February 2008

I just got back from SCALE 6X and enjoyed myself immensely.  I have to admit to not going to primarily attend papers or even to see the exposition hall.  I’ve reached the point where I enjoy going just to go.  I did hear that they move the show from the Westin Hotel next year and I hope they find a way to not do that.  Truth be told, I truly love that hotel and its service, staff, and location and the show would not be the same if the attendees could not mingle after and not have to travel “miles before they sleep”.  I told Ilan that I really wanted to see them figure out how to keep the show there. 

So what did I enjoy about the show this year?

I enjoyed the people and cameraderie there, the mix of the big and small.  I rubbed elbows with community types and a few people that were fun from Promise Technologies.  I also stopped by IBM’s booth and it was refreshing to see them in an element where talk flowed, ideas bounced, and people felt at ease and comfortable.  I liked the way the show is laid out and the scheduling of the talks.  I went to about 4 papers this year.  Not a record or even enough perhaps; but I enjoyed my time there.  Ed and Dave were there as well and I got to see Pat.

So what do I hope happens next?

I hope they figure out the logistics and administrivia of the show.  My fear and its bounded by optimism because of the organizers is that the show is changing.  Its morphing, becoming something else.  It will grow because people will want to attend something besides the IDG circus in August in SF.  I’ll still go to LWE because I like the little lunch party and this year its going to be a bigger thing with me moving toward a Linuxcare reunion and inviting a few friends from the current incarnation.    So, I hope Ilan and Gareth can figure things out, learn how to scale gracefully (bad pun?), and also reach a point where they can see how to stay at the Westin.  I’d still gladly attend but the social part of things would seem less.

What was funny or otherwise memorable…  A list of sorts:

1. Levanta was there.  That was kinda interesting.
2. Rockbox was there!!  Yes!  I like that software.
3. All the little guys that do things, promote software and choice.  That was the other group that was fun to rub elbows with.
4. The interesting hardware vendors with storage arrays, SANs, NAS, and other initials I don’t remember.

It was all good and thanks to everyone that went for making it SCALE 6x the level of fun and enjoyment than its been before.

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I have this goal to learn how to make things work in Linux-land.  I assign myself a “project” and then go off and read about it, learn it, and try to solve it.  Last night and today, I set two goals for myself to solve and not ask for help from some people I know that would be willing to help.  Here they are:

Set up a secure IMAP server under my firewall and not reachable from the outside unless I VPN or use Sqirrelmail to get there.  I chose to use Dovecot which is pretty easy all in all.  On Ubuntu its as easy as an “apt-get install”.  I wanted to write a onger SSL certificate for it so I processed one from an old bookmark I have which I still go back to every so often for these things.  The IMAP server should offer SSL logins.

Set up a secure Postfix Mail server using SASL and TLS.  Now this one got a bit more interesting.  I followed this page (or so I thought).  But there are a number of steps in there which you have to carefully grep and get correct.  If you don’t you stand the chance of running into Thunderbird complaining that the SMTP server does not offer STARTTLS in its EHLO.  Not  a nice thing.  But when I telnet there, it seems to.  So, if you follow this howto, be sure to follow it step by step.  Create all the certs it says.  Copy them just like it says.  Edit the /etc/defaults/saslauthd file and don’t leave anything out.  My big mistake was to not copy things the way it said there and I also got the location wrong for some of the certs.  If you are not offered up a SSL cert when you first try to send email after doing the steps, something is bad.  Stop and recreate the wheel.  I had to do this a few times.  If you follow the howto, you get there.  That’s a good thing to say about a howto, BTW.

But why, you ask, why would I want all of this setup if no one can reach it?  Well, that’s a habilis answer friends.  Its because I can.  Its a challenge and I like making it work.  I will never want to reach the server unless I VPN or use the webmal interface or ssh and use mutt.

Yahoo Mail — The extreme suckage factor

I’m sorry to vent on Yahoo!’s parade.  But their mail program, how they manage spam, how it records new mail.  It all is kind of broken or at least badly bent.  I have been getting more spamoli the last weeks then ever before.  In one day I got over 25 spamoli and for months before, I never got a single one.  Someone borked something.  So being a good netizen, I wrote a helpful email to their Help desk. 

Know what?  Their help desk is borked too.  I get a form letter back telling me about the bulk mail folder.  I asked not about that folder because I could care less about that folder.  I asked why.  What has happened or what has changed to make Yahoo mail be so bad?  It also seems overwhelmed with the sheer number of users sometimes and it can never get the number of email that are new right.

