Welcome to
Jeff Chan's Home Page

Recent Projects

• SURBL spam web site blacklists
• quakesignal.net grassroots earthquake prediction using electromagnetic signals from the Earth. Sounds like fiction, but truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. Check it out. The actual details are even stranger.

A few of my favorite things

• Nanosolar uses thin film "CIGS" nanomaterials to drive down the cost per power of photovoltaic solar cells by 5 to 10 times. This revolutionary technology will transform energy use and is currently in production. The first one megawatt installation is being delivered to a German town for municipal power as of Dcember 2007.

• Tesla Motors is bringing back the electric car in the form of an electric Lotus Elise. Range is about 250 miles and acceleration is about 4 seconds to 60 miles per hour. Being mechanically a Lotus and tuned by Lotus, handling and feel are outstanding. Along with a best-of-breed chassis, Tesla uses excellent AC Propusion-derived motor and controller and commodity Lithium Ion batteries. Tesla Motors is funded mainly by Elon Musk along with Google and eBay folks.

• Private firm SpaceX is single-handedly reviving the U.S. government manned space program with highly-efficient new engines that scale from light to heavy lift. (The heaviest lift Falcon 9 gets about a million pound-feet of thrust from 9 Merlin engines.) SpaceX is a commercial venture spearheaded by physicist and Internet Entrepreneur Elon Musk. Musk previously founded Paypal.

  "The Merlin 1C next-generation, liquid-fueled rocket booster engine is among the highest performing gas generator cycle kerosene engines ever built, exceeding the Boeing Delta II main engine, the Lockheed Atlas II main engine, and on par with the Saturn V F-1 engine. It is the first new American booster engine in a decade and only the second American booster engine since the Space Shuttle Main Engine was developed thirty years ago."

• Scaled Composites, Burt Rutan's innovative and daring aviation company, pioneers air- and spacecraft like SpaceShipOne, with which it won the X-Prize for the first private manned spacefights. I was there for the first one. Were you?
  
  Photo caption: Pilot Mike Melville stands atop SpaceShipOne with a sign that reads "SpaceShipOne Government Zero" after becoming the first private pilot to fly into space. Let's hope it's the start of a thriving private space travel industry.

• Still on the drawing boards, Reaction Engines' Sabre hybrid airbreathing rocket engine is a brilliant design that uses a closed-loop, Helium-gas Brayton cycle to cool the engine, preheat the fuel, compress the air (oxidizer) and drive the pumps and turbomachinery. Due to the engine cooling, the engine itself can be built much lighter than if it had to deal with the uncooled heat extremes of a non-cooled engine. Heat comes from air heated at a conventional hypersonic shock inlet cone. The engine can be used for hypersonic terrestrial travel or space launch. A major advantage of using ambient air is that the oxidizer doesn't need to be carried on board for terrestrial travel, making for a much lighter, more efficient vehicle. (For space launch some oxidizer is carried, but only enough for use outside the atmosphere. Breathing air within the atmosphere very greatly reduces the amount of oxidizer carried, overall vehicle mass, size, strength requirements, etc.) The flight profile is gentler also, using wings to fly most of the way to space. Note that this is a Hydrogen-Oxygen rocket engine that happens to use a turbine as air compressor. It is not a turbine engine. Performance would far exceed ramjets, turbines, chemical rockets, and nuclear-fission-powered rockets.

  "The Sabre engine is essentially a closed cycle rocket engine with an additional precooled turbo-compressor to provide a high pressure air supply to the combustion chamber. This allows operation from zero forward speed on the runway and up to Mach 5.5 in air breathing mode during ascent. As the air density falls with altitude the engine eventually switches to a pure rocket propelling Skylon to orbital velocity (around Mach 25)."

• eBay's auctions are a good fit to the transformative power of the Internet, enabling commerce on a personal-to-worldwide scale never seen before. I met eBay founder Pierre Omidyar when he came to check on their very first two Internet servers, installed at our Best Internet colocation facility in Mountain View, California.

• Google has a strong "not invented here" sensibility, but gets most of the stuff that it re-invents largely correct. Their ethics of doing the right thing most often end up being correctly implemented. It also does innovate. For example, their search engine is unique and obviously very good, and their ad driven revenue model is astute. Google's mail service gmail is lean and excellent.

• Like many people, I use Yahoo!'s news site. Other services on their portal are very good, if sometimes not as good as Google's. Yahoo's communities and mindshare are first-rate, even if Yahoo! hasn't found the commercial success of Google.

