How Not to Upgrade Your Computer Room UPS

The Computer Science Department at Princeton University needed to replace its computer room UPS. The old unit was a PowerWare 9330-40, a 208V 40 kVA UPS, installed in July 2005. When this box was first installed, the load was around 60%. Over time this has crept up to over 90%, causing us to believe that an upgrade was in order.

The new UPS is a PowerWare 9390-80, a 480V 80 kVA UPS that fills two 6 foot tall racks and weighs in at something near 4000 lbs -- we needed to add additional supports under the raised floor to handle the increased weight load. The UPS and its wall-mounted bypass switch cabinet arrived a few weeks ago, were put into the computer room, and were wired together in preparation for the big day.

That day was Tuesday, June 10, when we had scheduled a full computer room downtime from 6 AM until 2 PM. We figured that this should be plenty of time to unwire the old 208V UPS, re-wire our Liebert power distribution center back to factory specs (we had to change things around in order to accommodate a 208V UPS in a room with a 480V power feed), and get the new UPS and the computers and network gear up and running. Well as they say, "Two out of three ain't bad."

We had everything in the room shut down and powered off somewhere between 6:00 and 6:30, allowing the electrician to get started re-wiring at 7 AM. The PowerWare technician arrived around 9 and started his prep and check work on the new UPS. He needed to connect all of the batteries together and test voltages, check over all of the pre-wiring work, as well as a bunch of other stuff required before the unit could be turned on.

Most of the morning, everything seemed to be going along fine. The electrician finishes ripping out the old UPS wiring hacks and gets the new UPS and bypass switched wired in the way they should be. The UPS technician does his initial power-on and starts testing the system. Some time was lost when the electrician had trouble getting lugs installed on a breaker, but that was only about a 30 minute diversion. Then the first problem hit...

There are three panel boards in the Liebert system for power distribution, each of which has a 225A main breaker. When we went to put some test load on the UPS, one of those main breakers refused to stay on. It didn't trip, the handle just slowly moved from "on" to "off" on its own. It never made that satisfying "click" when you turned it on. Since about half of our load was on that panel board, this was going to be a problem.

The electrician kept working at it, and eventually the breaker clicked into the on position and stayed there. We're planing on having it replaced the next time we take the room down, but we decided to live with it for now. If the breaker goes, we'll just be replacing it a bit sooner than we planned.

At some point, the PowerWare technician decided that he didn't like the path that some of the signal wires took between the two UPS cabinets and decided they should be re-routed. During that re-wiring process, he discovered that he could no longer get the battery breaker to turn on, rendering the UPS essentially useless. He puzzled over this for quite a while (hours, in fact) and decided that we needed a replacement circuit breaker for the battery cabinet. Since this was a new UPS start-up and not a failure situation in the eyes of the company, the earliest we could get a replacement breaker was Wednesday morning at 8:30 AM. Even getting this required quite a bit of the technician's time on the phone.

We had underestimated a little on how long the electrician would need to complete his tasks, but if that and the 225A breaker were the only issues, we would have only missed our downtime window by about an hour. However, the problems with the new UPS stretched our downtime until 6 PM, four additional hours (for 12 hours of downtime). At this point, we had to decide whether or not to bring up the computer room without a UPS. As there were thunderstorms predicted overnight, we decided to leave everything off. Considering that the lights blinked out later that night, I believe we made the correct decision.

Fast forward to Wednesday at 8:30 AM (26.5 hours of downtime). Two replacement battery cabinet circuit breakers were delivered by FedEx. The PowerWare technician arrived around 9:15 and got to work. He was not able to find the hex wrench he needed to remove the wires from the breaker, so one of us went to track one down. By the time we found a wrench, the technician had found his and got to work. The replacement breaker was installed and when the technician tried to turn it on, it didn't work either. By 11 AM (29 hours of downtime), the cause of the problem was still unknown. By 1 PM (31 hours of downtime) , after examining his schematics (which didn't appear to exactly match the UPS we had) and making a number of phone calls, the technician finally figured out that the breaker required 48V available in order to be switched on and that the fuse protecting that 48V circuit had blown. This is an $11 part that had taken, by this time, over 8 hours of effort to identify as the source of the problem. The total cost of this UPS is around $80,000.

