import javax.servlet.http as http class FooBar(http.HttpServlet): def doGet(self, request, response): response.contentType = "text/html" print response.outputStream, "<h1>Foobar!</h1>"...rather than something like this:
import java.io.*; import javax.servlet.*; import javax.servlet.http.*; public class FooBar extends HttpServlet { public void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws IOException, ServletException { response.setContentType("text/html"); response.getOutputStream().println("<h1>Foobar!</h1>"); } }Overall, I'm impressed with how well most of the Python I've thrown at it runs; obviously, things like asyncore aren't implemented due to the pre-NIO lack of asynchronous stream management, and there are a few gotchas between CPython and Jython, but no real show-stoppers. Well, I take that back; SWIG extensions built for CPython won't work under Jython, which was originally what got me extremely excited about the idea; I was hoping to add a servlet handler to SubWiki to compliment the command line and CGI handlers, but being unable to import the Subversion SWIG bindings pretty much put an end to that idea. :-P Maybe once someone has a chance to revisit the JNI Subversion interface, this will be worth looking at again.
whytheluckystiff and lindsey mentioned recently that they had a feeling that developing in PHP is like "toy coding". PHP has always seemed to me to be the premier rapid prototyping language for the web; there is enough structure there for anyone to quickly deploy a working model or mock-up, but enough flexibility to be able to crank out something without worrying too much about formalities.
That being said, being the premier rapid prototyping language is sort of like being the best silly putty around; it might do a fine job of constructing a miniature, or even a simple working model, but you'd never build the world's largest buildings with it. The right tool for the right job. (Footnote: apparently, tools aren't as important as location when it comes to construction...)More XML-RPC play
Looks like gary has rolled the diary.getDates() patch into the live Advogato, and so my home page (written in PHP, see above about the tool for the job ;-) now has proper datestamps on each entry I'm displaying. Still haven't added caching, but now that timestamps are available, I can do a more intelligent job of it.O'Reilly mania
I'm now the new owner of a ton of new (to me) O'Reilly books on Java and others in a recent blowout of older inventory by MicroCenter; I've seen the same titles selling cheaply at Barnes and Noble and Borders, but MC is selling them for $2.99 and $3.99 each. A quick check of the O'Reilly website tells me that they're coming out with new editions of most of them, which is why people are getting rid of the older editions. Works for me. :-)
I now know far more about LVS than I ever wanted to, after spending the last two days wedging every little bit of information about it, Piranha, and all the accompanying niggling details into my head. Bryce, you and your group has done a very nice job of putting this all together in Pensacola.
As a point of note, if anyone is interested, version 1.0.1 of IPVS drops into the 2.4.18-0.12 Red Hat kernel SRPM (from Skipjack) completely unmolested, and the newer ipvsadm runs fine. Not that I had any (real) problems with the 0.9.7 version as shipped from Red Hat, just some incredibly annoying network issues that looked like an LVS misconfiguration on my part.
The only really disappointing thing about the whole affair was the distinct lack of user-oriented documentation, especially for 2.4 kernels and iptables; a combination of the (sadly out-of-date) Piranha/"Red Hat High Availability Server" documentation, the LVS HOW-TOs, and a recent acquisition managed to help with my questions, thankfully.Perspective
There seems to be an assumption on the part of programmers (I know I've been guilty of this before) that the user is aware of the boundaries between the software that they work on and the software that theirs interacts with. This lack of user perspective seems to give rise to range of results, from the "not my problem, ask them" finger-pointing game, to the more subtle omission of documentation on related issues that are considered "out of scope". So, you can end up with new users asking questions in the wrong forums (and occasionally being accosted for it), and documentation that doesn't go a little bit farther to explain useful product or project combinations that the user might be trying to find answers to.
Before anyone asks, yes, I have a few projects and people in mind as I write this. But bringing them up would be a distraction from the question: what can open source developers, whose perspective is usually focused on the particular itch they're scratching, do to augment their ability to consider the "in-the-field" use cases that seem to invent themselves with any useful project, and communicate assistance on them effectively? As a related question, what can the developer do to encourage better participation in the process by the user (as the user would seem to usually have very little natural inclination to become more than superficially involved in the development process)?Linux Firewalls
As I mentioned above, I just picked this up at the local bookstore. I have to say, Ziegler has done an excellent job of compiling an accessable and wonderfully complete overview of 2.4's iptables configuration, along with summaries of the most common hoops you can make it jump through. There is a good discussion of the differences between 2.2's ipchains and the new 2.4 netfilter-based system, and he gives a quick introduction to a few peripheral items of note as well: basic firewall administration tasks, SSH, Tripwire, and intrusion detection concepts. This makes an excellent reference text to go along with the often obscure documentation available online. Which brings up another question: what happened that caused New Riders to suddenly start putting out such good technical books? They have a few good ones out now, and that red backing is starting to crowd the animals on my bookshelf. ;-)
This diary entry brought to you by way of cmiller's handy little advodiary script. Thanks, you provided the impetus I needed to upgrade to Python 2.2. ;-)Laptop woes
My laptop has been acting flaky lately; when I'd boot up, it almost seemed as though the built-in screen couldn't handle the refresh rate that the video chipset was delivering; it'd display the initial "COMPAQ" logo, then blank like it usually does (making a video adjustment; the affect is far more pronounced on an attached monitor), and that's it: no more video. Usually, I'd get the video feed back, and the "COMPAQ" logo would appear again as usual. Attached monitors were unaffected. However, a gratuitous thwack tonight appears to have jostled it's little brains into working again. I'll probably still take it apart this weekend, just to see if it's a loose connection somewhere.
What was that phrase an old friend of mine used to use? "Beware of programmers who carry screwdrivers", if I'm not mistaken. Ah well, I've been a sysadmin long enough, I've earned my Leatherman(tm). ;-)gary and CSSificationn of Advogato
Bring it on. ;-) It's very cool to see activity on mod_virgule again.PHP and XML-RPC at Advogato
I've got a little more cleaning up to do (most specifically, with caching Advogato data rather than banging on it every time someone loads the diary), and I'm just waiting for gary to commit the rest of his XML-RPC interface enhancements (which I'm hoping contain the ability to extract the date of posting, and possibly a last-changed value for the entire diary itself, for caching purposes? :-), and I'll likely make the PHP code available somewhere.
I've been unimaginably busy lately. Both of the consulting projects I mentioned a few months back panned out...at the same time. The first, a redux of a spam filtering system and webby frontend that I developed for a previous employer, is thankfully something I can do remotely; thankfully, because the load-balancer cluster I'm building for the other client is requiring quite a bit of on-site work.
Met with a couple of people that I'm working with on the second job and a good friend from my last employer to go see Blade II tonight; afterwards, my friend and I did a little catching up, and it sounds like he might be able to refer another job my way, dealing with helping with their spam problem.
I can't believe how this is working out. I've been looking at the bills piling up, and realizing that I'm actually going to be in a position to start paying them properly very soon. Add to that the incredible luck I seem to be having with getting jobs into the pipeline (luck that I don't suspect will hold up much longer, though), and I'm in a fantastic mood right now about the whole idea. I'll get realistic about things again tomorrow, but I get to ride on this a little more tonight. :-)Advogato's XML-RPC interface
Nice work, gary! I've incorporated a simple version of my Advogato diary on my home page, done up using the Useful PHP XML-RPC implementation, owing to the fact that I can't seem to wrap my head around the non-existant documentation of the xmlrpc-epi stuff that appears to have been integrated into PHP proper. If anyone has any decent pointers to trivial example client implementations using the EPI stuff, I'd love to see it.GARNOME
More commendations for excellent work: jdub's GARNOME is an excellent idea that's been needed for some time now. The BSD ports system has always been a favorite of mine, because of how attractive they made building non-trivial combinations of packages into a cohesive system from source. It's nice to be able to honestly say I know how much faster the new Nautilus is compared to the 1.4 version; Xnest is a godsend for trying out things like this.procmail and testing
An interesting development from the work I'm doing for my old employer's spam filter is that I've built a testing harness for validating filter rules. It's fairly crude, but writing testcases for each rule is now easy enough to make me really buy into the XP idea of writing tests first. The whole time I've been working through debugging some of these rules, I've been thinking back to how hard it was when I originally developed this thing to validate whether the rules worked or not (in reality, almost half of my original rules failed on corner cases I added tests for as I was developing the harness).
I'm not usually one to buy into methodologies, but XP really provides a solid set of ideas for programmers to build their practice on, if you have a little self-discipline.
Enough for one night, time for bed. More later.
We are now the proud parents of a new puppy, a lab/shephard mix. Cute little guy, goes by the name of "Forty-Two".
Picked up a copy of Diablo II Battle Chest (includes Diablo, Diablo II, and Diablo II: Lords of Destruction), and have been playing it non-stop; I forgot how addicted I used to get to RPGs.
Bumped into another Linux user at Barnes & Noble the other day; turns out he's part of a local-area LUG, which I'll probably be attending this month. I've never been to a LUG meeting before, should be interesting.
That's all I can think of off the top of my head. More later.
Thanks to a well-placed friend, I've completed a paid analysis phase of a Linux clustering and load-balancing solution for a largish auto auction company, which is aimed pretty squarely at becoming a solid two-week implementation run with an annual support contract. This is going to be fun; the architecture is a simple high-availability config (two boxes in active/backup failover configuration) performing load-balancing for a series of custom web applications, which isn't exactly rocket science, but it's far more interesting than some of the work I've been doing over the last year.Newsletter
Based on some positive feedback from here, I think I'll give it a try for a few months to see how regular writing and I get along. Email me if you want your address added to the list. No ETA on the first issue yet.Linux Laptop
64MB is not enough for a laptop I use for business engagements, so 256MB PC100 SODIMM from Crucial is now on it's way. Whee, 320MB total memory.
I'm successfully using Red Hat 7.2 with the Ximian packaging of GNOME on this little beast (it's a Compaq Armada M700 366MHz; astute Linux users will recognize the distinctive sucking sound made by the built-in Lucent Winmodem and ATI Rage Mobility video that lacks stable/current DRI support). Aside from the inability to run Quake 3 at anything resembling a usable framerate (until I manage to whack DRI support into place; I'll have to live with Heroes of Might and Magic III for now), it makes a very usable business laptop. Abiword, Gnumeric, Dia, and Evolution are proving to be the perfect combination; now I need to start playing with MrProject to see how it stacks up to that other project management tool. I hope I can share data between it and Evolution...
Happiness is knowing that you have a pair of concurrent contracts ready to go in the next week or two. While I rationally knew the old axiom, "It's not what you know, it's who you know" (and the logical extension, "and what they think you know"), it was really driven home with these two opportunities; one is with a former employer, and the other is a direct referral from a co-worker at another company.
So, I'll be doing a bit of training (Linux-based service load-balancing and high-availability with off-the-shelf hardware) with possible longer-term assistance and maintenance on retainer, and a bit of engineering (revisiting a spam filtering system I built many many moons ago for a former employer), also with the strong possibility of follow-up work doing more involved systems implementation. Maybe this whole independant consulting thing will work out, after all. :-)
Regular readers of my diary will notice that I've shied away from the consulting arena before; let me shed a little light on that. My real objection isn't the travel, the work, or anything really related to the job. My objection is doing all of that for someone else's gain. I want to provide my services to clients, but not with a middle-man directing me. If I wanted that, I'd be jumping back into an IT department or programming crew somewhere.
By the way, if you're doing consulting (or thinking about it) and are looking for some good reading material, Alan Weiss' Getting Started In Consulting, and his better known Million Dollar Consulting. His direct approach to the subject can catch you off-guard initially, but it is a truly refreshing change from the typical marketspeak of similar publications.Newsletter
I'm considering writing a monthly newsletter covering issues that a systems administrator in a UNIX and internetworked environment would run into; problems I and people I know have run into in the past (with solutions), dealing with politics (management, projects deadlines, customers and users), ethical questions, and references to useful articles and information. Drop me an email if you'd be interested in such a thing if I decide to do it. Or just let me know if you think I'd be wasting my time. ;-)Ah, Loki, we hardly knew ye...
What a shame to hear about the demise of Loki. It's good to see that services they're currently hosting are being moved to new homes in an orderly fashion; this is probably the smoothest shutdown of a company I've witnessed in last year or so of major business failures (small comfort for the people laid off after putting so much work into the business, but that really is how it goes; you take a chance on a risky new venture, and hope it works out). Loki and the people surrounding them accomplished some incredible things for the Linux gaming community (SDL, OpenAL, and SMPEG being the most prominent examples), in addition to just bringing games over to the platform. Just like the failure of Eazel, no matter what you think about the companies themselves, they both left something behind for the community to build on. When is the last time you could say something like that about a traditional proprietary software company that couldn't make it in the marketplace? Thanks, guys.
Fair warning to people playing with guile under Red Hat Linux 7.2, their guile build doesn't include threading support. I've filed a bugzilla issue about it, hopefully they'll include that in newer builds (it's not like it's tough to add ;-).
You can take this to understand that I'm back into relearning Scheme. ;-) I really do enjoy working in this language; I became attached to the programming syntax back in the good 'ol days of building LPmuds (specifically, the "closure" syntax introduced into Jörn Rennekes' (Amylaar) branch of LPmud, and carried on into LDmud headed by Lars Düning). Most people swore at it, claiming it was the ugliest thing they'd ever seen. ;-)
My current scheme problem is getting (accept) to work in non-blocking mode (for which I can find no documentation, other than the latest CVS checkout of the reference guide, which doesn't mention anything about getting an error of "ERROR: Resource temporarily unavailable" in accept when O_NONBLOCK is set.Mach64 DRI
I have a laptop. It has an ATI Rage Mobility video chipset (aka mach64). While X works like a champ, no 3d accelleration is possible without pulling an in-progress development branch out of DRI CVS and whacking it into working. No luck so far. :-( The kernel module loads up fine, but now my re-built X server refuses to launch because of a symbol problem (identified by Mike Harris, although building with -fno-merge-constants still seems to be giving problems; need to make sure that the entire build is applying that gcc option). I have the beginnings of a HOWTO written for this; I'll publish it as soon as I actually have one that tells you how to build the damn thing and make it work. ;-)AOL to acquire Red Hat?
$DEITY help us. At least Alan Cox is against it.Movies
Unless you're one of those people whose eyes glaze over at the mention of subtitles, go see Amelie. It really is a fun story of turning love into a grand game, of suicidal goldfish, of travelling garden gnomes, and of all manner of wacky stuff. Great film.
I've just converted my home page to XHTML 1.0 Strict, and after getting myself accustomed to a few of the simple, yet oh-so-annoying standards changes (lowercase manditory for all tags? ye ghods), discovered that I was getting a very colorfully-rendered XML source version of my webpages displayed in the Internet Explorer document window (the website renders as expected in Mozilla). Removing the <?xml ...?> opening tag seemed to fix the problem, and it still renders correctly in Mozilla, but I don't believe that's the correct fix. (Still, the W3C Validator seems to think that's just fine, despite what the XHTML 1.0 specification says about it.) Overall, I'm happy with the conversion, but I need to dig up a copy of Netscape 4.x to see if it's still readable there too. ;-)Interviews...
