Yes indeed, I am doing it again. I think this is the 10th year in a row now. Wow.
I get tired just thinking about it - 24 hours, no sleep, see as many species of birds as you can in New Jersey. National Geographic is covering the event this year. Read more about it here in last year's post,
Please visit The Loons team website, and consider supporting us by donating to The Nature Conservancy.
Thanks
We've had Vonage for quite a while now, which has been a little bit of love (price) but too often hate (silence when we pick up a call, inability to call home, and other annoyances).
Worst was when our phone calls battled it out with other IP traffic bandwidth. Our broadband provider is Comcast. When I was syncing podcasts, or uploading pictures to Flickr, phone calls were getting hammered. There was no traffic cop present to make sure that phone call got priority. We needed some form of Quality of Service (QoS).
I recently decided to upgrade my aging 802.11b router with a Linksys WRT54GL. The "L" stands for Linux. The beauty of this unit is there are open source Linux-based packages you can "flash" onto it's bios, replacing the stock factory installed firmware. You risk "bricking" the router, but that's the price you play to have a little fun. I chose DD-WRT, which not only provides improved QoS features, but also lets you play with radio output power, over-clocking, and many other goodies. It even supports SSH access, sort of like a little miniature Linux server - Cool!
Following is the story of how I made VOIP calls get the priority they need at our house.
Step one: Power up Linksys and get to homepage:
Step two: download the appropriate version of DD-WRT for your router from here. In my case I used this one: DD-WRT.v23 SP2.
Step three: check the MD5 to make sure you got what you expected:
$ md5sum.exe dd-wrt.v23_generic.bin > dd-wrt.v23_generic.bin.md5
Step four: Upgrade the BIOS on the Linksys. My first attempt using IE7 choked:
My next attempt I used Firefox and all was well:
Looking good!
Step five: Bounce the router. Ooo! It wants me to login:
First try failed. Cute, check out the extension:
What to do? After resetting to factory defaults (holding reset for 30 seconds on power up) I tried again - noting the dialog now says "DD-WRT":
Woo-hoo! We're in!!!
Step six: Head over to the QoS tab and set it up:
"Start QoS" was disabled, so I enabled it.
Next up I did some tests to determine my upload bandwidth because in the end that is all you can really throttle. I used the SpeakEasy flash-based test here, hitting a bunch of endpoints multiple times, and looked at the averages:
It is important to get an accurate read on your upload speed, because you are going to tell the router how much it has to work with. If you underestimate your upload bandwidth, you may inadvertently throttle your upload speed - if you overestimate, the QoS will not be effective for the high-priority traffic. The DD-WRT Wiki recommends setting the uplink speed to 85% of your actual. This is to ensure latency stays tight - apparently if you go all in, you could saturate the line with so much traffic latency will suffer - and latency kills VOIP quality.
My average upload bandwidth is in the 768K/sec range. I ended up plugging in 668 for my uplink speed, and that seems to be working well. I ignored the Downlink field since Comcast controls the other end of the link and I have no control over it.
I also set the port to "WAN". I left the packet scheduler set to "HTB" - I am not quite sure what to do with that yet:
Finally, I plugged the Vonage router into an Ethernet port on the WRT54GL, and scrolling down on the QoS tab I set it's MAC address to the "Premium" priority level:
And that was it! We now enjoy clear calls at all times, even when the line is getting pounded by other traffic.
(Note - the DD-WRT Wiki has a note about prioritizing by Ethernet port not working on newer routers - I can concur that prioritizing the VOIP traffic by using the MAC address worked far better.)
I have barely begun to play with the many other interesting features and services that DD-WRT provides. One of the first things I tried was logging in via SSH (after enabling the SSH service):
Awesome!!!
Have you ever gotten to watch a Monarch emerge from it's chrysalis? Many have visited our house on their way South this year, and I was (finally) able to track down some chrysalises and capture this amazing footage. I have put together a time-lapse video of two Monarch butterflies emerging, as well as some other pictures leading up to the event. Hope you enjoy it.
By the way, the bright orange aphids are Oleander Aphids (Aphis Nerii).
The last month was not a typical one for Yee Olde Blogge. One quiet Friday evening I noticed that 2 hours had brought over 2000 visitors to my humble doorstep. This was, well... unusual. And they were all going to my blog entry "The Birds".
