Carousel is a lie!

• Word-by-word diff of GPLv2 and v3
• New version of Unix Backup and Recovery, by W. Curtis Preston. The first was amazing; this one covers Windows and Mac OS X as well. WANT.
• Good reading and good suggestions. I need to alias ls, fg, mutt, sudo, and to shorten my alias for SSHing to my webserver.
• I think I finally figured out what was going on when my desktop machine at work had a suddenly borked mouse/X relationship: double-clicking was inconsistent, single-clicking was inconsistent, but the keyboard still worked. It happened again a few days ago, and I managed to run xev and verify that things really were messed up: the mouse and all its clicks and motions just weren't registering at all. I managed to figure out what was (probably) going on when I came across this link. In the end, what worked for me was switching to a console and running cat /dev/input/mouse1. Don't know why (yet!) but that seemed to reset everything.

Still to come: Why upgrading is the most important thing EVAR.

Someone builds a Perl shell using Moose which led to a response to this article which cited this article and this response, which just made me laugh ("Mental Disorders (Can you say @_ = shift $1->Whuahahahahaha();)"), but not as much as the concept of yak shaving, which just made me laugh and cringe in recognition.

No, I don't usually just list what I've been reading lately…it's a quarterly thing.

USENIX has done a wonderful thing: their conference proceedings are now open to the public, rather than requiring a USENIX membership.

This is very, very good. If you haven't gone through the list of presentations and papers from LISA, FAST, WOOT, or the USENIX conference itself, you really need to.

Come to that, if you haven't picked up a membership yet to USENIX and SAGE, you really need to. A dead-tree copy of ;login: magazine is the most interesting single publication I've found about computing in general, and system administration in particular. You owe it to yourself.

I've been hlding off mentioning this 'til all my ducks were in a row, but at last it's settled. The job I've been working at part-time for the last six months will be my full-time job starting next Wednesday. w00t!

I've been spending my time at $job_1 making sure the documentation is complete, getting a spare workstation set up and ready to go, and dumping my brain into the sysadmin who will be helping fill in 'til a new person is hired (which might take a while).

I'm really excited about this. First off, I'll get my lunch hours back; I've been walking between the two offices (mornings at one, afternoons at the other, back to the first for the last half hour), and it'll be nice to have an hour to myself again. But the new job is exciting for me: nice big servers used for scientific computation, the chance to build an infrastructure from scratch, and some big projects. The people are friendly. The boss is nice. The place has funding for the next five years or so. It's all good. About the only thing missing is a rocket pack so I can cut down on this 90-minute commute.

And on top of all that, they're open to the idea of sending me to LISA this year. Now that would be nice…have to see if it works with the family, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

In other news:

• Though I'm starting to be a bit frustrated with its organization, the Postfix book has proved its worth again by helping me not only get SASL set up at $job_2, but understanding what it's doing. This is in contrast to the don't-touch-or-you'll-lose-a-finger approach I'd taken to getting this working at my current job.
• I'm growing increasingly comfortable with Fedora Directory Server, thanks in no small measure to being able to play with it in a couple of virtual machines. Man, it makes a difference to have that freedom. (And in other news, water continues to be wet.)
• Got my third batch of home-made beer (Grapefruit Bitter, from my local homebrew shop's recipe) into the fermenter on Saturday. My father-in-law is a retired millwright, and he made me an immersion chiller 'cos he's just that cool. Worked a treat; not so sure about the washed yeast. Here's hoping. My parents are coming for a visit in the summer; I figure my dad and I should be able to do a batch and bottle it before they leave, which'll give him a good souvenir.
• Enjoying the hell out of Anathem, which my wife got me for Xmas.
• Closer to migrating to Chronicle. The only thing I want is to not dump all generated HTML pages into one directory; shouldn't take too long to add. Wouldn't that be a lovely thing?

Now that I've officially started my new job, I"m trying to develop/reinforce a couple of good habits.

One of them is sitting down and planning out my day. I started doing this after I got a copy of Time Management for System Administrators (the link throws Tom a few shekels), which saved my sanity. (If you haven't bought that book yet, do it now. It's that good.) However, I haven't been as diligent in going through the motions every day like I should. Today was a good chance to get back into the swing of things…especially since there were about 50 emails waiting for me when I got here! It was reassuring to see the list of completed tasks grow; it's very satisfying to cross something out in my planner.

The second is Daily Doc ("Cute names a specialty" — Aardvark Consultants). There has been a ton of stuff in the last little while that I've been wanting to document, but The One True Source (a wiki) has been in a state of flux until, well, today. I'm going to try my best to take 15 minutes at the end of every day and just write something down, or improve something that's already there.

There are other things I want to accomplish to, but that'll do for today. Gotta give you some reason to come back tomorrow…

Attended a talk today about the upgrade of UBC's network from supporting VLANs to supporting VRFs. Complicated but neat. I'm hoping that the presentation slides and video will make it to the IT Services website; I'll post a link if it does.

Also interesting is this external review of the IT department at UBC. It touches on some things I've been peripherally involved or interested in (funding models, culture and management); I've only skimmed it so far, but it's fascinating to read something so straightforward.

