Older blog entries for logic (starting at number 96)

LVS stuffs

Thanks to a well-placed friend, I've completed a paid analysis phase of a Linux clustering and load-balancing solution for a largish auto auction company, which is aimed pretty squarely at becoming a solid two-week implementation run with an annual support contract. This is going to be fun; the architecture is a simple high-availability config (two boxes in active/backup failover configuration) performing load-balancing for a series of custom web applications, which isn't exactly rocket science, but it's far more interesting than some of the work I've been doing over the last year.

Newsletter

Based on some positive feedback from here, I think I'll give it a try for a few months to see how regular writing and I get along. Email me if you want your address added to the list. No ETA on the first issue yet.

Linux Laptop

64MB is not enough for a laptop I use for business engagements, so 256MB PC100 SODIMM from Crucial is now on it's way. Whee, 320MB total memory.

I'm successfully using Red Hat 7.2 with the Ximian packaging of GNOME on this little beast (it's a Compaq Armada M700 366MHz; astute Linux users will recognize the distinctive sucking sound made by the built-in Lucent Winmodem and ATI Rage Mobility video that lacks stable/current DRI support). Aside from the inability to run Quake 3 at anything resembling a usable framerate (until I manage to whack DRI support into place; I'll have to live with Heroes of Might and Magic III for now), it makes a very usable business laptop. Abiword, Gnumeric, Dia, and Evolution are proving to be the perfect combination; now I need to start playing with MrProject to see how it stacks up to that other project management tool. I hope I can share data between it and Evolution...

Busy, busy...

Happiness is knowing that you have a pair of concurrent contracts ready to go in the next week or two. While I rationally knew the old axiom, "It's not what you know, it's who you know" (and the logical extension, "and what they think you know"), it was really driven home with these two opportunities; one is with a former employer, and the other is a direct referral from a co-worker at another company.

So, I'll be doing a bit of training (Linux-based service load-balancing and high-availability with off-the-shelf hardware) with possible longer-term assistance and maintenance on retainer, and a bit of engineering (revisiting a spam filtering system I built many many moons ago for a former employer), also with the strong possibility of follow-up work doing more involved systems implementation. Maybe this whole independant consulting thing will work out, after all. :-)

Regular readers of my diary will notice that I've shied away from the consulting arena before; let me shed a little light on that. My real objection isn't the travel, the work, or anything really related to the job. My objection is doing all of that for someone else's gain. I want to provide my services to clients, but not with a middle-man directing me. If I wanted that, I'd be jumping back into an IT department or programming crew somewhere.

By the way, if you're doing consulting (or thinking about it) and are looking for some good reading material, Alan Weiss' Getting Started In Consulting, and his better known Million Dollar Consulting. His direct approach to the subject can catch you off-guard initially, but it is a truly refreshing change from the typical marketspeak of similar publications.

Newsletter

I'm considering writing a monthly newsletter covering issues that a systems administrator in a UNIX and internetworked environment would run into; problems I and people I know have run into in the past (with solutions), dealing with politics (management, projects deadlines, customers and users), ethical questions, and references to useful articles and information. Drop me an email if you'd be interested in such a thing if I decide to do it. Or just let me know if you think I'd be wasting my time. ;-)

Ah, Loki, we hardly knew ye...

What a shame to hear about the demise of Loki. It's good to see that services they're currently hosting are being moved to new homes in an orderly fashion; this is probably the smoothest shutdown of a company I've witnessed in last year or so of major business failures (small comfort for the people laid off after putting so much work into the business, but that really is how it goes; you take a chance on a risky new venture, and hope it works out). Loki and the people surrounding them accomplished some incredible things for the Linux gaming community (SDL, OpenAL, and SMPEG being the most prominent examples), in addition to just bringing games over to the platform. Just like the failure of Eazel, no matter what you think about the companies themselves, they both left something behind for the community to build on. When is the last time you could say something like that about a traditional proprietary software company that couldn't make it in the marketplace? Thanks, guys.

guile

Fair warning to people playing with guile under Red Hat Linux 7.2, their guile build doesn't include threading support. I've filed a bugzilla issue about it, hopefully they'll include that in newer builds (it's not like it's tough to add ;-).