Up until a month ago a busy day on this blog meant I had over 10 visitors. I get eye balls from all over the world, frequently coming in from Google searches. Usually people are looking for technical information and stumble across one of my tech related blog entries. Sometimes they are using birding related keywords in their searches.
Took me a while to figure out what was going on that night - the hits just kept coming in, faster and faster. Most everyone was clicking through to my blog from the Google Video hosted copy of my Starlings video.
Weird.
Suddenly it occurred to me... hmm, maybe I got Dug? I jumped over to digg.com - holy smokes, there I was on the freaking home page!!!
This was almost as big... as... as... hmm, maybe that time I submitted a story to Slashdot back in '99? Or maybe as big as that time I played drums on the first Marcy Playground CD?
Things did not stop there... the craziness continued as more sites and blogs picked up my video.
I got Farked:
I got Ebaumed and "Scharfed" - Der Speigel's online TV show (imagine a Rocketboom in German, brunette instead of blonde) covered the video in their show. My favorite part - hearing her say my name in the middle of a bunch of Germanic syllables..
I started getting visitors and links from all around the world! This was crazy!
Next I was Googled. In fact I was more than just Googled - the video jumped onto the Google Top 100, and for almost a week was in the top 4, peaking for a few days as number TWO:
Um, I guess it was a Paris/Fraser/Chakira sandwich. Or something.
Then even stranger things started to happen. My OTHER videos started showing up, some on the home page of Google Video. I visit Google one day, and there is my humming bird video, right next to "Girl Caught Cheating" and Farting Preacher!
And finally, the pent-ultimate honor - I got RocketBoomed!!! Yea!!!
Wow, that means my video is on Tivo too!
Numerous other aggregators, many of them in countries far away from humble Collegeville, were linking to Yee Olde Blogge. Many way too weird and/or not family-friendly for me to link to from this here island of puritanical values.
What could top this all of? What could be bigger?
Just when I thought things had settled down... My video is on the freaking home page of Yahoo.com!!!
In one day the video was viewed over 300,000 times on yahoo.com alone... soon to pass half a million!
So what's the final damage? At the least, the video has been viewed well over a MILLION times in the last month for sure. Unfortunately I don't know how many times it was viewed through channels and sites that "syndicated" it, or out and out "re-purposed" it. (Never thought I would need to slap a copyright on my videos!) For example, I have no idea how many folks viewed it via rocketboom.com directly.
Think about The Long Tail, consumer generated content, and how the heck traditional media companies are going to survive in this crazy new world.
NOW who's your mainstream media daddy? WE ARE!
Exciting changes are rocking advertising, media syndication, journalism, and their ecosystem. Blogging and podcasting are suddenly a force to be reckoned with. Mainstream media (whatever that means now) is getting mashed-up hardcore at all levels, and nobody knows where its headed.
Recently Portico chose to support the fabulous Public Radio show TechNation. We have a long history of funding charitable causes, events, and other worthy endeavors. I have been enjoying TechNation for years via standard terrestrial radio, but more recently via podcast from IT Conversations.
Public Radio "over the air" used to dominate my car time. But then it happened - two years ago this August I got an iPod. My "live radio" listening quickly plunged to almost zero. I now consume podcasts almost 100% of my commuting time, and whenever possible at home. Instead of hearing TechNation on 91FM WHYY (my favorite local public radio stations), I now listen to it on my iPod.
But back to the story - Portico, not the type of company that does traditional advertising, wants to get our name "out there" for recruitment purposes. We are growing fast, and need to employee highly skilled and intelligent IT professionals. 5 years ago, maybe some job ads in the local newspapers and online would suffice. But that was the glacial ice age days!
Here is how it works in the new world - we hop online, bid, and finally win an auction on eBay to sponsor TechNation. And this is not yo mamma's "shave and a haircut" print ad. This is PODVERTISING. We are sponsoring a PODCAST!
How completely surreal and weird to be driving to work last week, and here Dr. Moira Gunn announcing Portico as a sponsor of TechNation. Goosebumps. Not just because her smooth familiar voice was talking about Portico, but also because the food chain leading to this moment was totally and completely NEW:
Exciting changes - turbulent forces are pushing, pulling and refactoring the way people and businesses publish ideas, subscribe to information, and do what we all do as entities driven to share thoughts and consume those of others. These changes are stimulated by the same decentralized power that brings life to the blogosphere, energy that is now virally infecting mainstream media and advertising. Where will this lead?