Of course, the technician didn't have one of these fuses in his van. Two of my co-workers called around to a number of electrical houses and eventually found some. By around 3 PM (33 hours of downtime), the technician had replaced the fuse and was running his final checks. We decided to test the EPO (Emergency Power Off) switch before we put any load on the system. It did absolutely nothing. The wire from the EPO switches had never been connected to the UPS control input. Once again the UPS was opened up and the wire connected. We test again and the UPS only went into bypass, but didn't shut down. This is not exactly what we would have expected a "power off" button to do. The technician did some studying of the documentation, changed some settings and we tried again, with the same result. It turns out that we need to hold EPO switch for at least 3 seconds for the UPS to actually shut down. None of us like this, but I guess we'll have to live with it for now.

We got our operational training so that we could properly take the UPS in and out of maintenance bypass, and we started to bring up the room. It was now around 5 PM (35 hours of downtime). With everything down for so long, we decide that caution was the order of the day when we brought the world back up. What normally takes 45 minutes to an hour took 90 minutes. By 6:30 PM (36.5 hours after our adventure started), everything was back up and we were starting to receive all of the EMail that had been queued up for us around the world. All of us in the Computer Science Department are hoping that we never have to do this again.

Technorati Tags: UPS, PowerWare, Upgrade, Downtime, Disaster

me.com

me.com
Originally uploaded by Chris Tengi

Today, Apple announced me.com, the re-branding of .mac. At least, I think that was their intent....

Technorati Tags: Apple, .mac, me.com, WWDC

Back in the Sadle

Yesterday, I rode my bicycle to work for the first time in about 15 years. The reason for the long hiatus was mostly inertia. It was always: "I really should try riding to work again." Now, the last time I did this, I had a front tire blow-out on the way home and went flying over the handlebars, making a perfect 3-point landing on my knee, hand and head. Fortunately I was wearing a helmet and gloves, so my knee was the only part of me that sustained any damage. I'm firmly convinced that if I hadn't been wearing a helmet, my injuries would have been far worse than a scraped up knee. This little incident is one of the reasons that I'm a strong advocate for bicycle helmets.

But back to the current ride...

Like many Americans, I don't get nearly enough exercise, so I thought that riding my bike to work a couple of times a week might be a good thing to do, now that the weather has gotten nice. At 8.6 miles each way, it's not a bad little ride. It took me about 45 minutes both ways in light traffic. Of course, it wasn't the traffic that made the ride take that long, it was just me.

In my car it takes about 20 minutes to go from home to work, so only taking a little more than twice that for a bike ride was actually pretty good. And the ride itself was very pleasant, despite the fact that most of the ride was along 8 to 12 inch shoulders. Both in the morning and the evening, drivers gave me plenty of room as they passed and it was 68F for my morning ride in and 86F for the afternoon ride home.

The forecast for Monday is 97F, so I don't think riding then will be such a good idea, but Wednesday and Friday look good, so maybe I'll get in 2 rides next week. With any luck, I'll be back in the saddle and the only thing I'll have to worry about is getting saddle sore.

Technorati Tags: Bicycle, Commute, Commuting, Helmet

Project 365 (+42)

Yesterday, I finally finished up my flickr Project 365 work. I really didn't plan on it taking exactly 42 days more than the 365, but you know that 42 is the answer to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, so nobody should be surprised. I actually took the last picture on Feb. 14 and uploaded the last batch on April 2, but I didn't finish sending the last ones to the Project 365 Group until yesterday.

For those of you that don't know, the idea behind Project 365 is to take a new picture (or 2, or 3, or 4, or....) every day, with the goal of improving your photographic skill and technique. Over the course of a year, I've taken literally thousands of pictures (gotta love digital cameras!) . I've gotten some OK shots, some really nice ones, and some that never made it off of the camera. I got a new camera, broke the new camera, moved back to the old camera, and moved back after getting the new one repaired. Some of the shots I found easily, and some were desperation shots taken just before (or in some cases shortly after) midnight. During the last few months, I started really obsessing about getting a picture every day and my wife suggested, rightly so, that I should just quit. However, I really wanted to see this through, so I just kept at it.

So, did I get a new picture every day? No, but I did take one to be used on the days I missed. Did this project make me a better photographer? Maybe yes, maybe no. I did learn how to use some of the features of my cameras that allowed me to take pictures I would not have otherwise been able to take, so that's something gained. Would I do this again, or something like it, in the future? No, I have too many other things to do. That being said, I don't have any regrets about the project and wouldn't caution others against it. I would just suggest that they go in with their eyes open and that they not get obsessive about it. It's all just a bunch of bits anyway.