Another day, another interview. Interesting company, very clear about what they're doing and where their place in the market is, with apparently competant leadership at the helm. I'm just not sure if this is the right place for me right now; besides the fairly heavy travel component to the job (it's a consulting company, so I could literally end up working just about anywhere in the Chicagoland area), they're really not doing anything I haven't done before. The opportunity for gaining certifications is there, but that's not really what I'm after.*sigh*
Despite anyone's differences with the man, and the desire to start an alternative IRC network to Open Projects, is it really necessary to demonstrate the same level of maturity that one is accusing lilo of (validity of all arguments aside)? *sigh* Maybe I'm just getting old, but it seems like even bastions of sanity like Advogato are being overrun by the pre-teen "i wanna be a geek cuz itz c00l" crowd. I'm seeing arguments like this springing up all over the place lately. Is this an inevitable outcome of the growth of a particular group of people?Bernard Shifman is...
Cool, I got the Bernie spam too. I feel special.
I was finally inspired to install Snort and ACID today, just to see if it was worth the resources. I now have what would appear to be a very nice intrusion detection system logging to PostgreSQL with ACID serving as a handy-dandy web frontend to the whole thing. In the six hours or so that I've had the whole thing running, it's picked up a ton of attempts to exploit a handful of well-known web-based vulnerabilities (mostly from APNIC space...not much of a surprise, given the track record I've seen with SMTP relay and spam attempts from over there). I think I'll enjoy playing around with this little tool; makes a nice addition to the consulting/outsourcing toolbelt too.
Business name registrationsDamn, my second-choice name came back rejected (I had to eliminate my first-choice, since it was obviously already taken); wasn't aware of the restriction that caused this name collision before, but it makes perfect sense now that I see it explained. I still have the list of names that I originally made, so it shouldn't take too much hand-wringing before I resubmit the name hold registration.
School, teaching, and /.I am consistantly amused and surprised by the timing my life seems to enjoy. After much consideration, and a lot of discussion with my girlfriend, I've come to the conclusion that, long-term, the IT industry just isn't where I ought to be. My focus is firmly on returning to school, to finish up the undergrad CS degree I nearly completed 5 years ago, along with a followup tour at graduate school, with the eventual goal being teaching CS at the undergrad level. How surprising to notice, shortly after making up my mind to go this way, that I'm not the only one thinking of going back to school. Not too surprisingly, Slashdot has covered this kind of topic before, and while you have to take everything you see there with a grain of salt, there are a few good nuggets of information to be had from time to time.
Back in the real world...Unfortunately, that goal is a bit in the distance right now. I'm still unemployed (insert large flashing "NEED A SR. UNIX ADMINISTRATOR/ARCHITECT?" neon sign here), although there are a couple of prospects in the pipeline (none of which are very attractive, but which I need to consider since money is quickly running out). My ideal situation would be a short-term contract or two (3-6 months, tops) through a consulting firm or independantly which would give me time to either firm up the business, or figure out exactly how I'm going to fund and practically manage going back to school. Ah well, life isn't always ideal, is it? ;-)
Reading...I've noticed a new (renewed) behavior since I've had so much time on my hands; I'm reading voraciously again. My gf and I have practically been living in the local bookstores, and I've been absorbing damn near everything in the computing section; K&R's The C Programming Language and Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language (for the "I can finally say I've read them" category), Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming (don't tackle this set without a lot of latte's handy...and a pen and pad of paper), Hunt's The Pragmatic Programmer (solid point-form advice for anyone writing code in the real world), Schneier's excellent Applied Cryptography (truly required reading for anyone interested in the topic), and a bunch of others that were less memorable. (Hell, I even sat down and gave Design Patterns another read, although my original impression of it being of purely academic cataloging interest still stands; luckily, I noted that the authors admit this freely, although I don't know how many people I've bumped into who swear by that book as if it were a bible of sorts.)
I was especially pleased to see a friend from the "good old days" with a book on the shelf: John Viega (Hi Rust!) and Gary McGraw's Building Secure Software (the book's website is here). An excellent book; I know quite a few software engineers who could stand to give it a read.
I wonder: of all the people out there reading this who have been without work for a while, is this normal behavior? I still can't believe I spent hours poring over Knuth's math...
Enough for now, time for sleep.
Another month, another diary entry. So much for keeping up a regular log of events here. ;-)rblcheck
I pushed out a release last night. Whee! I'll probably email the Debian and FreeBSD maintainers that a new version is out, and nudge them for diffs that make life easier for them to get merged into CVS.Job stuff
Interview next Thursday for a full-time remote administration gig. Shouldn't be a problem to nail, but I already know the drive is going to be 45 minutes to an hour in good traffic, one-way. Losing two hours a day of productive time is not my idea of an ideal situation (it's why I left a previous job, but I'm not exactly in a position to pick and choose right now).Christmas
Made it through another one. Got some surprise gifts for Christmas and my birthday; a very cool leather briefcase (the soft material kind), a few movies (Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Spaceballs, and Star Wars Episode I: The Phatom Menace), a new toolbox, Return to Castle Wolfenstein (ye ghods, I've lost a lot of time to that game already), and a bunch of little stuff I'm probably forgetting. Christmas ended up being a three-day affair this year, visiting with three unique segments of my girlfriend's family (mine is 1500 miles away, making a quick trip to see them a little difficult). Mostly nice folks, although she always has a little angst at this time of year over spending so much time with family she never sees any other time of the year. Mostly, I'm relieved it's now past.NYE
My year-end festivities includes dinner with a few friends and their significant others, and a BNL concert. Looking forward to it; the last time I saw these guys, I nearly died laughing.Other stuff
I finally finished Pekka Himanen's (with Linus Torvalds and Manuel Castells) The Hacker Ethic. An excellent and relatively insightful read; while I think Pekka gets a little carried away in his fervor to convince the reader of what he's saying (while other parts, especially Manuel's epilogue, read much like a dry psychology paper), the book has a great deal to say about how work and ethics have evolved from the the pre-Protestant work ethic through to today's "nethic" (network ethic), as Pekka calls it. It's a worthwhile read if psychology and sociology are your cup of tea, although a lot of it will ring both true and obvious to most Advogato readers (and some of you may resent the canonical tone given to ESR's jargon file). If anything, Linus' introduction definitely grabs you, as it's written in his usual relaxed, convincing style.
An update, since quite a bit has been happening. Forgive me if I go on a little bit about relationships and business here, although it seems strangely appropriate to our favorite cat...Layoff Update
I was informed that my services would no longer be necessary at $COMPANY last Monday, effective Nov. 28 2001. Merry Christmas. ;-)
The rumor mill had me being cut a long time ago, and if I'm surprised by anything in this, it's that it took so long to happen. I'm also not angry; I don't believe that their drastic headcount reductions are the correct approach, but time will tell who is correct on that score.
To be honest, I've felt for quite some time that they really shouldn't have hired me in the first place. What they really needed (and unfortunately still need) is a good junior UNIX administrator. Someone who's looking for a learning experience, and someone you won't expect the world of. Someone like myself should be brought in from time to time on a consulting basis to handle specific projects that are beyond the scope of the in-house talent's abilities, along with the necessary training to make sure they can do that next time. Eventually, they have a dedicated employee who knows their environment well, the junior admin has grown beyond their title, and the consultant has made a few bucks. ;-)
As it stands, they're actually in that position now; with a little careful maneuvering on the part of myself and a few others prior to my departure, we managed to get a fellow with incredible potential handling the majority of my old duties, as an addition to his developer role. He's going to be stressing over the next little while as he comes up to speed, but he'll definitely be the better for it. Time for him to earn his stripes. ;-)Professional Relationships
He makes me feel old (and technically, he's a few months my senior, although our experiences have aged us a little differently). Speaking to the "old codgers" reading this, have you ever run into a person with so much raw energy and talent for creative thinking that it makes you realize that you've lost some of that boyish curiosity about everything somewhere along the line? I've had the distinct honor of meeting at least one person like that in every position I've held. Or, maybe it's me that seeks them out. Either way, I always have an interesting relationship with those people; I feed them with information, references, and anything else I have at my disposal to help them learn at a more rapid rate, and they feed me that enthusiasm that I have such a hard time generating on my own anymore.
I was using the term mentoring for a long while to describe these relationships, but I don't think that's quite right. These people are my peers in every sense of the word, and I regard them as good friends. They also feed me information, ideas, and that enthusiasm that I mentioned above in a similar manner to how I deliver information to them. It's a very symbiotic relationship. Perhaps a better phrase is mutual mentorship?"Going forward"...
Plans haven't changed too much, although I've needed to accelerate some of what has been going on. The new business venture I've been hatching in the back of my head is steamrolling forward while I seek interim work. (This is a big flashing neon sign for anyone in a hire/fire capacity: senior-level technology talent with a focus on networking and a miscellany of UNIX variants, heavy on integration, portability, and high-availability available on a contracting basis in the western Chicago suburbs or anywhere as a virtual set of hands.) I'm working on a few positions where what I have planned wouldn't be a conflict of interest, and that's the big catch for me right now.
To keep myself occupied and focused, I'm angling toward nailing down a couple of industry certifications that I've previously been too lazy to write the damn test for. ;-) Specifically, SCSA/SCNA, the SAIR Linux and GNU certification track, and possibly the RHCE if I can manage to cough up that much cash ($749 just for the exam) on what has become a limited budget.
Oh yeah, I'm also finally getting to all that stuff around the house that you always tell yourself you'll do, but never do. ;-) Like install the new center console in my GF's Wrangler, and loading that damnable HP NetServer with it's very disagreeable RAID controller (it's an HP-branded spin of the AMI/LSI Megaraid controller called a NetRAID 1si). I've posted an updated driver disk that lets Red Hat 7.2 boot "properly" (for a stretched definition; I'm still not convinced what I have is working correctly due to some odd behavior I'm seeing), so at least a few of the other people having this problem are able to get some work done.Unemployment Lines
It's a small world. I bumped into another UNIX admin (about the same level of experience as myself) filling out the same forms I was there to file. His story was that he'd been laid off in January from IBM (contracting him out to Lucent Technologies), and his reserves had finally run out, so he was down to asking for UI. I have to admit that I felt queasy going down there, even though I can tell myself that I've been paying into it just in case something like this happened. I wonder if there's a trend I could be reading into that.
Anyways, enough babbling for the night. Time to sleep. More later.
Short and sweet entry, since it's been a while: I've been keeping a regular journal in a hacked-up version of PhpWiki. I'm hoping to have a quick-n- dirty handler for the calendar function available soon, so that daily updates will actually appear on my home page.
rblcheck release soon, although with all the changes in the RBL world lately, it hardly seems worth putting out.
Mental note: I'm still on the hook to work on the i18n filename issue with Subversion. Need to get on that.
This is possibly the best idea I've come across in a long time. I've been peripherally aware of wiki goings- on, but hadn't had a real use for one until recently, as I've begun needing a means of managing personal information and projects. I'm playing with an internal copy of PhpWiki with patches for handling calendaring (available from PhpWiki:WikiAsPim). As simple in concept as it is, this has proven to be the perfect tool for managing day-to-day informational needs; by being completely free-form, I can adjust it to the way I best approach recordkeeping.DNS
Finally. The domain has been wrested from Network Solutions and is now (FINALLY!) pointing at the right nameserver. Ye ghods, I can't believe how much work and time I've spend on trying to get a couple of simple changes made to my delegations. Once the last vestiges of the transition are complete, I can finally cancel my outsourced DNS services (I've had nothing but positive experiences hosting with them, but I need to cut costs and now have the resources to host in-house; I'd highly recommend them for anyone with a lot of DNS work to do, and no resources to do it with).
Whee. :-) The old one finally started reaching the limits of its usability (you know it's bad when you have to thwack the tint knob to change the colors back from green and purple hues to something a little more normal), so we broke down and got a new one. The 18-month interest-free financing we got from Best Buy made it a lot easier to deal with, financially.Zen
I know I've mentioned this book before, but I have to say it again: if you're finding yourself beginning to hate what you do because of where you do it or who you do it for, and you don't find solace in traditional western approaches, snag a copy of Zen and the Art of Making a Living from your local dead-tree outlet of choice. I'm still working on finishing this book, as it's been a long read; there's an enormous wealth of information there, from coping strategies to marketing tips. Despite the name, it's really not married to Zen or Buddhism, although you may develop an appreciation for that line of thinking while reading the book. If anything, it's handy for those of us who collect quotes; there are snippets from every major philosopher, politician, and pundit in there. ;-)Ouch
I'm not sure if it was moving the TVs, or something I did by accident, but my lower back is killing me. Being tied to this chair all day isn't helping much, either. Dammit, why can't my dot-com sob story include some of those comfy Herman Miller chairs?
Well, I'm still here, although we lost nearly half the company in the most recent RIF. There's barely enough left to keep development moving forward, and the ones left aren't even the people who actually wrote the code they're trying to fix; they only inherited it from a consulting company now long gone. Too many false starts on new product development, and a complete company-wide failure to deliver; quite a shame, really. On the upside, I've been quietly talking to a few people through the office regarding plans after we find the doors locked, and a few are receptive to the idea of a new business venture.Camping
A weekend away from anything resembling a computer was just what the doctor ordered. We (my girlfriend and I, along with a co-worker and his wife) left late Friday night, and arrived at about 11:00 PM, just in time for check-in (pitching a tent at night isn't as bad as I thought it might be). After a quick meal on Saturday, we took an aggressive (to me, anyway) hike along the lake and back, then treated ourselves to some fantastic campfire cooking and goodies (mmm, s'mores). Then it poured. :-P Our friends' tent leaked like crazy, causing them to throw in the towel (so to speak) by 4:00 AM; ours leaked a bit, but we stuck it out all night. Come morning, our friends returned, and we packed up camp and headed home for some much-needed sleep. Overall, a good weekend, even with the rain.
I'm reminded of a movie I saw a while back, and am afraid of what may happen next. The people of the U.S. will demand a swift and violent reaction, and while I have a wish for vengance here, this is not the kind of battle you can fight with definitive strikes and quick measures. Terrorists of the world have just been sent a message: the same tactics used elsewhere in the world work even more effectively here, because we're so completely unfamiliar with the concept, we don't know how to react. Look at the country right now: we've effectively shut down for the day. Trading has stopped. Flights are landed. Borders are closed. People are hiding.
I don't know what I'm more afraid of: us showing the world that we really don't understand terrorism by taking a "decisive action" against an overly-broad grouping of people who are considered responsible, or us defending against this internally by becoming a police state. Or both.Other things...
In the midst of all of this, I have a strong suspicion that the rumors of an upcoming layoff are true, and that I may be a part of them. I don't know how to react to this right now; it seems small compared to what is happening around the U.S. right now, yet will dramatically affect my life very soon.
