Kesper North's New Writeups

False Color (fiction)

2007-06-04T00:22:15Z

"The Captain will see you now," said the red-shirted flunky by the door. He lead me through stained and scratched glass doors and past empty ticket booths, their displays long since dark. Behind me, the thousands of glass panels that made up the outer walls of the building were covered in decades of particulate grime and pigeon shit, staining them a sickly tan. I had seen pictures of this place taken from long before the Exodus, showing clear glass gleaming in the sunlight. Many of the Earthborn backers of the Uplift Initiative had been fond of the place in their childhood; it was one of the reasons why I had been sent here first. Of course, there were other reasons; of all the thousands of subcult tribes eking out an existence on Manhattan Island, the one that made its home in the Hayden Planetarium was one of the oddest.

The once-shining hall was hung with painted spheres, sad static depictions of worlds these people had never really…

growl (thing)

2006-02-08T00:49:33Z

Growl is an extremely flexible user notification system for Mac OS X. It allows graphics and text to be displayed for a user-specified period of time somewhere on the screen. Its abilities include, but are not limited to, notification of:

Receiving new email via software mail client or Gmail
Various IM operations (contacts signing on/signing off)
Connection and disconnection of USB and Firewire devices
Connection and disconnection of network interfaces
Connection and disconnection of network storage volumes
iTunes integration, showing current track name, artist name and album art

Growl is highly extensible. An API is available to allow developers to build Growl support into their applications. Growl can also be easily invoked by scripts, as it includes a command-line utility that accepts plaintext input. Growl can also be used by plugins to applications; for instance, both Firefox and…

3DNS (thing)

2004-07-21T02:11:58Z

The 3DNS Controller is a F5 Networks product intended to perform wide-area load balacing and high availability of Internet applications and services. It is able to manage traffic for large sites across multiple data centers, and ensure that users are connected to the data center nearest them. It does this by selectively handing out a particular IP address in response to a DNS name record request.

The 3DNS Model

The best way to understand what the 3DNS controller does, and how it does it, is to imagine it in action. Let us say that you are a large corporation with a website -- call it buystuffonline.com -- that gets a lot of traffic from all over the world. Your corporation depends on people being able to make purchases via its website for its revenue -- so if that site goes down, or is even merely slow, you're losing money. A lot of money. So you build datacenters -- facilities where a copy of your website is hosted -- in several major cities…

BIG-IP (thing)

2004-07-15T01:23:11Z

The BIG-IP Application Traffic Manager is the flagship product of F5 Networks, Inc. It is designed to act as a high-availability load balancer, helping companies ensure that their applications are scalable and reliable. BIG-IP units run a variant of the BSD UNIX operating system, with proprietary software and modifications to the kernel to increase efficiency in load balancing scenarios.

The Basics of Load Balancing

BIG-IP is designed with a two-network topology in mind: the BIG-IP straddles two networks, with one "side" facing the clients, and the other facing the servers. On one network -- usually referred to as the "internal" network -- the application servers sit in private non-routable address space, physically isolated from the rest of the world with the BIG-IP as their only gateway to the outside. The other network, referred to as the "external", is the public face of BIG-IP, where clients can connect to virtual servers that are, in…

thoat (thing)

2003-07-03T22:13:15Z

The thoat has the honor of being the largest land mammal on the world of Barsoom in the famous science fiction novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. It is an eight-legged beast, easily domesticated for riding purposes, serving as the local horse-equivalent.

The thoat is, however, much larger than any horse -- so must it be to serve as a mount for the tall Barsoomians. They average ten feet high at the shoulder, and have a broad, flat tail which is wider at the tip than at the root. It is held straight out behind while running, used for balance and, perhaps, supported by aerodynamic forces. The thoat's mouth is very large; it bisects the creature's skull nearly in half.

The thoat is hairless; its hide is a smooth, glossy dark gray. The belly is typically white, and its legs shade from grey at the shoulders to yellow at its heavily padded feed, which lack nails or claws.

A dead thoat can be rendered down into an oily substance, known as thoat oil,…

March 7, 2003 (thing)

2003-03-07T09:56:29Z

thunder thunder lightning ahead
kiss you kiss you dark and long

Yeah. It's cold and dark. So'm I. The tequila's worn off by now, and I'm reminded why I never drink that shit. I've lost the edge it gives, the speed and quickness and the arrogant certainty of myself: a power never used, always held in reserve. It's not false confidence: it's just what I would have if I had all the self-esteem I truly deserve, with no inhibitions to go with it.

I've still got enough of it in my system to notice that I look good: high black boots and black jeans and black leather jacket over a futuristic-looking tabshirt of raw silk, gold-brown hair splayed out just so around blue-green eyes. I only notice that when I've had a few, though I get a lot of attention all the time.

But it's never the attention you want, is it?

No, of course not. There's only one. Of all the women I care…