Current Events

Well, here it is Friday night. I’m preparing for a trip in a week or so to India and Singapore for 2 weeks. Got some priority projects to get good statuses on. The new work keeps me going most days and evenings. I noticed I had not posted anything here in some days so its time to scratch and sniff again and find some virtual travel spots. Excuse the rather lame wandering here; but its what I’m made of.

Anomie’s Journey

Anomie is a sociological term from back when. I like its meaning overall. It bridges a few gaps. I always felt that sociologists were kinda funny kids on the block back when I did anthropology. We used to joke that they were “almost enlightened”. But psychologists were unworthy. I still feel that way for some reason. Perhaps because they always felt that they had some magic answers and they only did the observation for an hour a week. After all, anthropologists study behaviors for years and often admit to still not knowing nearly enough. This is human and cultural behavior folks. How can you sum up another culture in an hour a week?

Sincerely Moving Away from Center

I find myself these days getting some kind of wanderlust. I drift off sometimes to find a reality that I once had. Advancing years? I still feel in command of my senses (for the most part). No, I think its some mental wanderlust. I still connect to Alexander Supertramp and still see that magical bus and wonder at his life and places. Darn that Sean Penn anyways. He had to do that movie. He left me scarred.

Now I am moving off the center beam. I remember when I went into my wild. For me, it was those days of wandering deserts, mountains, hills. I could have stayed there for those years and more. Anthropology was such a mistress folks. Demanding, sometimes demented; but always very possessive and needing more.

And I miss it sometimes very much and other times even more. But I miss it in a way of not wanting to go back. I like what I have now; in fact would say I love it. But its the secret life of my own conscience that drags me around its hurricane force winds.

Linux on the Corners of the World

Back to my travel to Chennai. I like India folks. I told a colleague that India and Linux are a lot alike. Both seem unfinished, promising, rich, and tapestried. They both have potential and like most human conditions some flaws. Software is never finished and my feeling about India is its not finished either. And that’s a wondrous thing. Its mold is still be shaped and I think the people know it. So off I go soon.

Wish me well and safe travels. I wonder why Dave and his Offbeat Guides guys won’t invite me. I’m a good traveler guys. I like adventure. Gimme a try. I want to be a Offbeat travel guy. I’m going to Singapore and India soon. I have 3 days of a weekend to go poke around in dusty corners.

My friend Jeremy left a comment on an earlier post I made regarding  Virtualization Software. I had just downloaded VMware Workstation 6.5 for Linux and thought the Unity Mode sounded like something I could really use. I really don’t use Windows all that often these days but Visio is one thing I still need. Since we use Exchange 2007 for mail, I just use Thunderbird and every so often OWA for calendaring and contact stuff. I also have a Motorola Q9 which acts as my central calendaring piece.

But Jeremy mentioned in the comment that I should give VirtualBox a try. So I did. In all fairness, I have VirtualBox with XP SP3 and VMware 2.5 Player with Server 2003. In my completely unofficial test; VirtualBox beats the pants off VMware Player. Both have a seamless or unity mode feature; but VirtualBox seems to actually want to run on my Thinkpad T43 with 1.5g of memory while VMware Player seems to struggle.

I think VMware has tried to do too much with too much bloat. it just feels all syrupy slow and loaded with a unity mode which really makes it not useful. My advice, VMware, is to lose the menu thing on top which lets you find menus or whatever. Instead try the lower in fuel VirtualBox method and just let us launch from the Windows Taskbar. Secondly, take a look at the memory use here.

All that being said, I’m still a VMWare Server and ESXi afficianado. Server must be the 1.0.x release though. The 2.0 server seems awkward and all webified. ESXi just rocks but Linux desktoppers need a VI client.

I’d say for lightweight desktop virtualization, it does not get much better than VirtualBox.

I enjoyed all the movies like Sundance and the Sting; but mostly I enjoyed the style and essence of the life of the man. One saving grace is that we have a body of work of his that spanned 50 years give or take which gives us a view of both the legend and the man. He rarely did interviews and seemed uncomfortable in public; but he made up for all that with the charisma and grace of his persona. I remember others that left us because of the same disease like Yul Brynner. Yul knew later that smoking was the culprit and did ads stating the same.

