October 2005

You are currently browsing the monthly archive for October 2005.

Operations and IT Infrastructure

October 28, 2005 in Weblogs | No comments

As a second plausible post, I’ll simply link to this explanation on the slowness of the TypePad service and make a general statement about the unsung heroes of this kind of work. Its a place I have played a few times and after a few rather big moves at this clothing company I worked at, I learned a few valuable lessons. First thing is that nothing or NOTHING ever goes completely the way planned and when a thing is going to break, it will pick the worst time of all possible times to do that. It will basically make life hell and its like it knows. Once moving almost 50 desktops and printers, conduits of communication were not laid down correctly and we faced a floor with no electrical power to speak of in the various rows and rows of desks. Luckily, the versatile and able WBE showed up and within time measured by our own beating hearts, rendered the floor usable for networking and power. Meanwhile all those systems, printers, scanners, and other doodads just sat in cubicles idly anticipating their new work.

But the main thing is not the computers. No. Its all the other stuff that enable the computers to do things. Switches, UPS, AC plugs, all the stuff that gets packed up and mysteriously lost. I worked and managed a move once for a rather large OEM’s technical service group and we labeled down to individual plugs with a scripted tag that had location, name, etc on it. This was planned down to the individual senior engineer cubicle that each had 4 workstations in it. Still we had issues in the new place. Its the territory and its the place and its what happens when a thing is moved. Distributed systems are particularly notorious as one person quoted to me in the recent past. A thing basically can happen to a system that you never knew you relied on and it will break everything else. A weakness in the chain and fabric of the space-time continuum? No. Just human intervention and the human way. Never blame a person for a thing like this unless you live in the blame factor world . There, in that world, its easier to just place the blame for heat, air conditioning, plugs, switches. Instead study what happened and you will see the fixes for the next thing. But when you implement the fixes next time around, remember there are new skids on your work that will suddenly announce themselves. Back at that same clothing company, one time I moved 110 desktops from San Bruno to SF. Somehow, a few got “jostled” and would not power up. Amazingly, all the systems running OS/2 Warp just started while the others running this legacy Windows OS had a variety of problems. Its all in the possibility game of a thing happening and then watching as another thing does.

I’ve enjoyed the IT world because all of those things challenge project managers with scenarios to plan against. But even the best project manager will find herself beset by real and imaginary dragons. As my drill sergeant used to say in Army Basic Training, “keep up the fire”.

Just catching up after a few…

October 28, 2005 in Current Events | No comments

Its been busy time around here of late. I noticed that normally I update the weblog almost every day by my article counts but I’ve fallen off last few days. Responsibilities around the house, some interesting work developments, and a few other things conspired and ruined my daily posting habits to the blog.

The new and hopefully improved Open Standards Base (OSB) Definitions and work in the background has also captured a bit of my attention and after some days of struggling with some content on my wiki, I’ve reached an interesting point in what I think needs to happen to provide continuity and a path forward for where Linux will actuallly be in 2006. Whether I’m ready to air those kinds of things is a different animal. There is a continuity to things I am recording and defining on my wiki which I think provided a set of expectations given a cosmic integration point where enterprises, the community, and the distribution houses see a meeting point. In my own meanderings, the actual term “standards” needs a bit of definition and description given the places Linux operates at these days.

But more on that later… My mini-hiatus, self-inflicted, is now officially a thing of the past :) I’ll have some interesting work news mid-week next week I would expect. An outlet for the OSB work I have been doing will occur in an unexpected location. Watch this space for both.

After a few beers…

October 24, 2005 in Subterfuge | No comments

You ever notice after a few beers that things that were rather oblique become somewhat clearer? Of course, things that were clear become all fuzzy as well. Its like beer can bring things that you could not see clearly into a bit more focus but the downside is that the things which seemed clear become rather out of focus. The other night in my continuing weekend frenzy of drinking craft beers, it came to me that getting jobs in technology is an interesting pursuit. Here in the Silly Icon Valley, we have literally thousands of people out of work which possibly are trying/vying for the same job that I could be wanting. Perhaps several other thousand want other jobs that yet others want. Its a pyramid of sorts here.

Top of the Pyramid

Only a few souls inhabit this part of the pyramid. Jobs are inherently theirs no matter what. They already know the people that know the people that know the people that know who is doing what. You can’t get to the top no matter what you try because it keeps on moving.

Middle of the ‘mid

At the middle is the group of stirring restive currently employed folks that want the jobs of other currently employed folks. Action is hot in the middle but the population is bigger and people try in vain to get the job that they think they want but really do not need. There is a minor God figure at this level that grants permissions almost like a Linux box. You can become chmod’ed or chown’ed to something new but you have to carve the position out of bedrock and be able to issue commands like the root user.