More later, when I'm thinking more clearly.
After a ton of resubmissions, my contact data is finally changed. Now that I know what magical combination of information they want, hopefully creating the new host entries and getting my domains moved to my new DNS servers should be relatively easy (knocks loudly on the nearest wood-like surface)...You put your left foot in...
Went to the Fireside Bowl on Friday with Erica, to see her favorite Ska band, which has reaffirmed for me that there are always new experiences waiting for you. ;-) Interesting place; it's an old bowling alley (and apparently still functions as one) which has turned into a punk/ska performance haven. No air conditioning, but hey, 300 people, 3 box fans...that's plenty, right? Memorable moment of the evening: Erica wanted to get closer to the "stage" so she could see a little better (the performers and the audience are basically at the same level, so it's impossible to catch more than a glimpse of the band between the spiked hair and people bouncing)...and as the entire crowd around us starts moving as one in a circular motion, it occurs to me that there didn't appear to be any room for a mosh pit...Musings
When was the last time you didn't even stop to think about consequences or repercussions if you took a stand on something you believe in, and just acted? Not some glib remark about how a co-worker is doing something wrong or arguing over a change to the way something is being implemented in a project you're working on, but actually standing up, deliberately and decisively, and striking out or speaking up against something that drives itself home as completely against your sense of morality.
When was the last time you even thought about what constitutes ethical and "moral" in your worldview, either through personal interest or forced situations?
When was the last time you felt as though you were truly living deliberately (with apologies to Thoreau)?
A number of events recently have forced me to think about this kind of thing again. It occurs to me that I can't recall a recent event of me reacting in a dramatic way to something around me. Which made me wonder why; when I was younger, I reacted quickly toward things which offended my sense of ethics. The realization, I suppose, is that I've done everything in my power to place myself in a position where these kinds of questions never come up. I've buffered myself quite nicely from the "evils" of the world; I've surrounded myself with things which distract me, and with people who do the same. I find myself in a "community" dedicated to a set of ideals that, when looked at from a distance, appear alien; dedication is only important when applied to your career path, appearances are everything, and toys are a good substitute for the things that are missing in life. Drama and plot replaced by rationality in shades of grey. Seems to lack a bit of art, doesn't it?
I have no idea where I'm going with this, and it's really just a dump of a bunch of things I'm pondering at the moment. I'll just stop here and let you read more into it if you're feeling adventurous.
Not too shabby. Relatively painless to put in place, and seems to only suffer from a few problems (double-drawing, for one; Gabber seems to redisplay lines in the roster and in text messages rather frequently) which are really only cosmetic in nature. To be honest, though, I haven't really been screaming for antialiasing for everything, just a few specific apps, such as Mozilla (which gdkxft doesn't work with, due to how Mozilla handles text output; it appears to have an effect on string width calculations, though, which really screws up rendering in a few cases) and AbiWord. Everything else looks rather silly and blurred.Work
Same as always. Rumors are gearing up about a third round of layoffs, and I'm suspecting I may be up for consideration this time (support staff? who needs 'em?). Not too surprising; out cash position can't be very good right now, with the amount of customer turnover we're experiencing.logic.net DNS
Since things appear to be relatively stable with my new upstream provider, I figure it's about time to stop purchasing outsourced DNS service and go back to hosting it myself. We'll see how long it takes to get Network Solutions and Register.com to process the DNS host changes...Hacking
None. Pity me.New Comix to Read
Why the hell didn't anyone tell me about these before now? ;-) Here I've been thinking the only good geek cartoon content out there was from Illiad and the corporate machine...
Went to see these guys on Saturday, with an opener from überzone and breaks by Static Revenger. So sue me, I like techo; I also happen to like everything from Vivaldi to Stomp to Bare-Naked Ladies, and a lot of weirdness in between. By the way, Static Revenger's stuff is available on MP3.com, so go support someone who realizes he's not going to go broke by having people download his music.Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back
Another View Askew masterpiece. Very funny stuff. If you go, make sure you've seen the others in the series (Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, and Dogma), and I'd suggest Good Will Hunting for good measure. Apparently, there's plans in the works for another one in 2002, called Clerks: Sell Out, but it looks like the future will be animated. Hmm.Subversion
Getting my feet wet here by trying to convince Subversion to build with both libtool 1.3 and 1.4 invisibly, which is taking far longer than I'd expected (I can fudge things pretty easily to build on one or the other, with a little manual compilation, but I want automation, dammit!). Next task is going to be getting mod_dav_svn installed so I can mess around with remote access (which means an upgrade to Apache 2.0); with all the discussion on the list about authentication, it'd probably be interesting to whip up a little how-to on setting up a multi-user repository with client certificates. As far as I can tell, that should be doable already, using Apache's native authentication mechanisms...Evolution
I've given up for now. After wedging the IMAP mailboxes for the fifth time, I decided to go back to Mutt for a while. Give it a few more revisions, though, and I'd expect to be converting over full-time. Unfortunately, I really need to get work done for now...;-)
Well, I bit the bullet, pulled down a beta Red Hat package of Evolution, and gave it a whirl as my primary MUA. I'm forcing myself to use it for a few days to see how I like it. There's a few things that are grating on me, such as it's tendancy to line wrap everything I send out, includng my 79-character-wide sig (despite it being rendered on the screen as intact), and the fact that it's quite a bit slower getting common tasks done in this client than it was in Mutt, but that could just be the learning curve hitting me. The integrated calendering and task management will be handy at work; it's a shame I still can't bolt it up to Exchange, no matter how much the client might resemble Outlook.Subversion
I'm having a blast playing with this thing. A lot of what they've done makes far more sense than CVS, and the fact that they're using WebDAV as the network transport instead of reinventing the wheel is very cool. I'm finally buying into the idea of Apache as a general-purpose application management server; with DAV and all the other extension modules, it's only barely a web server any more.Back to Advogato
I realized that it's just not worth the effort maintaining my own log, and updating the others. So, I'm back. ;-)
Updated diary.
More hits from Code Red and Code Red II:
$ fgrep default.ida /var/log/httpd/access_log* | wc -l 712
With the recent relocation of my home page, I'm going to try and move my new diary entries there. The first stab at it is here. Be kind, I'm not sure how well that poor webserver is going to hold up. ;-)
Update, 15:50 CDT: Okay, since everyone else is doing it:
$ grep default.ida /var/log/httpd/access_log | wc -l 68
I finally have a halfway-decent Jabber service up and running at home, with working ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo! transports. I'm already seeing a little instability with the Yahoo! transport, so I'm probably going to need to split each one off into it's own process, and once I'm done, supervise the whole mess. After all that, I'll probably tackle getting the AIM transport going; I don't have high hopes for it, though."Would you like to be a developer?"
I was just asked this question, arising from a meeting where a co-worker is trying to finagle some time off, and is being greeted with the "but you're too critical to the day-to-day development strategy" line of bullshit. So, they jokingly asked if I'd like to step into his shoes for a while so he can get a vacation. That's just what I need; senior programming/engineering duties on top of administration of a 50-system heterogenous multi-site network. No thanks. ;-)Resume
It's going out in full force again, although this time I'm a little more willing to relocate, as the other half has indicated that she'd be willing to try a new locale for a few years. So, anyone looking for a senior-level UNIX architect, possibly looking to move into a corporate or institutional training role, or even contract programming for the right organization? If so, drop me a line.
Yeesh. Apparently, we're in for 95 degree weather, to compliment our 93 degree weather today. Bleh. It's hot and humid, even in an air-conditioned office.Debian
Thanks to the power of a faster Internet connection at home, I'm downloading the Debian 2.2r3 ISOs I built at work, for loading on my old Sparc 2. Hopefully, this load will go a bit better than the attempts to get Solaris net-booting off a Linux system (I've pretty much given up on it, although I have a feeling I'm close to having it working and am giving up too soon). Next job is to get the Ultra 1 up and running properly with Solaris 8 running on it, and to revive the Indigo (IRIX 5.3). What a collection of hardware; the only things I'm really missing are PA-RISC (have a dead D-Class system sitting on the floor though), Alpha (can probably pick that up pretty cheap now that Compaq has effectively killed it), and PowerPC (mmm, G5s should be showing up soon).
A vacation was exactly what the doctor ordered. My head is clearer than when I left, and at least for now, I'm able to take a step back from work and see the things that are really frustrating me with it, rather than the "emergency of the moment" that has always seemed to loom as the dominant problem. The realization: I just don't like doing this anymore, or, more accurately, don't like doing it the way I'm currently doing it. I take the most joy in my day out of helping people turn on the little lightbulb over their heads, not out of doing what I've actually been hired to do. I think I've reached the point of a career change, but there is still much contemplation to be done.
As far as the rumored layoff went, nothing happened while I was gone, except for an all-company meeting (where "extreme cost cutting measures" were emphasized) and the dismissal of a few of the consultants around the office. The rumor mill is now speculating that we'll see something happen on Friday, though, and it appears that the co-worker that I was concerned about is no longer on the list. But, it's all just speculation at this point.Vacation rundown
Okay, so I've been informed that people actually read these entries I make every once in a while, so I'd better give a quick rundown of the two weeks. My other half and I hit the road for two days driving through St. Cloud, MN, US and back to Brandon, MB, Canada, where I finally had a chance to catch up with some old friends, under much better circumstances than the last time I saw them. Then, another day on the road to get to Unity, SK, Canada, where we stayed with Mom for a few days, visiting with my sister, one of my brothers, and their respective families. There, I was witness to something I hadn't seen for a while; someone who has never used a computer before trying to figure out the basic means of making it "do stuff". A few days of playing Solitaire, and her mousing skills improved dramatically, and she can even double-click with some dexterity now, but she's got quite the learning curve ahead of her. Anyways, then we were off for three days of driving stopping in again in Brandon, then in Kenora, Thunder Bay, and finally Niagra Falls, all in Ontario. We spent a day there, seeing the sights (the Clifton Hill area is definitely worth walking around) and getting wet (there are numorous opportunities for drenching near the larger Horseshoe Falls). Then, a final day's drive home to Naperville, IL, US. A lot of driving (well over 4000 miles), but definitely worthwhile, especially getting a chance to see the falls. Yes, it really is that impressive when you hop aboard a Maid of the Mist boat and slide right up to the foot of the falls, assuming you can see them through all the water spraying at you ;- ).Revision Control
<RANT>ClearCase sucks.</RANT> Specifically, ClearCase for Linux sucks. Even more specifically, MVFS for Linux (their versioning filesystem) sucks. I can hack in third-party patches into kernels all day long, but there isn't a damn thing I can do with that binary blob they're calling "Linux support" when it fails. So, tomorrow comes a whack at upgrading to ClearCase 4.2, and trying it out for the first time with a 2.4.x-series kernel. I'm not holding my breath.Reading
No computer-related books this time around; this episode of "Ed's Book Club" features good 'ol Western annoyance (see above) meeting up with Eastern thought. First stop: Thomas Cleary's excellent The Essential Tao, which includes modern translations of both the Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu, along with an extensive series of interpretive notes. For the geeks, consider this the Taoist reference guide. ;-)
The second book on today's list is Zen and the Art of Making a Living by Laurence G. Boldt. At first, I was pretty skeptical about this one, expecting a cheezy self-help guide, but I was bored in the bookstore and it was there, so I quickly flipped through it. An hour later, I decided I should probably just buy it and give the chair up for someone else. It's a hefty read, and I'm only partially into it so far, but the first few chapters deal heavily with the work you do, how all workers are really artisans, and the importance of building your life's work by following the Way (seeking your bliss, doing what makes you happy, or a host of other ways to put it). If you find comfort in this manner of contemplation, and find yourself stressed about work regularly, this is the read for you. Surprisingly, it's also an accessable way to understand the Zen mindset (or arguably, the lack thereof).
And, as an added bonus, both of these are a low-cost buy. $10 for the first, $14 for the second, assuming you get them in paperback (although, I'm considering spending the $18 on the hardcover edition of The Essential Tao).
Oh hell, I guess I did pick up a geek book after all. I grabbed RHCE Red Hat Certified Engineer Study Guide (Exam RH302) by Bill McCarty, mostly for the CDROM tests so I can be sure I won't waste my money if I decide to go for the RH302 exam. Once I've had a chance to read through it, I'll try and remember to give it a quick review here. A point of amusement for me: the testing software and CDROM frontend only run under Windows, despite the subject matter. (The entire book, however, comes on the CD as PDFs, which is rather handy if you're still into using Adobe products. ;-)Hacking
I have a backlog of rblcheck email that I haven't responded to. :-( Need to get on that pretty soon; I've been too busy playing around with my Jabber server, now that I have decent connectivity at home.Enough already; this is turning into a thesis. More later.
goingware: Visual C++ is truly evil; you have my deepest sympathies. As far as the STL implementation goes, there are patches available from the people who wrote it, and they'll be glad to sell you a version that doesn't suck as well (nice little game they have going with Microsoft there, eh?). But if you're used to GCC, cygwin or mingw is probably a better bet anyway. Watch out for the licensing trap with cygwin.dll with Cygwin, though; last time I looked, that DLL was GPL'd, which will bite you in the ass if you're doing commercial development with it. Mingw avoids that problem.Last day...
...before vacation. Kick ass. Plus, the parts for my Mom's computer arrived (it's hard to turn down a $69 ECS K7VZA motherboard with a $29 AMD Duron 800MHz CPU, even if it gives her twice the computer I currently have; btw, that pricing was for the combo only), so I've got a toy to play with tonight. :-)
Signing off for two weeks. Later, folks.
I worked (am currenly working) through both July holidays that I ought to have celebrated in some manner (yeah, I'm an American Canuck). But hey, I get Friday off, which means a head start on that two-week vacation. Translation: don't expect any updates from me until at least the 23rd. Two weeks of doing real work (helping out around my mom's place) rather than being tethered to a computer 12 hours a day. Whee!Work
It's surprisingly stress-free when there are only two other people in the building with you. :-) I can't believe how much backlogged work I'm getting done.
Interesting discovery: my problems getting various online games working properly through my Linux router/firewall/proxy appear to not have been due to any fault of my own. Rather, it was because my 56kbps connection simply sucked rocks; at 1.5Mbps, things are running exactly as they should, without any modification from what I was trying before. It's rather reassuring to find out that you really did know what you were doing, and the problem was simply something out of your hands.Rumors
The layoff rumors are abounding again, and I'm hearing that a fellow IS staffer is being considered for the cut. The word is that the axe will fall on the 16th, giving plenty of time to finish up the product release and get all the necessary knowledge transfer done before letting people know they're no longer needed. Which also coincides with the middle of my vacation, which means I won't have the ability to walk out in protest along with said fellow staffer, should it happen (thus partially losing my ability to help leverage my threat of leaving against cutting him; we can't function effectively without him, and they can't afford to release me because of my intimate knowledge of how everything works around here). *sigh* Round two; you'd think I'd be used to this after the first time this happened, but I still think the lack of ethics when playing with people's livelihoods is unconscionable; "Thanks for busting your ass for the last six months to get this product release out the door; here's your pink slip!".
