July 2003 Archives

While I was gone, last week, apparently (well, it could have started sooner than that, but I didn't notice it til I got back) the air-conditioner for the unit above me had a leak in its condenser, and the water went right down into the wall of my coat closet.

Luckily my "losses" were minimal, a couple of board-games covered in mildew, but it could have been a lot worse. Now the closet is open, airing itself out to dry out, after which maintenance will come in and make all the mildew go away.

Not exactly the greatest thing to come back from vacation to find, though.

I only had one session scheduled for Sunday, and at two minutes to start-time, neither the GM nor any other player had showed up. Since this was also the last time-slot, I decided to ask George's GM to hold a spot in his game for me for a few minutes, in case mine was cancelled. He convinced me to just stick around and play and not worry about it. I'm glad I did.

12:30 p.m. - ABERN I: The Rescue of Duke David... - It was weird to play D&D without any dice rolls. It was complete story-telling, no "Random Chance" or luck of the dice. What the GM and the players wanted to happen happened. It was great.

Overall, GenCon was quite cool. It was a much nicer facility in Indy than the MECCA was in Wisconsin, although GenCon's staffing issues were horrendous. There were people waiting on line for three to four hours to register. That's just ludicrous. It's the same thing year after year so they obviously know "a metric fuckload of people are going to show up", so how can they not staff for it?

Ah, well, I'll be there next year, guaranteed.

Wow... I'm old. It's been a while since I tried to go more than one day in a row on less than four hours sleep, and it kicked me in the ass.

If you're not a D&D geek, feel free to ignore this.

So the sports world is all abuzz about Kobe Bryant. What really seems to have it abuzz lately, though, is a talk-show host revealed the identity of the accuser. People are berating the talk-show host, etc., etc., for doing it.

The host is taking flak for daring to state publicly that maybe the accused might be innocent. I'm not saying Bryant is or isn't innocent, I wasn't there, but basically he's being taken to task for trying to be sure that both sides of the story are out there for the public to hear.

I'm still trying to figure out why this is considered "wrong". Her accusation has pushed Kobe Bryant into the spotlight as a "bad person". If the case is going to be in the public spotlight, and it is, the public has a right to be able to know the identity of both the accused as well as the accuser, so as to weigh the relative credibility of both parties.

If the woman was indeed raped (and it's not for a talk-show host or a blog to decide that, it's for a court to decide), I'm sorry that it happened, and on behalf of the entire gender I'd say it's wrong. But, at the same time, you don't get to publicly besmirch someone and then hide in anonymity. That means that the defendant gets to be grilled day in and day out about where he was before, during and after, but the alleged victim is not subject to the same scrutiny. That's not "like being raped again", as a doctor in that article states. It's like having your story subjected to the same amount of scrutiny, in the same forums, as the defendant's story.

773 Miles, 12 hours after I started driving this morning, George and I arrived safe and sound in Indy for GenCon.

The last time I was in Indy (well, the Indy area) was to stay at my late mother-in-law's house for a night as the wife and I travelled from California to Connecticut back in January 2002. Feels sorta weird to be back. It especially feels weird since, to George who's never been here before, I'm "the guide" even though I don't really know jack-shit about Indy other than how to get to the Circle Centre Mall.

I managed to drive the whole way without even feeling tired. Usually, especially like when the wife and I drove from CA to CT (or from Chicago to CA), I felt really tired after a couple hours driving. Today I managed to do the whole thing without ever really feeling tired at all. My gas-pedal leg is cramped (no cruise control, ugh), but otherwise, life is good.

In anticipation of a week of living on potato chips, pretzels and Coca-Cola, we had "one last meal of importance" at Buca Di Beppo. I love Buca, haven't eaten there since Jay's birthday party blow-out.

Meanwhile, tomorrow my Danger Sidekick Hiptop is due to arrive at the hotel via FedEx (since T-Mobile sorta got confused by the Pit's request and didn't manage to get me one before I left). That should be nice.