Technorati Tags: Flickr, Project 365, Photography

Eric's Whirlwind Spring Break College Tour

It's that time of year when parents of high school juniors all across the country venture forth to visit colleges and universities. We, as you might expect, are no exception. Follow our progress at http://cjtengi.jaiku.com

Tags: College, Tour, Travel

I Love Planned Economy

Last night at ETech 08, Comrad Nikita Chrusov held a BOF session where he told us all about the leading-edge technology used by his country. He ended his presentation with a song....

Tags: ETech08, ETech, BOF, Nikita Chrusov

Disk Encryption May Not Protect Your Data

Ed Felten and his research group have found a fairly easy way to defeat disk encryption technologies used by MS-Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It turns out that encryption keys in DRAM can be recovered fairly easily if you have physical access to a laptop either powered-on or in sleep mode.

Technorati Tags: Disk, Encryption, Laptop, DRAM, Security

LoC Photo Collection on Flickr

I just came across this post in the flickr blog talking about "The Commons." It looks like the Library of Congress has made a chunk of their photo collection available on flickr. This is really cool. From what I've heard, the LoC has quite a collection. Not only have they made these photos available, they're encouraging flickr users to tag them, making everything searchable. And if that isn't enough, the LoC includes a "Persistent URL" in the photo description that takes you to a page where you can download a higher-res JPEG or their archival TIFF file. The 137 MB TIFF I downloaded was 1800x1800 DPI, which made zooming and panning quite a bit of fun.

Tags: Flickr, Library of Congress, LoC, Photographs, Photos, Photo, Archive, TIFF

Bonjour Printing to a Linux CUPS Server

Bonjour (aka ZeroConf - mostly) printing looks like a great way to print from a Mac to a Bonjour-capable printer on the same IP subnet. However, on a network where the printers are not on the same subnet as the hosts that want to use them, something else needs to be done.

In our case, we use a Linux box running CUPS with the cups-lpd listener. All of the printers are on their own private subnet that can only be accessed form within the Computer Science department. All printing is intended to go through the CUPS server, which very nicely takes care of format conversions as needed. This architecture also gives us the ability to do print job accounting and to move jobs to other printers should one fail with jobs in the queue.

The problem is that anybody with a Mac or PC that wants to print something needs to add a network printer definition to their machine. Thanks to the Bonjour capabilities of the Mac, we have been able to use static DNS entries to define and advertise all of our print queues to any Mac user. Here's what we did....

For our printer advertisements we are using statically defined entries in our DNS files to enable DNS Service Discovery (DNS-SD) without the need for the Multicast DNS used by Bonjour-enabled printers to advertise themselves. We start with some boilerplate resource records in our main zone file:

;; Service Browsing
b._dns-sd._udp          PTR    @
lb._dns-sd._udp         PTR    @

;; Available Services
_services._dns-sd._udp  PTR    _ipp._tcp
_services._dns-sd._udp  PTR    _printer._tcp

While we only use LPD for printing (the '_printer' record above), I've included the '_ipp' record for those who prefer a more more printing protocol.

The next thing to do is define the print queues themselves, making sure to specify the various DNS records required by Bonjour printing support. Most of the information was found in the Apple Bonjour Printing Specification, but there were a few bits here and there that I put together from various searches around the 'net. I also used a bit of tcpdump sleuthing to discover what actual Macs and printers announce when advertising Bonjour printers. With all that said, here is an example print queue entry:

_printer._tcp           PTR    hp_218._printer._tcp
hp_218._printer._tcp    SRV    0 0 515 lpdrelay.example.edu.
                TXT   "txtvers=1" \
                      "qtotl=1" \
                      "rp=hp_218" \
                      "ty=HP LaserJet 4000 Series PS" \
                      "product=(HP LaserJet 4000 Series)" \
                      "transparent=t" \
                      "copies=t" \
                      "duplex=t" \
                      "color=f" \
                      "pdl=application/pdf,application/postscript"

Please note that the "\"-escaped newlines are only included for readability. One key insight I picked up from a mailing list post was that the TXT record fields all needed to be on a single line (at least for the version of BIND I'm running). The Bonjour printing specification allows for only a single TXT record, but requires multiple attributes.