Finally got it. 1.5Mbps down, 386Kbps up; mighty nice improvement over the 56k link I've been suffering on all these years. I'm actually impressed with the provider I selected; their provisioning system doesn't leave much room for the usual screwups. They resell for another CLEC but that will probably give them a little more flexibility should their supplier end up like so many others. Ahhh. It's nice to be able to place some of my favorite games online without being at the office. ;-)10 days...
...and counting until my vacation. It can't come any sooner; I now truly understand the concept of burning out.
Today had a number of interesting things happen. First, the total solar eclipse. Next, it's the first day of summer solstice. Then, we have Mars making a quick pass near earth. And finally, it is the 42nd day since the passing of Douglas Adams. What a strange set of coincidences.SUNW,Ultra-1
Damn those LANCE ethernet ports. You should take this to understand that I have not yet gotten "theseus" working properly yet; runs Solaris 8 like a champ, but so far I'm not able to talk to the ethernet port, in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode (as a side point, if you have a CG3 right now, don't plan on using it under 64-bit Solaris 8; there's a CG6 driver, but no CG3...and yes, I know about the deadlock problem with Ultra-1s less that 200 MHz in 64-bit mode, don't worry). The interface is configured correctly, but there's no link light on the hub. Grr. Surprisingly, I'm not getting the incessant "le0: link down or cable problem?" messages. I poked around eBay a bit, and found a 10/100 Sun Swift card for about $70, but I'd really rather get le0 working properly.
Hit a dotcom death sale today (second trip in the past few months), and actually sprung for a few items: an old Ultra 1/160 (dubbed "theseus"; nice step up from the Sparc 2 (minos) I'm using to prop the new one up right now), a quad-head Matrox G200 ($700 card, picked it up for $75; I love liquidation sales), and an old VT510 terminal. I was expecting much distress from my partner in crime, but she was unconcerned. Of course, she passed her second MCSE test today, so that may have contributed to the lack of concern. :-)
By the way, if you're looking for cheap Linux games, swing past EBgames. All of their titles are selling for $10 each (Quake III, Soldier of Fortune, Myth II, Heretic II, Heavy Gear II, etc). I finally broke down and ordered Quake III and Soldier of Fortune (Quake III is the tin box version too, nice and shiny ;-).Work
Way behind schedule on everything, due to constantly changing requirements. Deployed QA FreeBSD system today, will be deploying three development FreeBSD systems tomorrow morning, along with cloning yet another webserver for the co-lo facility. Brewing in the background is the need to finish off the Red Hat Linux systems, and get the hardware ordered for the Solaris boxen (can you hear those requirements changing as I type this?). Then, maybe, I'll be able to spend a little time hardening the Oracle system before the service rolls out. :-PWork-related
Received an extremely interesting invitation to talk to Compaq regarding a position in Singapore as a senior consultant (Tru64 and VMS shops, no surprise there). Strangely enough, I'm seriously considering talking to them; a little paid travel would be just what the doctor ordered, and after speaking with my girlfriend, it appears that she would be fine with a temporary change of locale (emphasis on temporary, of course).
sergio: Perhaps, rather than assuming defeat, you could spark a conversation that you consider interesting?
ask: That 75GB IBM drive is probably only running at 7200 RPMs, which will contribute to the access rate, but something that might be killing you is contention. Make sure it's on an IDE channel by itself, or at least not on a chain with another actively-used drive (ie. with a CDROM would be fine, but slaving with the drive you swap to is asking for it). Given the option, unless I know I'll never need more than two drives in a system, SCSI is always my pick. ;-)Work and Hacking
Finally, the two intersect. I have a question for the audience, and it hits right to the heart of something that I've been (peripherally, at least) sucked into. Target platform is FreeBSD, although that's largely irrelevant.
Say you have an application which links implicitly to libc and a few other libraries as necessary (libm, libsocket, etc; the usual suspects). You have a series of shared libraries you're dlopen()ing at runtime, some of which you've developed, and some of which you've received from third-parties (with source). Some of these libraries are implicitly loaded along with your main executable, as well as with each other. Another third-party library which you're implicitly linking your main executable (and some dlopen()'d shared libraries with) overrides a large number of functions in libc() and other libraries (little things, like strlen() and fopen()). There is no documentation regarding the interdependancies of these libraries, so you see a rather varied mix of linking going on in an attempt to forego problems with missing symbols. You're seeing semi-random behavior from what should be straightforward code.
The question, then, is two-fold:
- Is this a problem?
- If it is, what is your reaction/what do you do?
Somehow, I've become tangled in this as someone who can provide an "expert opinion" on the subject. I need to learn not to let on what I know about things, and just do what needs doing.
"Keep your mouth shut, guard the senses, and life is ever full. Open your mouth, always be busy, and life is beyond hope." - Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Vacation for two weeks in July was approved, with nary a word of discussion; whee, back to Canada! Picked up a set of wood-carved chinese letters for above the bed, which I need to concoct some mechanism for hanging now (the bedroom has a distinct oriental theme to it, just like each room in the apartment has taken on a specific flavor). Still in need of a good headboard or an entire bedframe (I found a headboard I like, but it's a little pricey), and some knick-knacks for the bathroom. Co-habitating with a female of the species helps with one's interest in a comfortable living space. :-)Priorities
I've been "re-prioritized" again at work. The end result, I'm beginning to see, is an inability for me to complete anything, since I don't work on any particular project long enough to figure out where it was left previously.
Personal resolution: stop complaining about work, and solve the problem already. I've learned all I can where I'm at right now, and now it's just draining me. Time to move on.Solaris and large IDE disks
It appears that I will never get these 60GB disks working properly in the Ultra 10s under Solaris 2.6. Since the project specifically requires that version of Solaris, I'm going to have to put in an order for a bunch of 32GB or less disks and stripe them (IDE and RAID are such a bad idea together, I can't even begin to describe it) or pick up a few Symbios SCSI controllers and some 18GB or 36GB SCSI disks. The problem, if anyone is interested, is that Solaris versions up to and including Solaris 8 can support IDE disks up to 32GB (although 2.5.1 and 2.6 require patching to successfully see anything bigger than 8GB, and this contradicts the FAQ entry on the subject), but to get past that 32GB barrier, you need to move to SCSI or Solaris 8 10/00 (according to this article). Further to that, I found an article which suggests that 8.1 (or whatever it's called) will have this fixed as well.
Blues
Blues Fest was cool; loud blues and folk music from all corners of Grant Park, with the smell of hot dogs wafting through the air (vegans need not apply :-). Which lead to dinner afterwards...
Good Eats
If you find yourself in the Chicago area, I highly recommend giving your tastebuds a treat and stopping by Heaven on Seven. Fantastic "n'awlins" cooking; I wish there was one out in the suburbs so I wouldn't have to brave downtown traffic to eat there. If you feel up to it, order the "Hot as a Mutha"; you have to sign a waiver, and if you finish it (yes, I ate the whole thing ;-) you get a spanky little fridge magnet that proclaims "I survived the Mutha!" and a bottle of "Hot as a Mutha" hot sauce (a tasty habenero blend). They'll also feed you for free, provided you can supply a bottle of hot sauce that they don't already have on their wall-o-sauces.
Solaris and large IDE disks
IDE and Solaris just don't mix, but this at least makes it bearable; you'll finally be able to support "large" (ie. 8G or more) IDE disks under Solaris versions earlier than 7. I'm still working on getting it to work correctly, but at least Solaris sees the drive now, which is a huge improvement over previous attempts. Ye ghods, just give me SCSI...
Friday
Thank $DEITY it's Friday. What a week. Deployed two more servers today, with a plan for deploying six more Solaris boxen over Monday and Tuesday (along with the FreeBSD and Red Hat backlog I've got to catch up on). Yeesh, you'd think we were mass-producing systems for customers here.
And, as a fun added bonus, I'm getting push back from management for wanting to take a couple of weeks off next month to visit Mom back in Canada ("Well, can't you just take a week off now, and a week later on? Oh, it's a three-day drive, and she isn't near any major airports? Hmm, well, we REALLY need you here..."). I told them six months ago that I needed a junior admin to take some of the load off and relieve the "single point of failure", but they still don't see it. Ah well, it's either two weeks off or two weeks' notice, their choice. Let's hear it for company loyalty.
...is cool. Finally, an institution of learning that wants to teach, not train. Frankly, I'd be happy to hear an article like that regarding any choice of software and hardware; in the Mac-dominated art world, teaching electronic design skills should come first (be it under Windows, Linux, or MacOS), and learning the latest feature of Photoshop should come second, just like teaching how you do basic day-to-day spreadsheet work is more important that drilling in the exact syntax of some obscure Excel macro.
I like the new "Modern" skin; I've finally switched back from the "Classic" theme, since this is actually pretty easy on the eyes now. Seems to play well with most of what I need to talk to, but I'm still having FTP-related problems (ie. FTP doesn't work, at all, which may just be a local issue). Seems to run well, overall, but this wasn't the groundbreaking release that 0.9 was; thankfully, it's a low-key stabilizing release.
Weekend
Hopefully, I'll be heading out to the annual Blues Festival in downtown Chicago this weekend. Looking forward to a day of good music, good food, and hopefully warm weather. :-)
More information about the ORBS shutdown: Alan has made the database available for download, which will at least allow some creative person to carry on if they want to. It's a shame that the software driving it won't move on to whoever eventually takes up the torch (there's too many people interested in the continuing existance of an automated open relay testing system for it not to be resurrected somewhere). It's a shame I don't have the financial wherewithal to take on the task; living in the US is an open invitation for interested parties to keep an ORBS-alike operator tied up in court long enough for resources to run out. At the very least, I need to finish up work on a 1.0 release of relaytest, although it looks like rfg has done the same thing. Ah well, competition is always good. :-)
Life
Ye ghods. $960 US to fix the brakes on my car. At least getting the car started from it's little I-won't-recognize-your-key-until-you-apologize tantrum was free, but that seems to mean very little right now. And, to add insult to injury, the car is a lease; a grand to fix a car I don't even own. Bah.
Blog!
I'm beginning to think that my posts here are drifting farther and farther from the original idea of Advogato, so I have a feeling I'm going to set up a crude diary weblog on my homepage soonish; it's tempting to flag technical items for submission here (which would be pretty easy to automate); is anyone else doing something similar (doing partial tagged content distribution between sites, not just doing a full sync between various sites; I know ithought already does that)?
Another link-o-licious post:
Work
The developers didn't like FreeBSD 4.1 (after all, it demonstrated fairly handily how fragile their build system, codebase, and resulting product were), so they had management order it reloaded with 4.2. Reloaded. Did I mention that their code fails with the FreeBSD-bundled version of GCC (2.95.2, with local modifications; stock 2.95.2 appears to build their stuff just fine...and don't even talk about getting them going with 2.95.3)? I can't wait until GCC 3.0 hits the wire, and all their template abuse no longer passes muster.
As a result, I missed the meeting with the Oracle consultant, since I was back at the office rebuilding that machine. Luckily, the Oracle installation on that inherited box was so fried, they spent the entire day just trying to get tnslsnr up and running (translation: he'll be back tomorrow when I go out there). Ye ghods, what a clusterfuck things are becoming.
Maintaining something like rblcheck means your ears perk up when you hear something telling you that there's one less RBL-style system out there. It's unfortunate that we're not hearing anything about a continuation of the service by someone (since he took it over from Alan Hodgson originally, and it's filled with referrals fed to it by thousands of sources from around the net), or at least the availability of the pieces that drove it so that someone could continue it, either in the current form or a modified vision of it (much like AB adjusted how it operated after taking it over). Ah well, I can't fault Alan for not wanting to hear anything about ORBS-related issues for a little while, what with the sale of his ISP and the ORBS-related court actions.
Gaming
Spent $20, bought a copy of Serious Sam. Cool game engine. In fact, the entire product feels like a technology demo being presented to a game design firm, rather than something meant for consumers; the engine has some very cool stuff, from the procedural effects (damn, the water refractions are cool) to the overall performance for what is primarily an outdoor game, but the gameplay leaves quite a bit to be desired. It just feels slapped together and shoved out the door. Definitely has mod potential (haven't had a chance to pull down any yet to see how they fare), and multiplayer goes well (the cooperative mode reminded me of playing co-op Doom many moons ago), so it's not a bad buy if you find it on sale somewhere; makes a nice fast-paced distraction from Black & White. ;-)
Life
My car is currently unstartable, because the little chip in the key appears to no longer be telling the car what it wants to hear. Argh, who thought this would make my car less prone to theft, anyway? Gack. The fellow at the service center said to give it a try tonight, since apparently giving it some time gives it a chance to "reset" (his words). Yeesh. I don't know what's worse, having a car with a security system that isn't, or dealing with a service center that can't.
Enough ranting for one day, methinks.
Got the new FreeBSD build server done and racked up, along with finally getting the new rack partially assembled and the QA Red Hat 6.1 and FreeBSD 4.2 test machines in place (and mostly done). Started working on getting the two new 1U Sun Netra clones loaded and ready for development and QA work, followed by reloading the two Ultra 10s as build machines. The new "go ahead, blow it up" DNS machine is just about ready for development to demonstrate their lack of understanding of basic name service concepts on, and I should be receiving two new systems for our co-location space on Monday, which gives me a day to load them and have development install their stuff before the Oracle consultant arrives Tuesday to validate the installation on the E420R that I inherited. Whew. Let's hear it for overtime. ;-)Life
Women are still a mystery, but one in particular appears to no longer wish me harm; cancelled a trip to Iowa to try and repair things for the weekend. On the upside, she passed the first exam in her MCSE track (620 is a pass, she pulled off 800), so she's now officially an MCP. Let's hear it for geek girlfriends. :-)Geek
My new video card arrived, which I am very much waiting to see if it lives up to the hype. For the price (compared to the GeForce2 GTS), it looks like a helluva card. More memory for my Linux desktop/mail server at home, so now it's not a complete dog; need to see if I can track down a cheap K6-II/550 somewhere, or maybe a K6-III for the windows box (and hand down the K6-II to the other machine). Hmm. Time to break down and build a dual Athlon or some such rather than constantly trying to squeeze life out of these older machines, methinks.
Wow! I haven't posted in...oh, wait. I posted yesterday. Sorry, dria. ;-) For some reason, I'm amused by the fact that you hadn't posted for over a month, and managed to fit the "Wow, I haven't" quote into your message without raising undue suspicion. ;-)Work
My suspicions about the "hitting the fan" thing appear to be correct, although that's all I can say right now. On the other hand, I've been handed a fairly interesting offer from a former employer (whose primaries are working on buying back the company from the people who acquired them), to take on a director role for infrastructure. I also have similar offers pending from a couple of other companies. A co-worker told me today, "You've got two directions you can go in your career right now: you can teach, or you can move into management." I'm not sure I disagree with him, although the direction I take may not be the "obvious" one.Life
Women are a mystery to me.Hacking
None. Some day, I'll have a little time to work on my rather lengthy list of projects. But today is not that day. Tomorrow isn't looking good, either.