You can take this to understand that I'm back into relearning Scheme. ;-) I really do enjoy working in this language; I became attached to the programming syntax back in the good 'ol days of building LPmuds (specifically, the "closure" syntax introduced into Jörn Rennekes' (Amylaar) branch of LPmud, and carried on into LDmud headed by Lars Düning). Most people swore at it, claiming it was the ugliest thing they'd ever seen. ;-)

My current scheme problem is getting (accept) to work in non-blocking mode (for which I can find no documentation, other than the latest CVS checkout of the reference guide, which doesn't mention anything about getting an error of "ERROR: Resource temporarily unavailable" in accept when O_NONBLOCK is set.

Mach64 DRI

I have a laptop. It has an ATI Rage Mobility video chipset (aka mach64). While X works like a champ, no 3d accelleration is possible without pulling an in-progress development branch out of DRI CVS and whacking it into working. No luck so far. :-( The kernel module loads up fine, but now my re-built X server refuses to launch because of a symbol problem (identified by Mike Harris, although building with -fno-merge-constants still seems to be giving problems; need to make sure that the entire build is applying that gcc option). I have the beginnings of a HOWTO written for this; I'll publish it as soon as I actually have one that tells you how to build the damn thing and make it work. ;-)

AOL to acquire Red Hat?

$DEITY help us. At least Alan Cox is against it.

Movies

Unless you're one of those people whose eyes glaze over at the mention of subtitles, go see Amelie. It really is a fun story of turning love into a grand game, of suicidal goldfish, of travelling garden gnomes, and of all manner of wacky stuff. Great film.

Glutton for punishment...

I've just converted my home page to XHTML 1.0 Strict, and after getting myself accustomed to a few of the simple, yet oh-so-annoying standards changes (lowercase manditory for all tags? ye ghods), discovered that I was getting a very colorfully-rendered XML source version of my webpages displayed in the Internet Explorer document window (the website renders as expected in Mozilla). Removing the <?xml ...?> opening tag seemed to fix the problem, and it still renders correctly in Mozilla, but I don't believe that's the correct fix. (Still, the W3C Validator seems to think that's just fine, despite what the XHTML 1.0 specification says about it.) Overall, I'm happy with the conversion, but I need to dig up a copy of Netscape 4.x to see if it's still readable there too. ;-)

Interviews...

Another day, another interview. Interesting company, very clear about what they're doing and where their place in the market is, with apparently competant leadership at the helm. I'm just not sure if this is the right place for me right now; besides the fairly heavy travel component to the job (it's a consulting company, so I could literally end up working just about anywhere in the Chicagoland area), they're really not doing anything I haven't done before. The opportunity for gaining certifications is there, but that's not really what I'm after.

*sigh*

Despite anyone's differences with the man, and the desire to start an alternative IRC network to Open Projects, is it really necessary to demonstrate the same level of maturity that one is accusing lilo of (validity of all arguments aside)? *sigh* Maybe I'm just getting old, but it seems like even bastions of sanity like Advogato are being overrun by the pre-teen "i wanna be a geek cuz itz c00l" crowd. I'm seeing arguments like this springing up all over the place lately. Is this an inevitable outcome of the growth of a particular group of people?

Bernard Shifman is...

Cool, I got the Bernie spam too. I feel special.

Snort and friends...

I was finally inspired to install Snort and ACID today, just to see if it was worth the resources. I now have what would appear to be a very nice intrusion detection system logging to PostgreSQL with ACID serving as a handy-dandy web frontend to the whole thing. In the six hours or so that I've had the whole thing running, it's picked up a ton of attempts to exploit a handful of well-known web-based vulnerabilities (mostly from APNIC space...not much of a surprise, given the track record I've seen with SMTP relay and spam attempts from over there). I think I'll enjoy playing around with this little tool; makes a nice addition to the consulting/outsourcing toolbelt too.