I just noticed that the Free Software Foundation is putting together what they call a "book sprint" — kind of like the 3-day novel writing contest — to write an intro to the command line for newbies. They're hoping to get it done by next Monday (!).

I like the idea of this project a lot; if I can get some spare time this weekend, I'll definitely be dropping by.

...that TCP Offload Engines (TOE) were so detested by Linux kernel folks. The arguments here make interesting reading and seem convincing to me.

(From Andy Grover's blog.)

I really dug Charlie Stross' Halting State (link throws the author a few shekels). But now he's declared it obsolete.

• Bacula config coming along; figured out today that /dev/nst0 corresponds to what mtx sees as Data Transfer Element 1 (as opposed to DTE 0), which explains why previous attempts to run label barcode just failed miserably. (Neat command that.) And I had thought that DTE meant the arm, but no: upon reflection, it's a subtle/obtuse (not the right word, but oh well) way of referring to the tape drive itself.
• Rather interesting comment, if you like that sort of thing, from Mark Burgess (originator of Cfengine on Puppet and Luke Kanies. I know, I should remain above, but it is weirdly fascinating.
• And to go out on a high note, some excellent advice from Tom Limoncelli on setting priorities as a sysadmin:

This sounds like when I was at my previous employer and they asked if
I could develop a web-based system to take surveys.  I nearly said,
"yes" because, well, I know perl, I know CGI, and I could do it.
However, I was smart enough to say "no, but surveymonkey.com will do
it for cheap."  Best of all it was self-service and the HR person was
able to do it entirely without me.  If I had said I could write such a
program, it would have been days of back-and-forth changes which would
have driven me crazy.  Instead, she was happy to be empowered to do it
herself.  In fact, doing it herself without any help became a feather
in her cap.

The lesson I learned is that "can I do it?" includes "do I want to do
it?".  If I can do something but don't want to, the answer is, "No, I
don't know how" not "I know how but don't want to".  The first makes
you look like you know your limits.  The latter sounds like you are
just being difficult.

Woohoo! My first entry for the Sysadvent Calendar, on Development for Sysadmins, has been posted! Thanks to Jordan for tidying it up and adding integration testing, which I'd missed when writing the article. There will be another article from me coming up soon-ish on OCSNG and GLPI.

As of December 1st, Jordan and Matt were still accepting entries -- so head on over if you've got something to say.

• Reproducible Science at AAAS 2011

• Taxonomy of Data Science. "Pointing and clicking does not scale."

• Nice Perl histogram utility

• A case study in the need for open data and code: Forensic bioinformatics (audio and slides for the talk here). Here's the abstract:

High-throughput biological assays let us ask very detailed questions about how diseases operate, and promise to let us personalize therapy. Data processing, however, is often not described well enough to allow for reproduction, leading to exercises forensic where raw data and reported results are used to infer what the methods must have been. Unfortunately, poor documentation can shift from an inconvenience to an active danger when it obscures not just methods but errors.

In this talk, we examine several related papers using array-based signatures of drug sensitivity derived from cell lines to predict patient response. Patients in clinical trials were allocated to treatment arms based on these results. However, we show in several case studies that the reported results incorporate several simple errors that could put patients at risk. One theme that emerges is that the most common errors are simple (e.g., row or column offsets); conversely, it is our experience that the most simple errors are common. We briefly discuss steps we are taking to avoid such errors in our own investigations.

• How to publish a scientific comment in 1 2 3 easy steps. Comment: "It describes deep problems in our scientific discourse today."

• Science and Video: A roadmap. Quote:

So, I make an open call for these two tasks: a simple tool to pin together slides and audio (and sides and video), and an effort to collate video from scientific conference talks and film them if it t exist, all onto a common distribution platform. S-SPAN could start as raw and underproduced as C-SPAN, but I am sure it would develop from there.

I'm looking at you, YouTube.

• "As a non-native speaker, I find the use of both 15-foot and 15 feet within the same text balloon puzzling (third panel). Is there an explanation?"

• Implementing a trojan, complete with dynamic linker, by manipulating exception handling section of .ELF binaries (PDF)

• DTrace book website, though not as much as I should and I should just buy the damn book and run an OS that includes DTrace. Every time I think of the possibility of meeting Bryan Cantrill and explaining that I don't do any of that, I cringe in shame.

• "The Mirage" by Matt Ruff. WOW. An excellent, gripping backwords-world novel with the premise that, in November 2001, Christian fundamentalist terrorists crashed hijacked planes into twin towers in Baghdad. I need to track down "Fatherland" by Robert Harris now.

• "Bad Monkeys" by Matt Ruff. Meh. I finished it, but more out of determined curiosity than anything else. It twisted, it turned, but I just couldn't get into it.

• "Planetary Astronomy: From Ancient Times to the Third Millenium", by Ronald A. Schorn. Absolutely fascinating overview of the growth of our knowledge of planets, from someone who was involved in planetary astronomy's rebirth in the 60s. Published in 1998; I'd pay good money to see an update that would go over the Mars rovers, Cassini, and the explosion of exoplanet research.