Good bye, Paul. I’ll remember you always and miss your style and grace.

One of my tasks at work these days is to build a knowledge management solution for the company. We have Redmine in place which I favor; but if you want to manage knowledge, you have to be sensitive to its requirements and dissemination. Otherwise, the very people that would normally use a tool will swear off and not get involved. The trick is to balance the tools and make something that makes folks happy. So I started down the path of building an internal collaboration server. I settled on three wiki engines for people to look at which are Twiki, Mediawiki, and PMWiki

All of them offer a set of constructs and use which are similar; but Twiki seems to bill itself as a enterprise collaboration tool. Mediawiki is nothing short of amazing as it powers the Wikipedia and PMwiki is simply simple. My first test was installing and setup. Installing Twiki seems rather daunting at times and you can mess up the whole thing easily with a twiki.conf which is not written correctly. Mediawiki and Pmwiki install easily. Use is not much different that I can see. The markup language is all the same. Adoption is another area. Who will adopt a particular media and then publish on it? And why? It seems we all chose Twiki and now we are off and running on it. I do prefer simpler tools like PMwiki; but I can use Twiki.

Adoption Grids

Wiki’s are great tools to bring folks together, build networks that bind thoughts, and also allow people to refine ideas. They also need to be used. Simply put a wiki requires “we”. Without a “we”, there is no I on a wiki. Thoughts, expressions, verbal jousting. Its all grist for the wiki mill.

I found this project to be very satisfying in that i got to listen to my fellow product manager, the VP of our group, the CEO. I also happen to work for those guys so its easier. But I also wanted to see how the use would be. Would Sales people use the tool? We want Sales guys to reach the site, understand it, use it. We’ll see if the adoption grid stretches to encompass sales.

Sometimes when I’m commuting somewhere here; I look at the hills around Fremont and Newark here in the SF Bay area. The Hayward hills remind me of hills I used to clamber over back in the way gone days. When the sun rises over those hills, I sometimes remember being there. I remember when the destination was never as important as the travel and when the companions were cherished but yet we all wanted solitude. Anthropology while its the study of the vastness of human behavior; archeologists seem to need the solitary nature of person versus excavation unit.

I remember digging out on Edwards AFB in SOCAL and the wind was howling at 45mph and the dust swirled around the unit we were digging. Mark and I would stand up and periodically survey the unit and the wind and dust swirling never amounted to as much as us doing science. As one archeologist remarked at some time; “archeology is the mind wielding a trowel”.

In those other hills, I traveled over terrain I sometimes wondered if another had ever seen. The country was wild and open and I was never sure that another human being had walked the same trail. The other archeologist, sometimes my wife, was 30 meters to my right or left. There on the far side was RWR. He seemed introverted and focused inward. We never talked that much. Until…

Until we went to the Pizza joint or the hotel. One of the more humorous stories took place down in Mojave. We had been out all day long and were dirty and dingy. Tired and filthy. Dirt clinged to every place you wished it would not. We tramped into a hotel and the front desk clerk almost sniffed at us. He gave us the look that we were transients, homeless waifs and we could never spend the night at his place. RWR produced a Corporate AMEX card (no preset spending limit) and put rooms, food, massive orders of beer on the rooms. The clerk just watched us walk away. We were laughing and pointing at him. But we all went to separate rooms.

What was it about that career and life? What was so special that makes me wander the history of my own life gathering its artifacts? It was more than it was. It always was more and the archeologist were more. Simply put, archeologists are bigger than life. Bright minds, dirty trowels, clothes clinging with dirt. But the talk, friends.

The talk was like blogging all the time. Science came out as though we were constipated and we had to remove it using some philosophical diueretic. it was painful because it was so hard; but it felt so good. We gathered and talked. Once a year we produced scholarly papers.

All of this compressed in one drive after a summer’s over BBQ party for my son. I have so much compressed in archives, readers. This blog serves the same need I guess.

