Somehow, this week was like a journey. Like starting out in one place and ending up somewhere totally different.
Cayman is not the place it used to be and we are not going to like the place it is rapidly becoming. You don’t have to
look hard to see the changes but you do have to stop and take notice, too many people think it wont affect them.

Non Caymanians, expats, foreigners, whatever you like to call them vastly outnumber Caymanians especially in everyday
situations. Everywhere I went this week I saw people, whole crews working at fast food joints and supermarkets, not one
was identifiably Caymanian. If I can’t identify the Caymanians I’m sure a tourist can’t either. If you walked into
Fosters you would be forgiven for thinking the national language was Spanish! Anyone entering KFC during the late shift
would be excused for thinking they were in India.

All these people have brought with them their customs, their habits and their attitudes. There was a time when
everyone understood that the supermarket isle were too narrow, courtesy dictated that you keep to one side. Tell that to
the two Spanish ladies with gaudy red lipstick I was behind. They walked down the exact center of the isle, slow as
turtles, gazing in all directions, except mine.

Crime is on the rise too. My friend from the Med School got his wallet stolen. My great aunt had hers stolen out of
her car while she was delivering Meals on Wheels. A car cleaning service took a co-workers Jeep for a joy ride and used
her credit card in three separate places. These petty crimes never happened before, largely  because people
couldn’t hide. Everyone had at least seen everyone else once. Now the crowds of people are a sea of nameless, shifting
faces. Cayman has lost its peacefulness and Caymanians are loosing their neighborly attitude. We feel the hustle and
bustle, we are all striving to make a buck, money has becoming more important than morality, or legality for that
matter.

We went out for a proper Caymanian lunch today, Conch Stew and Steam Fish. The conch comes from elsewhere now, a
total ban is in effect because of over fishing. The Crows Nest is one of Caymans hidden treasures, it overlooks the
water with a nice view of the South Sound Light House. The sound of the gentle sea on the sand is one of natures most
relaxing sounds. I remarked that there was no point being on this island if you didn’t make it to the beach every
weekend. Nobody could say they had been in the last month, everyone was too busy.

We are too few, too busy, too indifferent to look after our Island. Other people are looking after it for use, things
are bound to change. Now I feel as though I have woken up to where I am and its not the place it used to be.

JXTA is a standard (and accompanying reference implementation in Java) for P2P nodes to connect, form groups and ‘advertise services’. I’m currently looking at JXTA for the core networking technology in my project. Several things have struck me about JXTA’s design as overly presumptuous and are deal breakers for me.

All peers belong to the “World Peer Group”. I presume this means that all peers can communicate with each other because they belong to this group. Furthermore all peers are encouraged to rout traffic for each other. As a peer I would not be inclined to rout traffic unless it directly benefited me or other peers in my group. The last thing I want to be doing is routing traffic for some file sharing service when I’m trying to commit to changes to the group. My traffic comes first, preferable exclusively. The only thing I would agree to route for other peers would be discovery messages. Using the network at large to help people find each other is a fair exchange in value for traffic.

I’m aiming for a secure network. It seams peers can join my group without authenticating with one of the group members first. I want to have a custom authentication protocol with public key encryption.

There dost seam to be clear answers to these questions on the JXTA website either. I guess its time to dig into the protocol spec to find out.

My housing situation is getting stranger by the day. Now the usurpers, who wanted to rent the place out from under me and were putting pressure on the apartment complex, have disbanded. The poor guy that’s in there now wants to share the place with me. Unfortunately for him I’ve already promised to make other arrangements. I guess this just means more options for me.

I read all about the current copyright situation today Linux Journal. It was a very good article explaining why we live in very strange times as far as copyright is concerned. This lead on to some interesting stuff on telecoms as simple pervayors of bits because the network now consists of inteligent nodes (computers) instead of dumb telephones. All worth reading.

I’m in discussions with my profs over my thesis topic. They think the idea is interesting and that there is defiantly enough ‘research’ to constitute a thesis. Right now we are looking at how original the idea is. Groove Networks makes something similar. Their solution is aimed at business users and provides very structured co-ordination tools. On my project I’m theorizing that too much structure will actually be a hindrance to small projects because people work very informally. They do have problems arranging meeting times and such but not so badly that they need a calendar application to do so. A Wiki should be more that sufficient to act as message board, whiteboard, notepad and calendar.

Come to think of it I might not call it a Wiki because this term seams to elicit nothing but confusion from uninitiated users. The user interface will be a big push in the project. It has to be easy to use for people to adopt it. I’m also toying with the idea of implementing the CVS protocol locally so that tools like eclipse can talk to my software without modification. Not much is set in stone at the moment, other than the P2P nature of the software. I will have to evaluate the benefits of each potential feature and my available time.

Feature set? To Be Determined…
Finished? When Its Done.

I was in the middle of writing a water cooling beginners guide with a bunch of links to suppliers and so on. Seams
that Overclockers.com has read my mind and published a very good beginners
guide with all the same advice and links that it took me 3 days to find on the net. You can read their
guide here. They also
have link to some of their own articles on reservoir construction and using Radio Shack relays to switch on your pump.
Two great ways to save some money if you build a water cooled rig.

I’m currently considering water cooling my next box. This should give me about 10 degrees cooler temps on the CPU and
also eliminate the tow major sources of noise in the computer: the CPU fan and the Graphics card. Water cooling is at a
stage where it shouldn’t be too hard to get it right. There is lots of information out there now. also the cost isn’t
that bad, between $100 and $200. You could save that on your next CPU purchase and do an overclock.