The more time I spend studying companies and company stock, the more I realize how fucked you are if you take a job with a company and they issue you RSUs instead of options or stock. They’re usually handed out to people who show up too late in that particular startup’s lifecycle to matter. The new employees aren’t founders, they’re not startup people, they’re just workers. Unlike the first 20 employees, they are taking little risk as the company is already established, and they will see little reward in the end.

Google and Facebook have been doing this for years. In reality, the prevalance of RSUs is a direct response to much of the legislation issued after the .com bust. It’s easier to stall on the IPO and continue to accumulate capital than to deal with the IPO itself. Remember that the stock market was originally designed to allow individuals to pump capital into companies, a job now largely taken over by VCs.

With those companies, their growth is so good that you might get a nice upside working for them, but nothing like you would with options. Worse yet, you get few rights if you have RSUs. No voting rights, nothing. No common stock. If you hold them for ten years and your company doesn’t IPO, you get nothing (average IPO time these days is 9+ years and the market is slow) when they expire. The SEC will even grant special privileges to your company (easily upon request) so they can avoid the registration requirements for stock, which is around 500 stockholders and/or > $1M in assets.

Why is that important? Because around 500 registered stockholders, the company is forced into an IPO; The reporting requirements under Sarbanes-Oxley will cost as much as the IPO does, for the most part.

RSUs come with many restrictions. You can’t transfer them (to your spouse, or anyone), if you die, your successor is stuck with the same restrictions, and you can’t sell them. Guess what else? If your company gets bought, the acquiring company can just terminate RSUs during the acquisition. Whoops. You lose your stock.

At least if you get fired, you (might) get to keep your RSUs. If they manage to IPO, it’s going to be a good year or so before you can sell. It’s standard though, during the IPO, to convert RSUs directly to Common Stock during a Liquidity event, though.

If you’re taking a new job, take options or direct grants only, and make sure you read Know your Options. If you’re offered RSUs and you want serious upside stay away from companies that are issuing RSUs. You’re going to get fuck all in the end. Go find an early-stage startup instead. If you want a safe job, take the RSUs.

Here’s an example of what a company can do with the SEC. It’s Twitter asking for an exemption from Section 12 of the Exchange act and it contains some very interesting information about how the RSU program works.

http://www.sec.gov/divisions/corpfin/cf-noaction/2011/twitter091311-12gh-incoming.pdf

Here’s facebook’s for comparison (but they’re written by the same lawyer and even have a similar filename, so don’t expect too much difference.)

http://www.sec.gov/divisions/corpfin/cf-noaction/2008/facebook101308-12gh-incoming.pdf

For more information, have a look at the Bloomberg article, here:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-15/twitter-gets-leeway-from-sec-in-issuing-restricted-stock-units.html

Apple’s new iPhone4 has created quite a stir, even though consumers are paying slightly more for the same phone with a slightly better display, dual (improved) cameras, and flash. I’m sure by now you know about the antenna problems and the lame way that apple chose to fix it, but I wanted one of these wonderful gadgets, so I signed up on the reservation list and finally got my email notification to pick one up this morning.

The Apple store was helpful as always, but as soon as I got the phone in my hands I realized that it was going to be another iPhone upgrade with a different goddamn dock. I tried the easy way out and wasted $9 on a “universal dock adapter kit”, which didn’t work at all with my Apple iPhone 3GS dock. I assumed it was meant for the dock that I owned, but this adapter was meant for some device which clearly didn’t match anything that Apple has ever produced. Nine dollars wasted and no working dock.

The dock is an essential device to me. Without it, I’d forget to drop my phone into the dock at work and keep it charged. How to fix this? Apple wants $29 for a new iPhone 4 dock. This is completely unacceptable to me, considering that the iPhone 3GS dock is now selling at $7 on many sites. Why pay again for a similar connector and janky audio-out contraption? (Did you know the audio out is provided by a microphone in the base of the dock, which connects to an amplifier and then the audio out jack? It does.)

