July 2006

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What I like about blogging services…

July 24, 2006 in Weblogs | No comments

I don’t seem to be able to write manline blogs about all the kewl technology with blogging, new services that have sprung up to take care of us and our atoms and molecules, and how we all are big happy campers in the evolutionary ooze of the blogosphere.  Sociologists say that institutions spring up to fulfill a need.  Methinks that services do also.  People start doing a technology thing.  Its hip and cool and they need more.  Soon grassroots institutions spring up that may offer goods, services, and products.  These institutions often are in the ooze themselves; carefully birthing their services and products, watching how others get value. 

Soon complexity happens.  In the anthropological sense, cultures move from simple to complex due to a variety of reasons.  But their institutions cannot remain simple.  Religion, politics, art, science, warfare, sexual relations must all evolve to new places.   In our burgeoning technological entity, the services institutions start needing more than simple grassroots acceptance.  They have become more complex, require more feedng and the calls on them by the increasingly complex users require more.  Its a dizzying circle of build, need, add, want, need, build…  On and on.  Soon we have the so-called Icons of the institutions.  No longer basal systems but now giants that move in certain circles.  Often they have complex internal structures which require feedng; but often they ty to retain some degree of simplicity to allow access by a wide range of users.

Bear in mind that complexity will happen.  I’d pose the question to all bloggers.  Has blogging become more complex?  Do our tools and services require more touchng and feeling?  Is it just as easy to write a blogpost today?  Are you concerned with tagging and pinging and all the other things?  Or do you want the one thing which I cannot seem to ever really get:

TIME!

I never have enough of time.  I would love to be back to writing every day posts.  But it seems that the services are all growing and changing and wanting to become more satisfying.  I am in the midst of blogging anomie.  I cannot keep up with the bloggers I care about and I never really discover the new ones like I used to.  Shame on me.

But what are your thoughts dear readers?  Do you really understand this amazingly complex and stratified blogging world you participate in?  Do you grok the services or just not use them?

Lighter than Air, but solid

July 22, 2006 in Current Events, Linux | No comments

Blogging has been lighter than air; but I have blogged a few things which were important (at least to me).  I’ve been working on some issues with Mozilla Thunderbird of late which makes it almost unusable here for any serious email.  The scenario is wanting to move all my email to a Linux box that I own, one that is completely unreachable by normal means, and then doing super secure email over it.  This can all be done easily with no MX record, no outward facing mail server, and no real risk.  How I did it was to get openvpn and dovecot working.  Neither is terribly difficult since both are apt-gettable from debian official sources.  With openvpn, create some SSL certs or for me a static key works fine since  don’t have some population of users vpn’ing in.  Dovecot is easy too with a simple apt-get operation.  If you are running postfix, you’ll have to make a few changes to your /etc/postfix/main.cf file to make it do Maildir.  Why switch to Maildir you may ask? Well, I think mailbox performance is better even for a single user and its a thing to do.  You see… I still like learning this stuff.  So I installed mb2md and moved all my mbox folders to maildir style folders.  Then I edited my /etc/postfx/main.cf and told postfix to use maildir and procmail local delivery.

So now at home I have a fancy IMAP server which is fed by fetchmail from two mail servers out there.  I have my reasons for this; but most of them are around wanting to protect and secure the mail I send out.  So now, I fetchmail the mail to dovecot and have both accounts in a single user account on my linux mail server.

If I am off somewhere, I can openvpn in and do mail very easily.  I can also use squirrelmail or just ssh in from my laptop and use the venerable but ultra-cool terminal mail program mutt.  This all works exceedingly well for me traveling, at home, etc.  I can have the best of worlds and have a super dee dooper secure mail environment reachable only by vpn or ssh with RSA keys only.

Enter Thunderbird…  Now for some reason Thunderbird does not like to actually operate nicely with this setup.  It tends to time out putting mail in my Sent mail folder almost 5 times out of every 10; or 50% of the time.  Blech.  That does not make one productive or even happy.  So then I moved to Sylpheed which is lighter, faster, and more flexible.  It does not have the so-called “mozilla” flash; but it also does not do the timeout thing all the time or at least 50% of the time :).

I’ve reduced this down to some bad thing between dovecot and thunderbird and there are open bugs on Debian’s BTS for this.  Such is life.  But having choice means I can move on to other mail clients.  Consider that done.

The main factor here is the ease in building a totally private email server that has no dependency on DNS or other facts, making it available when you need it, and then protecting it.  Openvpn makes a great choice for this kind of access since it rus on the BSDs, Linux, Windows.  On Windows, it lets me click on network places and see places.  I’m not sure how that works with samba; but it does.  Kudos!

I was asked before whether blogging would pick up again after the summer heat wave.  I don’t know.  The temps are not making it conducive but I feel on the weekends that its time to write more inane garbage so perhaps I’ll just copy it to this place.

The longest well check

July 16, 2006 in News | No comments

I’ve blogged before about hitting the 50 or thereabouts and how I waited too long in search of better health or at least better health by adequate medication.  I am now in the midst of the longest well check and have been seeing a rather great physician for about 7 months.  Get this… When I started I had a BP of 155/110.  That is at level 2 hypertension and close to stroke condition!!  Its been now 6 months on a combination of Altace and Coreg and the results have been dramatic.  I also have been exercising 50 minutes most days which is walking for me.  After almost 15 years of doing archeology, my ankles are not what they used to be.  They get sore and I’ve twisted them too many times.  But the combination of walking and the drugs have brought things down to the norm.  Just so you all know what is the norm and why its important, here it is.  Remember, that undiagnosed HBP is a killer!

