Mikes Thoughts

This weekend was a quiet one for me. At work on Friday, I had reached the end of the tether running Windows. XP Professional decided it was unhappy and I had been unhappy for awhile being away from “The Linux”. I had gotten more that way of late with moving to a position of openly evangelizing Linux solutions. I should be eating the dog food. So, instead of merely buying another laptop drive, I installed the Brown Distribution over the XP drive. Its always a liberating feeling when I make a basic change. I just feel more real, more in control, more “there” with Linux. its a better thing. Now I’ll enjoy this until I see the new Ubuntu come out and then I’ll consider whether I update or not. Truth be told, things are working very well for me now. Since the company uses Exchange, I just use OWA for calendaring only and use Thunderbird for email.

My phone, a Motorola Q9 global, still does what I want. Its the hub of my own collaboration approaches and lets me keep updated with email, calendaring, tasks and I don’t interface all that much with exchange.

I do have a infrequent need to access specific programs like Visio so I have a native Server 2008 box all pimped out looking like Vista for those rare times.

You can live in a Windows-centric world and use other tools. Its not hard to get there.

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.

Its been over a week since a blogpost. Things at work have been busier and I’ve been re-assigned to new responsibilities which carry requirements for me to take active ownership of a number of priority projects on the Linux side. That’s a good thing since I enjoy that work immensely. I did notice the time that I have not written a blogpost. Bad me…

Time passages have been going on of late and I’ve had to build new servers at work for knowledge management, collaboration/wiki, and mailing lists. It all takes a bite out of time. I do have some time reserved for “play” and I will be learning iSCSI this next week to bring on dedicated storage via that protocol to my ESXi box. Its more about learning than needing.

I just noticed that now its been about 5 months or so since I left Visa Information Products and one of the most enjoyable jobs I ever had. A person at the defunked Levanta once told me I would never had a job with a big company with my work attitude. Neener. But I left it and now things are even better. I do miss Scott and Mani and I miss the times we spent working on product things, change management, etc. Visa was a great job but when it came time to turn the corner they simply could not equal where I’m at now. Celestix is just better in so many diverse areas. I wrote my own new job description and then the company management agreed. What a refreshing turn. I was able to name what i wanted to do.

I’ll definitely try to blog more often. I’ve had some pretty basic feelings about the whole anthropology thing. I seem to go through “spikes” of emotion over it. I guess I will never let it go all the way. Dammit. Baggage has its tentacles on me. Archeology was just so much more and different than anything I have ever done. I guess I do miss it.

Anyways, I am planning another trip back to Singapore and India and this time, I’m gonna get elsewhere. I want to get to HongKong for 2 days and then a day or so in Shanghai. We’ll see when it happens…

When VMware announced that ESXi would be downloadable for free, I knew that I’d be able to find a good source to do a so-called unsupported install onto a whitebox. Its tricky though. The installer just will not see any ole network interface card or hard disk drives. I’ll skip all the failures and get on with what I did to make things work on a lowly home whitebox. It is lowly compared to what we used to run ESX on at Visa; but still its a decent system. Here are the specs and data on the system:

1. ECS GeForce 6100SM-M2 Socket AM2 Motherboard (RETAIL) GeForce6100SM-M2 (V1.0A)
2. Socket AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6100 Chipset
3. NVIDIA nForce 405 Chipset
4. SATA RAID 0/1
5. NVIDIA GeForce 6100 Video Onboard

My particular system has 4g of memory but I could go farther with it as it all the way up to 16gb of memory and it has a dual core AMD64 6000+ CPU in it.

Note that most of the list above will not work with ESXi. Well, the memory and CPU will and perhaps that’s the most important. Here is what I had to add to make it work though:

• Promise SATA300 TX4
• 2 x 500gb Seagate SATA 3.0 Drives
• 1 crummy but reliable E100 Network card

So I assembled all this into the system, booted the ESXi installer ISO image and off it went. It found the Promise SATA controller, gave me a choice of drives to install to. The install went fine but of course the Marvel Yukon gig ethernet card is not found. Hence, the E100 card above that I have a few of. When done, I got the warning from the ESXi install that I had no “persistent memory”. So I configured two disks worth of 900gb of usable storage space.Promise SATA300 TX4. The other nice thing about this promise controller is that I still have two more SATA ports left with nothing on them and plenty of space in the case I chose.

So what to do with this you may ask? Well, its a home experiment and I already had the system. Just had to add the Promise controller which cost about $70.00. Its baremetal so things are different than VMWare Server at a few levels. Its faster, cleaner, and more dedicated which is fine for me. it also has a very constrained HCL that VMWare openly promotes; but as you can see it is possible to do ESXi on a comfortable; yet minimal system at home.