There was only one way to fix this — time to make this right with some hacking.

So, out comes the dremel tool:

Let the hacking begin. We start with the 3gs dock, and go from this…

…to this, a few moments later. I hacked it into the shape of the 4g:

But guess what? Hacking the dock to fit the iPhone4 doesn’t work, because Apple’s modified the dock to only recognize the 3GS. If you connect an iPhone 4 to that very same connector, the phone and iTunes will not recognize the phone.

Sure, my 3gs still works, so I haven’t damaged anything:

Connecting the cable directly to the 4g works, just not the dock to the 4g through the very same cable.

Apple’s position on this is worsening. The iPhone 1g’s came with working docks. Then, they stopped supplying them. on the 2g and 3g models, it was an extra $20 and $25. Now it’s $29.

This is awful. There’s a custom plug that you can’t easily purchase, and all iPhone models, even though they use the same plug, are incompatible with each other’s docks because of artificial incompatibilities created by a series of resistor codes hidden inside the cable or device.

Thanks, Apple. I love the iPhone, but the way you’re treating your customers is bullshit.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/04/twitter_and_the_end_of_the_sysadmin_as_we_know_it/

The author captures many of my points well, and applauds us for our open sourcing of our back-end infrastructure.

The talk is located right here on slideshare, if you’d like to view it.

First, turn your laptop into an access point. These scripts work on MacOS X running 10.5.4 or better — good luck!

I call this script ‘make-me-an-access-point.sh’:

#!/bin/sh

#Edit your /etc/rc.conf to set the option firewall_enable to YES
# Edit your /etc/rc.firewall to add lines:

/usr/sbin/natd -dynamic -interface ppp0   

sysctl -w net.inet.ip.forwarding=1

/sbin/ipfw -f flush
/sbin/ipfw add 1000 pass all from 127.0.0.1 to 127.0.0.1
/sbin/ipfw add 2000 divert natd ip from any to any via ppp0
/sbin/ipfw add 6500 pass all from any to any

ifconfig en1 192.168.1.1 up netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.0.255

dhcpd

and when you want this to go away, do:

laptop:bin jna$ cat undo-make-me-an-access-point.sh
#!/bin/sh
#
# undo the make-me-an-access-point script
#
sysctl -w net.inet.ip.forwarding=0

sudo /sbin/ipfw -f flush
sudo kill -9 `ps -efl |  grep dhcp | egrep -v VMware |  awk '{ print $2 }'`

echo "Now turn off the Airport, then wait a moment, and turn it back on."

The contents of my dhcpd.conf are very simple:

# dhcpd.conf
#
# Sample configuration file for ISC dhcpd
#
ddns-update-style ad-hoc;

# option definitions common to all supported networks...
option domain-name "retina.net";
option domain-name-servers 209.183.50.151;
default-lease-time 600;
max-lease-time 7200;

# If this DHCP server is the official DHCP server for the local
# network, the authoritative directive should be uncommented.
authoritative;

# Use this to send dhcp log messages to a different log file (you also
# have to hack syslog.conf to complete the redirection).
log-facility local7;

# No service will be given on this subnet, but declaring it helps the
# DHCP server to understand the network topology.

subnet 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
  range 192.168.1.100 192.168.1.200;
  option routers 192.168.1.1;
  option domain-name-servers 206.13.28.12;
  option broadcast-address  192.168.1.255;
}

First capture some data, with cron. We’re going to capture the free space in our database, once a day, so we’ll put something like this in cron, and set it for every night at midnight:

0 0 * * * ls -l /var/log/somefile | tail -1 >> /tmp/somefile_log

Wait a few days. We were looking at daily file growth, so we waited a full week to collect data. We had the luxury at the time.

Now you’ll have a file with a series of ls entries in it. Run those through awk, and capture the sizes of the files.

cat /tmp/somefile_log | awk '{ print $5 }'

At this point, it’s time to fire up Mathematica. Mathematica is a stunning piece of software by Wolfram Research, used for data visualization, scientific work, and in a number of industries.