Don't be surprised if I'm relatively quiet for a couple days. I'm set for gaming 8 a.m. to midnight for the next four days basically, and it'll be blissful to be able to pay little to no attention to The Pit. It's my first real vacation, where I'm not expected to really be reachable at all, in years.

Sweet blissful peace.

Well, since Jeremy said something, I guess I can now say something as well. :)

Jeremy asked me to help him work on his (now our) book, High Performance MySQL, for O'Reilly.

Jeremy's the brains (and the blame) behind the whole plan, though, although I think if I remember correctly, I can take credit for the banner at the top of the cover.

At some point, when ORA starts taking pre-orders for it, there'll be a gratuitous link here, so that I can try to guilt trip visitors into buying it. If you visit both my site and Jeremy's site, I feel it's only fair that you buy a copy from each of them. ;-)

As noted in a prior post, I was having a large issue with some memory in our machine. Well, today, it finally got all sorted out, and the memory is now installed, the machine purring along, and everything happy.

And, NewGuyCIO gave me permission to not bother with the commute tomorrow or Tuesday, so I won't get sick of driving every single blessed day

Time to go relax.

Last Tuesday: four hours in the car, commuting to White Plains
Last Wednesday: four hours in the car, driving to Secaucus and back
Last Thursday: four hours in the car, driving to Secaucus and back
Last Friday: four hours driving up to Vermont
Yesterday: four hours driving back from Vermont
Today: four hours, to Secaucus and back
Tomorrow: four hours, to White Plains and back
Tuesday: blissful ... no driving necessary
Wednesday: Thirteen hours, driving to GenCon in Indy.

Way not cool.

Anyone who's ever used Yahoo!Maps knows how flaky they are, giving directions like: Turn left on unnamed road for 0.0 miles.

Tonight they hit their limit with me. I was driving up to Vermont to visit with some friends, and Yahoo!Maps sent me up US-7. Which makes perfect sense -- if you don't know about the plethora of ferries that cross Lake Champlain and attach on their western shore to the freakin Interstate.

So, I ended up driving all over creation at 30-45mph through small towns when, if Yahoo knew how to use ferries, could have been MUCH easier.

If only there was a good TripMaker program for the Mac...

So, as I may have mentioned before, The Pit has a nice fat IBM RS/6000 7026-6H1 unit... 6 CPU, 2GB RAM... not too huge (I mean, I've had co-workers who were able to say they worked on a Cray with serial number "1"), but nothing to sneeze at.

If you're my mother, or something like that, feel free to skip this entry, because it'll be complete gibberish to you.

I'm having trouble with my Samba install at work, and need some help...

There are open source projects in the world that have world class responsiveness. If you have a perl question, you can post to comp.lang.perl.moderated and have an answer (several, after all, because there's more than one way to do it), within a couple hours. For Linux issues, you can post to any of a number of mailing lists or newsgroups, depending on what type of issue it is, and get an answer back lickity-split.

But the folks on the Samba mailing lists have got to be the least responsive people on the face of the planet.

I've asked, over the last several months, a number of "this isn't working, I need help" type questions on the mailing list (samba@lists.samba.org). To date, about the only time I ever get a reply is when I fat-fingered something and it's someone pointing out how dumb I am.

One of the benefits of open source, that we advocates tend to tout, is our responsiveness. We tell people "go out on the net when you have a problem, you'll have an answer in no time"...

... unless, it appears, it's with Samba.

So, given that I asked the Debian package maintainer a question yesterday, and posted that same question to the mailing list this morning, and have yet to see even a peep about it from either, I'm forced to ask myself the question I dread asking:

Is it more efficient to drop a Win2K Server box in there where the Samba server presently sits, and call it a day?

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not implying that somehow the Debian guy is "a bad person" for not replying to me, or that the Samba community owes me some obligation to help me out. I'm simply saying that the perceived benefit - a global network of people to help with support, bugfixes, etc. - is not nearly so beneficial in this particular open source project.