Business name registrations

Damn, my second-choice name came back rejected (I had to eliminate my first-choice, since it was obviously already taken); wasn't aware of the restriction that caused this name collision before, but it makes perfect sense now that I see it explained. I still have the list of names that I originally made, so it shouldn't take too much hand-wringing before I resubmit the name hold registration.

School, teaching, and /.

I am consistantly amused and surprised by the timing my life seems to enjoy. After much consideration, and a lot of discussion with my girlfriend, I've come to the conclusion that, long-term, the IT industry just isn't where I ought to be. My focus is firmly on returning to school, to finish up the undergrad CS degree I nearly completed 5 years ago, along with a followup tour at graduate school, with the eventual goal being teaching CS at the undergrad level. How surprising to notice, shortly after making up my mind to go this way, that I'm not the only one thinking of going back to school. Not too surprisingly, Slashdot has covered this kind of topic before, and while you have to take everything you see there with a grain of salt, there are a few good nuggets of information to be had from time to time.

Back in the real world...

Unfortunately, that goal is a bit in the distance right now. I'm still unemployed (insert large flashing "NEED A SR. UNIX ADMINISTRATOR/ARCHITECT?" neon sign here), although there are a couple of prospects in the pipeline (none of which are very attractive, but which I need to consider since money is quickly running out). My ideal situation would be a short-term contract or two (3-6 months, tops) through a consulting firm or independantly which would give me time to either firm up the business, or figure out exactly how I'm going to fund and practically manage going back to school. Ah well, life isn't always ideal, is it? ;-)

Reading...

I've noticed a new (renewed) behavior since I've had so much time on my hands; I'm reading voraciously again. My gf and I have practically been living in the local bookstores, and I've been absorbing damn near everything in the computing section; K&R's The C Programming Language and Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language (for the "I can finally say I've read them" category), Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming (don't tackle this set without a lot of latte's handy...and a pen and pad of paper), Hunt's The Pragmatic Programmer (solid point-form advice for anyone writing code in the real world), Schneier's excellent Applied Cryptography (truly required reading for anyone interested in the topic), and a bunch of others that were less memorable. (Hell, I even sat down and gave Design Patterns another read, although my original impression of it being of purely academic cataloging interest still stands; luckily, I noted that the authors admit this freely, although I don't know how many people I've bumped into who swear by that book as if it were a bible of sorts.)

I was especially pleased to see a friend from the "good old days" with a book on the shelf: John Viega (Hi Rust!) and Gary McGraw's Building Secure Software (the book's website is here). An excellent book; I know quite a few software engineers who could stand to give it a read.

I wonder: of all the people out there reading this who have been without work for a while, is this normal behavior? I still can't believe I spent hours poring over Knuth's math...

Enough for now, time for sleep.

Getcher red hot updates here...

Another month, another diary entry. So much for keeping up a regular log of events here. ;-)

rblcheck

I pushed out a release last night. Whee! I'll probably email the Debian and FreeBSD maintainers that a new version is out, and nudge them for diffs that make life easier for them to get merged into CVS.

Job stuff

Interview next Thursday for a full-time remote administration gig. Shouldn't be a problem to nail, but I already know the drive is going to be 45 minutes to an hour in good traffic, one-way. Losing two hours a day of productive time is not my idea of an ideal situation (it's why I left a previous job, but I'm not exactly in a position to pick and choose right now).

Christmas

Made it through another one. Got some surprise gifts for Christmas and my birthday; a very cool leather briefcase (the soft material kind), a few movies (Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Spaceballs, and Star Wars Episode I: The Phatom Menace), a new toolbox, Return to Castle Wolfenstein (ye ghods, I've lost a lot of time to that game already), and a bunch of little stuff I'm probably forgetting. Christmas ended up being a three-day affair this year, visiting with three unique segments of my girlfriend's family (mine is 1500 miles away, making a quick trip to see them a little difficult). Mostly nice folks, although she always has a little angst at this time of year over spending so much time with family she never sees any other time of the year. Mostly, I'm relieved it's now past.