Bottom Part

Man this part teems with populace. People enter this part from all the other parts. The succession is what you know, who you know, and how you know it. The “what” is more about what others think you know and not so much what you know yourself. The “who” is your ladder. Climb on out of the morass dood! The air is clearer at the upper levels and the conditions are nicer. Instead of several thousand competitors, you know the other person and you know their weakness. Finally, the “how” points at what price you have paid to get to where you are. Did you “stab” and “rend” in your rush to reach the upper levels? We are not so apologetic down here and we have long memories. Its tough down here and jobs seem to get filled before you even apply. If you send a resume to a recruiter, they will NOT EVER CALL YOU BACK. Its the rule of the jungle. Getting a call back is like the golden fleece. You suddenly have a beautiful gilded jacket and you can move up the food chain.

Is all this true? Who knows. I just invented all this stuff because I was bored and I drank too many of them beers :)

Oodle has oodles

October 23, 2005 in Current Events | No comments

In my somewhat matrixed search for work, I visit a few of the busier websites that advertise positions which means often I visit up to 10 sites each day. This has actually gone down of late because I am hoping that one of the latest contacts I have had may lead to a very nice position doing project management. But the neat thing about Oodle other than some issue with Craigslist is one can build sets of search criteria based on it “scraping” numbers of sites out there for what you want to find. Perhaps Craigslist does not like it; but when you are looking for work, having everything in one place is pretty handy. You can also have Oodle mail you the results every so often so basically you get a master list of what all the big players in the job market are advertising (hotjobs, monster, careerbuilder, etc). You can manage the Oodle alerts by creating a free account. I don’t pretend to know what Oodle will face but having all the lists in one email that comes every day is pretty damned handy.

I also just noticed that Open Office has iterated and manufactured its 2.0 release! Congrats OO.org team!! The 2.0 release factors in some great usability reforms and includes new tools as well.

This next week should prove very interesting around here. I have a few pet projects I want to do. I want to rebuild my primary Debian server which is now running Unstable and take it back to Testing for a few reasons. Unstable has been rather “unstable” of late. I went through some pretty severe breakage in Dovecot and ended up reporting it to the BTS like a good warrior. It took me about 30 minutes of casting about a bit frantically finding out that my preferred imap server solution seemed broken to remember the pool packages of the earlier releases. Man… I need to expand my personal wiki and include some notations on this stuff. I always seem to circle around for a bit before deciding on my course of action. Luckily, Debian has its testing packages and pool packages which mean I can usually get things back. The main thing this brought up to me was the issue around running too far on the edge. I also want to implement a new 3ware SATA controller so I have RAID1 on it. I have two 300g SATA drives which I am gonna plug in and do a Debian Sarge Netinstall. If you have not seen the new Netinstallers, you are missing serious coolness. Way to went, Debian!

If you are looking for a cheaply implement RAID solution, the 3ware solutions are pretty nice. The support in Debian Sarge is topnotch. You simply plug the drives in, do a RAID build in the 3ware bios, and then the netinstaller sees the two drives as one big thing. I took my buddy Ed’s advice and formatted them as XFS and its been very nice since. I did this initially to get away from a tape backup which I started having doubts about and instead went to rsync backups. Now my samba, nfs, vpn, web, mail, etc server is calling out. At some point in the future, my backup box will fill up. I’ll probably just go to a bigger 3ware solution then with more drives. I think hard disk based backups using Linux as the destination simply cannot be beat.

That Pretty Senorita

October 22, 2005 in Weblogs | No comments

I go over every so often and visit wpthemes because I really dig their work and they produce just enough variability to whet my appetite as far as change goes. The theme I am running now can be played with here. I took one look at it and fell in some degree of wanting and desire because of its color schemes and placement of things. Running WordPress makes changing a theme so simple these days and the themes coming out from the pro’s are so damned cool that one can simply play with the themes, dig into the fonts and CSS, and just plain have a good ole time.

When I ran MT, I also found a few nice themes here and there but it involved a few extra steps. Now I just download the zip archive and plop it. Log into WordPress SiteAdmin and make a few changes. The “pages” support is really great too. I like being able to have dedicated “about” and “personal” pages that just show up as you create them. No need to hand-edit php that much to make them arise.

A few other words

I’ve been considering what an open source standard and certification should look like and I’ve been a bit busy outlining a new manifesto that accurately places a new breed of standards and certification efforts into the hands of the community, distributions, and the holistic enterprises. Its all private for now on my wiki but I have this feeling I am approaching the time I will birth it. Simply put, I believe that for an effort to succeed that targets Linux and desires to build sets of mutually acceptable standards beyond repute, the entire community must be engaged and commited to the work. Without this, all of the ISV and OEM and other support will not really matter. Its this seminal thing I see around Linux and why its so different than marketing, busdev’ing (is that a word?), and selling other solutions. For the person or persons who figure out how to leverage the holy trinity within Linux, success will come. Standards will also emerge that target that trinity to success. Groups that endorse standards then will be able to really come to grips with what Linux will become, what the ingrediants are for that change, and what needs to be added to make the mix complete.

