Ever on and on

Presidentials

September 23rd, 2009

What’s a Presidential peak? My niece asked me this question, and it’s an excellent question with a very confusing answer.

A Presidential peak is generally considered to be Mt. Washington, and one of the major peaks on the ridges connected to Washington. North of Washington, these are Madison, Adams, and Jefferson. Mt. Clay sits between Jefferson and Washington; it is not an official 4K peak (for the usual insufficient col reason), nor is it named after a President. There are 5 peaks in the Adams group; the tallest is named after John Adams, the next tallest is John Quincy Adams, then Sam Adams, then imagination failed and the call the smallest bumps Adams 4 and Adams 5. (I and many others think Adams 4 should be called Abigail.) John Quincy Adams, by the way, sits across the col from Mt. Madison and is in fact taller than Madison.

South of Washington the Presidential ridge is Monroe, Little Monroe, Franklin (an even smaller bump on the ridge than Clay), Eisenhower, Pierce/Clinton, Jackson, and Webster. Of these peaks, only half are named after Presidents: Monroe, Eisenhower, and Pierce. (But the Clinton is a former governor of NH, not the President). The Jackson was a state geologist.

There are several other ridges leading to Washington. The Montalban ridge is just east of the Southern Presidentials: its highest peaks are Isolation and Davis, as well as the very recognizable Giant Stairs. The Rocky Branch Ridge, to the east of Montalban, has no major peaks. Then the ridges to the east, which define Washington’s ravines: Boott Spur, Glen Boulder, and Chandler Ridge (where the auto road runs). The peaks on Chandler Ridge, all higher than the Southern Presidentials, are named Ball Crag and Nelson Crag. None of these peaks are considered Presidentials.

Why is this such a mess? Mountain naming is necessarily haphazard (don’t get me started about the peaks named after Native American chiefs who never set foot in New England), and necessarily represents a moment in time. The Presidentials (Adams through Monroe) were named by a group of “prominent citizens”, who climbed Washington (named after George Washington when he was a general and not yet President) and named the next 4 highest peaks after the next 4 Presidents. They got it wrong, by the way, because Monroe – named after the fifth president – is actually the fourth tallest, and Madison is only fifth tallest.

None of this accounts for Lincoln, which is named after President Lincoln, but is not in the Presidential range. (It’s on Franconia Ridge.)

I wrote above that Clay is not named after a President, but that is not entirely true. There has been a national drive to rename features after President Reagan, and Clay is the peak that was targeted in the Whites. The New Hampshire legislature has renamed Clay to Reagan, but the US Bureau of Geological Names, which has its own rules, does not recognize the renaming. So Clay has two names, depending on whether you answer to NH or the US.

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Favorite Peaks

September 16th, 2009

These are some of my favorite peaks from the past 4 years.

Wheeler Mt. Absolutely my favorite hike of the past 4 years was climbing Wheeler, a short hike (about 2 miles round-trip) on a small mountain with dramatic cliffs, but it was the company that made the day. My son was with me – his 2nd or 3rd time on Wheeler – and my father – his first time hiking in years, and the first time hiking with my son when he was actually walking, and not on my back. My wife completed the team. Standing on the final outlook with them was a very special moment.
Bondcliff, very possibly my favorite NH 4K. Positioned in the middle of the Pemigewasset Wilderness, it is hidden from most of the overt signs of civilization. It has close-up dramatic views of South Twin and the other Bonds, nearby views of Franconia Ridge, and more-distant views of the Sandwich Range and the Presidentials. And it has a luxurious summit area, very flat and broad. It’s remote, so you know you’ve earned your solitude.
Guyot, not actually a 4K, but on the Twins/Bonds ridge. Another remote spot with awesome views. I had a full day planned and had to press on, but someday I plan to hike to Guyot by whatever route seems easiest, and have lunch.
South Kinsman is another broad summit area, with unique views over the wall of Franconia notch into the Pemigewasset. I was so enthralled by the views I nearly missed the storm sneaking up on me from Moosilauke.
Jefferson. It seems unfair to pick the Presidential I most recently climbed, but I think Jefferson probably is my favorite. The unique double-humped summit, with views into the headwall of the Great Gulf, and of course Adams and Washington up close, are simply awesome.

Somehow I’ve left off Franconia Ridge, and my favorites in the Sandwich Range. Some peaks get short shrift because I climbed them on busy days (South Twin, Liberty). Actually, there’s hardly a peak I’ve climbed that I wouldn’t go back to. But these are some of the ones that stand out.

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Finishing the Separate LANs Configuration

September 14th, 2009

Last time I wrote about how OpenWRT configures networks at the port level. Once I split the LAN ports into two separate LANs, there was higher-level configuration that also needed to be taught about the LANs.