NYE

My year-end festivities includes dinner with a few friends and their significant others, and a BNL concert. Looking forward to it; the last time I saw these guys, I nearly died laughing.

Other stuff

I finally finished Pekka Himanen's (with Linus Torvalds and Manuel Castells) The Hacker Ethic. An excellent and relatively insightful read; while I think Pekka gets a little carried away in his fervor to convince the reader of what he's saying (while other parts, especially Manuel's epilogue, read much like a dry psychology paper), the book has a great deal to say about how work and ethics have evolved from the the pre-Protestant work ethic through to today's "nethic" (network ethic), as Pekka calls it. It's a worthwhile read if psychology and sociology are your cup of tea, although a lot of it will ring both true and obvious to most Advogato readers (and some of you may resent the canonical tone given to ESR's jargon file). If anything, Linus' introduction definitely grabs you, as it's written in his usual relaxed, convincing style.

Wow, I haven't posted since...

An update, since quite a bit has been happening. Forgive me if I go on a little bit about relationships and business here, although it seems strangely appropriate to our favorite cat...

Layoff Update

I was informed that my services would no longer be necessary at $COMPANY last Monday, effective Nov. 28 2001. Merry Christmas. ;-)

The rumor mill had me being cut a long time ago, and if I'm surprised by anything in this, it's that it took so long to happen. I'm also not angry; I don't believe that their drastic headcount reductions are the correct approach, but time will tell who is correct on that score.

To be honest, I've felt for quite some time that they really shouldn't have hired me in the first place. What they really needed (and unfortunately still need) is a good junior UNIX administrator. Someone who's looking for a learning experience, and someone you won't expect the world of. Someone like myself should be brought in from time to time on a consulting basis to handle specific projects that are beyond the scope of the in-house talent's abilities, along with the necessary training to make sure they can do that next time. Eventually, they have a dedicated employee who knows their environment well, the junior admin has grown beyond their title, and the consultant has made a few bucks. ;-)

As it stands, they're actually in that position now; with a little careful maneuvering on the part of myself and a few others prior to my departure, we managed to get a fellow with incredible potential handling the majority of my old duties, as an addition to his developer role. He's going to be stressing over the next little while as he comes up to speed, but he'll definitely be the better for it. Time for him to earn his stripes. ;-)

Professional Relationships

He makes me feel old (and technically, he's a few months my senior, although our experiences have aged us a little differently). Speaking to the "old codgers" reading this, have you ever run into a person with so much raw energy and talent for creative thinking that it makes you realize that you've lost some of that boyish curiosity about everything somewhere along the line? I've had the distinct honor of meeting at least one person like that in every position I've held. Or, maybe it's me that seeks them out. Either way, I always have an interesting relationship with those people; I feed them with information, references, and anything else I have at my disposal to help them learn at a more rapid rate, and they feed me that enthusiasm that I have such a hard time generating on my own anymore.

I was using the term mentoring for a long while to describe these relationships, but I don't think that's quite right. These people are my peers in every sense of the word, and I regard them as good friends. They also feed me information, ideas, and that enthusiasm that I mentioned above in a similar manner to how I deliver information to them. It's a very symbiotic relationship. Perhaps a better phrase is mutual mentorship?

"Going forward"...

Plans haven't changed too much, although I've needed to accelerate some of what has been going on. The new business venture I've been hatching in the back of my head is steamrolling forward while I seek interim work. (This is a big flashing neon sign for anyone in a hire/fire capacity: senior-level technology talent with a focus on networking and a miscellany of UNIX variants, heavy on integration, portability, and high-availability available on a contracting basis in the western Chicago suburbs or anywhere as a virtual set of hands.) I'm working on a few positions where what I have planned wouldn't be a conflict of interest, and that's the big catch for me right now.