The txtvers, qtotl, transparent, copies and pdl attributes are the same for all of our printers. The rp attribute specifies the name of the print queue on the CUPS server. The ty attribute provides a "display name" for the user's printer browser and product needs to be the same value as the Product specification in the printer's PPD file. I suspect that the values for color and duplex are fairly obvious. :-)

In our DNS configuration file, we have a definition similar to the one above for every printer that our CUPS server is driving, and while we are currently using the LPD protocol, we could just as just as easily use IPP for printing. For IPP, the above example would require 2 simple changes: All instances of _printer would be replaced with _ipp and the 515 port number in the SRV record would be changed to 631. Both configurations have been tested and appear to work just fine.

If you have any interest in reading further, I have saved a number of bookmarks concerning Bonjour and DNS-SD in del.icio.us.

Technorati Tags: Mac, Bonjour, Printing, ZeroConf, DNS-SD, Linux, CUPS, Tutorial

Computing in the Cloud: Possession and ownership of data

The first panel on Monday afternoon concerned the possession and ownership of data. Moderated by Ed Felten, the panelists were:

• Joel Reidenberg, (home page), Professor of Law, Fordham University
• Timothy B. Lee, blogger at Technology Liberation Front and adjunct scholar, Cato Institute
• Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director, Electronic Privacy Information Center

The panelists presented their positions and answered audience questions as well as responding to each other's positions. I don't feel that I can do justice to the panelists and what they said, so I'll just give a little flavor of what was said. When the video recording of the session becomes available, I'll add at the bottom of this post.

Tim Lee started things off with the position that privacy is governed by a series of trade-offs. Some data sharing is a pre-requisite for any useful online service and users are generally willing to give up some privacy in return for a valuable service. Some users will be willing to share more information for more value. Tim also spoke a bit about the history of browser cookies, GMail, and the Facebook news feed. All 3 of these things were initially looked at negatively by at least some segment of the user community. In all 3 cases, users became more accepting as they learned more about how the technologies worked, what "opt-out" options existed, and what benefits the users could derive from the technologies. A key point Tim made is that having private companies collecting data about you is less troubling than having the government doing the same. If you don't like the policies of a particular service provider, you can choose not to use that provider, as there are others around with different policies. There are no such choices available when it comes to the government.

Joel Reidenberg focused no 3 sets of implications: ownership of data, embedded values in the architecture, and irony. Data ownership is really how you get to use the bits and bytes. Fair information practice standards provide a control here. However, if data usage is based on a user consent model and the user doesn't understand, how can the model be effective? Joel also raised the question of whether data on social networking sites is public or private. Despite what many users may think, the data is generally public and can be accessed by anybody (including law enforcement). Next up, Joel talked about how privacy values are embedded in the architecture of a given technology. With the Facebook beacon fiasco, we got to see "how the data mining sausage was made" and it bothered quite a few people. We got to see what was going on behind the scenes in a way that was quite graphic when compared to GMail's ad scanning. Joel said that data privacy rules have to focus on effective transparency and proposed that a data usage rule set should travel along with data wherever it goes. Finally, he spoke of the irony that cloud computing actually opens the doors for privacy enhancement. Centralized data holders are easier to find, regulate and prosecute. However, we will need more cooperation in the future between lawmakers and standards bodies if we are to have effective data privacy standards and rules.

Marc Rotenberg gave an introduction to privacy culture. He presented the concept of fair information practices where the entity that collects data on individuals takes on obligations for security, accuracy and rights of access, among others. The custodian of the data has the responsibility to prevent "bad things" from happening to the data. Privacy people by and large believe that technology can be a solution to privacy problems, but the techniques need to be evaluated: having secure encryption keys will protect your data, but having a key escrow system will erode that protection in at least some (if not all) cases. Anonymity is critical to privacy. A person's actual identity should not be required to determine if they have the credentials to use a given service. Also, there is a paradox in that much of privacy is about transparency. Imposing obligations on custodians to be more open and accountable about the data they collect makes it easier to ensure that the data will only be used in known ways. The greater the secrecy about how data is being collected, the greater the possibility that it can be used in negative ways without people learning about it.

As I was trying to actually pay attention to what was being said as I was taking notes, I feel that I may have given short shrift to all 3 presenters and I encourage you to watch the video of the panel (once it becomes available - please check back for an update). That way you'll hear first-hand what they had to say. You'll also get to hear the lively debate that took place during the rebuttal and audience question section.

UPDATE: The video recordings from the workshop are now available at the Princeton UChannel.

Technorati Tags: Cloud Computing, Cloud, Computing, IT Policy, Privacy, Data Ownership

Computing in the Cloud Workshop

Today is day one of the Computing in the Cloud Workshop being presented by Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy. After opening remarks by H. Vincent Poor, Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, Ed Felten got things rolling with "Computing in the Cloud: What, How and Why."

Starting with definitions of Cloud Computing from John Markoff, Wikipedia, the MIT Technology Review and Eric Schmidt, Ed then went on to expand on them and delve into the history and some of the implications. It's all about location, but why does it matter where the data and software actually is? Possession of data implies control, and control implies power. Whomever owns the systems on which data resides has the ultimate control of how that data is retained and who has access. If, for example, all of your EMail is in your Google Mail account, how confident are you that what you delete is actually gone forever? Are you confident that your data on a third party server will not be accessible by anybody else, except as you decide? If the government presents a subpoena to the holder of your data, what, if anything, will be released?

Ed also gave a broad over of how we got here, talking about the swing back and forth between centralized computing and a more distributed model. Early on, computers were big and expensive so there was an economic incentive to have the users come to the computer. This was followed by timesharing, where users had terminals at remote locations (such as their office), but the actual computer was still in a large, air-conditioned room somewhere. In the late 1970s and early 1980s PCs and Sun Workstations (for example) were available at a low enough cost that individual users could now have local computing. This gave users more autonomy and the potential for a more rich user interface, but at the loss of the lower cost per user, expert management and higher utilization that centralized computing facilities could provide.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the client-server computing model gained popularity but was soon overtaken by the World Wide Web. This swing of the pendulum took us back to a more centralized model of computing where all of the data and manipulations took place on a remote computer and the results were displayed locally, as in early timesharing. In the early 2000s, the web browser became more like a computing device as AJAX and other programming models came into existence. More like the client-server model, some computation takes place on the remotre "back end" and some on the local computer. This brings with it all of the complexities of client-server computing along with those inherent in trying to shoe-horn a computing engine into the browser. In addition, these applications are typically written in multiple programming languages such as SQL for database access, PHP for page generation, and combinations of HTML, XML and Javascript for local processing and display.

The modern tools and infrastructure available today make many interesting "real-time" applications possible. For example, during the Iowa Caucuses, the Democratic Party was able to utilize infrastructure from Amazon to present an "Iowa Democratic Party Caucus Results" web page, that was kept updated as results came in and was not adversely effected by the amount of traffic the page received. The tools of today also allow the creation of sites such as Facebook and ebay. Sites such as these would not have been easily created in the past.

With disk storage prices dropping and as a side-effect of the AJAX-type programming model, data is continually building up in remote data centers. It is in the best interest of the data center owner to hold onto that data for as long as possible as there is probably some value that can be extracted from it along the way.

There are additional concerns and implications to having your data on somebody else's server. How portable is your data? Can you easily extract it and move it to another provider if you so choose? Does your current provider have data retention policies that meet your needs? When you access your data, how secure and private is the connection between your computer and the provider's site? If an intermediary has lots of customer data and amkes it difficult for customers to move that data, the provider gains market power.

Concerns such as those above can be addresses in a number of ways. If a cloud computing provider is a "community" then the members of that community have a say about how their data is managed. A provider may also decide that they won't "be evil" and if you trust them to follow through, you may feel more secure about your data. There are also the options of ex post regulations that would control how a provider that has already amassed data must manage the data or ex ante agreements where the provider makes promises up-front as to how they will deal with data on their servers.

A number of the above issues and concerns were addressed in the first afternoon panel discussion: "Possession and Ownership of Data."

UPDATE: The video recordings of the workshop are now available at the Princeton UChannel.

Technorati Tags: Cloud Computing, Cloud, Computing, IT Policy, Ed Felten, Google Mail, GMail, Amazon

xmppid - OpenID Meets Jabber

I just found this blog post while looking over the news on Planet Jabber. There is now a web page available that allows you to use your Jabber/XMPP ID (JID) for OpenID authentication. When prompted for a URL to use for OpenID, just add your JID to "http://xmppid.net/." For example, if your JID is "MYNAME@jabber.org" you would specify "http://xmppid.net/MYNAME@jabber.org" for your OpenID URL. You will receive a message with a code on that ID and your browser will be directed to a web page where you must enter the code to complete the transaction. Pretty cool stuff....

