybe, I can own one of those homes.

Speaking of long shots, I got a call from an old co-worker of mine named Peter. He was in the midst of switching jobs in the South Bay because his previous company was purchased and broken up by a competitor. Listening to him describe the situation, I was amazed that he was so excited about the chaos and evil infecting his previous employer. I think he's just one of those people who will always put their money on the "high risk, high reward" bets. I don't think I'm one of those people, but I admire those who are.

Posted by Scott at 8:39 AM | Permalink

So, I finally got around to making a couple of AppleScript scripts to automate the tunneling of my SMTP and IMAP traffic through a secure SSH connection established to my mail server. Here are the steps I took.

First, I generated an SSH DSA key from a UNIX shell on my PowerBook. I suggest supplying a password for the DSA key since it will prevent an attacker who has access to the client (PowerBook) from accessing the remote system (mail server) without your DSA password. The command I used to create a key was "ssh-keygen -t dsa".

Next, I added an entry in my Mac OS X keychain for the DSA key password. The keychain is a secure way of consolidating your various security credentials with OS-level protection. I started the Keychain from "Applications->Utilities->Keychain Access". Then, I selected the "File->New Password Item" menuitem and supplied the password associated with the newly created DSA key:

I then created a shell script capable of starting the 'ssh-agent' program. The role of 'ssh-agent' is to cache SSH keys in memory so that the key password needs to be supplied only once. I gleaned this script from the MacTechNotes website. Here's the body of the script:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Check that the ssh-agent is running, and if not, kick it off
#

if [[ -z $SSH_AUTH_SOCK ]]; then
   SOCKETFILE=/Users/${USER}/tmp/ssh/ssh-agent.socket
else
   SOCKETFILE=${SSH_AUTH_SOCK}
fi

/bin/ps -wU ${USER} | /usr/bin/grep "[s]sh-agent" > /dev/null
if [[ $? -gt 0 ]]; then
   /bin/rm -f ${SOCKETFILE}
   /usr/bin/ssh-agent -a ${SOCKETFILE} > /dev/null
   /bin/chmod 600 ${SOCKETFILE}
fi

Posted by Scott at 11:14 AM | Permalink

Now that my new Mac Mini arrived, I am facing the age-old problem of synchronizing information across multiple machines. I have a lot of transient information (addresses, mail, bookmarks, etc.) on my PowerBook that will need to be synchronized with the Mini. Since both machines are equipped with Bluetooth, I thought that they would be able to sync with each other in the same way that they would sync with a Bluetooth-enabled phone or PDA. Apparently, this is not the case. I believe that Apple chose to not enable this feature in order to promote the synchronization features in their .Mac subscription-based service.

So, I've been looking around for alternate methods of synchronizing data on the two machines. It's got to be a network-based solution since moving USB thumbdrives around is not something I'm willing to do.

The fact that both machines are UNIX-based opens the avenue of using the 'rsync' program to synchronize points on the disparate filesystems. Rsync can easily be secured with SSH, operates over any network, and has been around for years. It's also a generic solution that can be used to sync any data, application-oriented or otherwise.

This morning, I came across a Rendezvous/Bonjour-based program called 'address-o-sync' (yeah, pretty bad name) for synchronizing AddressBook data across multiple Macs. Bonjour is a zero-configuration network protocol that is the successor of AppleTalk. It seems like a cool idea, though the program doesn't encrypt any of the data transmitted over the network, and solves synchronization issues for AddressBook only. I'd like to get the Mail data synchronized, too.

I think that I'll try out the rsync solution next week. But only after I've made a verified back-up of my data! :)

Additional links:

• http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2005/07/22/backup.html


• http://www.alexking.org/blog/2004/12/10/rsync-backup-system/


• http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/index.html

Posted by Scott at 10:04 AM | Permalink

My last day working for SRA will be Friday, November 4, 2005! I've accepted a Senior Software Engineer position with EMC Documentum in Pleasanton, CA. This means we'll be relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area soon. My first day of work is November 14, and I'm excited about having a week off to unwind.

I'll be working on the core of the Documentum product. This means doing lots of Java development with technologies I've come to love: J2EE, XML, Web Services, etc. I'm also excited about the opportunity to work on a commercial product. It will likely differ from my previous work on projects covered under a low-risk government contract. It has been difficult to embrace change while working in an environment that opposes anything new and uncertain. I'm thrilled about the significance of this change in direction!

Posted by Scott at 10:30 AM | Permalink