Perhaps the quality of this thing has gone down. I don’t blog so much about Linux; yet these days at work Linux is very much in my sights. I’ll blog more about that later. Things are still evolving there too.

I’ve been playing around with two cool virtualization technologies. One is on my almost brand spanking new Windows Server 2008 box. This box is a AMD64 dual core 6000+ with 6g of memory. It runs most stuff very robustly and VMware Server and/or Hyper-V are no exception. Unfortunately, on Ubuntu 7.10 AMD64 I can no longer seem to get the Console Monitor to work no matter what I try; so I moved things off that box. Now I have VMware Workstation installed on a Server 2003 box and my 2008 Workstation (uhm Server). Truth be told, Server 2008 is an excellent workstation OS. It flat outflies Vista 64 which I have one of as well. Now I just use the Vista box to serve up my new HP printer software.

I found a few interesting newbie things with Hyper-V which took me a bit to deal with. Ubuntu 7.10 no matter what just won’t install and its been reported a few times. I installed Ubuntu 8.04 server and it works fine but you have to assign a legacy network card and you also have to “associate the real card” with the virtual card or at least I did to make networking work. Then you can just reboot the VM and networking/dhcp comes right up. Hyper-V is pretty cool though once you learn its little tricks and traps. I can see why VMware is threatened. It does some stuff and I’m just starting. Bundling it with an Operating System is smart. Damned smart Microsoft. Good one! That makes VMWare have to give things away like ESXi.

On to VMware Server. As I noted, something is just wrong with Server on Ubuntu 7.10 and I don’t know what. Server Console won’t work but I can RDP and ssh to the guests. What’s up with that? VMware Server seems to be a back step since it does all kinds of weird stuff with web and console. Forget about it!

I could probably just stabilize on Hyper-V but I have been a VMWare customer for years and I want it to work. VMware Workstation is still plenty nice but I think VirtualBox threatens it with its transparent or seamless modes for guest applications. I have not tried VirtualBox on Ubuntu yet; but I may do that at work. Truth is, it appears that VirtualBox is a great personal virtualization thing but I cannot serve up images. Since I am involved with building out a support lab that is all virtual for work; I need to serve up the guests.

I also wonder what’s next for VMWare? They seem to be giving away stuff now and Hyper-V is plenty cool and its something for VMware to worry over. Gnaw that bone VMWare guys. You need some competition! It gives the rest of us new toys and tools to test out.

I ended up moving some stuff around here and took a database backup which was missing this blogpost. Scribefire kept it in the editing window so I am reposting it. The thoughts still run true on the whole Linuxworld Expo experience…

I visited Linuxworld Expo for the day yesterday. It was yet again different and a few folks commented on the overall size reduction of the exhibition floor. Gone were Novell, no Redhat (again), no Sun, no groups of others. At this point it could move back to San Jose for size reasons much like it moved out of San Jose back in 2001 or so for size reasons.

The show is sad and it seems to be like an anxious shadow casting about furtively for its master image. It just don’t know what it wants to be. Am I data center show focusing on Linux or a Linux show focusing on data center? There was a huge trailer with the next generation data center in it but there were not enough visitors to keep the show floor busy.

At the other end of the spectrum, thanks to the folks at SCALE for making 7x a Westin LAX Hotel event again! The accomodations, staff, location make the Westin a great conference location. I will be attending next February 20-22 for sure! The difference is the difference. SCALE is enjoyable, rewarding, and fun. There is the mix of big enterprise and individual contributor there. I like the spread of papers that one can listen to and enjoying a beverage at the hotel of the event each evening.

I’ll probably drop to one Linux show each year now and it won’t be LWE in SF. I cannot afford OSCON. SCALE remains my show of choice especially after seeing this last Linuxworld. I commented to Doc that it was like someone washed the show in very hot water and it shrunk.

So true; so sadly true.