First, let’s load the data into Mathematica.

What we’re going to do now is to copy the 1st data point into the Fit, and create a function that will allow us to predict the future.

(* Fit data to a curve using a polynominal model, make sure you insert the 1st data point or the curve fit will be bad *)
result =  Fit[data, {336660004864, x, x^2}, x]

(* current free space on our partition (312334824), refunding the 1st data point as that \
space is already alloc'd *)
diskfree = (312334824 * 1024) + Take[data, 1]

(* use the fit function to find doomsday *)
diskfreefunc =  diskfree - result

(* when x = 0 , we are dead *)
deathday =  NSolve[diskfreefunc == 0, x]
deathday = Take[x /. %, -1]
deathday = deathday[[1]]
DatePlus[datastartdate, N[deathday]]

So now we know when this data set will hit zero, we have the date of that failure, and an ability to graph when that will happen.

For this example, my data set turns into:

We now know that in ~64 days, we’ll run out of disk space. Prediction is pretty nice, huh?

For you stats types, you’ll want to know how good the fit is for this curve, and for that, we look at R².

Normally I don’t re-post Twitter articles here but this one on the New York magazine was wistful, fair, balanced, and gave a good representation of what it’s like to work here.

The reporter was in the office on the very day the US Airways flight crashed into the Hudson, and he recorded our (completely boring) reactions to the event.

Sure, the Twitter guys still have no idea how to make money off their fabulous invention. But for now they are living in a dreamworld of infinite possibilities, maybe the last one on Earth.

How Tweet it Is – New York Magazine

Since people started using virtual hosts by name with Apache HTTPD and other web servers, it has become very difficult to figure out which virtual hosts live on a single IP, if all you have is the IP address.

Have a look at the Robtex Internet Swiss Army Knife. It solves this problem, and far more, including AS# lookups, BGP dereferencing, and DNS checks. There’s a firefox search toolbar available for the site (very useful!) and RBL (blacklist) check tools right on the main page of the site.

Lately I’ve been examining the actual performance charastics of wireless networking devices.

I recently purchased a  Netgear WNR3500, and testing with iperf tells me that I see a maximum of 35Mbit/s. Many commenters have written in to ask me to try forcing the 802.11 connection to 802.11g, so I did that by installing my older Apple Airport Extreme (snow) base station.

Performance on that device is even worse:

dhcp-102:iperf-2.0.4 jna$ src/iperf -w256k -c 10.1.1.15
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 10.1.1.15, TCP port 5001
TCP window size:   257 KByte (WARNING: requested   256 KByte)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 10.1.1.102 port 54575 connected with 10.1.1.15 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0-10.1 sec  20.5 MBytes  17.0 Mbits/sec

Wireless speeds just don’t compared to wired! I’ve yet to see anything come close to 100mbit/sec, but 802.11N (draft standard 4) is much faster, by a factor of two.

If you’re in California, vote No On 8. It brings hate crime directly into the state’s constitution. 

In San Francisco, vote Yes on K. Sex workers have rights and need protections too.

Oh yeah, and VOTE OBAMA!

When you go to vote:

* Make sure you have proper ID

* Make sure you’re a registered voter

* Study a sample ballot, and when you make your marks on that ballot, mark clearly (and punch ALL the way through if your district uses those types of ballots)

* Vote early! (A bit late, considering today is Monday the 3rd)

* Do not listen to rumors. Research your vote thoroughly. Weigh all the options.

Some extra tips from The Huffington Post:

To avoid long lines, take advantage of the early voting option if it is available in your state.

Take your identification with you: your voter’s registration card, your driver’s license or other official picture identification, and the other documents that you gathered together earlier.

Take your list of phone numbers (hot line and campaign headquarters) and some extra paper for taking notes, if necessary.

If you vote on Election Day, Tuesday, November 4, 2008, go in the middle of the morning or middle of the afternoon if you can to avoid long lines.

Take your cell phone and small camera. Document the vote!

Check it out at http://www.taggalaxy.de