As mentioned on FuckedCompany, this memo from eBay to its employees is pretty harsh:

Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2003 10:30 AM
To: DL-eBaySJC-all-R
Subject: eBay internal communication - Talking at desks- Please read

It has come to my attention that several employees are talking at their desks during scheduled work hours. I must convey the importance of NOT talking at your desk, or to your desk partner. Talking greatly decreases work productivity, and company morale.

If you need to talk to someone, please schedule a meeting room where you can talk, or use the break rooms. If you are caught talking at your desk, you will be escorted into a meeting room and questioned as to why you are talking, and if it is relevant to your job. If not, you may be subjected to disciplinary actions.

We want you to work hard at eBay, and enjoy your work. Please contact management if you have any questions.

Let me get this straight, they put people at the same desk (hence "desk partner") and expect that they're going to stare at each other for eight hours and not be friendly with each other? What the hell, man, I have a vision of Winston Smith's workplace now, with everyone wearing drab clothes and nobody speaking to each other.

Mark down one place you'll never see me work, no matter how good the pay there might be.

One of the things that every OSCON has had in the past is to close out with a Town Hall meeting. People bring up ideas, things that occurred to them while they were here this week, things that they think need to merit at least being heard by the Open Source community, or just to thank certain members of the Conference team for their work.

But, this year, there's no Town Hall scheduled.

To me, the Town Hall was always indicative of what made the OSS community unique. That, annually, you could show up and speak your mind about where the community had gone, was going, or - more often - should go.

I wonder if its disappearance is a by-product of the Microsoft sponsorship of the lunches. Just kidding, I'm not that much of a conspiracy theorist.

I have every incentive to keep my accounts with Citibank. Both my debit card and credit card are AAdvantage cards, earning me a frequent flier mile for every buck I spend. I've amassed a shitload of miles in the two years I've had them.

But, when I get back from Portland, they're history.

Before the holiday weekend, on 7/2, I deposited an advance from my company (against my OSCON expenses). On 7/7, I transferred that money to my credit card, so that I'd be able to pay for my hotel. On 7/9, I had an automated payment to my auto-loan company.

Except that they waited until 7/11 to clear the funds from the initial deposit. A check drawn on a local company took them that long to clear. And they charged me an overdraft fee to boot.

So, I called them up. Because that's what I do when companies screw up.

... followed, of course, with sharing the conversation with you fine folks.

It occurred to me, as I sat in a room that had no connectivity to speak of, to wonder this: Why does ORA continue to depend upon volunteer efforts for the WLAN for OSCON?

Now, I mean no disrespect for the fine folks who are donating their network skills and hardware, but we (attendees) are left sorta saying "well, ya can't complain, nobody's getting paid for the network, so it's catch as catch can".

But, why isn't anyone getting paid for it? There's 1500 attendees this year. If the conference fee total was raised $50, few people would really notice, and that would amount to $75,000 to spend on wireless network support for five days.

That's a helluvalotta money to build a small high-traffic WLAN with. Occurs to me to wonder why it's not being done.

Use a gateway of 192.168.10.1 and a netmask of 255.255.252.0. Pick an IP address somewhere in the range of 192.168.10.2-192.168.11.254. If you get a message about a conflict, change to something else.

Why a wireless LAN that's NAT'ed and sits in RFC1918 space, with literally millions of IP addresses available to it, is having issues providing enough IP addresses for the subset of 1500 attendees that are using wireless is beyond me, but this is how I'm protecting myself from the DHCP Server Madness. Maybe at some point they'll open up the DHCP server to use a larger subnet or something. I mean, 192.168.0.0/16 gives them 65K addresses to use, but they are only using 512. :-/

With Cleveland in town, they'll be up against the one and only Coco Crisp, Center Fielder for the Indians.

What a dumb fucking name.

SCO has a market cap of about $145M. For many companies, that's not terribly hard to come by in their warchest, especially a company like, say, IBM, or such.

A hostile takeover for that could look a lot like "Hi, we're big-corp, we plan to buy every share of SCOX we can get our hands on and the instant we have something resembling 51%, we plan to cease operations of the corporation entirely, leaving any remaining shareholders with worthless stock. Thus, it's in your interest to sell to us as early as possible, lest you be left holding worthless pieces of paper."