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Links to some recent TechNation shows Portico has sponsored - give the audio a listen and you will hear the announcement in the first minute:
Dr. Mahendra Rao: Vice President for Research - Invitrogen
Apostolos Gerasoulis: Vice President for Search Technologies, Ask.com
Robert "Al" Beardsley: President and CEO of Kereos
Dr. Katrina Firlik: Author, "Another Day in the Frontal Lobe"
Kelly Tyler-Lewis: The Lost Men ... The Harrowing Saga of Shackleton's Ross Sea Party
Mary Del Brady: Diagnosing Pancreatic Cancer
Dr. Robert Mann: Forensic Anthropologist
Darrel Rhea: Author, "Making Meaning"
By the way - if you work in IT, do check out IT Conversations - they are an incredible resource. Imagine a smorgasbord of IT specific audio content. If you partake, please consider becoming a member.
UPDATE: The hummingbird nest filmed for this post fell out of the tree in a wind storm on July 2. I will post more at a later date, but here's the short story: we rescued the immature female who had fallen out of the nest, tucked her back in (the nest was still adhered to the branch), and mounted the branch on a tripod. The young hummingbird was re-found by the mother and successfully fledged later in the week. I got some GREAT footage of some of this activity, and hope to get it online as soon as possible.
This year in the London Planetree next to our house we have THREE (updated!) FOUR active nests all at the same time:
One huge tree - three FOUR active nests. Pretty cool. I have captured pictures and video of some of these birds, and will post them as I have time.
First up is this short video of a female hummingbird nest building. Ruby-throats will use lichen, downy plant material, spiderwebs, and the outer casing of buds to construct their tiny nests which are reminiscent of Blue-gray Gnatcatcher nests. I believe the female is on her own for the whole job - she builds the nest, incubates the eggs, and feeds the young without help. When you consider the crazy ratio of energy to body mass these little birds require to live (Basal metabolic rate, or "BMR") even without raising the young, its hard to believe the male does not help out.
Hummingbirds are incredibly light, but for every gram of weight they need an insane amount of calories just to get through the day. Their diet is flower nectar with some insects mixed in (for protein). But its mostly nectar - and they actually can consume several times their body weight in nectar PER DAY. How do they make it through the night? Good question - they actually go into a "hibernation" like state at night called "torpor."
As mentioned in an earlier post, for the ninth year in a row I have participated in a fund raiser for The Nature Conservancy (and also for New Jersey Audubon). Teams of birders "compete" by positively identifying as many species as possible anywhere in the state of New Jersey within a 24 hour period - midnight to midnight. It's full on "speed birding" for a cause. Teams roam the state setting their own course, and scaring the locals on the way.
Picture this:
A peaceful roadside burger stand in North Jersey, families seated outside and eating lunch. Suddenly a van screeches to a halt - 4 scruffy sleep deprived guys stumble out, lugging spotting scopes and binocs, gesturing overhead and scanning all around. One of them shouts "Black Vulture! On the wing!" The other guys respond - "Got it! Got it! Got it! Check!" Then "Move move move!!!" as they leap back in and take off in a cloud of dust.
Nice.
OK so that's all well and fine, but... birding... in Jersey???
Yes, Jersey. Long story short, it's actually a birding hot-spot on the East coast. The state has beautiful and scenic spots which - thanks to this event - I have gotten to know well.
This year was extra exciting, but not all in a good way. My team's rented van broke down in a swamp, forcing us to spend about 1/4 of our day getting a tow, borrowing a car, etc... We made the most of a day that got off to a horrible start, managing to see 150 species.
Also of note, our team was profiled in a Reuters story that was picked up by MSNBC. The Nature Conservancy has also put up a nice "thank you" letter to our supporters here. All my pictures from the event this year here. Enjoy!
We eat a lot of JDBC Type 4 database driver connections at Portico Systems. One of the challenges during installations is ensuring the deployment team gets the syntax of these URL's correct. We have some decent validation of them embedded already, but recently I decided to make it bullet proof.
Since Java 1.4 Regular Expressions were baked into the Java stack. For example the Pattern class. This is a beautiful thing. (Before 1.4 libraries like Jakarta ORO were used to get the power of regex in our code.)