To keep myself occupied and focused, I'm angling toward nailing down a couple of industry certifications that I've previously been too lazy to write the damn test for. ;-) Specifically, SCSA/SCNA, the SAIR Linux and GNU certification track, and possibly the RHCE if I can manage to cough up that much cash ($749 just for the exam) on what has become a limited budget.

Oh yeah, I'm also finally getting to all that stuff around the house that you always tell yourself you'll do, but never do. ;-) Like install the new center console in my GF's Wrangler, and loading that damnable HP NetServer with it's very disagreeable RAID controller (it's an HP-branded spin of the AMI/LSI Megaraid controller called a NetRAID 1si). I've posted an updated driver disk that lets Red Hat 7.2 boot "properly" (for a stretched definition; I'm still not convinced what I have is working correctly due to some odd behavior I'm seeing), so at least a few of the other people having this problem are able to get some work done.

Unemployment Lines

It's a small world. I bumped into another UNIX admin (about the same level of experience as myself) filling out the same forms I was there to file. His story was that he'd been laid off in January from IBM (contracting him out to Lucent Technologies), and his reserves had finally run out, so he was down to asking for UI. I have to admit that I felt queasy going down there, even though I can tell myself that I've been paying into it just in case something like this happened. I wonder if there's a trend I could be reading into that.

Anyways, enough babbling for the night. Time to sleep. More later.

Short and sweet entry, since it's been a while: I've been keeping a regular journal in a hacked-up version of PhpWiki. I'm hoping to have a quick-n- dirty handler for the calendar function available soon, so that daily updates will actually appear on my home page.

rblcheck release soon, although with all the changes in the RBL world lately, it hardly seems worth putting out.

Mental note: I'm still on the hook to work on the i18n filename issue with Subversion. Need to get on that.

WikiWikiWeb

This is possibly the best idea I've come across in a long time. I've been peripherally aware of wiki goings- on, but hadn't had a real use for one until recently, as I've begun needing a means of managing personal information and projects. I'm playing with an internal copy of PhpWiki with patches for handling calendaring (available from PhpWiki:WikiAsPim). As simple in concept as it is, this has proven to be the perfect tool for managing day-to-day informational needs; by being completely free-form, I can adjust it to the way I best approach recordkeeping.

DNS

Finally. The domain has been wrested from Network Solutions and is now (FINALLY!) pointing at the right nameserver. Ye ghods, I can't believe how much work and time I've spend on trying to get a couple of simple changes made to my delegations. Once the last vestiges of the transition are complete, I can finally cancel my outsourced DNS services (I've had nothing but positive experiences hosting with them, but I need to cut costs and now have the resources to host in-house; I'd highly recommend them for anyone with a lot of DNS work to do, and no resources to do it with).

New TV

Whee. :-) The old one finally started reaching the limits of its usability (you know it's bad when you have to thwack the tint knob to change the colors back from green and purple hues to something a little more normal), so we broke down and got a new one. The 18-month interest-free financing we got from Best Buy made it a lot easier to deal with, financially.

Zen

I know I've mentioned this book before, but I have to say it again: if you're finding yourself beginning to hate what you do because of where you do it or who you do it for, and you don't find solace in traditional western approaches, snag a copy of Zen and the Art of Making a Living from your local dead-tree outlet of choice. I'm still working on finishing this book, as it's been a long read; there's an enormous wealth of information there, from coping strategies to marketing tips. Despite the name, it's really not married to Zen or Buddhism, although you may develop an appreciation for that line of thinking while reading the book. If anything, it's handy for those of us who collect quotes; there are snippets from every major philosopher, politician, and pundit in there. ;-)

Ouch

I'm not sure if it was moving the TVs, or something I did by accident, but my lower back is killing me. Being tied to this chair all day isn't helping much, either. Dammit, why can't my dot-com sob story include some of those comfy Herman Miller chairs?