Technorati Tags: xmppid, OpenID, XMPP, Jabber, Identity, Authentication

Disney World - Day 4 - Magic Kingdom

4 of 5 in a series of placeholder blog posts. :-) Day 5 started with a character breakfast at the Crystal Palace. We only managed to get on a few rides during the day but went back for "extra magic hours" after spending a few hours at Downtown Disney. As with the previous posts, this will get fleshed out when I get better network access.

Disney World - Day 3 - Animal Kingdom

Day 3 at WDW was spent at Disney's Animal Kingdom...

We started off on the Kali River Rapids where we all got slightly damp. The boys wanted to ride again, so Randee and I hung out near the exit and watched a few of the more local primates hang out. While everybody continued to dry out, we roamed around, learned a bit about the Komodo Dragon and headed over to the bat house. All of the bats are male, but that doesn't prevent them from "fighting," as one little girl commented. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

The boys and I had been pin trading since we arrived at WDW and our day at the Animal Kingdom presented more opportunities for trading. In fact, it presented opportunities for more than just trading. We were on our way to the 2PM Lion King show when the boys stopped to trade pins with "Joe," a cast member with a clipboard. We chatted for a while and he eventually asked us if we were planning on watching "Mickey's Jingle Jungle Parade." We said we probably would and he asked if we'd like some really good seats. That sounded good to us, so he showed us the route of the parade and said that our seats would follow the parade route. The only requirements were that we wear some minor costumes (vests and Goofy hats with antlers, as it turns out) and wave to everybody - we'd actually be in the parade! How many times does something like *this* come along? (Answer: not nearly often enough).

We went of to the Lion King show and then wandered off to the parade's starting location. We were given our costumes, put on a float, and off we went! We rode all around the park and waved and smiled at many, many people. It was really satisfying to see little kids' eyes light up when you smiled their way. It made you want to keep smiling and waving even thought your arm felt like it would fall off any minute. One amusing moment during the parade was when we looked into the sea of people and saw Mark's 3rd grade teacher waving to us. You just never know who you'l run into at Disney World.

After the parade, there was not a whole lot of time left until the park closed for the day, so we headed off to the new Expedition Everest. The boys and I had each gotten a FastPass for this one earlier in the day and we were ready to go. Randee had no interest so she cruised the gift shop while me and the guys waited on line. The ride was fun and the boys went again since the line was now pretty short. It turns out that Randee spent her time in the gift shop getting the 3 of us Expedition Everest t-shirts for Christmas. It was a nice reminder of the trip when we got them.

So day 3 didn't include too many attractions but it did include a once-in-a-lifetime thrill for all of us. I think that riding in the parade was, for all of us, the highlight of the day, and perhaps the entire trip.

UPDATED 2008/03/19: Way later than I expected.... I originally posted a day 3 (Saturday) entry from my Blackberry at 1:15 AM on Sunday (Nov. 11) using IMified, which is cool, but not great for long blog posts - especially if you want links and pictures.

Tags: WDW, Disney World, Epcot, Vacation

Disney World - Day 2 - Epcot

Today we spent a *really* long ("Extra Magic Hours") day at Epcot. We got kind of a late start and didn't actually get on a ride until around 10:45 AM. That ride was "Mission Space" where we discovered that, unlike the last time we were at WDW, there are 2 flavors of the ride: one where they spin you and one where they don't. The boys and I opted for all-spinning, all-dancing and enjoyed it quite well.

After "Mission Space" we met up with Randee's sister Merryl and her girls: Megan and Lauren. We headed for
the "Universe of Energy" where we got to see "Ellen," "Alex" and "Bill Nye The Science Guy" (Bill! Bill!). Nothing new to report here, but we always seem to enjoy this one. We went on to "The Seas" followed by "The Land" where we had lunch.

Other than "Soarin'" (which we rode later, during our Extra Magic Hours), both Land and Sea were pretty disappointing. "The Seas" now seems to be much more geared toward younger visitors (way pre-teen). I remember there being more scientific information available in the past. The boat ride in "The Land" was pretty useless. The last time we went to WDW, there was a cast member riding along with us, explaining what was what and answering questions. This time, we were on our own except for a few pre-recorded blurbs here and there.