Its getting to be that time of the year again. People are booking rooms in San Francisco, packing up suitcases, perhaps traveling at the behest of their company. They’re seeking out news of the Penguin in the wonnerful city by the Bay. They may travel long or short distance and if they’re exhibitors their feet will ache, time may crawl by, and other booths start looking interesting.

I’ve done my fair share of booth duties and doing a trade show is always interesting. You meet people that want to know what you do or just want to know what you are giving away. I think the doodads used to be better and more fun. I remember all kinds of interesting little things and big. When I worked at Linuxcare we gave away cars! And bug suckers. Big and small. Linuxcare knew how to package up show things. Perhaps the strangest and best was the “poster”. This was the so-called Simply Supported Poster with the “palm girl” holding a Redhat box on it. I remember handing them out to everyone that morning in North Carolina and then we got the cease and desist request. Redhat was not happy. And it was their show.

But it was too late. Everyone had seen it and wanted it. I handed out copies to friends at Suse and a few guys I knew in the support pit at Redhat.

The shows have paled in some regards and IDG seems to be able to do a massively mediocre job at promoting something as fun as Linux. Lets be clear and certain here. Linux is fun. Its fun because its not done yet and the people and companies and pundits that go know its not done. Trade shows must be unfinished too to gain acceptance. You cannot hustle off the .orgs to some other place, city, or floor. Big mistake and IDG gets another bad mark.

Yet still I will go. Why? Well this year I am meeting someone for a business meeting. I’m a SE Manager but I touch many things at Celestix. I get to play with lots of things in the course of a day. And I’m going to meet up with some friends, see other friends, hopefully see the oldtimers from those other halycon days.

Then we’ll wander for lunch and maybe a beer at the Thirsty Bear. That’s just what ya do. So if you are at the show, I’m there with ya. I show up for only a day this year on Wednesday. It will be fun and mediocre. But that’s the declining nature of the whole thing. Linux is changing and since its not done; no one knows what it will change into. I have some questions around evolution of it all. I’m unsure what it all means any longer and perhaps no one really knows and they’re along for the ride as well. That’s okay. It all works for me. I use it the way I want to use it and it works for me.

What’s the best about traveling? Some would say getting home. It was a 12 hour plane ride where I slept, ate, read most of the time. I managed to sleep for periods up to 3 hours each time which was a joyous reprieve from the monotony of the long ride home.

Jetlag is real though. I’m kinda suffering through it today with being tired but still waking up really early this AM. Back to work and perhaps some normalcy tomorrow but something tells me that tomorrow is going to be exciting because of some of the email threads. I’m up for it! The trip was really good though and a lot of things settled out for my work including building out an entire SE organization fundamental for international operations. I’m excited about that.

Anyways, I’m home and I have the rooms, the network connection, the computers. I found out my combo printer, scanner, fax machine died while gone so I ordered a new one from the “egg”. I got another HP because they just seem the best these days.

I’m at the last stop in my tour of company bastions of appliance freedom. Chennai, India is the home of our Linux-based team which I have looked forward to linking up with since I’m just a Linux guy at heart. And it was good today. Meetings, discussion, and formative statements all made me feel that we are on the right path. I also like Chennai quite a bit. Its this mix of culture, religion, poverty, technology. Perhaps it stirs the anthropologist in me too many ways; but its this fabulous unfinished picture of life with the colors and shades still being added. I want to come back for longer actually and learn more about this city once called Madras.

After meetings tomorrow, I’m back to Singapore for a night and then on to home on a long airplane flight. It will be good to get home but I already am planning a trip to the UK and back to Chennai. There are things which need to get done that belong to me. Its a good feeling that I still have so much left to contribute. I feel in the right place, right time. Now I need to deliver and execute. I’ve always felt I could do that reasonably well. Except perhaps at Levanta. But Levanta had its own issues far and away from my humble abilities. They did not know what they had and mis-managed the rest of it. Blech…

I’m going to Linuxworld Expo in SF for one day. If you go on Wednesday, see ya there. Look for me. I’ll be wearing an older debian shirt or something and my beard has touches of grey. Age moves along at its pace.

Catch you all tomorrow Chennai time!