I don’t know that my default approach will do that. I am only a vehicle. Others perhaps may see the same thing though as they go through their works. One simply must go back and look at what Linux has been, where its gone, and what it will take to take it to the next level. The challenge will be to unite the trinity and then truly open standards and certifications will emerge and all the groups will be empowered.

Can you imagine the force of that change?

When the News is bad…

October 21, 2005 in Current Events | No comments

Just reach to the TV remote control bud.

Okay pick it up now and dial this show up. I don’t blog often about TV shows but this one earns the spot. It has this tingly thing which reminds me of watching Seinfeld reruns late at night. Laughing is good, my wife tells me. Well sometimes after “earl” we wander around the house in full gaffaw. It has that certain tendency to make you remember and want more. Hopefully, NBC sees it the same way.

Its my second blog post of the night. And the show is not on for a few. Set it up in your reminders. Its that worth it.

Extending VMware

October 21, 2005 in News | No comments

I’ve been a VMware user since before they had a 1.0 release. Way back when, Linuxcare and VMware used to team up at the tradeshows and would do boothsharing which ended up being a lot of fun for us all. VMware always had an interesting system setup and we would often loan them a Dell Precision Workstation that was a screamer for its time. They’d add a number of fancy guest OS’es all running on Linux and then up X to start them all when it was started. We had lots of fun with that and we’d always start the system first to see what goodies existed. I’ve been a license holder for a number of years and just recently, I got to play with this interesting product that they have called VMware GSX Server. The beauty of this thing is what it does. If you think VMware Workstation is cool, VMware GSX is what a friend called “bees knees”. It just does amazing things with guest VM sessions. You can use a multifaceted client tool to fire up a VM session remotely (yes over the ‘net), do some maintenance using a browser, and do remote installs from ISO images if you so desire. I installed this on a pretty fast Compaq Proliant Server when I was with the Free Standards Group and pretty soon I had like 6 different guest OS’es going. Different people can open the same guest. People can copy the images to local systems and open them in Workstation. You can build a image using Workstation and take it in and initialize and use it in GSX. Its like geek heaven, man!!

Now VMware has announced their player. Anyone can run a guest OS now using the player on either Linux or Windows. Its “beer free” too. So now a person can develop a testing build or something and truly share it and not worry about everyone needing the actual application/workstation thing. With GSX one gets around all that but you will need a fast network pipe to make it happen.

But VMware is just truly cool and has been since I did some stuff with them testing a build out that was destined to be the 1.0 release way back when. We all knew it was cool shit back then. It just did a thing that is remarkable and when it boots and you see the Phoenix BIOS thing, it still slams me down and I appreciate!

How I survived Instiwiki, Moin Desktop Edition, and PHPwiki

October 20, 2005 in Current Events | No comments

And lived to blog about it :)
Basically, I had settled on PHPwiki because its very easy to setup and use and some of its access controls I appreciated. I initially believed I would use Instiwiki for a personal information manager tool. But instiwiki is too personal. Then I moved on Moin Desktop Edition and I suddenly remembered why I really did not like Moin. Its nothing specific, just a hazy and haunted feeling that I cannot really understand its methods and I think there must be “intelligent design” but I don’t get it. Next was PHPwiki and I controlled its access but I could not get used to some of the markup language it uses. So I settled back on Mediawiki. Some would say, “whoa… that’s information overkill or complexity overkill for a personal information directory”. Not true.

What I found was that I could easily find documentation on use, examples, even tutorials for mediawiki very easily. It also has a pleasing and aesthetic look to it. Kind of a “finished look”. I used Moin at work and while I kinda understand its use, I never really got used to it. Its definitely a nice wiki tool.

So here I am off on Mediawiki now and I am happily accessing it from here and there. I can restrict it because it really is not for everyone. Its something that I wanted but did not know. Its a personal place to write revelations that are not picked up by pingomatic, technorati, or whatever. Since it runs locally for me, I can make it into whatever I want.

The best thing is the price. The next best thing is the learning I have to do with it. I enjoy that part quite a bit since it always produces more interesting personal ideas when I can find a new way of doing something with it. Its a very powerful tool but one that does not overpower.

The Role of a Purely Personal Wiki

I think these have roles and I could use one and I know of others that would find value in them. I think Moin Desktop Edition is the clear winner there. Instiki is just too difficult to deal with after the install for a person of my limited abilities. Moin can be shared easily and you can even run the executable as a Windows Service or do an init of it on Linux. Its a bit slow sharing; but if I really wanted something shared amongst a workgroup or team, I would probably roll out an internal version of something or other.