I hate to say this and rain on Art’s parade.  But someone needs to go in there and fix things.  Its borked, man.  So off I went back to Google and Google Apps.  I like the overall feeling of Google Apps and I like the idea its not really done because it gives me some deep down feeling that I too can help fix things I find along the way.

With Yahoo!, things just seem broken and all I get are less than helpful form mail responses perhaps from real live people telling me how bulk mail the trash folder works.  Gimme break. So I broke.  And I’m gone.  They don’t do enough to earn my Mail+ and the changes to the Mail app are not even close.  Its like covering a cow dung with pretty electric lights.  You know underneath it still smells but its pretty on the outside.

SCALE-ness

Yes.  The time has come folks.  I took tomorrow off from work and I’m heading down to Los Angeles in the morning to do SCALE time.  This show has become the one for me to go revel in the Linux-ness.  And friends are going there too like Ed and DK and others.  I may write a blog of the day report on what I do and the fun I have there.  If you are going, look us up.  We’ll be

At a personal level to sum it all up; I’ve reached 185 pounds or so.  That means I have lost 90 pounds.  I’m gonna slip inbetween the tiles on the floor here pretty soon

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I recently decided to stress test my Microsoft Technet+ subscription a bit and download a few things to toss at my newest system.  I had started with another rather ordinary install of Ubuntu 7.10 AMD64 on it and now I know how to get everything I want to work without installing 32bit stuff.  Its a easy transition actually and the things I want to work like watching movie trailers on Yahoo or Apple just works.  So I did a XP 64 install and found out that Technet had given me XP 64bit 2003 version.  Somehow this is slightly different and a few things would not install.  An interesting lack was I could not see the network card or sound card until I figured out how to install the Nvidia enumerator which is part of a unknown PCI device in the Hardware Mangler in XP.  Once having done that, I could move on to actually making the build network and do sound. Silly me.  Now why would i want a system that I play on to do those things?  On Linux, it all just works and there is not much wonking around.  On XP it does not. On Vista 64bit these systems product elegant and wonderful blue screens when the ASUS Optical drive is plugged in.  Unplug it and it all works. Great. Thanks!  Give me a system from which I cannot install any of my CD based Windows stuff until I get yet another package installed.  This led me to a rather interesting set of virtual CD tools like Daemon Tools which is pretty cool at one level and kinda frustrating at another.  The coolness level is virtualizing a CD drive and being able to make an ISO image look like one.  I’m curious though.  It seems if I just mounted a ISO image on Linux in loop back mode and shared that directory using samba it would be the same or almost?  Anyways, any innovation that seems to make Windows greater has probably been around in other OS’es for some bit of time.  No proof of this; but I always wonder why even the most primitive of consoles in Linux has the ability to do virtual TTYs and Windows in all its GUI-ability requires an additional tool.  Another one is one we bemoan at work on occasion.  We can simply SSH to Linux boxes, do things, make changes.  On Windows, we’re forced to rDesktop.  Seems kinda overkill to me.

Anyways, I managed to get it all working but then I looked at the work and hated it.  There is something ugly about having that desktop running all the time and not being able to run “apt-get” to make it do something more :).  So I pulled the disk drive and put back in my Ubuntu drive.  Hell, I can run VMware server full-screen in one pager window at all times if I want or need my XP experience.

I’m sure there must be other tools that are the same.  One that comes to mind is screen.  I showed this to a Windows friend and his only reply was “so?”.  Well, I guess its a difference in uses and the habilis mentality.  I am habilis and I use but I also want some mastery.  I don’t want the experience to be all one way and that one way points north to Washington state.  Give me a tapestry of many colors from which to paint my needs and desires.  Happiness swells in my head and heart then.

Tinkering with XP is hard.  It just does not really want to be tinkered with.  Things like:

1. changing a theme or skin. 
2. adding a package using a tool that is not directly web-based (i.e., browser)
3. figuring out how to make XP do virtual desktops
4. making icons and fonts change sizes without rebooting

These are all tinkering type things and are very easy in Linux.  We all really want to take over after we install a OS and own it; make it do things or look a certain way.  Way back when, I felt really locked down with Windows 2000.  It seemed I had this one look and that was it.  Then I saw Linux on Art’s old GAP system.  Man!  It was like a blinding burst of illuminating light and… choice.

I’ll take real choice everytime to fulfill the habilis in me.

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