"For those of you only motivated by money, we have a special incentive..." Yes, folks, that's right: the company I currently work for has put everyone in engineering and IT on hourly pay until the product launch date (June 30), with time-and-a-half for anything over 60 hours in a given week. Translation: I'm now getting paid for the 12-hour days I'm putting in. They're obviously desperate to make their release date (since it's pretty obvious to even the casual observer that the product will not exactly get the kind of acceptance they're shooting for if they ship it looking anything like what it does now). I have a feeling that something will hit the fan after the product launch, however. Call it a hunch.
deekayen: Those toe-cages should be removable; I picked up a Trek 4500 last year, and it came standard with the toe cages, but three screws later, they were off. They're handy if you're doing a long run (lets you get a little power out of the pedal upswing), but they just seem to get in my way for regular riding.
Spend five minutes helping a coworker with clue solve an interesting problem, and then hear a thank you five minutes later because your solution helped fix the problem. I don't care how bad you might feel at the time this happens: you still end up with a smile on your face because of it.
Livid. That's the only word for my state of mind rightnow: livid. My hands are shaking over this. Why do I get worked up over a company I "only work for"? Easy: it's an enormous investment of my time, and there's no way that the pathetic paycheck I receive for it covers the cost to me. When I'm asked to do something that takes two or three days of work, then get told "do it again, because we told you to do it the wrong way", I tend to get a little upset. When it happens consistantly every day for a week or two, I become livid.
That's it. If I keep writing today, I'll say something I'll regret when an employer down the road gives this a read.
You know you're a geek when you actually take the time to verify that yes, in fact, Wed Apr 18 23:25:21 2001 CDT is actually 987654321 in UNIX "seconds-since-epoch" format.
And don't forget, kids: the billionth second is only a few months away! (Sat Sep 8 20:46:40 2001 CDT, to be exact.)
Ye ghods, I gotta get out more.Penguin Computing
I love these guys. ;-) Every time I place an order, I get free t-shirts, cute little penguin toys, etc. Mind you, I've ordered 20-something machines from them in the last 6-8 months, so I'm never too surprised when our sales rep gives me a call every time I quote something out. ;-) Question for the crowd: who do you use (if you're in such a position) for 1U x86 machines? I've been happy with these guys mainly because I've never received a dud machine, and their prices are head-and-shoulders better than my second choice. With the volume of these things that I have to deal with, building them myself just isn't an option, unfortunately. Too bad, too; I just found my dream 1U case. Mmmm, a quiet server room...mod_virgule and Advogato
barryp: The RAS complainer was me. ;-) I agree, it would be nice to be able to go back farther than just a day or so through the "Recent Diary Entries" page, but if memory serves about how mod_virgule stores it's data, I don't think it's a trivial extension.
Grabbed the name of that other book from my recent buying binge:Work
- The Eternal E-Customer, by Bryan P. Bergeron, Ray Kurzweil
This book pushes the mantra of "Emotionally Intelligent Interfaces", and looks to be an good detailed design guide for that approach. I haven't read it myself yet, although the Amazon reviews appear promising.
Finally got around to putting together a secure framework for automated account management here (not a trivial thing to do when you're dealing with a wide variety of platforms), which should hopefully save a fair bit of time later for distribution of software and configurations. Next job is the internal audit of how Engineering is using our IP address space, since our ISP isn't doing so hot these days. Seems to be the trend these days, doesn't it?
I find it hard to believe some of the things I learn from time to time about Windows. A "did you know?" moment: Windows 2000 RAS will request DHCP assignments in blocks of 10, regardless of whether or not it uses all 10. Wonder what it does when only two or three are left for assignment? It will also automagically assign addresses from a "magic" internal pool if it can't reach the DHCP server. And it's not RFC 1918-dictated space. Nice. Wonder if ARIN approved that use (I know they've been insistant about not approving requests for space used in books or literature...)?
Let's hear it for Chapter 11; SuperCrown (they're a fairly common bookstore down here, but without the cappucino and fuzzy feel of Borders or Barnes & Noble) is going out of business, which meant it was time for me to stock up on books (60% off the jacket price is hard to pass up, even if the book is a waste of paper). The few decent books I managed to find (the only books really left in volume were in the business section and the rows upon rows of cheap romance paperbacks) were:Work
- The Hacker Ethic, Pekka Himanen
Slashdot did a review of this book a while back, and it caught my attention. It looks to be a good read, but I have't tackled it just yet.
- Rebel Code,Glyn Moody
Another book reviewed by /., this is a good summation of recent years, starting from Linus' first stabs with Linux, and working forward to today where open source is viewed as a reasonable basis for software development models in business. I have to wonder if the book would have read differently had it been written during or after the recent layoff frenzy (yes, I believe the worst is over, sans a few more upcoming announcements) in the tech industry? I haven't finished this one yet.
- Getting Started in Computer Consulting, Peter Meyer
This was a pure impulse buy; I recently read Getting Started in Consulting by Alan Weiss (from the same publisher), and was curious if it would match Weiss' quality of writing and direct approach to the subject. Haven't had a chance to go through it yet.The fifth book's name eludes me for the moment, and since they're all sitting on my nightstand at home, it's a little hard to go look it up. ;-) It was what appeared to be a fairly complete book regarding user interface design for e-commerce applications. I'll make sure I post the title here later.
- Why Should Extroverts Make All the Money?, Frederica J. Balzano and Marsha Boone Kelley
Another impulse buy; being an introvert myself, and having a strong interest in MBTI typing (I'm an INTJ), I was interested in what she had to say; I've just about finished this one, and I'm actually fairly impressed, I expected a feel-good book of self-affirmation, and I what I found was a book filled with example case studies (which didn't always work out well) and reasonable approaches to the problems many introverts have with "networking". It's geared toward the job-hunter, so maybe some of the recently-downsized here can find some use in it.
Spent the last two days attending a surprisingly up-beat all-company meeting, which unveiled our new "image" and (more importantly) gave everyone in the company a solid understanding of the product produced by the company we just acquired, and how it will integrate with ours. I'm surpised to find myself very impressed with what this tiny group of folks have managed to create in under a year with a shoestring budget; it put our own efforts, which were presented as well, to shame (they have a working product, we have some lovely PowerPoint slides). (For the curious: their product is an amazingly complete "coming together" of responsible online marketing services; opt-in email, banner ad campaigns, etc, most with the ability to actually track both the hits you're getting from various impressions, and the amount of actual revenue you brought in from them, along with a whole gambit of other handy toys you'll probably want if you're trying to run a real business with Internet sales.)
Good things arising from the sessions: we're committing fairly publically to reducing our current platform support (how many proprietary software products do you know that ship on 19 separate platforms? betcha you can count 'em on one hand), and that we're really pushing to phase out the old product as quickly as possible after the new product launch, meaning a much simpler infrastructure to try and maintain here. The bad things: international sales are attempting to completely backdoor the entire process, and artificially prolong the life of our dead product by foisting it on the European audience, with partners over there doing all the translations and further development (with our name stamped on it, of course). Sales seems to think that we'll manage the infrastructure for all this development here in the U.S. The CTO has a slightly different opinion. It'd be fun watching the fireworks, if it wasn't my infrastructure caught in the middle.Personal
Erica's Jeep died yesterday, on her way to lunch from class. Luckily, we haven't missed a beat; she's driving me to work and picking me up afterwards, with classes during the day, so all is good. Hopefully she'll have it fixed by Monday (let's hear it for 1500-miles-left-on-the-warranty!).Red Hat 7.1
Almost here. Sounds like the release name is "Seawolf" from some chatter on a few Red Hat mailing lists. I'm betting on either a late Friday/Saturday release, or they'll hold off until Monday to better handle the flood of support requests. ;-)
Very cool; I now have a working "make solarispkg" target for automatically generating a Solaris package. I've been dragging my feet on the Debian packaging; I'll probably get to that tonight or tomorrow, at which point I'll need to document the new packaged build features ("rpm -ta", "make solarispkg", etc). One cool thing that came up recently; rblcheck is in the current FreeBSD ports tree, albeit with some patches.Trademarks:
In case noone has seen the latest NetSaint news, Ethan Galstad (the author of the fairly popular open source network and service monitoring tool) has been cease-and-desisted by World Wide Digital Security, Inc. (makers of the SAINT network vulnerability scanner), with claims that he is infringing on their trademark and creating marketplace confusion, and have insisted both that he desist in the use of the name NetSaint to refer to his program, and the domain name NETSAINT.ORG. Ye ghods. Good thing I don't use SAINT; I'd be going to the trouble of finding another security vulnerability testing tool right now because of this. Unhappy about their actions? Maybe you could contact WWDI...
I now have a decent RPM spec in place, and it actually builds and installs correctly from a "make dist"-ified tarball. I'm having a bit of trouble making the RPM relocatable, but that might just be a problem with the Wolverine version of RPM; I'll try it later on my stock Red Hat 7.0 machine later to be sure that it works. Now I just need to finish adding in Debian support and a "make solarispkg" target.DSL:
What a week. First, NorthPoint drops dead after selling off it's assets to AT&T, and then amidst rumors of getting delisted on the NASDAQ if they keep up the poor performance, Rhythms Netconnections' CEO resigns. If you have DSL through one of the typical bargain-basement providers, this is your wake-up call. The one that I and others have been trying to give people since the first ad appeared for cheaper-than-beer DSL. Not to say I told you so, but...
As a point of comparison, the other names in that space like Telocity (last traded at 2 1/8) and Covad (last traded at 1 1/32) aren't doing so hot either. I can't imagine how the other CLECs who based their entire business model on reciprocal compensation are doing. Not well, would be my guess.
Welcome to 2001, guys. The investment free ride is over.
Inching ever-closer to a working release, I now have some spiffy make rules for the docbook-ified documentation, thanks to some inspiration from the GNOME folks (make dist now does a conversion of rblcheck.sgml into assorted formats; I just need a clean text conversion now). The only things left now are a .spec and a debian directory, and possibly a set of rules for building a Solaris package. If anyone has pointers to info on building packages for their OS distribution of choice, I'd love to see it.
You know, it occurs to me that I'm really going overboard with the packaging of what amounts to a couple of hundred lines of code. Mind you, I now have a fairly nice framework for building larger projects within, so I suppose that it's just icing on the cake that rblcheck has taken advantage of it.Work
Did a final tally of systems, and you can definitely tell we're a software house. I'm up to 33 UNIX boxes, all running radically different varieties and versions of UNIX-like OSen, with a proposal on the table for adding 9 more in the short term, and at least twice that in the longer term, with no deprecation of existing platforms. Yeesh. The next time you hear someone chanting one of the various mantras of portability, listen to them. You'll make people in my shoes a lot happier with you.
I still can't believe I'm keeping FreeBSD 2.2.8 and Slackware Linux 3.6 boxes alive for nightly builds...Reading
Finished Cuckoo's Egg; the Epilogue covers the author's involvement with the Morris Worm (the young'uns in the crowd might need a reminder about this one), and there's a little wrap-up at the end to cover what direction his career went afterward.
Overall, an excellent dramatized retelling of a series of real incidents. I'd recommend this as required reading for those who just don't understand why people didn't think about security when designing things like Sendmail and BIND originally; it was a completely different culture, one that we've mostly forgotten in the firewall-everything, yet-another-DDOS-attack environment of today. I don't claim to relate to Stoll's 60's/70's political ideology, but it's a shame we don't all play as well together anymore.Personal
We finally got Erica moved in this weekend, and she started her MCSE training today. I'm expecting her to come home tonight with the same wide eyes she had after her last administration training session (a one-day high-level overview of 2000 and some migration considerations); it's fun to watch. Reminds me of when I first started doing UNIX administration for a living.
Hmmm. What's with the length of my diary entries lately? A new-found sense of self-importance? ;-)
Well, I finally got around to sitting down with this book; it's an excellent read so far, although it's not something I could give to a non-technical friend to enjoy. The writing drew me in quickly, mainly because of the focus; that's my job, and it's fun reading about someone else's experiences. The scary thing is that I could actually imagine those old DECwriters chugging out pages of copy, because we had a ton of those monsters lying around while I was at University. The only part I can't really identify with is the compulsive fear the author seemed to have dealing with the NSA, CIA, and assorted other "spooks" (growing up in Canada, I had heard of them, but never had to really consider their implications; the closest thing we had was CSIS, and you never heard much about them...).
I haven't finished the book just yet, but I've enjoyed it thus far. It presents a refreshingly honest look at how intrusion analysis really works, rather than how you'd like it to work, without explaining away or talking around places where he made errors in judgement, and thus enhancing it's value to the reader. I'll have to add it to Canonical Tomes, methinks.
The past two weeks have kept me busy enough to not have to worry about how much things are falling apart around here, but I had it thrust firmly in my face today, resulting in a decision: I am unwilling to continue subjecting myself to the office politics and miscommunication here, and thus will be either working independantly or in another position within a month. Enough is enough; the resume is already making the rounds. If you're looking for UNIX administration talent in the west suburbs of Chicago, or you're an open source-friendly company looking for architecture or development help, I'm available. ;-) (Note of interest: looks like the opensource.org folks finally did a website update.)
I finally took the time to convert the rblcheck documentation to docbook (4.1) format. The resulting output from docbook2html is far better than I expected; the last time I looked at SGML parsers, the resulting output was disappointing, to say the least. All I need to do is finish merging the last of the scattering of text files I called documentation into the master SGML document, and then build a quick Makefile.am entry for it (anyone have one offhand? yes, I'm lazy).SuSE
Work-related issues have finally brought me into contact with SuSE 7.0 and 7.1. My experience so far: it feels like Slackware with RPMs (take that however you wish ;-); the distribution directory structure is the first glaring similarity, but some of the things I'm finding scattered around the disk show the signs of someone trying to take Patrick Volkerding's distribution and make it look like Red Hat Linux (again, take that however you wish).
I was singularly unimpressed by their proprietary installer, YaST (a complete inability to deal with FreeBSDs "whole disk" disklabelling scheme was disappointing, especially when anaconda can deal with it just fine), and the lack of complete ISOs anywhere. Finally, a glaring omission: no crypto in the U.S. version (you can download everything you need, but it's a hassle that Red Hat thankfully eliminated with the release of 7.0).
On the upside, their knowledge base is top notch, although most content is targetted for the German reader, and the distribution is quite complete (a whopping seven CDs, or a single DVD) and very usable. I applaud their move to DVD in addition to CD media; if you're in a facility where DVD-ROMs are the norm, it's six less discs to carry around with you (I'm also glad they chose to also distribute CDs, though; DVD-ROMs aren't quite that ubiquitous yet). The internationalization of the distribution seems far more cooked than Red Hat's latest efforts with 7.0 and the Fisher/Wolverine betas; they've obviously had a lot longer to think about doing it right.