I am not a terribly healthy eater and I don’t diet well.  I have managed some success in this endeavor thanks to the drugs and the exercise.  Truth be told, my doctor says I subscribe to the “Bar Diet” approach.  Burgers, fries, and beer.  I am exceedingly lucky at a genetic level also.  Colesterol levels are at the norm.

I was never concerned at a younger age with such things so I waited and I waited too long.  My advice to you all is if you are over 40 get thee to a doctor.  Don’t f**k with the health indicators.  I have it on pretty good authority that men often believe they are indestructible and will never suffer from A, B, or C.  Wrong!

I am weak and I bet other men are much stronger.  I eat all wrong and I drink beer.  But if I can do a well check so can you Ed.  Ed, if you read the blog, you got to go take care of yourself.  The kids and wife love you and need you around.

Wishing I could…

July 14, 2006 in Current Events | No comments

There are a few things that I wish I could do or be or become:

  • be a little more patient with my kids sometimes
  • have a few extra moments to read more books that are not about computers
  • try to be more understanding of others and their needs
  • reach out by reaching in
  • understand the difference when someone tells me it makes a difference
  • listen, watch, know

I’ve come up with these things because we all seem to rush by at some genetic speed that never lets us slow down.  Its frenzied work and then we get done with that frenzy and its frenzied play.  When we play its like someone drives us to that and we must “enjoy or else”.  Sometimes there is just not enough time to get all the things done between balancing the things I have to do, want to do, and would like to do. 

My wife and I missed our vacation this year.  Its that one time of the year for two nights we go out and do something.  Its not much, really.  Three days and two nights.  I always wonder if other old married folk have problems tearing thmselves away from their parental duties.  But our little monsters are not so young any longer.  They can cook, eat, sleep, wake up, get mad at each other, find common ground, and then start it all over again.

I don’t mean this to sound so negative; really I don’t.  I think I need a bit of time away.  Perhaps alone but not lonely.  Looking at some sunset or sunrise or ocean or desert or a place inbetween where all the scapes balance. 

In the End…

It balances and I’m heading to the back porch for a beer and a bit of philosophical reflection.

Skating on the thin ice

July 11, 2006 in Linux, News, Views | 1 comment

Not Tull; definitely.  But been pretty busy since my great trip to Japan.  One of wonderful and wacky things traveling is getting Friday to live twice.  This last Friday I took off at 1605 or so and landed the same day at 0900 or so.  Wonnerful; but by 2100 I was zonked.  I’ve figured out that sleep is the great jet lag eradicator.  I went to sleep at 2100 and woke up the next morning feeling rested but still some tired.  That next night I drank two cold man sodas and slept another 10.5 hours and then was back to my usual argumentative self.

I’ve been thinking about using Linux a lot lately and since I really do have the choice and my work even as a director does not require me to write incredibly complex proposals, share them with customers, do MS Project GANTTs, Visio thangs, excel cells, and word doc’s; it means I run Linux.  But I also run the ever free VMware Server with XP Pro, Office 2003 Pro, and other stuff loaded as a guest.  My count for actually starting up XP in VMware is like twice in the last month.  I got a visio diagram which needed converting to another format so other Linux users could see it and I edited a rather detailed document in Word.  All other times, I can do OpenOffice and share those documents with my co workers.

Then there is the self-proclaimed laziness factor.  With Debian GNU/Linux I have reached new levels of laziness and sloth.  I run apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade once per day and on my desktop and servers I run cron-apt which does it for me.  I don’t particularly worry about spyware, malware, blameware, windows registry strangeness, anti-virus things, cleaners, vacuumers, and other strange and wacky things a computer that keeps a “registry” needs.  Instead, I seem to get along with no registry just running Debian. I could probably use an rpm-based distribution; but that seems painful too and it may require some actual work.  I don’t think I could actually run Fedora Core 5 for any length of time.  It frustrates me with its slow yum thing and the huge downloads of patches and upgrades that seem to take forever; although at times Debian also does this with the larger packages like Openoffice.org.

Anyways, sometimes the temptation strikes me to use XP more for editing and creating documents; but truth is I don’t need to.  Those zany moments pass and I am again feeling lucky and happy with my choice of overall OS.  Thanks to all those great debian developers, documentarians, users, bug reporters, bug fixers, and the overall community that is larger than the sum of its parts.  Its fun to be a part of it and use it.

In Japan for a Week

July 8, 2006 in Current Events, News | No comments

Just got back from some business travels and meetings in Tokyo. It had been a number of years since I was last there.  Went out for some great meals with a work colleague and old friend, did the trip to the “electronics zone” and also wandered through the Roppongi district. Our hotel was right by the Roppongi.  The restaurants were great but expensive.  We went to one called Compatchi I believe is the name.  That one is truly memorable and was in one of the Kill Bill scenes I have been told.

One of the days we had lunch at this placed called Pepper Lunch in Akihabara and ran into some GI’s from the same base I had been stationed at so many years before. 

I am not a big photo taker so I have no photostream on Flicked Out to show people.  In fact, I am not a firm believer in Flickr so I don’t even have a membership there.  I do have my internal memories; but those are only privately viewable.