The next step is to run the VMware converter which talks to ESXi directly and “port” a few VMWare workstation images I have to the server. I could also just do installs of new guests if I wanted; but I have a few different ones.

If you decide to go play in the fields of ESXi, read the vm-help website for tips and tricks to get you through the experience. You too can have a whitebox running a baremetal hypervisor!

Final Steps

Why you may ask would I do this? Mess around with temporal and spatial things like virtualization. This leads me to my last area. My position has changed dramatically at the company. I am know working as a product evangelist and technologist/product manager for our evolving and emerging solutions which includes our Linux portfolio. I am expected to participate in wide-ranging technology discussions with partners, assess new technologies (like virtualization) and then promote their use in the company ecology. I’m very excited about this move because I think I’m good at this. I’ve been around Linux for about 12 years now in a few settings. I’ve managed deployments, built custom distributions, managed large PS engagements. I also feel that I understand its place and what it offers as a compelling alternative in a few settings to more standardized solutions. Call me a disruptive solutions specialist if you will

Things never stay the same and when they change, they really change. Change is good and I believe our minds and spirits and bodies thrive with it. If we just stay the status quo, we never feel the challenge.

I spent today with family and did a bbq tritip, turkey breast, some special potatoes that I like cooking, and cauliflower. If you have never bbq’ed with Newman’s Italian Dressing as a marinade; you are missing out. Its simply great on veggies, fowl, and other stuff like spuds. But I also thought and sat and hoped. I’m now waiting for a evening work call at 10pm tonite because its some other time in India and its what we do

I’ve given a great deal of thought lately to my current state of affairs; what I enjoy doing; what I miss; what I have. Its like blowing a balloon up and then knowingly letitng it whisper out a bit. Its not full; but if you did not know that I left air out; it would not be obvious. That’s the way “it is”. I’m very content; very happy; but I feel that somewhere some air was left out.

I go to work, come home, perhaps write a bloggable. Or not. More often, I don’t write a bloggable these days during the weekdays. Too many other things to sit and hope and think on. Why is it we reachable venerable ages and we seem to live vicariously I wonder? Why cannot we go out and challenge some life direct? March into our life actively and not always just watch and wait.

But the BBQ made up for it all the way. The tritip was excellent, the turket fair. The potatoes ruled. My daughter, the lovely little irritant in my evenings always tells me how much she loves these cookeries. Thanks daughter of mine. You may irritate me at times; but I do love you.

I miss the other things though. The mornings staring at a breathless desert sky. The days with sweat streaming down and feeling damned alive. The days with a trowel and a tape measure. Now its VMWare and Hyper-V.

At least its all fun and my company insists on participating and is giving me brand new work on the Linux appliance frontier. I’m about to morph into something else. Perhaps a platform product manager of sorts. I like it. I like what we do with Linux. I feel kinda lost with its desktop aspirations; but on servers I love it.

So, I’ll post a bloggable tomorrow maybe when the news come down officially. Or perhaps not… There is no trowel in my hands. Its in my mind now and it carves effortlessly through paths of air and history. Fitting, wondrous, and simple.

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 considering a few of Cormac’s books of late. I had wanted to see the movie adaptation of No Country for Old Men but never did. I read the trilogy All the Pretty Horses and now I note that The Road is coming out as a movie.

This brought me to looking at the authors I really enjoy and the ones that may have let me see a world that was brutal, sensual, or stripped of its ecological niceties. Cormac writes in this brutal way that makes you pay attention. It strips away all the pretty and nice things and lets you see a world perhaps in the West that has terrible truth in it. I hated and loved Pretty Horses for that reason. It upset me, bothered me, made me want more.

The second guy that always got me was Edward Abbey. Mr. Abbey always struck me with his vision questing and desires to see a world for what it was. Desert Solitaire was perhaps the one book I read that made me love the desert even more than growing up in it, practicing archeology in it, seeing its myriad hues.

I remember also reading a passage from a mysterious author named Ambrose Bierce that simply disappeared into the west. Once asked what he thought about a book he was reviewing, he remarked that there were too many pages between the covers. As the venerable wikipedia notes in the link, Bierce simply disappeared. I watched a Gregory Peck movie onced called Old Gringo that tried to capture that moment. Krakauer’s Into the Wild remains the most disturbing vision quest movie though for me. It still haunts steps I take.

Why, I wonder. Because we all take steps like a wandering Alexander SuperTramp. Because we all know that we each have journeyed forth on perilous reaches. Some like Bierce and Christopher did not come back and their mark was larger than their reach.

I wanted to tie a blogpost together with string and twine and wire that made people see that we can read material that challenges, perhaps threatens, even disgusts us at times. Because life is that way. Its not all Winnie the Pooh and 100 acre woods and Piglets that get hungry and afraid. Its terrible lonely death in obscure border towns. They are Cormac’s rules and life either goes on or not.

Most often it does, but some of us are not there for the return trip.

Flesh is willing; but I notice a disturbing trend in blog posts these days. I am going through the week kinda busy and only doing my posts weekends. That’s not really good for me. Its funny tonite though. I’m sitting in a Vagabond Inn Hotel in Sacramento over by the California State Fair and have found a hotel at a level that I would never book. Light switches that don’t work. A desk with no power outlet. Uncomfortable beds and furniture that sags. Perhaps as my wife says I am spoiled by nicer class hotels like Marriott or Hyatt’s. I do like business class hotels with business comfort and roomy room service. I like international hotels in Singapore with almost instantaneous service. This place is creepy. We’re only here for a night though and on a mission of mercy.

Now I’m sitting at the bathroom door; laptop in lap. Beer iced and drinkable and thinking. I watched the sun do its retirement tonite and I remembered so many days in the field as an archeologist watching it. Days in the Mojave; afternoons in the Sequioa. Evenings in the Sierra. Wonderment in the Great Basin. What became of those years? Simply memories that I cull up when the mood strikes. I miss them though. I miss the best part of anthropology which was the cowboy science and the looking at incomplete things and forming pictures. Truly archeology is a record of trash and dumps and converting it all to behavior. I’ve always felt that those prehistoric cave painters were the ancestors of the blogger today. They reached to a pinnacle of expression and found a cave wall. It became their canvas and paradigm and speech network. They marked their world in uncertain hues.

I traveled that world, saw the record, and ate home-cooked rattlesnake chili many times. Drank way too much beer and considered the wonder of a sunset with a bunch of people that fell silent at the same time. Was there some bond or boundary that no one crossed those days? Yes. There was. I have never seen the same boundary and bond today. Computer technologists don’t possess the same joy, frustration, and love. Because archeology reaches to a depth of the spirit and rewards.

I’ll hoist my beer to all those I knew, that I dug with, that broke bread with me. I’m still here guys. I’m sitting in a bathroom blogging.

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.

Its the weekend so perhaps its blog-time. Seems that I only write these days on the weekends. I started writing some stuff last night about a slashdot story on Linux and where it would be in 3 years; but I stopped. I’ve been using Linux one way or another for about 10 years now. At home, work, selling it, preselling it, managing it, deploying it. The last year or so I’ve moved off center from it. I worked at Visa and only touched Linux things and now I’m more involved at a few levels since I seem to be moving to a place where I’ll be some kind of Product Manager for our Linux line of appliances. That’s to be defined still I guess. But after reading the comments and the article, I’m unsure where the whole thing is going and perhaps that’s part of the mystique and why the desktop environments replicate but really don’t innovate. I cannot find where Linux will be and my questions are:

• Will Linux on the desktop ever truly arrive for the masses? People point at Dell selling Linux as though this is the first time it happened. Here’s a bit of news for ya. In 2001, Dell was packaging 4 different forms of Linux on desktop machines and laptops. Linuxcare Labs certified that hardware for Dell back then and I managed the technical relationship with Dell back then.
• Will KDE and Gnome ever see it will be better to come together? Perhaps there is one integrating platform between the two camps. We also need to evolve applications in general. Applications are organisms. They require feeding and watering and they need to take a dump every so often. Dumps mean learning for developers I think.

I went to the show at Moscone this year. We need something else and I suggest that its SCALE in Los Angeles. Linuxworld has lost whatever vision and participation it once had. Drop the feeble attempts guys. You’ve lost the thread of what the show is. Somehow its some next generation data center show. You’ve lost the consciousness and evolution of things. The show is not a show-case of Linux and it does not capture a meeting place between Linux and users (corporate, personal, company). its some bastardization of open source and show with a dash of feeble representation by dwindling attendees and exhibitors.

For me personally, I love Linux and what it is and does. I’ve just moved beyond using it on the desktop and have gone backwards unfortunately. Perhaps this habilis has gotten lazy and wants something simple. The idea for me is the tool. The tool must deliver and give function. If I have to run one thing to launch another thing which in turn is virtual and I do that to take care of default tools, I have questions. Like Why. Why am I doing things this way and am I doing the best job at tool using?