This isn't a distribution that is going to be replacing Red Hat or Debian on any of my servers or desktops anytime soon, but it's an interesting distribution to take a look at. However, I'm afraid some of their recent actions with respect to distribution of their media may make this a review of historical significance only.Personal
Well, it's official: A year later, and I'm moving again. The new place is a two-floor, two-bedroom apartment; plenty of room for a real living room without computer equipment in it, and a tidy home office (now I just need that desk I've been eyeing ;-).
In other news, my girlfriend has given her notice at her employer, and will be taking the next two months to train for her MCSE; as an old UNIX hack, I was skeptical of the value of the training, but after looking through her course material and the books she's picked up, I'm relatively impressed. Everything obviously has a Microsoft spin to it, but with me providing a bit of cross-platform balance, I think she'll come out of it with a solid grasp of the essentials.
After seeing the material, though, I've come to a realization: no amount of training can make someone who is "just doing a job" good at what they do; you really have to love this stuff. Despite what is obviously a good training program, most MCSEs I've worked with have displayed a distinct lack of real understanding of what they were doing, and always seemed to be just "going through the motions", without any real interest in learning more. On the other hand, open source projects around the 'net are filled with people with little formal training but an intense drive to learn through any means they can find. I'll take two or three of the latter over a company full of the former, because I can fill in the blanks with someone who wants to learn. I can't do anything with someone who lacks motivation.
It's been a while...
I can't think of enough bad things to say about Rational's flagship product right now; their Linux port is, to say the least, disappointing. My experiences so far:More playing with HarpiaI've been fighting with this for a couple of weeks now. This wouldn't be an issue if I just had the damned source for their kernel module, but I can't do a thing with this binary glop. Wherefor art thou, Subversion?
- Binary kernel module, with a source code stub. They're obviously hoping that the binary interface remains stable from kernel version to kernel version. Nope, sorry. The first big thing to hit them was the SMP prefixes change (for good reasons), which you have to back out of any new version you want to use ClearCase with. So far, the newest kernel I've successfully built with has been 2.2.17, and I'm making headway with 2.2.19pre17 (strlen_user is now strnlen_user, with new calling semantics; whee!), but I'm considering calling it a lost cause. Forget about 2.4, that's going to be a porting job for Rational.
- Beware slocate. When updatedb hit my MVFS-mounted partitions during it's 4:02 AM run, a non-fatal oops kicked off and MVFS wedged until reboot. I'm going to try this with 2.2.16 and see what happens. Certainly not slocate's fault; ksymoops places the blame squarely on the mvfs module.
- NFS problems. This is both a beef with Rational and with the automounter that ships with Red Hat 6.2 and 7.0. First, NFS exporting of MVFS filesystems seems to be broken (at least, broken when exporting to Linux clients; while I get errors, I can at least mount the export on a Solaris client...imagine that, Linux NFS problems), which is causing our environment some grief. Second, most of the autofs/amd/automounter implementations for Linux don't properly implement the Solaris /net automounting scheme. Luckily, the autofs4 work done by Jeremy Fitzhardinge results in a very fine automounting setup.
Why is noone using ADODB for database access in PHP? Here we have this standardized means for talking to a data repository, and everyone still insists on mysql_this() and mysql_that(). Bleh. I'm trying to decide if it's worth the effort to port Harpia to use ADODB (if the authors would even accept the patch; once I decide if I'm going to do it, I'll ask them before I expend the effort), or if I should just write something from scratch. Just what the world needs: yet-another-weblog. ;-)Solaris netbooting
The last patch that Neil provided seems to have done the trick, but I've lacked the time to post to linux-kernel regarding it to see if anyone has ideas on generalizing it so it might eventually make it into a real release. Plus, I still don't have a booting server; I have a feeling that bootparamd isn't passing some critical values to the client, which might also explain the inability to force an rsize value (which should also solve the NFS packet ordering problem, without a rather ugly kernel patch). More investigation is needed.rblcheck and relaytest
I swear I'll get back to these eventually. I've given era eriksson CVS write access for rblcheck (he has a few ethical issues with relaytest, for which I can't blame him, honestly), and he may be contributing a bit, but my goal is to clean up both and get out the release I've been meaning to get out for a very long time. ;-)Personal
The past two weeks have been hellish. I'm fighting a head cold that's a month old now, my mother ended up having surgery due to complications with older operations, my girlfriend's father had quadruple-bypass surgery, I'm trying to organize a move to a new apartment again (has it been a year already?) since what is essentially a one-room dorm isn't cutting it for space (hard to run a home office out of your living room), we're trying to save up the money to put my girlfriend through training for her MCSE (you can snicker and laugh right up until you see exactly how much you have to know to pass those exams). and work is gearing up for a new product release (meaning everyone is in emergency mode: "My issue has priority." "No, MY issue has priority."). One of these days, I'll slow down. Maybe.
Still going back and forth with Neil Brown on this one. The prevailing thought is that Solaris' inetboot expects the NFS packets to arrive in a specific order. Some initial tries at monkeying with packet ordering didn't result in any change.Harpia
Finally got a chance to pull this down and take a peek at it. Seems to run well, but I've got quite a bit of looking-over to do first. There's a few too many hard-coded strings, and most of these weblog backends don't really give me that "I've been carefully audited" feeling. But maybe it's just me.
Blarg. I've filed a bug report with Red Hat (since I'm technically using their shipping kernel, not a stock kernel, although this appears to be a general problem) and fired a message off to the Linux NFS development mailing list regarding getting the Solaris network install working from a Linux machine. The problem is with the NFS root filesystem that the installing server tries to use; it mounts up fine, but then fails to be able to communicate because of some incompatibility. If I were to throw the NFS root over to a solaris machine, I'd be able to install just fine (with the installation media itself being on the Linux box; only the NFS root needs to be on the Solaris system). How annoying.
Time to actually peruse the documentation; I managed to somehow encrypt one of my web pages by accident with "vimcrypt". Not that it was too big of a deal; Google is my (caching) backup device. ;-)Solaris:
I've almost managed to get one of my Linux boxes serving as a network boot server for my old SS2; hopefully I'll actually get Solaris 7 loaded on that beast this evening. I am now quite ready for the network installation section of the Sun Certified System Administrator exam. Which I really need to finish studying for; I should have picked up that cert (well, the 2.6 version of it, anyway) four years ago, but I've just been too lazy.Acronymania, Keyworditis:
I've been perusing a few job boards lately, just for fun, and I'm amazed at the copy that the headhunters get away with publishing; they're rivalling the last round of spam I received for grammar and punctuation abuse. But the key feature of all of these is the overuse of cryptic acronyms and industry buzzwords; it doesn't take much to realize that most of those are written by recruiters with absolutely no understanding of the positions they're hiring for. It worries me that these are the gatekeepers for most new entrants to the business; it's akin to the U.S. Patent Office trying to determine the validity of patents on industries they can't possibly know the details of.
I'm both flattered and embarassed. rblcheck is in Debian proper (flattered), and I've never added dpkg support to the source tree (embarassed), although a kind soul within the Debian project did so already. So, I'm repenting by teaching myself about building dpkg packages, so that I can feel comfortable merging the work already done into the source tree; hopefully, I'll get around to cranking out an RPM spec file for it as well.
First impressions of the dpkg scheme: this feels almost exactly like RPM, except that everything is broken out into separate files (within a single directory), while RPM conviently (or inconveniently, depending on your point of view) keeps all additions tucked in a single file. In the long run, dpkg is probably more flexible (ie. would seem to handle future extending a little more gracefully), and gives package maintainers a standard place to tuck packaging-specific scripts and data. The documentation for dpkg seems to be a bit better too, but that's only because it seems to be current; RPM has a fine manual for it, but it's so out of date as to be useless.Fragmentation:
It seems a shame that the community has a tendancy for NIH (not invented here) syndrome; dpkg vs. RPM vs. ports vs. openpackages (etc), QT vs. GTK+, GNOME vs. KDE, Konqueror vs. Galeon vs. Mozilla, GNOME Office vs. OpenOffice vs. KOffice, etc. I've heard others say that the Linux community (using them as a generalization for GPL-using projects) doesn't have the same tendancy towards fragmentation that the BSD crowd have (again, generalizing for projects without viral licensing, using the FreeBSD vs. OpenBSD vs. NetBSD rift as their prime example), but it would seem to me from the prior examples that free software developers, in general, strive for reinvention and shun reuse.
Whether this is bad or not is a judgement call, and one that I haven't made myself yet; on one hand, it has resulted in some fantastic improvements to the existing "state of the art" (NCSA HTTPd vs. Apache, NCSA Mosaic vs. Mozilla, etc), but on the other hand, it has also resulted in replication of effort, often on a massive scale (XFree86 vs. Berlin, for example). It's also resulting in huge community rifts (GNOME vs. KDE, Samba vs. Samba TNG, OpenBSD vs. the world), which pundits could easily use as "representative examples" of our inability to collaborate.
What's my point? I don't really have one. I'm just thinking out loud, and hoping someone else has some thoughts on the subject.
I have no idea why I laughed uncontrollably when I saw this (and the original thread that started it). The 'net gets weirder every day...rblcheck:
Obviously, no release. This weekend was crazy, and didn't afford a lot of time for coding. On the other hand, I finally picked up my very own copy of the new Dragon Book. Whee!
I wasn't expecting much when I started playing with this, but I'm actually impressed; it's nice having "just another GCC frontend" for Java. If you're working with this stuff, by the way, the following makes a nice little addition to your GNU make makefiles:
JCC=gcj% : %.o $(JCC) $(LDFLAGS) --main=$@ $< -o $@ $(LDLIBS)
%.o : %.java $(JCC) -c $(CFLAGS) $(CPPFLAGS) $< -o $@
Caveat: the "--main=$@" option isn't such a good idea, since it really could be anything you want. It works for me, since I follow that convention, but someone better versed in the ways of make may want to adjust that a bit to taste.rblcheck:
Hopefully, I'll squeeze a release out this weekend, regardless of the "readiness" of it. If I don't get one out, I never will. ;-) I'm expecting the only changes to be documentation updates, besides what's already in the CVS version.
Wow. First CVS commit to rblcheck in about a year, cleaning up documentation and getting a few patches applied. A little tidying up and I'll probably roll a new release, if only to get the bug reports coming in again. ;-)relaytest:
Set up nightly snapshots of the source for the CVS-impaired. Once I roll the rblcheck release, I'll be back on this.
Ah, what the hell. I've imported what's sitting on my hard drive right now into SourceForge. Three working (but not dynamically-loaded) and extremely basic tests, so it's not really ready to use to verify your state as an open relay just yet. No docs, no source unless you pull it from CVS, script kiddies need not apply.
Been extremely busy for the last week or so, so no update. My home network is finally starting to look less like a hacked-together mess, and more like a real environment in which to work; my main desktop will be turning into a 550MHz box, rolling the 333MHz CPU down to the mail server. The router took a drop of 20MHz, but an upgrade from a 486 to a Pentium and a quadrupling of memory, so I don't think I'll complain much. ;-) Overall, I'm happy, but the result has been that I've gotten very little non-work "work" done lately.Geek Eats
If you're in the Chicagoland area (although I understand that there's one in NYC as well), an interesting place to swing by is Mars 2112 in the Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg. The service left a bit to be desired, and I'm not sure if the food was worth what they were charging (although it was relatively tasty), but the main dining room is a geek's basement wet dream; I want a basement done up with the Mars-surface style rock and overhead black-lit "starscape" ceiling. It didn't hurt that the room stretched up two floors or so. A good one-time visit, methinks.Intermud-3 stuff:
Yeah, I kept playing with that. I now have a "real" parser for the incoming data (ie. translating MudOS data text-formatted types into native Perl variables), although why I thought it'd be fun to write this in Perl, I'll never know (I'm thinking Scheme would have been much easier, and probably made more sense). Blecch. Ah well, I'll probably throw up what I've done so far on my webpage, and call an end to it.relaytest:
No progress. (I found time for a Perl implementation of I3, but none for a real useful project? Bad programmer, no cookie.) The only thing I'm holding off on before the CVS import is the loadable module interface, and then it goes off to Sourceforge while I try to find time to do all the testing modules. Promise. ;-)
Had a flashback the other day, incurred by someone asking about this project that I was slightly involved with "way back when". Hardly anyone I talk to anymore has even heard of a MUD, let alone used to develop for or operate one. Anyway, I remembered this cute little protocol we used to use (which is still in use today between a fairly hefty collection of MUDs), and thought "Wouldn't it be cool to tap into that again?" The result? A quick perl hack to communicate with the I3 router. I wonder if I should whip up a Jabber agent for I3? *smirk*
That's sick. I like it.
I think I've found a weblog backend that satisfies my girlfriend's requirements; Harpia seems to cover the multi-topic requirement, as well as handle hierarchal topics, along with the usual weblog moderation and access features. I haven't done any kind of technical evaluation of it just yet; I'll probably pull it down tonight or tomorrow and play with it a bit.
I'm beginning to get the feeling I should write an article for one of the various online rags doing a comparitive study of the various weblogs I've been evaluating; maybe someone would find the research I've been doing useful in their own work.
Have you ever made a programming error of such newbie-esque proportions that it made you want to return your compiler, since you obviously won't need it anymore? Translation: I've fixed the last major bug in relaytest, which means as soon as I've finished writing up all the tests, I'll probably throw it into CVS for everyone to whack at. I may take a little longer to get the loadable test modules working first, though.
More later.
Finally, a well-written, up-to-date book for using GNU autotools (autoconf, automake, and libtool). Finally having a reasonable set of templates to work from, the build environment for relaytest is sane, and should be relatively portable (once I test it out on a few more platforms; I think I've caught most of the portability problems, but you never know until you actually try to build it yourself). I've settled on using shared libraries for the tests, even though that will eliminate use on platforms that can't handle it; nearly every major UNIX has some form of shared library interface (be it dl, ltdl, etc), so hopefully this won't be a huge burden. I might try a conditionally-compiled static version, if people kvetch too much.Postfix:
Count on Weitse to make a new snapshot release the day after I upgrade. ;-)
Finally upgraded my home mail server from an ancient Postfix release (Beta-19990317-pl05) to the latest snapshot. I consider that to be a statement on the reliability of that package; I would still be running on an older still version of what was then called VMailer (renamed due to IBM legal concerns) if I hadn't lost a harddrive at an inopportune time. ;-) The only problem with the upgrade was forgetting to carry over a couple of configuration values (specifically, recipient_delimiter; whoops). Not bad for an upgrade inspired at 8:00 PM on a Thursday night.FreeBSD:
I gotta give the FreeBSD guys credit; that 4.2 machine I needed to crank out was one of the smoother installs I've walked through in a while. I remember having had a few problems with 4.0 and 4.1, but 4.2 was without problem. Then a quick cd /usr/ports/www/apache13-modssl ; make install and the machine was out of my hands. Every time I use that, I'm reminded of why I like apt; I'm fond of RPM as a package management system, and with the Conectiva APT+RPM release, I should be able to realize the ease-of-building that the ports collection gives me, with the package management features of RPM. I wonder if someone has done an APT repository of the current Red Hat 7.0 release, plus the updates?