So I was thinking that surely out there on the inker-net somebody would have posted clever regexes to handle JDBC URL's as well as IP quad format addresses. What I discovered were some bits and pieces - some wrong, some close, and none really complete.
So here is my contribution; I hope it is useful to you. Rather than
walk you through this beast I am just going to put it out there. If you dance with this pattern, I recommend the wonderful Regex Coach, a Common Lisp based (!) native Windows app. I wish I had something like it on OS X and Linux.
Back to my pain... the biggest challenge to wrestle was that an Oracle Type 4 URL could have an IP address, or a hostname embedded in it. Both of these are very tricky to handle in a regex. The pattern I put together comes really close to perfection, in fact it may just be there already but I don't want to jinx this blog. I am guessing I may have missed something, but so far all my JUnit tests are passing.
What's the big whoop bout IP Addresses in "dotted quad"? They are tricky because of the limited range of each number - 1 to 255 for each quad. And if you really wanted to get technical, there are certain reserved ranges you might want to lock out, but I just don't have that kind of time. Oh, and I am not worrying about IPv6 with this regex pattern.
And hostnames, aren't they easy? NOPE. How many people out there really know the spec? I was forced long ago, when operating my own DNS servers, to appreciate RFC 952 and RFC 882. They differ on some points, so I am not entirely clear on how it all shakes out... for example RFC 952 disallows single character names and RFC 882 allows them. But they agree on most of the high level basics.
From RFC 952:
1. A "name" (Net, Host, Gateway, or Domain name) is a text string up
to 24 characters drawn from the alphabet (A-Z), digits (0-9), minus
sign (-), and period (.). Note that periods are only allowed when
they serve to delimit components of "domain style names". (See
RFC-921, "Domain Name System Implementation Schedule", for
background). No blank or space characters are permitted as part of a
name. No distinction is made between upper and lower case. The first
character must be an alpha character. The last character must not be
a minus sign or period. (...) Single character names
or nicknames are not allowed.
Hmm... I have to wonder if the 24 position thing is really a limit anymore, and aren't their root name servers on the internet with single position names? From RFC 882:
Appendix 1 - Domain Name Syntax Specification
The preferred syntax of domain names is given by the following BNF
rules. Adherence to this syntax will result in fewer problems with
many applications that use domain names (e.g., mail, TELNET). Note
that some applications described in [14] use domain names containing
binary information and hence do not follow this syntax.
<domain> ::= <subdomain> | " "
<subdomain> ::= <label> | <subdomain> "." <label>
<label> ::= <letter> [ [ <ldh-str> ] <let-dig> ]
<ldh-str> ::= <let-dig-hyp> | <let-dig-hyp> <ldh-str>
<let-dig-hyp> ::= <let-dig> | "-"
<let-dig> ::= <letter> | <digit>
<letter> ::= any one of the 52 alphabetic characters A through Z
in upper case and a through z in lower case
<digit> ::= any one of the ten digits 0 through 9
Note that while upper and lower case letters are allowed in domain
names no significance is attached to the case. That is, two names
with the same spelling but different case are to be treated as if
identical.
The labels must follow the rules for ARPANET host names. They must
start with a letter, end with a letter or digit, and have as interior
characters only letters, digits, and hyphen. There are also some
restrictions on the length. Labels must be 63 characters or less.
I have attempted to faithfully adhere to both these specs where they agree, and where they do not - I allow for 63 position as well as single position names.
Finally, note that my regex creates 3 matching groups:
These groupings are your handles to programmatically pluck out the URL pieces you want to chew on.
Let me know if I missed something! (NOTE - my blog was having trouble with the long string. I have chopped it into five bits. You must put the following five lines into one long string to create the regex, or click here to get it in a downloaded text file.)
^jdbc:oracle:thin:@((?:(?:(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?).){3}
(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?))
|(?:(?:(?:(?:[A-Z|a-z])(?:[\w|-]){0,61}(?:[\w]?[.]))*)
(?:(?:[A-Z|a-z])(?:[\w|-]){0,61}(?:[\w]?))))
:([0-9]{1,5}):([A-Z|a-z|_|#|$]{1,8})$
Once you have the previous five lines stitched together into one regex, you should be able to match the following example URL's, and break them down into the three groupings:
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |
