I just look forward to the album from United Nations, the collaboration project between Geoff Rickly (lead singer of Thursday) and Daryl Palumbo (lead singer of Glassjaw, among other bands). Then my life will be complete.

Apparently, my life will be complete on September 9th.

I’ve been thinking about this since it happened.

Geoff Rickly, by bill shouldis. Licensed by the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

.

“This is two minutes and twenty seconds of extreme awesome.” -Six

I like to say that I am just a sysadmin for a little bookshop in Seattle.

Some bookshop!

His blog is pretty cool and strongly shows that he’s a really bright computer scientist.

End result?

Epic fail.

So. True.

(Though replace “CIO” with “senior technical management” and “Is” with “Can Be”. While you’re at it, replace “Application Developers” with “System Administrators. Let’s try this again.)

9 Reasons Why System Administrators Think Their Senior Technical Management Can Be Clueless.

I don’t really see any reason not to start charging for plastic bags. Well, maybe I do. It’d be supremely inconvenient for consumers, but for places like super markets where your purpose of going is to buy groceries, it won’t be hard to bring a couple of canvas bags with you.

Precisely. People will adapt to this stimulus. They will change. That’s why high prices of oil are good for exactly one reason: it encourages positive behavioral change toward efficiency.¹

1. Granted, the fact that it may mean less food for some families suck. This is a consequence and a testimony to the power of economics and proper planning, at both the macro- and microeconomic scale.

The redesign of the gallon milk jug, experts say, is an example of the changes likely to play out in the American economy over the next two decades. In an era of soaring global demand and higher costs for energy and materials, virtually every aspect of the economy needs to be re-examined, they say, and many products must be redesigned for greater efficiency.

1. The system is working.
2. I love when things I take for granted are redesigned.
3. I love when things I take for granted are redesigned for efficiency.

Okay, so that quote was actually me summing up the argument.

I agree with his assessment that the iPhone has a great user experience. Everything is pretty sharp. Its components feel like they belong together. Things just flow.

But it is still a closed platform. One where you cannot publish software without Apple’s acceptance. One where usage of the device outside of Apple’s vision is prohibited. One where the power of a single entity has control over the utility of the platform.

This may be good for “user experience” but is horrible for the user. Is this an acceptable compromise?

If the user is limited in the usefulness of a device, knowingly or not, the user loses. There is no reason for Apple to be authoritarian on this matter. Users deserve a choice to do what they would like with their own devices.

Could you imagine what computing would have been like had Microsoft said, “We will give the masses this platform called Windows, but we will control the vertical stack. We will not allow external innovation. We will not allow other people to be creative, unless that creativity is synergistic with our platform strategy. We will control computers ‘top to bottom’.”

This too might have been good for “user experience.” But, this would have been horrible for the user. (We would be forced to use IE. There would be no such thing as Firefox.) This would have been a very bad thing for personal computing in general. And it could have happened. It did not because market forces did not give Microsoft the gift of inventing the hardware.

This is what Apple is doing with the iPhone.

That Apple created its hardware base does not make it any different. This authoritarian control will be a very bad thing for mobile computing.

I’d agree that Android is flawed for various reasons. It’s hard to program for a device that doesn’t exist. And it’s hard to program for multiple types of devices.

This was one of the downfalls of the Windows CE development back in the early 2000s. Multiple processors, multiple screen sizes, and multiple input methods all made it difficult for a programmer to appeal to a wider audience. Standardization is a powerful thing; Apple has de facto standardized its hardware platform, allowing software developers to be able to predict usage patterns.

This is kind of like the rest of the computer industry: A programmer knows, with some exceptions, that the person using his software will have a screen that is wider than it is tall, have buttons to press to input characters, and have a method to move a cursor around on the screen.

This standardization does not mean that the user has to sacrifice user experience. Nor does it mean the user must sacrifice the freedom of choice. Standardization at lower levels is a very powerful force that pushes developers to creativity. Standardization could have occurred at the hardware level and then Apple could have provided an open interface for alternative operating systems and programs. Apple could have invented the physical parts, but leave the bits in memory to be manipulated by the end user as he or she pleases. Apple could have given their operating system and their software as the default choice, but allowed users to chose otherwise.

I sit here typing this post on a Apple MacBook Pro running Linux 2.6.24 in a text editor whose source code I can download and change. Apple created the physical parts but I own the information. Does this use of their hardware design harm Apple or Apple’s brand in any way?

No. It allows them to have another happy customer, while all of the customers who choose the default on their systems being happy as well. This is how it could be on the iPhone.

Give people the choice. Never think that a closed platform is an advantage.

Recently, Jeremy Clarkson began a segment on Top Gear about the new Ferrari Scuderia with, “Do you know what’s wrong with Ferrari at the moment? They’re nerdy. It’s all about the plumbing and the wiring and the computer systems. When I drive a Ferrari, I want it to be all about passion. And excitement.”

Then he drives it. He ended the segment with, “I cannot tell you how happy it makes me feel to be driving a proper Ferrari again.”

A flashy user interface, cohesive user experience, and an open platform are not mutually exclusive goals..

1. As in any post that ends in “Shabowza,” it is very intellectually deep and only fit for the philosopher-king.

Computer scientists and system administrators like the current system, without these extraneous, crazy TLDs, because DNS forms a very nice tree which is easy to manage. (There are specifics here that I should gloss over with the desire to not repeat how DNS actually works). Trees are a very basic computer science data structure, one whose properties are extremely well known, in conjunction with cooperating algorithms. Recursive DNS doesn’t work for obvious reasons that iterative DNS does, for example. (Yet, stragely, everyone teaches that DNS works recursively. That annoyance is for another time).

This tree structure gets completely destroyed with the addition of arbitrary TLDs. This is because ICANN is no longer valuing a TLD more than a [second-level] domain name (or the part before the .com). We will have a flat structure for DNS, exactly what it was created to prevent.

My thoughts on this are three-fold:

1. The tree structure of DNS is rather nice, but arbitrary. The tree will now become a forest, in Microsoft Active Directory-speak.

2. That the DNS root servers will have to cope with more queries is a non-issue. Root DNS administrators will step up and get the job done. They want a functioning internet before they want a tree-like DNS structure.

3. The internet doesn’t care. Having a naming scheme where there are far more than three letters after the last dot means nothing. DNS is for human consumption and should not purport to be any other type of addressing system. DNS is no longer a very structured system of naming a particular computer on the network; it is now tag-based. That’s all.

The last point needs to be expanded. The very notion of having people remember pointers to particular machines on the internet is silly. This is effectively what you do every time you type in a URL. You first identify the protocol your computer should talk to the other computer (typically http://), then you specify a human-readable form of an identifier for a machine (ericgar.com uniquely identifies a particular machine that holds the files that make up this website). Any additional bits of the URL are to specify to the machine what you actually want to see.

Take a step back. Why should a human care about contacting a particular machine on the internet? He or she should not. They want the content. The content is what matters. The service is what matters.

I predict we will see an internet where it isn’t unreasonable to search for whatever you need as a first point of contact. Want to get to slashdot? Search for news for nerds. Want to read the news from the US? Type “journalism north america” and your choices will be presented. This will take the form of a combination of Wikipedia, where there is peer-submitted, peer-reviewed links and a search engine, where the information gathering is algorithmic.

I’d imagine that this seems foreign to most people. We’re so used to specifying a URL that we take it for granted.

I think the traditional notion of DNS is going away and faster than I can imagine. I think something like google, today a celebrity, will become a very necessary tool for navigating the internet. In the future, we will consider this kind of search infrastructural, just as we do DNS.

• The authoritative reference on Ubuntu on a MacBook Pro is just a life-saver. My ubuntu experience would be so much more hell without its existence.

• Using Mutt with Gmail (the minimal way) gives a copy-and-pasteable few lines on how to use Mutt with Gmail over IMAP. Easy to remember, but easier to look up and forget. Most of the other references are with fetchmail. The only thing I would add is to include other IMAP folders as mailboxes:

  mailboxes ="INBOX"
mailboxes ="[Gmail]/Sent Mail”
mailboxes =”[Gmail]/Drafts”
mailboxes =”[Gmail]/Spam”
mailboxes =”[Gmail]/All Mail”


• The official Mutt & GPG Notes.
• myopenid gives free domain-customized openids. My openid is now http://eric.ericgar.com. Watch out.
• This post on CPU scaling reminded me how to root-enable some CPU tools to allow me to easily scale my processor speeds
• The Lifehacker post detailing how to minimize Firefox 3’s toolbar. Do it. You’ll feel less constrained. It’s a new world.
• Recovering from a failed LOAD operation in DB2 LUA. Enough said.
• An overview of the Completely Fair Scheduler in Linux and why I probably won’t use it ever.
• Doug, who pointed out there exists an Ubuntu package for mutt with some really useful patches that vanilla mutt doesn’t roll with. It saved me probably a good 45 minutes of patching mutt myself out of the source.

Remember kids: 64-bit web browsing in Linux currently sucks. Avoid it. Since I doubt you have over 4GB of RAM: Do the right thing. Go 32-bit.

Update: Here’s a screenshot of my ff menubar:

• …server logs from a really large blogging site and see how Google interacts with the site.
• …logs from several different sites to figure out how Google staggers them (hopefully distributed randomly), and
• …Google Reader usage statistics to correlate Reader membership to RSS pulls.

Dude, easy on the makeup.

I’m sad I wasn’t instantly reminded of this:

Were I to post all of the clips I think are interesting, I’d end up duplicating TED.com’s index. I can’t help but share this one below: Sir Martin Rees discussing the future of Earth. Starting off by stating that he speaks “first as an astronomer and then as a worried member of the human race,” he asks the questions that I, hopefully along many others who are much smarter than me, have been thinking about for quite some time. In 17 minutes.

Great. Which one do I choose? I guess it’s clear: 2.0 is an order of magnitude better than .93, which it self must be three times better than 0.3. Right?

Uhh…No.

Okay. I’ve been a developer for a while and I’ve even developed RSS-related stuff. If I don’t know what the real differences are and how it affects my choice and subsequent enjoyment of the content, then I feel like most people wouldn’t either.

As syndication format family tree clearly shows, RSS .93 is the wicked step-child of earlier RSS 0.9x versions and the extinct scriptingNews formats. Basically, Dan Libby at Netscape borrowed (ahem.. stole, really, but for the better) in an effort toward standards. Then, RSS 2.0 is the inbred child of all RSS 0.9x versions, and, strangely, RSS 1.0. Then, the Atom format was created to make a fresh technology and leave all of the accumulated crud that an old protocol takes with it.

What does that all mean? Nothing. Not when the end user doesn’t care, just randomly picks one from the list, and hopes his or her client works well with it. Even after reading a more detailed account of RSS lineage, do you care which version of RSS you use? **

Any software developer will tell you that they’ve had the urge to throw out a piece of legacy code and start all over from scratch, applying best practices and lessons learned. That’s what Atom is supposed to be. It’s raison d’etre is to be the child who observes what his parents don’t like about themselves and improves upon those aspects.

On the Atom wikipedia page, these two points are listed among others under “Barriers to adoption”:

Many sites choose to publish their feeds in only a single format. For example CNN, the New York Times, and the BBC offer their web feeds only in RSS 2.0 format.

…which is actually doing a service to the user. This shouldn’t be criticized as a “barrier to adoption”, but a embrace of usability.

Sites that publish Atom will often publish RSS as well.

But why? If backward compatibility is a concern, then continue publishing content in all formats that you’ve given to users in the past, but advertise only the current best format.
I understand that backward support is good, so that people who subscribed to the RSS 0.93 feed don’t get burned when support for RSS 2.0 comes along. I also understand that too much meaningless choice for an unknowing consumer is just that: meaningless. And, if we’re supposed to be using standard technology, why are there three competing standards with no winner in sight? ***

Incompatibilities may exist with software being able to read the formats. **** Here is an informal survey of some popular feed readers on the formats discussed here:

Google Reader: RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, Atom 1.0
NewsFire: RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, Atom 1.0
RSSOwl: RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, Atom 1.0
Bloglines: RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, Atom 1.0
NetNewsWire: RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, Atom 1.0
FeedDaemon: RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, Atom 1.0

Do you get the point?

Feedburner, a recent acquisition by Google, at least is tending toward the user:

Here we see a application-centric model of how to advertise syndication formats. Feedburner presents icons denoting popular applications that the user might use. If I’m a user of Pageflakes, I may not know anything about RSD 3.2 vs Atoms 1.4, but I do know that I go to www.pageflakes.com to see this week’s Dilbert cartoon on my homepage.

Here’s the bottom line: Stop advertising the older formats. It’s fine to continue to serve up the others, just don’t actively advertise it. No one cares what formats you advertise, or the format they click on, as long as they get the content they want.

I’ve chosen Atom. I think it’s in the winner in its modularity, feature-set, and future growth. I could go on about why I think it’s the right choice for this application, but here’s the point: no one cares.

* Admittedly, www.ericgar.com suffered from this affliction, which are the default options for Wordpress. This has been locally remedied.

** Ironically, that wikipedia article has an “Incompatibilities” section, with no “Features” section or similar. What is the (probably unintended) implication of that?

*** The Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD competition at least was better in this regard: there was a financial motive that would produce a winner. This is not so in RSS .93 vs 1.0 vs 2.0 vs Atom .93, Atom 1.0

**** Strangely, this isn’t listed under as a “barrier to adoption” on the Atom wikipedia page. I wonder why?

From an interview with Marc Ecko:

Whatever you do in life, be passionate about it. At least once a month, if not every day, reassess what you’re doing and make sure you still love it. If you’re passionate about something others around you may see as a dead end, pave your own way. Be a trailblazer.

From “Why Old Technologies Are Still Kicking,” a discussion on mainframe technology:

“Technologies want to survive, and they reinvent themselves to go on,” he said.

From the opinion piece “The Republican Resurrection” by Frank Rich:

Mrs. Clinton is fond of mocking her adversary for offering “just words.” But words can matter, and Mrs. Clinton’s tragedy is that she never realized they could have mattered for her, too. You have to wonder if her Iraq speech would have been greeted with the same shrug if she had tossed away her usual talking points and seized the opportunity to address the war in the same adult way that Mr. Obama addressed race.

I said, “Naw, that can’t be.” So I clicked on the Trac ticket number:

Freaking awesome.

Today I was walking back home and thinking, “My apartment is a single point of failure for some of my critically important data. Hmm. Okay, well, I should replicate it remotely somewhere. But if I were to do that, I might as well have remotely replicated storage as well. So I need some SAN space mirrored at the hardware level between two disparate geographic sites. But then, I need two dedicated servers co-located with that storage to actually serve me the files. Or maybe I should just use snap-mirrored NFS toasters.”

Then I came to my senses.

I’m still sad I don’t have my own datacenter(s).

(This, a thank you post, to whomever anonymously sent me a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. While I kind of enjoyed being made fun of for not having read it, it was really good to finally do it.)

By the end, we [met | had physical contact with] a nice group of guys, and one crazy girl, who felt the same we did.

Sadly, no good concert injuries to speak of. I banged up my knee and elbow a bit, and Chris drew a little blood, but nothing like the guy who broke his leg. By standing there. We had nothing to do with it. Honest.

Sleep.

Photo credit: Dave - Foo Fighters by gajbireland. Licensed under CC Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic.

I would never use this feature because I would rather that window #n
always remain window #n, but I can see the usefulness of the feature
if you used to have more than 10 windows and now have fewer than 10
but some windows still bear numbers greater than 9, so you can go
back to using Ctrl-A to switch to them quickly.

My recommendation is that you call it compacting, not renumbering.
“renumber” doesn’t make it clear enough HOW they get new numbers.

To which I replied:

Thanks for the mail. Your comments are fair enough and definitely anticipated. I often can peak way above 10 windows, begrudgingly, and often want to migrate down to as few as possible so that the next window allocated is the highest available number. And, I’m an active user of the hardstatus line, including labeling windows. I implemented this because I know several people who use screen like I do, though knowing many people do not.

I do like your suggestion that the patch feature be called “compacting.” I was in fact struggling with how do best describe the action, and that does, in a single word. I will create a new patch sometime in the next week reflecting this, even just for my purposes.

I’m curious, though, for my own usage: how do you remember which window is which? What is your typical screen workflow?

Thanks,
Eric

What do you do?
I knew you were going to ask that, but I’m weird about being associated with what I do. We all label people based on that, so what I do is, I’m a human living life, just like you are.

But how do you pay rent?
Vocationally, I’m a fashion stylist and an artist and I’m multifaceted. And then I also work at Jeffrey in their women’s designer section. I’m in a space with four walls and other people, and it’s been very challenging to wrap my brain around that.

(Emphasis mine).

I’ve been thinking along similar lines. Pretty sweet.

I’ve created a patch against CVS HEAD to fill in the holes of the window numbering. It simply moves windows to lower positions until there are no holes left. Any [constructive] comments are welcome.

The patch can be found here. It was also sent to the screen-devel mailing list.

named is pronounced “name-dee” and stands for “name server daemon.” BIND is pronounced to rhyme with “kind.” Some creative people have noticed the similarities in the names and choose to mispronounce them “bin-dee” and “named” (like “tamed”).

ericgar@babbage extusb$ bzip2recover columbia-2007-10-31.tar.bzip2
bzip2recover 1.0.4: extracts blocks from damaged .bz2 files.
bzip2recover: searching for block boundaries ...
bzip2recover: I/O error reading `columbia-2007-10-31.tar.bzip2', possible reason follows.
bzip2recover: Input/output error
bzip2recover: warning: output file(s) may be incomplete.

I was thinking, “Well, data loss sucks.”

But it turns out the underlying filesystem was mounted read-write on a read-only mount point. D’oh. I feel like tar and bzip2recover could have told me that off the bat.

So really, that’s not a $190 flight:

I didn’t realize email could come without wires:

Not a traditional Nun:

One of these is not like the others:

Really useful tags:

When you go to http://gmail.com to login, your browser greets you with a happy “this webpage is secure” notification.

And you sign in. Your username and password is sent using an encryption technology called SSL/TLS so that people who see your information go by can’t actually read it.

*

Google then sends you, over the same encrypted connection, a delicious cookie to identify you so that you don’t have to sign in every time you request something from them.

This is all standard practice. But then Google does something sneaky. It redirects you to the non-encrypted version of Gmail.

All subsequent information you retrieve is sent over the internet unencrypted, available for any eavesdropper to see.

*

This is particularly important when you’re browsing over an untrusted network, like the wireless network at Starbucks, the connection you happen to use on a park bench, or even my wireless network when you come to my apartment (where I may or may not log packets).

Now, we all know that you don’t want your correspondence with the new half-orc you met at the Friday Dungeons and Dragons session to be known to the world.

Worse than anyone being able to see everything you send back and forth to Google, the eavesdropper could intercept the delicious cookie, install it in their browser, and impersonate you. They would have complete access to all of your information at Google.

There is a simple fix to avoid this potential embarrassment, however cute the half-orc may in fact be. Instead of going to http://gmail.com, use https://gmail.google.com which will encrypt everything you send and receive to and from Google.

Remember, your love life is counting on it.

* “Alice” is the name used for the unassuming victim of computer security. “Eve” is the typical name for the “eavesdropper.”

Picture of happy baby by cnbyates.
Picture of cookie baby by Jason Trom.
Picture of Eva Longoria by steature.
Picture of Orc Donny by cristajoy42
All are licensed under CC Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic.

Tell me about your look.
A lot of it is influenced by Japanese street fashion, but mostly I wear band gear. My favorite band is Glassjaw.

What are they like?
It’s hard to explain them, but it’s music that you want to hear when you break up with the love of your life. Very emotional. Very angry. Honestly, I’ve never had a love of my life, but if I did, that’s what I would listen to when we broke up.

I just look forward to the album from United Nations, the collaboration project between Geoff Rickly (lead singer of Thursday) and Daryl Palumbo (lead singer of Glassjaw, among other bands). Then my life will be complete.

At least it probably bought a bottle or two of wine and is contributing to my credit score.

Yes and No

I’m really glad those questions were answered for me.

As good as new.

I love being an engineer.

Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these “users” never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.

Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?

Is this fair? One thing you don’t do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn’t make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.

From Coding Horror, today:

I accept that software registration keys are a necessary evil for commercial software, and I resign myself to manually keeping track of them, and keying them in… Furthermore, registration keys are often the user’s first experience with our software– and first impressions matter.

Welcome to the age that thinks software is not the end, but just a means to an end; an end that is something useful to humans: communication, collaboration, creation, perhaps; something more than making someone else pay for something we made for the sole purpose of accomplishing our own goal that costs us zero dollars to give to other people.

Welcome to the age that has advanced itself.

This is disruptive technology. Deal with it.

(P.S. I’m around more often now and starting to contact people.)

* Monstar! party planning in progress. stay tuned.

Electing the Doge of Venice: analysis of a 13th Century protocol.

From the paper:

The most obvious feature of this protocol is that it is complicated and
would have taken a long time to carry out. We will advance a hypothesis
as to why it is so complicated, and describe a simplified protocol with
very similar features.

———–

From a registration page somewhere:

I love to be contacted! Thanks for asking!

———–

My internet told me so:

(I wonder if that will actually be useful to anyone).

- RFC2870, “Root Name Server Operational Requirements”

I demoed using opendns.com’s free resolvers, which indeed are fairly fast, but load my browser with advertising for every domain name typo. Not going to fly.

As a temporary fix instead, I started using local (and my former) universities’ DNS servers, as they’re really quick, reliable, close, and most importantly, wide open to the world. I try to be mindful of using other people’s resources, though, prompting me to ask my coworkers, “Is it ethical to use someone else’s DNS resolver?”

Just today on the NYLUG mailing list was a post about using freely available DNS servers instead of crap ones. Indeed, a list of open DNS servers exists and even conveniently geolocates the closest DNS server. Problem is, the three it suggested for me are also really slow. Where the uni DNS servers are about 20ms away, all three random DNS servers bottomed out at 140ms. It appears that one of them, even, is some guy on an ADSL line.

Which just leads me to believe I should set up my own tinyDNS server and achieve ultimate roundtrip times through tuning. Alas, my router does run dd-wrt, but does not have the necessary memory for yet another service.

Ah the problems a geek faces when he gets home from his day (and, for the last while, night) job.

I think his response was so right on. He seems to think he disrespected both his mother and his constituents. I happen to think his reaction is just what happens when you screw with a real New Yorker.

Then I saw this, and thought, “Man, Columbia doesn’t have an army at all!”

McLaren Mercedes was recently punished by the Federation Internationale d’Automobile (FIA) for improperly handling documents containing Ferrari secrets. The penalty was stripping McLaren of all its constructor championship points they earned this season, awarding Ferrari the win in that competition, and fining the team $100 million. (In real terms, McLaren screwed itself out of a lot of money).

The interesting news: It was reported by the commentators of Speed during today’s Chinese Grand Prix that McLaren Mercedes management will still pay their employees the promised bonus based on the number of constructor points they would have had come season end. In that move, I see a company that recognizes the importance of its employees and cares about keeping the good people that created a potentially award-winning car.

Companies have a hidden incentive in treating its workers well. Sure, it’s hard to identify exactly how much benefit any given employee has on the bottom line, but it’s important to foster an environment that strives for results. Most people will only accomplish that by chasing after the carrot in front of them; one day, the carrot has to be caught for them to continue to the next one.

While I don’t know anything else about the working conditions at the McLaren-Mercedes F1 team, I applaud its management for this decision.

• Using Mentors To Help Achieve Your Dreams
• The Importance Of Being An Idiot
• Debating the Linux Process Scheduler
• An OpenLDAP Update
• DB2 best practices for basic design, performance, and manageability
• Basketball Referees and Single Points of Failure
• Python for system administrators
• Enable database high availability using DB2 HADR and Tivoli SA MP in an SAP environment
• Log stored procedures messages for DB2 on Linux or Unix
• Perl is Dead. Long live Perl.
• DB2 Viper 2 compatibility features
• New features in DB2 Viper 2 to help your business grow
• Why you should write: common myths debunked
• Automatic table and index reorganization in DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows
• Anatomy of the Linux networking stack
• Anatomy of the Linux kernel
• Anatomy of the Linux slab allocator
• Freebase: Your database is ready!
• The Myth of the Superuser
• Visualize spatial data in DB2
• Linux system auditing by example
• Top 6 List of Programming Top 10 Lists
• Kernel command using Linux system calls
• Why Isn’t System Administration Evolving?

I haven’t posted since July because I’ve been reduced to a continual vacationer. I’ve spent my days with little worry or mission, but I’ve been able to be whimsical and to take a break. Consequently, I’ve had a lot of time to write and think for me, and not a lot of momentum toward solving interesting problems or commenting on those of others.

I see that as a problem. The problem would have been solvable had I not been lazy and lacked an internal drive to complete some of the goals on other projects I am loosely involved in. Instead, I took the easy path, which annoys me. At the same time, I recognize that path may have been the right path to follow, given that I’ll very rarely, if ever, have the same opportunity again until I’m retired or beyond. What is done is done, and I have the future to look forward to.

I’ve come to a crossroads and that path will change starting Friday. After a long summer hiatus, I’m being forced back into the real world. Luckily for me, I have a lot of internal incentive to actually join society for the first time, not to mention the external incentives that are being given to me. On Friday, I start working as a trainee in the Morgan Stanley’s IT group.

For four months, I will be immersed in a college-like experience of taking classes, doing homework, collaborating on projects, and passing tests. The difference, as I’ve been told by past trainees and have experience myself during my previous summers, is the immersion into that environment with incredible, passionate instructors teaching pure technology to students with a like-minded interest in those subjects. (I should add that I’m actually getting paid for that, too.)

With the anticipated new stimulus that is work, I look forward to being interesting again, in a sense. I’m unsure what my new employer’s attitude toward public-facing employee blogging is, but I know I’ll be able to comment on and share interesting problems that I came across, solved, or new ideas presented to me.

While I’m really looking forward to the intellectual motivation that is at my doorstep, I’m also really looking forward to meeting those new people who have a similar interest in my passion. I’m looking forward to being a member of an organization again, even if it is a corporation. I chose Morgan Stanley because it presents me with both defined and undefined growth opportunities as well as actively facilitates getting me involved in something other that work. There are people there who are actively interested in seeing that I have the right skills and tools to do my job and my next job and who are willing to cultivate that. Also, I’m just looking forward to solidly being a part of something larger than myself.

In short, I’m looking forward to being (mildly) interesting to the internet again.

Jacks Art Gallery - I had two small pieces framed there recently and both turned out wonderfully. The staff were very helpful in helping me pick a solution that would make the pieces really pop out. They even were nice enough to give me hanging hardware and wall bumpers. I definitely recommend them for fairly inexpensive, quality framing work.

Tiecrafters - Realizing I had become out of fashion, I brought both my ties to Tiecrafters to have narrowed into a cool, hip, new tie. The ties came out exactly as I wanted them. The gentleman with whom I dealt was extremely kind and accommodating in helping me pick out a size. Everyone I know has used them, and everyone I know who has used them loves them. Highly recommended.

Note that the donor card on the back of your driver license is of dubious legal quality. Be sure to register yourself with your state registry. If you live in New York, sign up here.

When I moved in, I picked up signal from their AP and I immediately signed up for their service, since a geek without internet service is rendered powerless like Spiderman without his spidey suit. I figured I’d only keep the service until I got a “real” internet service provider (DSL from Verizon or cable from Time Warner; Speakeasy was in the running at one point, but then they were picked up by Best Buy, and I hate that chain more than I hate consumer ISPs).

The day after I signed up, some Natural Wireless guys came to install an access point in my apartment so that I would get a better signal. For a returnable deposit, they also gave me a wireless bridge so that I could connect my networking gear to their network. At first this seemed like a good idea, but there was no encryption between the wireless bridge and the AP, making all of my traffic in the open.

I returned the bridge soon thereafter and lived with the wireless service for a while, re-intending to subscribe to Time Warner’s service, albeit at a higher price.

Then I had an afternoon of annoying phone calls with Time Warner (first they couldn’t locate my apartment number in their system, despite my neighbors being listed; then, they told me I could not get the promotional (better) price and no installation fee, costing me lots of money I don’t think I should have to pay and requiring a week’s wait).

I emailed Natural Wireless with a proposal to install a switch between their network and their AP, and then connecting my own router directly to the switch. I had indicated I was prepared to pay for the additional connectivity.

Ralph responded to me very quickly; not only did they accept my proposal, but were willing to lend me some equipment to do it, and could do the install on the next business day. Best of all: they aren’t charging me anything additional. Even better: Ralph must have picked up on the fact that I’m a geek, dispensed with the customer service-speak, and used acronym-heavy lingo. I really appreciate when customer service reps can speak to the level of their customer.

So now, I have a true and verified 3Mbps down and 3Mbps up, for $26 per month, no contract, and most importantly, no dealing with incompetency at the big ISPs. I’m even thinking of upgrading to their bigger plans ($30/mo for 5Mbps up/down, $45/mo for 10Mbps up/down), because of that last point.

Kudos to Natural Wireless. They’ve made this customer happy.

Random statistic:

But what about the other 6% of young people? Spawns of the hellbeast, must be.

—

You mean software vendors distribute patches to existing installs?

—

This is from the website of a new condo building being built in my neighborhood.

“Where SoHo meets Tribeca” ? You must mean Canal St, but don’t want to make people think of Chinatown or hellish traffic.

—

Wow. Who ever would have thought?

—

For whatever reason, when I visited this website, my mind made an unconscious decision as to what kind of robot I was interested in…

I find myself disagreeing with those who believe teachers should be paid this way. In thinking about all of the best teachers in my life, those who actually made a difference, whether they were teaching exactly what they were supposed to or not, probably would not have benefitted from having me or many of my peers in a class. What they offered us was definitely not anything measurable by standardized tests. They offered us knowledge and wisdom that was most certainly beyond the scope of any curriculum that any state committee could develop.

I highly disagree with using standardized tests in general. While I have tended to score fairly well on many of them, I realize that so many people who did not are denied opportunities they might have had without this movement toward standardization (a topic of a future rant, perhaps). Let measurement play a role in areas where measurement is legitimate and accurate; don’t force it into areas that it does not apply. Passion and enthusiasm cannot be expressed as a number. Keep standardized tests away from killing off the good teachers. They are the some of the only people that make people like me want to be educated.

I think these state legislatures should instead toy with killing off or heavily reducing tenure for any teacher below higher education. I’ve always found competition is a great motivator for success.

At noon Pacific time today (June 18), members of the Peer-to-Patent project team will discuss the project on the New York Law School’s Democracy Island in Second Life.

(emphasis mine)

Sadly, I’m not geeky enough to have an avatar in Second Life.

I just ran our new magical super jabber fixer script, and it’s assured me
that your jabber is working now. I have full confidence in this script,
but should it have been lieing to me please let me know and I’ll see what
more I can do.

Thanks!
James

I wrote him back asking if he had a version of the script for DB2 or Oracle 10g. He responded:

Maybe now we’ll let it loose on our bgp tables… hmm…
maybe best to limit it to jabber.

Cheers!
James

I love techs with a sense of humor with their customers. It makes working with them so much more fun.

]]> http://www.ericgar.com/2007/05/19/from-dreamhost/feed/ http://www.ericgar.com/2007/05/19/in-both-of-our-shoes/ http://www.ericgar.com/2007/05/19/in-both-of-our-shoes/#comments Sat, 19 May 2007 22:36:58 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/2007/05/19/in-both-of-our-shoes/ If you, as a parent, choose to not lie to your child about Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, are you limiting that child’s imagination or heightening their sense of reality? Or are you just producing the kid who ruins the fun for all of the believers. Is that to say that there always is an acceptable level of naivety for a person? Only in the developmental stages? Why? Or, what does that mean for those of us who are knowingly veiled by this naivety but strive for truthful knowledge?

I haven’t yet arrived an answer.

]]> http://www.ericgar.com/2007/05/19/in-both-of-our-shoes/feed/ http://www.ericgar.com/2007/05/19/my-taste-of-tribeca/ http://www.ericgar.com/2007/05/19/my-taste-of-tribeca/#comments Sat, 19 May 2007 22:36:31 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/2007/05/19/my-taste-of-tribeca/ I moved into my apartment on Tuesday. Many of you reading this have probably already been here, the rest should come by some time soon. It’s a gorgeous little place, perhaps seemingly better to me because of one fact: it’s mine. For at least a year. No moving out, no RCRs to fill out, no RAs. If the last few days of living in Tribeca have anything to say, the remaining 51 weeks will be a blast.

I went to the Taste of Tribeca festival today, in which 40+ neighborhood restaur