In reference to a post by Joe (quoting James Altucher), let me quote something from James too, that I found to be true, in exactly the time space-time-continuum that this article relates to… (Emphasis added by me.)

How I screwed Yasser Arafat ….

…

But I did learn several things that became incredibly important to me later. :

A) if you have to raise thirty million to start your business, its probably not a good business (at least for me). All of my good businesses (businesses that I started that I eventually sold and made money on) started off profitable from day one and never raised a dime of money.

B) Most M&A transactions don’t work. When you buy a company, its very hard to keep the owners of the old company incentivized. 90% of acquisitions don’t work. Build your business. Don’t buy it.

C) A lesson I learn repeatedly: traveling for business almost never generates more revenues. New York (and America) are big enough places to generate revenues. You should never travel. In the course of doing this business I traveled repeatedly to the west coast, Denver, England (to try and buy a company), Sweden (where Ericsson was based), Germany (Ericsson wanted me to show up at a conference for one day), Georgia, Florida, Boston, etc etc. Not a single meeting generated any revenues for the business but wasted hundreds of hours of my life.

D) Hiring smart people doesn’t work if you aren’t smart. Everything ultimately comes form the top down.

E) Spending a lot of money on branding and marketing materials is a waste of money for a startup. If you don’t know who you are, no amount of money will create materials explaining who you are.

F) If you are going to raise thirty million for a business, then raise a hundred million if you can. Don’t turn down Henry Kravis’s five million. It doesn’t matter how badly you get diluted. If you have to raise money, take in every dime you can.

G) MOST IMPORTANT: If you raise thirty million, spend none of it. Warren Buffett once said, “if you know a business will be around 20 years from now then its probably a good investment.” With thirty million we could’ve stayed in business for 20 years or more and eventually figured ourself out. Instead, I spent forty million in the first month or so. I learned a lot, and over a hundred million was lost.

Not-so-startup food for thought eh?. Apparently my blog is a great startup. Having to field around 10 to 20 spam posts (after kismetting) a day must mean something right ? Hah!

FreeRADIUS is a great RADIUS server, but custom integration with it has pretty much always left developers with the choice of rlm_python, rlm_ruby, or rlm_perl.

Understandably, rlm_python is not an option for me, so I’ve been doing some work with rlm_perl, and pretty much the first thing I did there, was to use Gearman, and serialisation to get a FreeRADIUS request out of perl as quick as possible, into a gearman queue, and then and into my chosen worker platform of choice — PHP.

Besides, does one REALLY want to drag an entire interpreter, business logic and it’s potential pitfalls into the FreeRADIUS core, and potentially affect it’s stability ?

FreeRADIUS also makes heavy use of threads, so to integrate a random language is quite a bit of a pain, and most of the language modules are non-thread safe so you cannot really benefit from FreeRADIUS thread scaling.

I don’t mind perl, and I’ve worked in it for long enough, but once one looks at the bridge that the above builds to get into a messaging layer, it kind of makes one think… Can it be better ?

Enter rlm_zmq

I’ve built this FreeRADIUS module over the last two days, firstly, because I haven’t really played with zeromq before, and secondly because I wanted to see if I can make the bridge a bit shorter, and faster.

Well, the results are pretty cool. 4500 requests per second for authorisation only in FreeRADIUS, and 3500 requests per second if I use rlm_zmq in every possible processing section in FreeRADIUS (such as accounting, post-auth etc).

ZMQ still requires a “broker” or “queue” manager of some kind if you’re doing the sort of fan-out to fan-out of multiple worker thing that’s required to get some nice scale.

The basic zmq socket architecture is request reply, along these lines:

freeradius_rlm_zmq(zmq socket pool) ----> queue.php <------ worker(s).php

queue.php is a simple message router, that routes between FreeRADIUS threads and worker processes.

In essence, very similar to a standard gearman architecture, but much more ‘native’. ZeroMQ sockets pretty much behave like sockets, except a bit more clever. Gearman has a lot more functionality than zeromq, and I might just attempt rlm_gearman next.

Either way, gone are the days of having to build language specific modules for FreeRADIUS, I think. If you can deserialize json, and can use any of the many language bindings for ZeroMQ, you can now do RADIUS.

rlm_zmq basically adds Mongrel2-like functionality to FreeRADIUS, giving you the option of 30+ languages and a number of N-to-N messaging patterns and load distribution capabilities.

rlm_zmq is pretty much alpha, but it’s fairly stable, and hasn’t yet eaten all my memory alive after hours of hammering with radperf which is always a good thing. In fact, I think it’s about as stable as rlm_perl 🙂

This was a fun project with pretty cool results.

I’m just posting a bunch of really cool Nick Cave videos embedded into my site, so that the muppets from VEVO, and the rights holders don’t get to show me an utter bunch of nonsense.

Like “Rihanna Cheers, [Drink To That]” when you’re watching a Nick Cave video! The gall of it!

It really spoils the entire experiencel… Just click on the “Watch on Youtube” to see the “youtube commercial” effect, and how disgustingly disparaging it is to the artist.

Henry Lee

I did it for me. Cause it’s easier for me to post an embedded video on my own site, that skips all the crap “tinsel” on Youtube.

Can you imagine it … ? Rihanna next to Nick Cave. No wonder the record industry is conking out. They clearly have no clue, and have completely disconnected with their audience.

In March this year,  I complained about how ISLabs seemed to have become defunct, and had become a haven for spam comments.

A few weeks later some of it was cleaned up.

But it seems that now ISLabs has completely rebooted ?

No more content at all, all ye olde stuff be-gone, and it pretty much appears to be a reset of the original drupal installation? It’s a pity. I believe in the durability of web content (except of course, for spam).

I hate it when URL’s disappear. Of course, part of the reason I think it’s disappeared is because people like Justin Spratt are no longer tending to these things, and thus the drive is gone.

Oh well. All things come to an end I guess. /me listens to the rustling of the leaves.