I have a friend that has asked me a few times for a tool to help him find facts that he knows but never records. I think Moin Desktop could be that thing. Its non-intrusive but it also provides a great way of recordation. Instiki for its simplicity and almost elegance cannot make the cut for me because of my limited intellect around these things. I just cannot grok its method.

Oregon is North

October 19, 2005 in Current Events, Views | No comments

oregon

Many light years ago, my wife and I took this rather interesting road-trip coupled with a couple of classes in Oregon. We started in Portland and I attended a Historic Preservation Law Class for archeologists and historic preservationists. We then drove down Highway 1 all the way south to Bandon and then inward to Burns through Bend. Burns is so different in geology and ecology and when you arrive there you know you are in the Great Basin Desert. The sunsets echo out to reds and greens there and birds sing off in the desert air. The Great Basin Desert is truly wondrous and being used to the Mojave, it set me back to see the differences. Temperature gradients were incredible and my wife and I just loved the entire trip back then. If you have never driven the coast south on Highway 1, the beauty is simply incredible. You just get to see it all.

Since we flew into Portland, we then drove back up from Bend to Portland and rented a hotel room the night before leaving. The trip up was also incredible; moving from geological zones starting in the desert and then back up to Portland. All told, we put over 2000 miles on a rental car over about three weeks of travel.

Earlier I think I blogged about a possible road-trip we had been planning but it became evident that that trip was way too ambitious given our dual kid status and doggie requirements. We slimmed down a bit; hence the map above. We’ve decided instead to plot out a road-trip following somewhat in reverse our earlier tip. We’re gonna drive north up the coast to Portland and then back down through the interior of Oregon so we can see the northern edge of the Great Basin. I’d love to get over into northern Nevada on the most lonely highway but I don’t know about that one.

The desert seems to just do something to me and for me. I think I need a battery top-off every few years and a desert does this. I’ve been in a few including the Sonora, Mojave, and the Great Basin. They all offer so many things but the beauty of the desert is in all the things you never notice until you spend time there. Things like sunrises and sunsets, the brute force of erosion and deposition on geological landscapes, the wonder at how prehistoric Native Americans carved a bountiful living, and the really primitive changes as one does something simply like going up in elevation. Perhaps Edward Abbey once said that the desert is God’s country. If not, I think he would have said that about the slick rock desert over in Moab, Utah.

But the real challenge is to experience it for yourself. I’ve walked miles across a landscape that others would say is desperate; but then the botanist I worked with and I traveled down a small dune and found clusters of the most beautiful wild flowers. Often I would see that voyager, the desert tortoise staking out his world.

I’m definitely looking forward to this next trip. There are things that could happen to change things though. Work may be a positive thing that comes up. I’ve not blogged about work on purpose because there is lots going on there.

Personal Wikis and Information Gluttony

October 18, 2005 in Current Events | No comments

I happened to read Dan’s blog post the other day and it started me thinking. I do a weblog but there is this sense I have of wanting a place that is personal to record thoughts, reach some critical mass in my thinking, or just make some personal revelations. As it happens, I did a simple search on Yahoo! on personal wikis. There are a few different ones. I’ve tried thus far instiiki and Moin Desktop Edition. But then I figured if I installed it on only one system that my data would not be reachable from any other system. Instiki seems difficult to configure once you get past the basics but for MMDE one can write a new serverconfig file and open it up to workgroup members or whatever. Truth be told, the MMDE is dog-slow serving to other systems for some reason. Undaunted, I tried installing MoinMoin into my debian unstable webserver using the Deb package. For whatever reason, this seems more difficult than it should be. I also tried Mediawiki but its too big. So, feeling like onf the three bears in the fabled story, I went back to basics. Basics for me was to recheck out PHPwiki which initially was broken in debian unstable; but now, gloriously, it is not and it also found a bunch of older pages I had written in some other existance. The other thing I did since I want this instance to be presented only to my local net plus a vpn connection I do at times, I restricted access. Thanks to the maintainer of this package for making it quite a bit easier to do exactly that.

Perhaps my personal wiki needs are different than the person that simply wants a single system information manager; but I found that if I got a single thing that often I wanted more . More… give me more. But I don’t want or need some worldclass environment and PHPwiki does both more and less. Restricting access to local IP ranges is a nice addition and if you know how to edit those kinds of files, you can make it do a few other nice to have things.

Now I am happy! I got more and I got less and somewhere they meet. I definitely understand the desire to have a “personal wiki” but when its too personal its really difficult at least for me. Thanks to Debian and the package maintainer and the philosophy of package maintainership at Debian for answering just this question.

« Older entries