Cupertino Election 2009

Well, it's November again and that means it's time for another election. This time it is all local to Cupertino. I voted a couple weeks back, as I am a permanent absentee.

Let's go through the various issues:

Measure B

Measure B is an update to the Utility User Tax, which is not supposed to change anything about our current taxes, but simply to define terms to correspond to current usage. In skimming through the proposed changes, the only thing that stood out to me was that VoIP was specifically included as a telecommunications service in this tax, but I guess that is already the case.

Verdict: YES

Measure G

Measure G is an update to an existing $98 per parcel additional property tax assessment which expires in 2011. The changes are to allow this additional tax to increase by 2% per year (or the rate of inflation, whichever is higher), and to no longer have an expiration date.

The argument against this is that this is an unfair tax and that it will go up too quickly. The tax will go up a minimum of about $20 in 10 years. There is an exemption for seniors already in place that is carried over to Measure G.

Personally, I believe that our schools deserve funding, and to have a small tax which keeps up with inflation does not seem unreasonable at all. In fact, I believe it will benefit the property value and the schools to have this funding secured. A few extra dollars a year is not a big deal to me but will make a big difference for our Cupertino schools.

Verdict: YES

Cupertino City Council

There are three open seats for Cupertino City Council, and seven candidates running. This is definitely the toughest decision I had on this election. I watched two debates with all the candidates, and read a lot of campaign mailings and websites.

In the end I decided to vote for Daniel Nguyen, Darcy Paul, and Marty Miller.

Daniel Nguyen is a Cupertino native who went to Cupertino public schools. He brings a different perspective than many other candidates, being the youngest candidate this time around, and I was impressed that he has a facebook page in addition to the usual candidate website.

Darcy Paul impressed me in two ways: 1) he only sent one campaign mailing on a small card (pointing out that this was to reduce environmental impact), and 2) he was the only candidate that in the debates suggested implementing a school bus program. Growing up in Texas and taking school busses for granted through most of my years in school, I am amazed that in one of the top school systems in the Bay Area we don't have bus service. This creates huge traffic problems at our schools when all the parents have to come pick up the kids at the same time. An additional benefit of a bus program would be that parents would not have to adjust their schedules to pick up and drop off kids, except if the kids needed to get to school early or stay late.

Marty Miller has many years of experience on the planning commission. He seems focussed on ensuring our sales tax revenue is increased and that we keep costs in check. Revitalizing Vallco and filling up our empty office and retail space appears to be his top priority, as well as controlling spending.

Verdict: Daniel Nguyen, Darcy Paul, Marty Miller

Cupertino Union School District Board

This one was easy. There are four candidates and you can vote for three of them. Three of the four provided information in the sample ballot and one did not. Also, apparently two of these three are already on the board and one is heavily involved in the PTA.

Verdict: Gary McCue, Ben Liao, Anjali Kausar

Cupertino Sanitary District Director

Again, an easy choice as only two of the four candidates provided any information in the sample ballot packet. These were also the only two candidates which mailed information to me.

Verdict: Don Sun, Steve Andrews

How to set up port mapping for iChat video chatting

Here's how I set up to be able to receive incoming connections for iChat for video chatting (or audio chatting or screen sharing). These instructions should work for a Time Capsule, AirPort Extreme, or AirPort Express.

Step 1 - Set up static IP addresses

The first step is to make sure that all computers on your home network have static IP addresses. The easiest way to do this is to simply have the AirPort Base Station/Time Capsule hand out the same IP address via DHCP each time. You can do this using AirPort Utility. Select your base station and go to Manual Setup. Under Internet -> DHCP -> DHCP Reservations you should add an entry for each computer.

You will need the Ethernet MAC address for each computer, which you can get in System Preferences -> Network. Go to the interface you use to connect (AirPort or Ethernet) and click Advanced... and go to the Ethernet tab. There will be an Ethernet ID listed which is a sequence of numbers and letters A-F with colons. This is what you want.