After lunch, we headed for "Test Track" which is always fun. We rode again during the Extra Magic Hours, but I took a video clip for our first ride. On the way out, Eric found the car he wants when he turns 17 in January. If he can pay for it, he can have it!

The rest of the daylight hours were spent roaming around the World Showcase. We rode the "River of Time" (another attraction modified down to the way pre-teen level, sigh) and the Maelstrom. We saw Chinese Acrobats and found "Hidden Mickeys" and wandered around until about dinner time, when Merryl and the girls headed back to their hotel. The four of us then had dinner at the "Rose and Crown" where we had lagoon-side seats for the nightly "Illuminations" light and fireworks show. The food was great and we had a great view of the show. If you'd like to watch the show while enjoying some typical British fare, I highly recommend that you make reservations at the Rose and Crown for dinner - and be sure to tell them that you'd like outside seating to watch the fireworks.

We ended the night with a ride on Soarin' which involved almost an hour waiting on line. The wait was worth it (just like it was last time). To keep you amused while you're waiting, they have an interactive wall that allows the crowd to move various animated objects and animals back and forth across the wall. If you wave your arms to the right and your shadow moves into an object, the object moves to the right. The same goes for left, up, and down. They have a number of different games they run, alternating them such that you (hopefully) don't end up playing the same game twice while you're waiting. The ride itself is pretty spectacular. You sit in a "car" in a row of 6 or 8 seats, all facing a large curved screen. Your car gets lifted into the air so that your feet are dangling (don't wear flip-flops!) and all you can see is the screen. They then play an iMax-like movie while blowing you with a gentle breeze, appropriately scented for the area over which you are flying. You almost wish it could go on forever. This one is a definite for Fastpass. I honestly wouldn't mind riding this 2 or 3 times.

I have pictures from this trip over at flickr, with the Epcot pics starting here.

UPDATE 2008/01/04: I originally posted this from my Blackbery using IMified early morning on day 3 as a placeholder post to be fleshed out when I got a net connection better than my Blackberry (and I wasn't ready to just collapse onto the bed :-) ).

Tags: WDW, Disney World, Epcot, Vacation

Disney World - Day 1 - MGM

Last night we flew from PHL to Orlando (via Atlanta), got onto Disney's Magical Express, and arrived at the Port Orleans Riverside around 10PM. Fortunately, we had gotten some good advice about packing "first night" clothing and such in a carry-on bag, so we didn't need to wait for our luggage to catch up with us (good thing too, as it didn't get to the resort until 3AM).

Today we spent the day at Disney MGM Studios. The highlights were the new "Lights, Motors, Action" stunt show imported from Disneyland Paris, the Rockin' Roller Coaster, and Fantasmic. The stunt show was very cool (and very loud). This being a Disney attraction, it naturally had a back story: they are "filming" a number of chase sequences for an upcoming movie. Of course they're not really doing that, but it does provide for a bit of behind-the-scenes style theater. If you like fast cars, fast bikes, jumps and flames, this is a show must-see.

The last time we were at the Disney-MGM Studios, they had not yet built the Rockin' Roller Coaster. The premise is that you've been invited by Aerosmith to one of their shows, but everybody's running very late so they need to put you in a really fast limo. They shoot this limo out of the staging area at what seems like 0 to 60 MPH in about 1.5 seconds. I'm sure I have the numbers wrong, but we did get up to speed very quickly. The limo took you over the surprisingly winding and hilly LA freeways to the tune of (naturally) blaring Aerosmith music. Too bad all limo rides can't be like that.

We also tried something new (for us) this year by signing up for a dining plan. This is a really good deal. We had lunch at the ABC Commissary and dinner at Spoodles (at the Boardwalk), saved a substantial bit of money, and walked away from both meals *far* from hungry. The meal plan entitled each of us to a sit-down meal, a counter-service meal, and a snack, every day. The counter-service meal included an entree, a drink and a dessert and the full-service meal added an appetizer to that. I just have to say that the food at Spoodles was absolutely great. I would eat there again even without the meal plan, but I don't think I'd order nearly as much food.