Once again, I’ll show the configuration from /etc/config files. The first thing we need to do is define a network for the new LAN (in fact, I renamed the old LAN as well). The type is “bridge” so we can bridge it with the wireless LAN, as we noted last time. The interface is eth0.2, which is the new VLAN. This looks something like:
config 'interface' 'homelan' option 'type' 'bridge' option 'ifname' 'eth0.2'

Finally I wrote some iptables rules to prevent forwarding between the two LANs, and to prevent access to the router itself.
Then we need to add a section to the dhcp configuration. In this case we don’t want to run DHCP on this interface, so I set “ignore” to 1.
config 'dhcp' option 'interface' 'homelan' option 'ignore' '1'

Finally, and this is key, we need to add some sections to the firewall config file. First we need to define a “zone”, which is an OpenWRT concept. This (typical) zone allows packets to be transmitted or received on the homelan interface, but not to be forwarded between interfaces:
config 'zone' option 'name' 'homelan' option 'input' 'ACCEPT' option 'output' 'ACCEPT' option 'forward' 'REJECT'

Then we configure forwarding from the homelan into the WAN:
config 'forwarding' option 'src' 'homelan' option 'dest' 'wan' option 'mtu_fix' '1'

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Open Source in Startups

September 11th, 2009

I’ve worked for several New England startups that used open source software to jump-start their product development. What are some of the tradeoffs? I’m interested in open source software integrated into a product; there are different issues when the company exists to extend an open source project, or when open source software is used as part of the company’s IT infrastructure.

The classic case of this usage is embedding the Linux kernel in the product. Linux is mature, actively-developed, and very modular – these are all attractive attributes. It’s also free, as in royalty-free, and the source code is similarly freely-available. The competition – embeddable kernels, often with a real-time flavor – is also mature, several options are actively-developed, but you pay for using the code, and presumably receive better support in your development. (The technical fit will depend on your application, I won’t address that here.)

Other classic examples include using gcc in your product, or building a web-based service around the Apache web server, or even using common tools such as Perl and PHP. Each one of these software packages is mature and actively-developed, and has competitive commercial products (depending on your application) that are also mature and actively-developed, but require payment.

One company I helped start made the decision (free or not free) several times during our lifetime, and changed the direction we went. Initially, we licensed a commercial embedded real-time operating system, bought a commercial suite of compilers, and used them to develop the first products. Later, in our 3rd-generation products, we switched to a Linux base. (We revised the physical designs at the same time, moving to a more off-the-shelf approach.) Our server application team made different decisions, building in more open source software from the beginning. All of these decisions had an impact on the business years later, and some of them led to last-minute rewriting of non-trivial parts of the product.

The problems we faced – and bigger problems that have been faced by much larger companies – evolved from that word “free”. When I described Linux and other open source projects as “free”, that was sloppy thinking, and in the case of this company it led to some sloppy management practices. (I was part of these practices, I share the responsibility.)

The Linux kernel is copyrighted, and that copyright is released under a license. In this way it is no different from the commercial products I called “competitors”. gcc is also copyrighted, and so are all other open source projects. (If there’s no copyright, we call the software public domain, and the rules are different.)

You wouldn’t found a startup – or start a new project – by saying “I’m going to steal this software and use it to build our next-gen best-seller.” No, you would say “we need to license this software package, and that will cost us X dollars up front with a per-unit royalty of $Y” (or whatever the vendor’s terms are). But, because the industry often calls open source projects “free”, we as software managers often forget to account for the licenses that control them.

Open source software is licensed. The choice to accept those licenses, and abide by their terms, is a business decision that needs to be made by the business managers. Just as you wouldn’t make an individual engineer responsible for counting the units-shipped of a commercial component, and paying the vendor’s royalty, you shouldn’t leave open source licensing decisions to engineers either. These are business decisions that need to be made by technically-savvy business managers.

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Why do I hike 4Ks?

September 9th, 2009

As I write this entry, I have climbed 47 of the 48 4,000′ers in New Hampshire. (To make the list, a mountain has to be over 4,000′ tall, and the col – the lowest point – between it and each of its neighbors must be at least 200′ deep.) Sometime soon, I’ll climb Mt. Garfield and “complete the list”. But why did I start?

My father started me on hiking, when I was young, and I hiked with an elementary school teacher and at summer camp. But life got busier and it wasn’t something I kept up with. In my 30s I meant to find a hiking buddy and start hiking again, but somehow it never happened. Then I bought Mike Dickerman’s book, Why I’ll Never Hike the Appalachian Trail, and that reminded me again how much I loved the outdoors. (Oddly, Bill Bryson’s A Walk In The Woods was a fun read but didn’t get me outside.)

I finally realized that if I kept waiting for someone else to start me hiking, it would never happen. I decided to do a trial hike on Stratton Mt in Vermont, and see whether I still liked it. (Stratton is where both the Long Trail and Appalachian Trail were conceived.) And I decided that if it went well, I would get back into hiking – by section-hiking the Long Trail.

The day I climbed Stratton was cloudy, and I got no views. But it was great to be out in the woods again, and out-of-shape though I was I made the longer loop off the far side of Stratton and then back to the road. While I was up on the peak – after chatting with the GMC caretaker – I ran into another hiker. We got chatting and he told me that if I wanted hiking companions, I should check out this web site “Views From the Top”. I never got his name.

On Views From the Top (VFTT), I found an enthusiastic community of peakbaggers, mostly NH-based (although there’s a vocal NY contingent). And from them I learned about the 4,000′ers, and saw pictures they shared of their hikes. And I found my target shifting: when spring rolled around I went off to hike Mt Hale, one of the easiest 4,000′ers, on a soggy grey day with almost no views – and I got hooked. Since then, over about 4 years, I have climbed 46 more NH 4K peaks. I’m not exclusive – I’ve climbed in the Wapacks nearer home, and various smaller peaks, and even once or twice gone out hiking with no peaks at all. But I’ve organized around the NH 4Ks because it’s good to have a goal, and it’s mostly because of a hiker I bumped into on Stratton, and the enthusiasts on VFTT.

And the Long Trail? It’s still waiting for me.