"We won't be on the board of directors, we won't be officers of the corporation, we'll simply propose the resolution, act upon it, and shut the company down in one fell swoop. We're doing this because the existing management is a menace to the industry in general, and it's a public service to put SCO out of business."

I have to believe that would work, if you could find someone willing to do it. That and the stock price for SCO would probably plummett as shareholders became more desperate to be "in the portion of the shareholders who saw some return instead of being left holding their dicks in their hands"

I was speaking with Jesse during the break in his RT talk, and pointed out how if there was a book on "doing cool stuff with RT", I'd buy a copy in a heartbeat. He indicated that there was this "on-again,off-again" ORA interest in a book that Tim had killed the idea, then it had gotten a new champion, and Tim had gotten back on board, but then it later got killed because they didn't think it could get enough copies sold.

I personally think that's a shame, and would encourage Jesse to either find some way of convincing O'Reilly to publish a book on the topic or to go find some other publisher more willing to get behind the project. Lots of people (myself included) have installed RT in the past, and been very intimidated after trying to look under the hood, and a book that walked someone through the innards, and how to use those innards to get RT to do what you want would be very well-received I think.

In the morning session, I went to the Extending and Embracing RT talk, which was very useful. We're in the process right now of evaluating RT3 (we're presently running a mid-range 2.0.x version), and it was reassuring to see that a lot of the things I thought "Wow, that's going to mean someone spending some significant time hacking on RT to make it work the way our users want it to!" is actually (with version 3.x) more like "OK, someone's going to have to write a script or to against the RT API, and maybe change a couple configuration options".

In the afternoon, I headed over to the Jabber Boot Camp session, which was quite well done, if a bit too basic for my hopes. I was sort of hoping more for "here's how to do cool stuff with Jabber", instead of "here's how to use Jabber"... I can't really fault the organizers or speakers, at all, it was advertised as a boot-camp after all, and for the target audience, it was very well-done.

Anyone else think it's kind of funny that the Technology Volunteerism Summit at OSCON is invitation-only?

Guess they don't want any fresh ideas on the topic. Why even include that on the agenda as "an event" if it's something that 99% of the attendees aren't even allowed to attend? There's a nightly event held in my hotel room. It's the Derek Balling Sleeping Summit, and it's by invitation-only.

There's nothing like forcing your body to do stuff it doesn't want to do, in order to be able to do the things it needs to do the following day.

I left Newark Airport yesterday morning at 08:22. Which means I woke up around 5:00 yesterday EDT. In Pacific time, that's 2AM.

But, I needed to get onto Pacific Time right quick, or every night around 7 or 8, I'd be dying, getting ready to fall into bed, etc.

So, after spending 8 hours in the air, working 5 hours at the Registration booth downstairs, and a number of hours on either side of that waking or waiting in airports, I pushed myself to stay up late, really late, in the hopes of kicking my internal clock onto Pacific Time in one fell swoop.

I'm amazed. It worked flawlessly.

In NY, I wake up at 6AM every time without an alarm clock, sometimes even earlier. Today, no alarm clock in sight and three hours "off-kilter", I woke up at 6AM exactly, feeling rested and ready to go.

I figure I'll probably have to force myself tonight again to stay up, but then it should be over, and I should be perfectly fine.

I'm at the airport now, and while Newark doesn't appear to have 802.11b connectivity, I figured I ought to write this while it's still fresh in my head.

If your passenger screening hardware is so sensitive that a standard card-reader badge will set it off (e.g., the kind that geeks all over the country have to get into their offices or colocation facilities), then perhaps, just perhaps, it's worth considering "tuning it down a bit".

There's less metal in a magcard than there is in the fillings in my teeth, so why that is setting it off, I have no idea. Took me forever to figure out "it's your wallet that is setting off the metal detector, because that's the last place I'd look for freakin metal.

That and I hate having to take off my shoes, especially when you're making every passenger take off their shoes, which means the line moves slower than shit.