After dinner we headed back to Disney-MGM for the evening's showing of Fantasmic. We saw the show years ago when we were last at Disney-MGM, but I don't remember enough to say if/how the show has evolved. There was lots of smoke and fireworks, as well as animations and movie clips projected on water sprays (which were pretty cool). And of course, there were plenty of Disney characters and extras. All-in-all it was a good show.

I have a bunch of pictures from this trip over at flickr.

UPDATE 2007/12/11: I originally posted this from my Blackbery using IMified. It's a great tool for quick posts, but if you want multiple paragraphs, formatting and HTTP links, you need to do a little post processing on a bigger screen.

Technorati Tags: WDW, Disney World, Disney-MGM, Vacation

I Have Spies Everywhere

Today, Princeton University held its annual vendor fair. I asked my wife, Randee, if she was planning on attending, and she said "no." One of the vendors there was Dell and they were holding a drawing for a Latitude D630 laptop. I decided to pass, as you needed to be present to win and I wasn't planning on hanging around. -- One of Randee's co-workers had entered the drawing and gone back to the office. She was heading back to the fair, asked Randee to go with her and Randee agreed. With 10 minutes to go before the drawing, Randee decided to enter. 15 minutes later I got a message on my Blackberry from one of my co-workers telling me that Randee won the laptop. A few minutes later I received another message telling me the same thing. -- I sent Randee an EMail asking her if she had anything she wanted to tell me. I got a phone call a few minutes later asking how I knew, before she even got back to her office. I told her that "I have spies everywhere.". :-)

GMail Now Supports IMAP

I'm in NYC today, attending Interop. One of the keynote speakers is Matthew Glotzbach, who is Head of Products, Google Enterprise. In his talk he announced that, as of today, GMail supports IMAP in addition to POP. Now all of us who use Thunderbird or Mail.app can access our GMail using the same interface we use for our other EMail. Woo-Hoo!

Technorati Tags: Google, GMail, IMAP

Test from IMified

I just found out about IMified and decided to give it a try. The whole idea is to be able to do a bunch of different things by sending messages to a single IM buddy. You set up an account by adding imified as a buddy and then sending a message. You get a message back with a URL. Visit that page to complete your setup. You can add different widgets to you IMified menu (which is displayed in the conversation when you send IMified a message). I added the Blogger and Remember the Milk widgets to my menu, as well as one called NetLookup, which allows you to do things like ping, traceroute, and whois. Sounds pretty neat.

Tags: IMified, Blogger, Remember the Milk, Jabber, AIM, Google Talk

Google as Landlord

Today I attended the first "IT Policy Lunch" of the school year. These are weekly lunch-time discussions hosted by Ed Felten, director of Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy. The topic on the table was "Computing in the Clouds." If you're not familiar with the concept, it is essentially computing as a service, typified by Yahoo!'s flickr and Google Mail. We were given pointers to 2 short blog posts by John Markoff of the "New York Times" for background reading that go into a bit more detail than the one-liner I wrote here.

The discussion was lively and touched on a number of topics such as the level of privacy that users of these services should expect, how difficult should it be for law enforcement to gain access to the data, and do many users even know or care that these types of issues exist? The most notable take-away for me, however, is from a comment made to Ed after the session ended by Matthew Adlai-Gail, Director of New Product Development at Kaplan Eduneering.

Matt said that these services are analogous to an apartment building, where the landlord has the keys, but each tenant has an expectation of privacy within their "space." This seemed to me to be just about right. If I live in an apartment, I can fill it up with my things. As long as I lock the door(s) and windows, I feel confident that nobody will go snooping around when I'm not there. Yes, the landlord has the keys. But between my lease and various laws, he is not likely to use them just to come in and start going through my stuff. If the police want to see what I have, they need to get a warrant from a judge.

Let's say I have a Google account and I use Google Docs to save a few spreadsheets and other random documents. If I have a reasonable password on my account and I don't explicitly share any of documents with anybody, is it more like I have them on a desk in my apartment, or have I left them lying around on the sidewalk? I'd like to think that I haven't left my documents where they can be picked up and read by anybody, and I suspect that many users of these services feel the same way. That just seems reasonable to me. I'll keep my stuff in my "apartment" and let Google be my landlord. While I'm at it, maybe I'll get a place over at the Flickr building for my pictures and let Yahoo! be my landlord over there. I might even put a bunch of pictures in the windows so that everybody can see them. :-)

So, what do you think?

Technorati Tags: Internet, cloud, Web 2.0, Google, Yahoo