Validation comes from the strangest places. Quite a while ago, I mentioned in rblcheck's CREDITS file that Dire Straits wrote great music to code to. Apparently, coding isn't the only thing you can do; you can do research to the sound of Knopfler's tunes too. :-)
Came in to work this morning (after a much-needed day off), and discovered that I was expected to have three server systems installed, configured, and in place by 10:00 AM this morning, with various extra bits of hardware expected to be on-hand (little stuff, you know: a KVM, an 8-port 10/100 switch...stuff everyone has just lying around, right?). No sense getting mad about it, although the requestor can kindly kiss my ass, because he'll get it when it's done, not when it's convenient for him.Anti-work:
Found a number of excellent resources today, including Altavista's self-employed section. They have a nice collection of links regarding trade/service-mark law, consulting information, and the like; a good suppliment to the archives over at Monster, and a surprise, since I haven't seen many new services from them lately that would pull me to their portal (Google now being my first-choice search engine, followed by dmoz, Freshmeat, and various online discussion and news sites (although Technocrat just won't be the same anymore).Weblogs meet cross-referencing:
My girlfriend has convinced me of the merits of a project she wants to take on, and I'm thinking of ways of tackling the backend. The basic format of the site will be a weblog combined with a cross-referenced database of categorized data. I'm wondering if there is any publically-available code which already tries to tackle this combination, besides SourceForge (which is obviously far beyond what I need to do with this application); something which smoothly integrates the two ideas. I'm thinking of every "article" being both a user-commentable item (ie. /. articles), and categorizable in a hierarchal structure in multiple places, allowing for a navigable site index as well as references from one article to either another article, or a category, easily. Slash and Scoop would seem to come close, but not having looked at them under-the-hood, I don't know how amenable their architectures will be to extension to that. I'm half tempted to write it all myself (borrowing from other projects), but there are already too many weblog backends out there already...
Freshmeat, along with what appears to be everything hosted over at Andover, was offline for a while today, without much fanfare or little information about how long it had been down. Which made me think; would a website dedicated to discussion of outages as they happen be a useful tool? Not a site like Internet Traffic Report, but rather something which takes the load off of less appropriate forums (such as NANOG) and moves the brunt of the typical newbie screams of "ohmy$deitymyfavoritewebsiteisdownhowwillieversurvive!?" to a forum better equipped to handle it, with people able to post their takes on outages and their effects. ;-) I'm thinking of a basic weblog (something akin to Slash or Scoop), with community modereration and submission. The question, of course, is: has someone already done this, and would it be reinventing the wheel?Work:
Mixed day today: a chili cookoff, with four people bringing in some fantastic home-made chili. Mmm, no meetings this afternoon (for obvious reasons). On the other hand, I now know of at least four people who probably won't be here by the end of the month, which will put our numbers well under 50.ithought:
I really need to get that working; this is round two of trying to compose this entry because of a simple mis-click. Unfortunately, I have a bunch of GNOME apps that are no longer displaying (they run, and sit in a read(2) loop forever waiting for something; that's what I get for running a mixed bag of Raw Hide and Ximian GNOME software, I suppose). So far, the failing apps include Gabber, Gnumeric, and ithought.Stuff:
I really need one of those uber-cool Ximian stuffed monkeys. Even cooler would be to get one with "Helix Code" on it too, to pair 'em up. Ye ghods, I'm a geek.
The most recent movies I've seen are Antitrust, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Anna and the King (yes, I'm a little late on that one). Loved all three, for different reasons.
Antitrust reminded me of watching Hackers the first time; I remember thinking, "Damn, that was so cool! A movie about the geek stuff I like." A day later, I started actually thinking about the plot, the message, and what I usually look for in a good movie, and realized that it failed on many counts. In both cases, I don't think I care; I still loved the fact that they were semi-modern (at time of release) plays on the world I'm immersed in.
"Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon": I can't say enough good things about this movie. Fantastic action sequences, a good plot, and I completely forgot about the subtitles minutes into the movie. I've had a few people comment to me on the "cheezy" quality of the flying sequences; I truly enjoyed the fact that they turned what could have been a set of poorly executed wire acts into beautifully choreographed sequences.
"Anna and the King" is basically another play on the traditional "The King and I" story, but this was the most serious and respectable presentation of the elements from the original that I've seen; Chow Yun Fat was a perfect choice for the role of king, displaying the confidence that has always come out in his more action-oriented roles. The contrast of cultures is portrayed harshly and effectively. A good watch.Hacking:
None. Bah. Looks like I won't get relaytest into a workable condition for CVS until next week.Weekend:
Not soon enough for me. Time to go home.
Going to try out a new format for my entries. A little nicer on the eyes, although it's a bit more typing.Work:
Busy. Very busy. We're closing down a remote office due to the staff cutbacks (there is now plenty of room in our HQ for everyone), and so the last week and a half have been spent doing nothing but moving people around, and transporting hardware from place to place. Now that the move is just about done, I've got a NOC reorganization to tackle, hopefully putting some new machines into service and killing off a few older power-sucking BTU-generating pigs. Oh, and the NetSaint installation is finally being given the attention I wanted to give it four months ago; it appears that minor disasters are a good way to get the attention of managers. See, I'm learning something from this industry all the time. :-PLinux/PPC:
Not too shabby. I came into possession of G3 at work, so I've been messing around with the Debian powerpc release, and I'll probably install Yellow Dog Linux later for grins.slide:
I'm here, just quiet. ;-)relaytest:
Just about ready to push into CVS; it won't be feature-complete, but it should be at a level that people can actually play with it. I think I might take a little time after that to push out a much-needed rblcheck release, which will likely be the last one I do. I just haven't had the time to spend on it, and it's a usable product in it's current form.More later, I'm sure.
dirtyrat: I've had my resume online since it was being hosted by an ancient version of NCSA HTTPd that I'd installed as an experiment with that web thingy I'd been hearing about way-back-when. I've never had an issue with it being up there, other than getting the occasional call or letter from a headhunter. I've also never gotten what I consider to be a "quality" response from it, so draw your own conclusions. Sites like Monster, techies.com, and hotjobs.com have generally afforded a better level of response, in my experience.
Coding: More playing with relaytest; I now have the "basic" test working (MAIL FROM: whereever, RCPT TO: wherever), but I still haven't decided on a framework for handling multiple tests. I'm just doing a simple registration scheme right now, which may end up being enough for anyone wanting to add more tests. Now, if only "make" would stop segfaulting at SourceForge's shell machine...
Programming: Came across a link today that actually made me rethink some of my positions on software architecture. I'm still a fan of eventually starting from scratch with the knowledge you've accumulated (as a project goes on, eventually you either reach a natural end of development, or a brick wall where the architecture just doesn't support where you want to go with it anymore), but this article makes some excellent counter-arguments for the corporate setting, where the people who originally wrote a package aren't necessarily the ones who are working on it now, nor the ones who will rearchitect it later. A good read.
Pondering: Motivational "Go Team!" meetings bother me for some reason. Maybe I'm just too cynical, but they always come across as contrived, and a demonstration of how executives tend to lose touch with average working people over time. Their speech loses a little humanity, and they really do think that motivation can be inspired by a focus group or a strategic session. I feel a little bit sorry for them; they're no longer nearly as alive as most of the people on the receiving end of those meetings, and don't even realize what they've given up for the position and influence they've gained.
Coding: I get the "Doh!" award. After an hour of trying to figure out why my little SMTP client library was failing on a test case against one of AOL's SMTP servers (btw, can anyone recommend any other mail servers with multi-line banner messages?), I went to bed. 10 minutes later, I jumped up, added a "\r" to my testcase commands, and discovered with much joy that I was an idiot (but that the testcase was working perfectly). ;-) Note to self: even if you think you remember the RFC, you probably don't.
Anyways, now that the client is basically done, I need to decide how I'm going to handle the relaying tests. I've got a few options, as I see it:
I wonder if it's worth it to mess with anything more complicated than the first approach right now. Then there's the more important interface problem; from a command line, selecting multiple testing options will be a little ugly.
Hopefully I'll at least get something usable for the CVS tree by the end of the week.
Coding: Finally, I'm writing code again. I'm starting off small, writing a simple SMTP client that tests for open relays using the same set of tests that the MAPS TSI test runs. Once I've got it minimally working, I'll stick it up on SourceForge (the project page has already been approved). Once that's done, I really need to dust off rblcheck and bring it up to date (with the most recent RBL listings).
Life: Thought I lost my wallet on Saturday. Found out that a local restaurant I had visited that night had it waiting for me. Relaxed immesurably. ;-)
Work: Still cleaning up from last week. More people let go today, and we're all trying to figure out how to make up for the lost hands on a few projects (especially revision control; the release manager was "released", without a suitable replacement for most tasks he was covering).
The biggest problem I'm expecting to come down the pipe soon is the lack of problems. Let me explain: we're going to be in maintenance mode. No new projects, and doing only the bare minimum to keep us in a holding pattern and keep up a reasonable sales level. Smart move for the business, since I'm guessing they'll find the profitability they've been seeking within a few quarters. However, not so much fun for people like me, who prefer new challenges to keep them interested. So, I suppose it really is time to dust off the resume and find something new.
Work: Yep, the hammer fell. 15 people are now without work as of today, and we're stuck trying to clean up their accounts and close off access while people wait to get "the phone call". Add to that the fact that a certain local industry website reported the phone number and conference access code to use to call in and "listen in" on the news being delivered, and it's been a really screwed up day today. I expect more of the same Monday, when the people who were out today find out that they're really out.
More some other time. Today, I'm just not in the mood.
Skiing: Didn't do it this weekend. Crap.
Old hardware: My girlfriend rescued an old HP D-Class machine from her place of employement, and I discovered to my great amusement that it came with one of HP's old Entria X terminals. 1024x768 (only 8-bit color), and fairly snappy. After a bit of searching, I managed to track down the last released firmware image for the hardware, and figured out the magic key sequence for popping up the setup menu (F12 for two seconds, in case you ever come across one ;-) after having booted off of the flash ROM card. Not too shabby. Now to go about rectifying the "FLT 3000" (Hardware Error, Processor dependant hardware) error I'm suddenly seeing on the HP machine itself (probably just didn't seat the CPU board properly when I pulled it apart to clean it). Then to go about seeing if HP-UX 11.00 will run on the thing (it's currently loaded with 10.10, circa 1996, and 11.00 is the newest media I have handy).
Work: New CEO, and mumblings of layoffs in the next week or so. I'm probably safe, but there's going to be serious morale problems with those of us left, and everyone's planning an exit strategy, "just in case". Not a very productive atmosphere. We'll see what happens.
Advogato: Whew. Writing anything in your bio that requires character-precision formatting (ie. <PRE></PRE> tags) is a royal PITA. That being said, I think I now have my PGP public key up there in a format that will be relatively cut-n-pastable (but completely non-machine parsable; WHY does the Advogato backend rip out my very carefully placed carriage returns?).
The odd thing is that the diary entry forms seem to leave formatting alone for the most part (aside from stripping out non-approved HTML tags). I'll have to poke my head into mod_virgule to see what's going on.
Post-analysis: Restoration was only successful up until Sunday. Luckily, most of our development staff has been on vacation for the last two weeks, so we didn't lose much work (with the exception of a few people). I didn't mention earlier that I was the only IS employee on staff during the whole mess (my two counterparts were out for the week), so that contributed a bit to the stress level.
A few good things that resulted from this: the latest Solaris 2.6 patches have been applied (had I known how badly things were going to go, I would have just reloaded the beast with Solaris 8), and the latest ClearCase patches were applied after we verified everything was kosher.
ClearCase: Which brings me to ClearCase. Yeesh, what a monster of a product. This is a piece of software that has redefined the phrase "problem child" in my mind; we've been finding and reporting bugs like crazy, and I'm getting the impression that they're basically just asleep at the wheel. Given how little of the feature set we're actually using, I almost wish our SCM team would go to something more primitive (and far more stable) like CVS. Oh, wait. They wouldn't get the pretty little colorized diffs to hold their hands while they merge. So much for progress.
I wonder what Larry McVoy and Co. have been up to lately with BitKeeper?
New Year: Hmm. I keep thinking, "You know, there's a new year coming up, and I should be getting excited..." But I just can't seem to care. At least last year, there was the threat of society collapsing. I don't see much excitement this year, aside from get-rich-quick dot-commers getting a valuable (albeit harsh) lesson in what it means to be profitable, and maybe the occasional company starting to get it. So, let's raise our glass to the new year! Or something.
Skiing: So help me, I'm going skiing this weekend. For the last two weeks, I've been coming home and watching people on top of the ski hill (the rental property I live at has a (very small) ski hill in the middle of it), and have been too tired to actually head over there. Hopefully I can convince the significant other to come along as well (under a month left until she moves in; woo!).
Anyways, back to work.
Data recovery: Didn't get out of the office until 1:30 AM. Back in the office at 8:30 AM. The filesystem was built overnight, and I've been pulling data off of tape since I got in. It looks like the tape from this week is dead, so I'm only going to be able to restore up to Sunday. Merry #@*(ing Christmas.
Veritas: Bah. It's 10:30 PM, and I'm still at work reconstructing a &#@*ing Veritas volume. It's my own damn fault, but the fat- finger that caused it was the result of trying to keep track of three people's jobs today. Bah. Here's a tip: don't reboot from one terminal while you're extending a volume on another. :-P Here's hoping the backups are good...
The worst part of it is that I don't think I care. I wouldn't have even been messing around with adding yet more drives to an already-slow software RAID set if management were willing to spend a few dollars on some badly-needed (and properly implemented) network storage. It's hard to care when your best arguments are met with "You're absolutely right, we do need that. But find a way to hack it together some other way." It wouldn't bother me if they just didn't understand the projects being proposed, but they do. Bah.
Christmas: Was there a class I missed out on in grade school that failed to prepare me for the efficient and thoughtful acquisition of gifts for significant others during holiday seasons?
Old stuff: Picked up an SS2 today, along with an assortment of other outdated hardware. I'm torn between loading it up with Solaris 8 (if it'll even load, which I doubt; I'll probably end up running 2.6 or 7, some recent Linux revision, or a *BSD variant. And, now that I have a SCSI CD-ROM, I can go about reloading my Indigo properly...
Back to watching superblocks scroll by...