Copy and paste this into AirPort Utility, or retype it as appropriate. Then assign an IP address which is below your starting DHCP range. In my example, the dynamic range starts at 200, so anything under 200 would be fine. I use 100, 101, etc. for the statically assigned addresses.

Repeat this process for each computer on your home network that you want to use iChat video chatting/audio chatting/screen sharing with.

An alternative to this would be to use the use DHCP with manual IP address option in System Preferences -> Network. This option works best with desktop machines, since laptops may move to different networks and the static IPs you assign will likely not be valid on other AirPort networks.

Step 2 - Set up port forwarding

Now that you have the IP addresses assigned, you can redirect incoming connections to these static IP addresses as appropriate. This is done in AirPort Utility as well, under Advanced -> Port Mapping.

The port range for iChat is UDP ports 16384-16402. Starting with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, iChat will first try 16402, and then continue with the lower numbered ports down to 16393. Earlier versions of Mac OS X use 16384-16392 as well. If you just have one machine you can map the entire range, but if you have more than one, just assign one port to each and then the remaining ports to the computer that is most likely to be used for chatting. Here are some examples:

As you can see, you can enter both ranges of ports with a dash, or a list of ports with commas, or a combination.

Other routers

For other routers, such as LinkSys, you have to use the web configuration interface (which is usually just the router's IP address). As far as I can tell the standard LinkSys firmware does not support static DHCP reservations, but custom firmwares like HyperThibor do.

Port mapping on the LinkSys is done under Applications & Gaming -> Port Range Forward. It is not as flexible as the AirPort, so you will need one line for each continuous range of ports.

Time Capsule update

Last weekend I went ahead and completed the switchover from my old LinkSys WRT54G to the new 1GB TIme Capsule as the primary router for the home network.

On the Time Capsule, I had to set up port mapping to match the previous configuration of the LinkSys. I also set up static DHCP mappings to match what was already set up. Enabled PPPoE client and DHCP server.

LinkSys changes:
- reset to defaults
- disabled WiFi
- disabled internet/WAN connection
- disabled DHCP server

I also needed to connect one of the LAN ports of the LinkSys to one of the LAN ports of the Time Capsule.

After setting all this up, I noticed the AirPort menu extra started showing the connected time for the PPPoE connection, which is a bit annoying. Luckily I was able to figure out that you turn this off from a submenu that shows up from the network name in the AirPort menu.

Another discovery I made was that with Leopard it is now possible to have multiple computers on the home network set up to do video chats. The secret was to map different incoming ports to different computers. In Leopard, iChat will try port 16402 and then continue trying lower port numbers down to 16393. Given that the Time Capsule is more flexible with port mapping, it was easy to set aside 16401 and 16400 for the laptops, while leaving all the old iChat ports for the Mac mini.

Already Voted

I've been a permanent absentee voter in California since the switch to electronic voting machines... given a paper trail for accountability and recount purposes I'm no longer opposed to electronic voting, but I just preferred the level of privacy and ease of referring to my sample ballot that the old method allowed.

This election is the first time I am actually turning in my ballot before election day, however. Kathy and I went through the propositions today and made our decisions. It's tough when there are 12 statewide propositions and 4 local propositions. Seems like we are doing the legislature's job for them sometimes.

In the end, I voted no on most of the propositions, though I did vote for a few. I also found a cool new website called Ballotpedia with lots of information for anyone who hasn't voted yet.

http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_2008_ballot_measures

How to transfer local Time Machine backups to Time Capsule

I was able to successfully transfer the backups from our 500GB external FireWire drive to our new 1TB Time Capsule. This was not easy, so I decided to document the process for anyone who is interested.

1) Connect the external hard disk and the Time Capsule (via gigabit Ethernet) to the same computer.

2) Complete a backup to the hard disk, then turn off Time Machine while doing the conversion.

2a) If you have other computers backing up to the same hard disk, make sure those have a current backup as well before continuing.

3) Unmount the external hard disk.