At yesterday's family gathering, the topic came up about how I think, to a certain extent, the following statment is true: There are a certain class of old rich men who seek hot young women, and there are a certain class of young hot women who seek out rich old men. I likened that in our discussion to the American Dream, it's what every old rich man wants deep down in some visceral level... to live the life of Hugh Hefner.

It occurred to me that society seems to judge a relationship based on the ages of the particpants, if it knows them. For instance, in the above example, we assume that while the older rich man may indeed love the hot young female, we assume subconsciously that the love in not really reciprocated, and that the young cutie is after the old man's cash when he kicks it. Or that the old man really isn't necessarily in love, but willing to trade the "expenditure" that is his young wife's needs for the lust-filled life he gets out of the deal.

Because there is a large age-difference between the two, we assume "ill will" of one of the two parties. That age-difference seems to be directly proportionate to the age of the parties. For example, a 17-year-old dating a 13-year-old, we view usually as "wrong" where the older is taking advantage of the younger, but a four year difference means nothing when it's a 28 year old dating a 32 year old.

Is it wrong for, say, a 30 year old to date a 20 year old? What would we think if we saw that? ... and if we did think ill of it, why? Would we care if a 40 year old was dating a 50 year old? Not likely, we'd be happy for both of them.

Why does society really even care, so long as both parties are happy (and, of course, assuming ages of consent are met, etc. etc.)

Man, what a July 4th... Barry White dies, that's a bummer. The Yankees lose to Boston, and the small-town fireworks I was raving about were pretty much "totally suck-ass" until the finale, and then half of it was below the treeline of the place they do the fireworks at, so the crowd couldn't see it.

On the upside, though, I did head north and visit with the family, seeing a bunch of aunts, uncles, and cousins I hadn't seen in a while, and it was nice to spend most of a very warm day dangling my feet in a nice inground pool.

Tomorrow night, I head to Newark for an overnight stay in the airport hotel, before I fly out early Sunday morning to Portland for OSCON. Lots of travel this month for Derek.

I was beginning to despair about a lack of good concerts this summer, or - where were good concerts, they were being held while I was out of town, such as Queensryche or Weird Al.

But, I've got tickets for Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, and now, coming to my favorite local shithole club, Anthrax.

Summer may be looking up after all.

It's as good a holiday recipe as any that came before.

I was terminally bored tonight, so I headed over to the local multiplex to see the latest in the Terminator series.

I read in someone else's review that the car chase series kicks ass over the one from Matrix Reloaded. I'd agree with that assessment.

Plot was weak, but it definitely had lots of shit-blowin-up, which is what a summer movie is all about.

And while one might say, "I wouldn't want to get between Kristanna Loken (the T-X), and Claire Danes, but I'd disagree. I'd pay good money to get in-between those two.

Errr, sorry. Was that the out-loud voice?

The kind of people for whom my pure unreserved hatred is reserved are those folks who tell you "You're thinking foo", and I say, "No, you ignorant moron, I'm thinking bar", and they sit there insistently trying to convince me that they know what's going through my mind better than, say, the person who owns said mind, insisting that any claims that I'm thinking bar are just some fabrication, and what I'm really thinking is some makes-no-sense foo that they came up with all on their own.

There's probably some Psych-101 term for people who insist you're thinking what they think you're thinking, but I can't be bothered to look it up.

Seems to me that unless you can be shown to have one of those deadly diseases, that spitting on a government employee should not yield you a life sentence.

Certainly, it's not the most polite thing to do, but without there being actual "damage" in terms of having transferred some deadly contagion to the victim, it makes absolutely no sense for someone who spits on a cop to end up doing a longer jail term than a fucking rapist or murderer.

Seriously, where did our Bill of Rights go. I know I saw it here, somewhere.

Jon Orwant, quiz-master extraordinaire, Perl Guru, and all-around good guy, along with his lovely wife, Robin, recently brought home their daughter, Amelia.

After a couple hiccups, it looks like everyone is now doing fine. Congrats to everyone up there in Boston.