This week has been a writeoff. I took 2.5 days off sick (shoulda been 3), I slept for maybe four hours last night, and I've stared blearily at my work monitor more than I care to admit.
I did get some stuff done: updated one of my wireless routers to the latest version of OpenWRT (and promptly found problems), got njam working on the new incarnation of the MythTV box (the kids are thrilled), and listened, rapt, to my youngest son proudly show his friend around the house while I hid upstairs in bed, snuffling quietly. So there's that.
I've been reading "A History of Christianity". I long for footnotes, but more for comfort than anything else; other than that, it's pretty damn good. I've also got "Why Evolution Is True", and that's good too. I picked up Sue French's "Deep Sky Wonders", thanks to my ever-generous in-laws, and if the verdammt clouds ever clear up I hope to put it to good use. (Though I was proud, the last time the sky was clear, to have found NGC 1662 by Orion, which is mentioned in this book...I was surprised at how easy it was to find.)
Optional reading for the week: "Sun's Unified Storage 7210 -- designed to disappoint?". Bryan Cantrill is a class act.
Mandatory reading for the week: Terry Milewski's article on Section 34 of Bill C-30, which outlines the duties of inspectors, appointed by the minister under the act. Quote:
The inspectors may "enter any place owned by, or under the control of, any telecommunications service provider in which the inspector has reasonable grounds to believe there is any document, information, transmission apparatus, telecommunications facility or any other thing to which this Act applies."
...The inspector, says the bill, may "examine any document, information or thing found in the place and open or cause to be opened any container or other thing." He or she may also "use, or cause to be used, any computer system in the place to search and examine any information contained in or available to the system."
...The inspector -- remember, this is anyone the minister chooses -- is also empowered to copy anything that strikes his or her fancy. The inspector may "reproduce, or cause to be reproduced, any information in the form of a printout, or other intelligible output, and remove the printout, or other output, for examination or copying."
...Finally, note that such all-encompassing searches require no warrant, and don't even have to be in the context of a criminal investigation. Ostensibly, the purpose is to ensure that the ISP is complying with the requirements of act the but nothing in the section restricts the inspector to examining or seizing only information bearing upon that issue. It's still "any" information whatsoever.
Horrible. Email your MP today.
Michael W. Lucas, of Absolute FreeBSD fame (among many others), has a book coming out on Network Flow Analysis. Sweet!
/me hurries off to pre-order...
I knew I didn't like Vaio's very much, but I had no idea they were so awful — to the point of requiring hacking on your goddamn BIOS to enable VMX.
The flash demo for Dell's ML6000 tape library boasts that it's "completely self-aware". Not sure I want SkyNet running my backups…
O'Reilly has an upcoming webcast on -- deep breath -- "Advanced Twitter for Business". (At least they didn't call it a webinar. When I told my wife about this, she said "So...you and O'Reilly break up yet?"
Obviously not, because I've just ordered Backup and Recovery and Linux Clusters with Oscar, Rocks, OpenMosix and MPI. I had purchased B&R at my last job, but this is for me.
And did I mention the dream I had a while back about a Sun laptop that looked like an X4200 server folded in half? In the dream it ran nearly perfectly, except when you tried to go to a web page with flash; then it would crash, and a movie of Matt Stone would play, apologizing on behalf of Jonathan Schwartz and everyone else at Sun.
I'm playing with the CVS version of Emacs after reading about some of the new features in what will become Emacs 23. It's nice, but the daemon mode isn't quite multi-tty — you can run Emacs server, detached from any TTY, but if you try connecting to it with multiple emacsclient instances, the first one is where all the TTY action goes. Not sure what I'm missing.
I never expected to read that Ken MacLeod has Prince tickets to sell.
(Incidentally, if you haven't read his books already I can't recommend them enough. Start with Cosmonaut Keep and just keep on going.)
I spent the better part of the day yesterday setting up IPv6 at home
now that I've got my subnet from SixXS. I'm running rtadvd on
my OpenBSD firewall, and was testing it with rtsold on a laptop
running OpenbSD. I'm not sure what I was doing wrong, but for the
longest time all the laptop would pick up was the gateway; it would
not set up a global address, but stick with the link-local address
only. Every time I tried to ping the dancing turtle it would try
sending it with the fe80 address, which of course did not work.