• FreeBSD is an excellent, stable, fast, free, open-source operating system. I find it much more consistent, stable and simple-to-use than Linux and strongly prefer it for all my servers. We used FreeBSD extensively for servers at Best Internet, as did Yahoo and Hotmail. FreeBSD has the excellent kernel-supported pf firewall from OpenBSD. Due to kernel archetecture, Linux likely can't use pf. Linux may be a more appropriate desktop operating system than FreeBSD, but I use FreeBSD for desktops too. Apple's OS X is based on Mach and FreeBSD. BSD, widely used in the research and academic communties, is also the basis for Sun's Solaris. The open-source successor to BSD "Berkeley Unix", FreeBSD is ported to Intel, AMD, SPARC, Alpha, ARM, ia64, pc98, etc.

Older stuff

• ZoneAlarm
• AVG by Grisoft
• Spybot - Search & Destroy
• Ad-Aware
• SecCheck by myNetWatchman

For some current freeware references, please see my other pages at: www.freeapp.net. Some of the references below may be rather old.

The interactive Online Inter-Network Mail Guide comes from the plaintext Inter-Network Mail Guide FAQ file, part of a general Email page.

World Wide Web Initiative (w3.org) -- includes HTML and HTTP specifications. My favorite HTML starting point is the Beginner's Guide to HTML. Here are International Characters in HTML. HTML Tables, Frames, Mozilla.org site, home of open source Firefox web browser and Thunderbird mail client.

Get your Web Colors here!

Web catalogs: Yahoo, and HotBot, and DEC's AltaVista all use different methods of cataloging the web. Originally a Stanford University grad student project, Yahoo! essentially hand categorizes web sites. The Yahoo! web catalog is a bit stale, but I find other content there very useful, such as their news and financial info. Another great feature of Yahoo is that its search results pages have links to other search engines. This sort of inclusivity builds on the strength of the other sites and simultaneously encourages its use as a portal. AltaVista and HotBot each claim to use unique technologies, and seem to produce different results form each other and Yahoo! HotBot is a Wired Magazine project.

I've found what may be a better search engine: Google! Originally a research project at Stanford, it yields very good results. Google is unusual in that it uses links to a given page to rank it's importance, the idea being that a page that's referred to often has a good chance of being authoritative or at least relevant. Google was recently looking for VC funding but instead has been funded privately by Andy Bechtolsheim, Sun Microsystem's hardware founder. Bechtolsheim, who continues to be at the forefront of technology and is now probably a billionaire, was at one point another struggling Stanford grad student.

One of the most useful ways to find stuff on Usenet is Deja News. Deja News has a very fast, searchable database of pretty much everything useful on Usenet. It's probably the quickest way to find things in the newsgroups, including simply reading them by group. Since it's web-based, you can get to it from anywhere with just a Web Browser, and nothing is downloaded to your machine (other than normal web page caching).

All of my domain registrations are now with GoDaddy.com. They're cheap and seem to work fine.

For great information about Internetworking see the Cisco Internetworking Technology Overview.
Another very good resource is Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia which includes descriptions and documentation about much of Internet networking. For a closer look at the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which coordinates routing on the Internet, see Cisco's Interdomain Routing document, overview chapter (from ITO mentioned above), and commands. Avi Freeman of Netaxs has a good couple articles about using BGP for Multihoming as an ISP. Here is a sample BGP config with communities used to mark which ASNs the routes come from. Network Computing magazine has a good overview of various routing protocols including BGP, RIP, OSPF, etc.

Here is a link to Sprint's BGP policy. UUNet shared their current BGP community settings privately.

Looking glasses, route servers and remote traceroutes are useful tools for digging into routing issues. www.traceroute.org has a good collection of these. The Oregon IX route server near the end of the list is very useful since it has many dozens of views of the full Internet routing table.

BroabandReport.com's DSL FAQ is a good collection of information about DSL lines, provisioning, wiring, usage.

Berkeley UNIX has nearly 30 years of expert development. As a truly open operating system it is widely used, very efficient, and highly reliable and secure. Best Internet used freeware FreeBSD, and that choice and advocacy influenced acquiring company Verio to continue the practice of hosting web customers on FreeBSD. Verio is now one of the world's largest FreeBSD web hosting companies after Yahoo and followed by Savvis. Both versions of Berkeley UNIX are popular as servers throughout the Internet.

-- Windows / Winsock (Windows tcp/ip) --

Winsite	The authoritative Winsock application archive (formerly CICA). See also: Win95 network utilities
Simtel	General Windows (and Winsock) archive
Schaft's	Nicely edited collection of Windows and Winsock programs (& it's local to Best)
Internaut	Well-edited collection of Winsock information. Includes Aboba's excellent PC tcp/ip FAQ (has LAN integration details).

(Please use a mirror site near you. In the SF Bay Area use cdrom.com.)

Here's an online dictionary of computer jargon. Just the thing to find out what FUD or BOHICA are.
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