Stab: Thanks for the pointer to PEAR, although I wasn't able to find a whole lot of information out there regarding DB.php (but reading through the source was quite illuminating). If I end up settling on PHP-Nuke, I'll probably end up doing a rewrite of the DB access code using that. (The main thing driving me here is that I already have applications making productive use of PostgreSQL; I can't see a good reason to run both it and MySQL just because of a single software dependancy.)
gstein: Zope's footprint didn't seem too bad for a complete application backend (comparing it to, say, Allaire's ColdFusion, or InterShop's app server engine, or even MudOS/DGD/ldmud *grin*), and it provides a very nice framework to do development in, but I can't really justify the resources for a single project. So, no Squishdot for me. ;-)
Debian woody: Unsatisfied with the disgustingly high degree of stability shown by my potato machine, I finally got around to updating to woody. The upgrade went smoothly, and I'm generally happy with the result. Mind you, I don't use that box on a day-to-day basis, so I probably should have just left it alone. ;-)
More later.
It's been a while. I guess this post will make up for lost time...
Weblogs: I've been looking around for a weblog/forum package which has the feature set I'm needing, without some of the built-in design and performance flaws of Slash. I came across PHP-Nuke by accident, after noticing that debianHELP went online using it. The feature spread is there, it's written in PHP bolted up to MySQL (which is a fairly good performer), and seemed relatively navigable, so I downloaded it and gave it a spin.
Initial impressions:
Overall, it looks managable, but I have a few serious concerns. Other systems I've been considering are Slash (made famous by /.), Squishdot (see Technocrat as an example), Scoop (Kuro5hin is an example most of us know), and, of course, mod_virgule (as seen here). They all have their strengths and weaknesses; mod_virgule was my first choice (for simplicity), but I really don't need the trust metric management (which is the main drawing card here). I similarly skipped on Scoop, since I didn't need the peer-reviewing of articles, it's main feature over Slash. Slash and Scoop both have scalability and performance issues I'd rather not worry about initially, and Squishdot wasn't quite feature-complete for me (no individual preferences management). Squishdot also imposed the requirement of installing and maintaining Zope; while not a bad thing in and of itself, I don't have any other use for it right now, making it unneeded additional administrative overhead.
Anyone else have any systems I should take a peek at?
Obligatory personal stuff: At the stroke of midnight, there will be 11 days, 6 hours, and 30 minutes until I am on an airplane with a very special woman on my way to the Carribean. This vacation couldn't come at a better time, for an unimaginable number of reasons.
Advogato diary musings: I've seen a number of people posting anti-employer sentiments here (and I'm among them). I wonder why I, or others, don't worry about said employers reading this information, and using it against them in their workplace? Do we not worry about it at all, because this forum has an "in the company of friends" feel to it? Is it the anonymizing nature of these diaries? Hmm.
More later, I'm sure. :-)
Job stuff: <RANT> Every once in a while, you have one of those days where you can't seem to please anyone, and start to lose the enthusiasm for an industry you used to love. That day passed a few weeks ago; now I'm into "wouldn't teaching be a wonderful career change?". I've been seriously considering self-employment again, too. Anyone looking for a dissillusioned UNIX/network architect in the Chicago area? </RANT>
That's enough for now; I just don't feel like writing much today.
IBM: AIX was a bad idea. Just say no. It presents a lovely mix of late-70's throwbacks and DOS-era interfaces, mixed with proprietary extensions to things like Apache which stand just fine on their own without Big Blue's help. Ugh. Yes, I'm bitter.
Job stuff: This is why I keep a resume on Monster at all times; you never know what might be sent your way. It's always nice to get a good offer from time to time to remind you that you're never stuck somewhere.
Yawn. Time to call it a day, methinks.
Whew, it's been a while.
Research: Put on hold for a while, as real life is getting busier by the day. Eventually, I'm going to need to take a break, which luckily enough is already on it's way; a Carribean cruise in December. We're already counting the days...
Inventory control: I've put together what I think is a reasonable schema so far for a basic inventory control scheme, although it's got a lot of stuff that's specific to my environment in it. Once I've generalized it a bit more, I'll post the results.
Other stuff: In a fit of unbridled annoyance at the lack of functionality rlytest provides (it provides a reasonable basic test, but nowhere near the level of testing provided by the mail-abuse.org "telnet" test), I've begun working on a "work-alike" for the mail-abuse.org relay test, that an administrator can use themselves for the testing of hosts on their own network, either in an automated fashion, or with a quick command-line test. When I have something usable, I'll do the usual Freshmeat announcement thing.
Random: The IP-over-DNS article over at /. caught my eye. Interesting idea, but it seems to me that it's no more than just an academic pursuit. The only real application of it would be for circumventing the security of a particular network (presumably, since you can't create an IP tunnel using a different mechanism due to local policy, you're stuck doing so with this). Cool hack, nonetheless.
As always, more later.
Fun with M17: I'm impressed. This is looking like it will be the first milestone release that I'll be able to use for day-to-day work; sub-windows are now opening properly for the web interface to exchange, and the classic theme (even though it's obviously a work-in-progress) makes actual use much easier on the eyes. Sorry guys, the default theme is hard to look at for any length of time. The only things really missing are decent Java support, and a new PSM module (which I'm expecting soon). Nice work, overall.
Back to school, sorta: Research is going to be my new middle name for the next little while; I've decided to start seriously pursuing a new business avenue, which means I need to be an expert on DSL, campus networking, and all the fun stuff that they entail. Anyone have any literature recommendations for someone who's relatively adept at networking, but just needs to fill in the gaps?
Inventory control: Before I start implementing my own inventory management system, does anyone have a free software recommendation? I need something that will track both physical assets (hardware, serial numbers, etc), and intangibles (software with versions and licenses, etc). If I end up doing this myself, it'll probably be a relatively generic database schema with a PHP frontend or some such. It's not that complicated, I'm sure a quick search on Freshmeat will turn something up...
More later.
Red Hat "Pinstripe" impressions: While the average user isn't going to notice much new (other than a few new apps to make desktop use more attractive), Red Hat has been very busy under the hood; the filesystem layout is much closer to it's other Linux brethren, package layouts have been standardized a bit, they've moved to xinetd instead of the traditional inetd, and XFree86 4.0.1 ships as the default. The new version of RPM is going to give people migranes, however (since packages created are no longer backwards-compatible with older releases; RPM 3.0.5, a "middle-ground" release, has never seen the light of day as part of an OS release yet, and it looks like Red Hat 7.0 will ship with RPM 4.0). I'm seeing semi-random X crashes during screensaver use, but that could be an artifact of the way I did the upgrade. The distribution is spread over two disks now, which is probably going to result in some moaning about how people have to lug around two whole CDs now to do a system install, but I'm fine with it. All in all, I'm pretty happy with the results. Nice work, Red Hat.
More fun with BSD/OS 4.1: I'd never have this much trouble with FreeBSD, OpenBSD, or any Linux distribution. All I want is a working build of binutils 2.10 and gcc 2.95.2...it looks like I may finally have a reasonable build of binutils, but I'm still running into problems with GCC...of course, egcs 2.95.1 (which shipped with the OS) has a series of patches to it which BSDI apparently never folded back into the GCC mainline releases. Fuckers. I don't see any way to get at those patches without owning a copy of BSD/OS either, which might be a potential GPL violation, although I don't have the energy to call them on it just now (mind you, anyone can get a developer's copy of the BSD/OS 4.1 release for free from their website, so maybe it's not an issue?). Once I've got everything building, I'll have to see about cleaning up the patches for the binutils and GCC developers.
On handhelds: Daaaaamn, I gotta get me one of those iPAQ units that Jim Gettys is working on (see handhelds.org for details). I've been looking for a good PDA, and those look pretty reasonable for what I'd want to do with it. Although, Handspring still makes a damn cool little PalmPilot clone...
Today's slogan: "Go away, or I shall replace you with a very small shell script." (Thanks, ThinkGeek.)
Fun with old Linux systems: I've spent the last two days working on getting GCC 2.95.2 built on a Cobalt RaQ1. What a pain in the ass; it's running a special blend of linkers and libraries which requires the builder to explicitly link against libc. Bleh. I'm finding all kinds of problems coming out relating to this.
Fun with Apache: If you ever have the pleasure of installing Apache on Solaris (the version of GCC (2.95.2) and binutils (2.10) I'm using may have something to do with it) using shared modules, be sure to add the configure flag "--enable-rule=SHARED_CORE", or you'll be greeted with fun linking errors at runtime.
Fun with BSDI 4.1: Still don't have a working build of binutils 2.10 on this ass-backwards platform. Anyone have any success stories to share? (It's looking like a libtool-related problem, since ltmain.sh doesn't seem to like BSDI 4.1's "file" command.)
Today's slogan: "I am not here to make you feel better about yourself." (In reference to a work environment.)
Very quick random update, just because I'm in a good mood: my N600 application (for those who don't know INS-speak, it's an application for a Certificate of Citizenship in the U.S.) just got approved, and I should finally have proof of my U.S. citizenship in my hands by the end of August. THREE YEARS to process one little piece of paper. Crazy.
Also, went back to messing around with Python again today, got a basic multi-user chat server working with about 20 lines of code (telnet in, then "quit", "shutdown", or talk to everyone else there). Should be fun fleshing that out a bit; damn, I like that language.
More later when I'm not so busy.
In my life: spent the day working with the rest of IS practically ripping our NOC apart moving a dozen machines or so after a rather serious water leak from a frozen (not anymore!) A/C unit mounted directly above the #&*@ing equipment room. Bah. Plus, there's a batch of machines coming in next week that need building and configuring as a "last minute support emergency". Hope the new rack arrives before they do...;-)
Been playing with Jabber lately. Damn, that thing is cool. I have some issues with the security model (you're required to implicitly trust your Jabber server administrator with your other-network passwords, as far as I can tell), but as long as you run your own server, all is good. I'd like to see a Win32 client bundled with a local server for people who don't like that problem, but still want to play without having a real...er...I mean, UNIX system handy.
Hamstrung. Hurts like ever#&*@ing hell. Yay.
That's it for today. More later.
Bah, Advogato really needs an "Edit previous articles" button. As originally submitted, the article didn't have that ugly carriage return in the lead section, but that's how it ended up being posted. Ah well.
Other than ranting about DNS issues, I've been quietly chugging away at the new place of employment. Nothing really new to report (unless you really want to know about the new Trek 4500 bike I picked up a few weeks ago). Life is wonderfully calm for the first time in a few years.
rblcheck is still without a release. I'll stop promising a new release, but I do have plans to do some further work on it this weekend based on a few emails I've received recently. There's a few bugs that will need to be worked out and some documentation to be written before I'll put out a full update.
Celebrating my temporary stint of unemployment, I spent last week with someone special in South Dakota, in the Badlands/Black Hills area. Hiking, caving, swimming, and plenty of rest does a good job of revitalizing a person. I must do that again.
Which brings me to today, my second day at my new job with Mercantec as UNIX Administrator. No more 1.5 hour commute each way, nice desk, nicer desktop, Linux as my primary OS again, and a good feeling about this place. We'll see how things go.
Now that I have a bit more time, I'll hopefully be packaging up a release of rblcheck soon. Plus, I need to find out where people are still getting the XNet URL for the package; it hasn't been there for quite a while now.
More later...
The past eight days could possibly rank as one of the busiest weeks of my life.
Spent all day Friday, Saturday, and Sunday moving into the new place. I can't believe I've accumulated that much crap. Just a few more changes of address, and I'm pretty much done.
In the midst of all that, attended a suit-n-tie interview with a national software house for a UNIX administration position. Nailed it, but I'll be turning it down; two acquisitions within the last six months have left most people a little too bitter and stand-offish than I'd prefer to deal with.
Received an offer from another software house which produces a small-business e-commerce package. Accepted a position as a system/network administrator, and should be resigning from my current employer today.
I've been calling people all day getting my contact information changed...hopefully, I'll only lose bills and nothing important. ;-)
Spent an incredible week with my girlfriend, while she studied for her A+ certification and helped with the moving. Helped keep me sane.
Geek-wise, I've got a network to reassemble when I get home tonight. Yeesh, you wouldn't think four machines would require so much effort to move. Work on rblcheck and the mod_virgule to-do list stuff should commence again as soon as I get back online.
That's it for now. More later, I'm sure. :-)
The SourceForge folks took care of the rblcheck CVS repository, so I'm now in a position to start working on it again. Woo!
mod_virgule is cool. :-)
I've started playing with getting mod_virgule working with Apache under Solaris; it builds right out of the box, but the sample_db provided doesn't render quite right; something is stripping all the text between tags like <P></P>. Now that I have a spare Linux installation that I can play with, I'm going to try the same setup there to see if it's just a Solaris thing, or if I've fat-fingered something. If anyone has set this up before, feel free to send me a clue.
The reason for the sudden interest in it is purely selfish; I want an Advogato-based to-do list. raph (congratulations!) had a good idea that to-do lists shouldn't be person-specific, since projects could use them too. Once I get a working Advogato-clone, I'll start in on this. Hmmm...and I need to fit getting an rblcheck release out into my schedule too.
I'm working on landing a position with another company (the commute at my current job is killing me; it's four hours each day that I'd rather be doing something else during). As an aside, if you're looking for a UNIX sysadmin in the Chicagoland suburbs...:-) Moving into the new apartment this weekend; I'm not looking forward to transplanting my home network. I hope Ameritech doesn't screw up the wiring; at least it looks like my cable service will transfer over cleanly (mmmm...digital cable...hundreds of channels I'll never watch...;-). Co-habitating with the gf has been going exceptionally well this week, and generally, life is good, albeit a little stressed.
I can't hear out of my left ear, and I just don't care. Thank you, Nine Inch Nails, for one hell of a concert.
Well, the rblcheck home page is pretty much complete at this point; all the information from the old page has been migrated to an easier-to-navigate multi-page format. I'm still not happy with the colors, but the content is there, and that's all that really matters.
I also managed to find the time to go through all my old email; it looks like I've covered most of the bug reports, although a few feature additions that people sent me haven't made it to the SourceForge project page yet.
Still to-do:
It just occurred to me: a to-do list, in addition to the current diary, would be an excellent Advogato addition...
Ahh, the joys of CVS. Blecch.
By the end of today, I'll hopefully have a working CVS repository for rblcheck at SourceForge (my first attempt at importing was rather gloriously screwed up, so I'm just giving the working repository to the SourceForge guys, and letting them do their magic ;-).
TO DO:
Getting 1.5 done, however, will depend heavily on life slowing down for a while (I'm in the middle of moving to a new apartment, and am coping with a new job which involves a four-hour/day commute). My current thinking is that I'll have a release in early- or mid-May, but who knows. :-)
Well, here I am.
I've discovered something: with the proliferation of websites like Advogato, Freshmeat, SourceForge and others in my online life, there are far too many pages for me to keep updating in addition to my own home page.
Ah well, all part of the fun.
Anyway, a quick summary of the stuff I've worked on/poke at occasionally is off my home page in the projects section. Of them, rblcheck seems to be the one most people are interested in (although if you work for an ISP, some of the other stuff there might be handy).
More to come later, I'm sure.