In the end, after a few reboots of both machines, it did work. My notes were a little thin (hey, this is my vacation here :-), but I can't think of what changed…the laptop just started setting itself a global address, routing worked, and that was that. Weird.
Next up will be to get the website working on IPv6. Maybe a dancing daemon or something…
And hey, I won tickets to see William Gibson speak! "Hey, Mr. Gibson...you know that book you wrote called Virtual Light? ...It was really cool." Ah, fanboys. But my wife wants to go too, 'cos she loved Pattern Recognition. Should be a fun night.
And I just realized that although I've been generating an RSS2 feed, I've never linked to the RSS2 feed until now. Enjoy.
When I got my first job in IT, a friend of mine bought me a copy of the third edition of Unix in a Nutshell. (Incidentally, why does O'Reilly's search, which in my client returns "Sorry, no matches were found containing ." (sic), suck so much?) Sure, it was help desk on a small ISP, but it was something. I read that book front to back on the bus to and from work, and filled it full of stickers from all the servers or PCs I assembled.
The sysadmin at that first job also had a cordless drill, and that made things so much easier when assembling or racking servers. I wanted one, but I didn't buy one 'cos I figured I hadn't earned it yet. When my Italian millwright father-in-law bought me one, I felt like it was a vote of confidence in a way.
Another thing the sysadmin had was a Leatherman Wave. Again, I wanted one, but I didn't think I'd earned it yet. Last week, I decided to get one; and if I was going to get one, I was going to wear the damn thing. I started wearing the sheath on my belt, and waited for a chance to use it.
Today I had that chance.
I got to work and went to the kitchen to grab a coffee. "There's a bat behind the fridge," I heard.
What?
The cleaning woman pointed. "I moved out the fridge to clean it," she said. "There was a bat behind it. I don't want to touch it."
I looked, and sure enough there was one hanging by the edge of the cupbard. It was small, like a mouse wearing an overcoat. (Goth mouse?)
And then my moment came.
There were no gloves (I was worried about rabies), but there was a towel. I draped the towel over the bat while frightened coworkers watched, and then covered it with a recycling bin.
And then I took out the Leatherman, and flipped out the knife. "I need help cutting cardboard," I said, and the receptionist came to help. She sliced up a cardboard box and gave me a square of it. I slid it between the cupboard and the towel, sandwiching the bat gently between it and the towel, with the recycling bin behind.
I carried it outside to a clump of trees (ah, the advantages of living on a beautiful campus), found a stick, coaxed it onto it and then left it up a tree.
But I couldn't have done it...
...without the Leatherman.
(This writing style brought to you by my third reading of Battlefield Earth. Our motto: Yeah, it's trash...so what?)
In other news, Hunter Matthews is giving a workshop on server room best practices at LISA '07. I met him at LISA last year, when he was another attendee of an otherwise thin tutorial on setting up server rooms/closet. He was also at the documentation BOF, and the one who said "I've got one user who considers 7-bit ASCII a luxury compared to what you can get from 5 or 6 bits." (Oh, and: "Cooperative collaboration. Yeah, its part of our vision statement.") He's a good guy and a good teacher, and if you're going to LISA you could do a lot worse than going to his workshop.
I had no idea. And he's speaking about it here in Vancouver. 12 years here and I still haven't run into him, unlike folks I know. Here's hoping I win tickets.
Woot! The second edition of "The Practice of System and Network Administration" has finally started shipping! Just ordered my copy, along with Beautiful Code and Perl Best Practices. I love books, oh yes I do.
Network problems again last week. Cheap switches will be the death of me, I swear, unless cable management gets me first. (Actually, it was both this time...cable looped back on itself + cheap switch == lots of embarassing explanations.)
But there are bright spots in this morass -- 48 of them, to be precise, in the form of 2 x HP 2626 Procurve Managed Switches. SSH login, VLANs up the wazoo, and much muchness. The only thing I'm not sure about is whether or not it does port mirroring (which I can live without, but it'd be nice). (UPDATE: Yes it does. Weeoo!) If these work out, then I think it'll be 2 x 2650s to replace the DLink unmanaged ones that keep crashing. The Ciscos seem nice and all, but the cost...oh my. And the respondents to the recent Ask Slashdot seemed to like HP a lot. Plus, we used to use 'em at my old job, and everyone was pretty happy. We'll see how it goes.
Just bought Neal Stephenson's The System Of The World at Big Hair Bookstore. Twenty-two pages and I love it already. God, the man can write.