4) In Disk Utility, create a new disk image from device from the external hard disk. Select the partition rather than the whole disk. I saved the image directly to the Time Capsule. This will take a long time. In my case, it took over 12 hours.

5) Unplug the external hard disk.

6) At this point, you have a .dmg with the complete contents of the external hard disk. This needs to be converted to a .sparsebundle image. This can be done using "hdiutil convert -format UDSB harddisk.dmg" on the command line. The sparse bundle will be smaller than the .dmg since free space is not copied into the sparse bundle image. In my case, I had enough space on the Time Capsule to fit both images at the same time.

6a) After the conversion was completed, I removed the .dmg file, and made another copy of the .sparsebundle. This is because I was backing up both my MacBook and Kathy's MacBook to the same external drive. In a single computer case this is not needed.

6b) Next, the two images need to be fixed up to only contain the relevant files and free space on the Time Capsule. I mounted each image and deleted the inappropriate set of backup files. This seemed to work best dragging the top level folder under Backups.backupdb to the trash and then doing rm -rf in Terminal on the files. Emptying the trash might work as well but seems to be slower.

6c) After removing unneeded files, to free up space on the Time Capsule, unmount the disk image. Then run "hdiutil compact image.sparsebundle" in Terminal. This will remove unused band files from the sparse bundle.

7) Configure Time Machine to use the Time Capsule and start a backup. Once a disk image is created, stop the backup. The image should be named <computer>__<uuid>.sparsebundle. Remove this image and rename the sparsebundle you created to match the name. Then do a backup again. You should still be doing this over Ethernet.

8) After the first backup, wireless backups should be fine.

The only other consideration is that the image size may not be correct (500GB vs. 1TB), but I don't suspect to run into that limit any time soon, and it is easy enough to resize using hdiutil.

Time Capsule arrived

We finally took the plunge and got a 1TB Time Capsule to replace our current 500GB Maxtor hard disk which has been backing up Kathy's and my MacBook since we upgraded to Leopard (around the time of my last blog post actually - yes I am lame for not blogging for so long).

So far I am liking the Time Capsule. Right now I have it set up in bridge mode and am still using the LinkSys WRT54G as the main router. Here are some of the tradeoffs between the two routers:

* Time Capsule has a built in hard disk which can be used for wireless backup
* Time Capsule supports USB printer sharing (thinking of moving the inkjet printer to be shared this way - it's currently shared by the Mac mini)
* LinkSys supports dynamic DNS which I am currently using... Time Capsule supports Back to My Mac, but doesn't seem to support dynamic DNS
* LinkSys has 4 100Mbit ports plus 1 uplink port, Time Capsule has 3 Gigabit ports and 1 uplink port
* LinkSys is 802.11g, Time Capsule is 802.11n
* Time Capsule requires a reboot for any configuration change, which takes 30 seconds or something. Config changes on the LinkSys happen much faster.

Overall, I think I should be able to totally replace the LinkSys with the Time Capsule, but the first challenge is to transfer our last 9 months of backups over to the Time Capsule. This is not as simple as you might think because the Time Capsule needs backups in sparsebundle disk image format, and the backups we have are just stored as files on the hard disk directly. I have an idea for how to get this working which is taking a while. If my plan works I will post an update on how to do it for anyone who's interested.

Thanksgiving preparations

We're having Kathy's family over for Thanksgiving again this year so today was spent doing a lot of preparation work... we did the big Safeway trip (got there around 5 so the store was not crowded yet - yay), and last night I replaced the dimmer switch that burned out recently with a better one that has a separate slider and on/off switch, plus replaced the bulbs in the track lights. I wasn't able to find CFLs that would work so I just went with 60W halogens for now. Maybe later I will get some different fixtures for the track that can hold a dimmable CFL flood (which seem to only come in the long neck versions of the bulbs).

Also, is it just me or is it really, really annoying that everyone seems to have forgotten about waiting until the day after Thanksgiving to start the Christmas music and decorations? In some cases, Christmas stuff was out even before Halloween.