July 2004 Archives

Day Two was a pair of tutorials for me. Now, I've said it before, but I think it bears repeating: You can have so much important, useful, intelligent stuff to say, but if they put you on right after lunch, you have got to be more engaging of your audience, and you can't put them in a dark room and expect them to stay awake. Turn the lights up, even if that means spending less time on your powerpoint slides. Be energetic and engaging. You've got to, especially in a tutorial because they're longer, hold the attendee's attention for a long period of time when their body is telling them to sleep off their lunch.

Yesterday was a lot more interesting, though. First off, because it became abundantly clear that IT budget purse-strings are loosening again. The attendance this year was just huge. I haven't been in a room that wasn't overflowing into the hallway. Jeremy had joked on Tuesday "they put me in Salon E [huge-ass room] so there's absolutely no way it's sold out", and while he was right, it wasn't, it probably was pretty damned close. I've been to sessions yesterday where "the seats were full, the floor was full, the aisle was full, the doorway was full, the area BEHIND the people standing in the doorway was full, and getting any closer than six-feet-outside-the-door was damned near impossible. So, yes, attendance is high, and that's a good thing.

Dan Gillmor's talk was enlightening. None of it was really terribly surprising, about how the rise of "distributed journalism" in the form of blogging, etc., is having an effect on both where people get their news, but also what the media outlets begin to think of as newsworthy. In the afternoon, I attended the Apache Performance talk, which had a lot of information I already knew as well as some new things to try out when I get home.

"Why Data Stinks," though, was another great session. It was basically a talk about data-constraints and where you should be setting up those constraints in a database-driven application. Was really interesting stuff.

The Perl Lightning talks, this year, were really disappointing. Maybe I just remember when there were a lot more, maybe it's that they've split up the Lightning talks and the WIP (Work In Progress) talks (in past years, WIPs got the same 5 minutes as anyone else). Personally, I liked the old format, where WIPs were just another lightning talk. I don't want to go listen to a WIP where one guy can potentially drag on about a topic for 10 minutes that I care nothing about. Get him on-stage, force him to concentrate on the important bits, and get him off-stage. If I'm interested, I'll find him after and chat. If I'm not, I won't care because I only have to listen to him for five minutes.

We also had our first "formal" book-signing last night, as O'Reilly rolled out a couple dozen O'Reilly authors. The only thing I saw wrong with this was that -- since O'Reilly now subs out the on-site book store to Powells -- ORA couldn't directly sell copies of the books right at the booksigning table. When ORA ran the book-store themselves, they'd just bring inventory over and make it easier for people to buy the book and get it signed. With the way it is now, you basically have to tell the prospective recipient "go away and buy the book" which gives them the opportunity to get distracted, not come back, etc. I understand the business reasons behind the way it is now, but it still would make a lot of sense to be able to sell directly from the tables.

There were two parties in the evening I attended. One in a location I will not disclose hosted by a publishing company and it was cool. I got to see a lot of people I don't see all that often, put faces to some names from e-mail and blogging, as well as got to meet a couple other people I really enjoyed. After that, we headed over for Stonehenge's annual soiree. Lots of cool people, although it seemed a little less populated this year than last (but then again, we weren't there all that late and it probably picked up as the night went on, knowing the way Randal's parties go).

A couple other random notes before I get showed and ready for today's activities:

• 5 minutes in between sessions is really not enough time. You can't clear out a room in 5 minutes.
• Portland is beautiful, but I suspect we need a larger capacity place to hold it next year
• The wireless has been really pretty decent this year. I complained a lot last year about why the WLAN didn't have a budget to "do it right". Apple apparently sponsored the WLAN this year, and aside from a brief hiccup yesterday, I have yet to have any significant problems with it. Kudos to all involved

Enough for now... more later.

I've been having this weird recurring dream over the last couple months, and I can't even begin to understand the significance of it (and I'm sure there's some readers who are into that whole "your dreams tell everything about you" line of thought but I don't really buy it).

The basic premise is always the same, although the details change from occurrence to occurrence:

• It's night
• I'm in an environment like Manhattan
• Except there's like no population
• I've just decided not to take "my date" (a faceless entity in the dreams) to "the dance", but we instead decide to hang out
• Part of this includes going across the street to what is either a bazaar, or a hot dog shop, and ordering up some dogs
• While coming home I notice, "Oh, hey, the werewolf is out and about" as I see him down the city street
• I go back inside
• Some quantity of panicking and/or hiding occurs by the occupants of the house/apartment
• I wake up

Now, seriously. I have no idea what that means, but given that I've had it like a half-dozen or so times, that's a bit odd. I mean there's other dreams I've had even more frequently, but, well... er... at least I understand the motivation behind those dreams. :-P

Ah, well, not looking for answers, just looking to document for posterity, so when it drives me insane, I can point out exactly how long it's been going on for. :-)

This morning, I attended the Stop Spamming Me!! tutorial, given by Matt Sergeant. I was readily impressed by the breadth of options discussed. Matt definitely knows what he's talking about from personal experience, and it shows.

I was scheduled to go to the mod_perl 2.0 tutorial in the afternoon, but the more I read the tutorial notes, the more I realized I wasn't going to understand the tutorial anyway. It was written more as a "mod_perl 2.0 for mod_perl 1.0 users" talk, which makes sense for a lot of people, but I'm not nearly "mondo mod_perl 1.0 guy" that I would be able to follow along. The class notes will make excellent reference material, but the tutorial itself would have lost me. Instead, Jeremy and I headed out to get some groceries and lunch.

Tonight, I sat at the SCO Moot Court session, and was fairly disappointed. I understand that they had trouble finding someone who could get behind the SCO position themselves, but they found someone who said they'd "Give it a go". What I came here hoping to see was an actual "Reasoned Debate" version of the SCO v. IBM trial. Instead what I got arguing the SCO position was someone who actually stands behind the IBM argument in their heart. The guy who "made" the SCO point did so mockingly, in a way that obviously would never be done in a real trial.

I wanted a "Moot Court", I got a "Kangaroo Court". Very disappointing. Admittedly, there was a lot of "give the audience what it wants" as well as "this is a six-month long trial, you can't do it 'right' in 45 minutes", though, so it's not really the "SCO Lawyer"'s fault at all, I guess.

Ah, well, more fun tomorrow...

The Jews vs. The Drug Dealer

My apartment complex has what they consider to be a nifty feature. If you call the leasing office, and they're not there, or the phones are busy, then you automatically get redirected instantly to the nationwide office.

Now, for a lot things, service emergencies, etc., this can be really useful. However, when you get a message on your voicemail like:

Derek, this is $NAME at the leasing office. Can you please give us a call back at $NUMBER? Thanks.

... then it's completely ass-useless. You call the number, you get some operator in Illinois who has no idea what Sue wanted, but promises to have her call you back. When you tell her that she can't because you're in a conference session, she tells you to try back later. Except, of course, that later, I still have no guarantee it won't ring through to Illinois.

I'd rather get a busy signal, which doesn't cost me air-time minutes, than get routed through to a person who is useless to me. Guaranteed, every time, no "if"s, "and"s, or "but"s. But, of course, there's no option for "calling a number which will never forward through to the call-center on busy".

Sigh.

This afternoon, still a little sleepy from time-adjustment, and needing to get back to the hotel by 3 p.m., I decided to take it easy and go see The Bourne Supremacy at a matinee.

Interestingly, Supremacy is cited as one of the classic examples of the modern movie life-cycle. The Bourne Identity only grossed $213M on a $75M budget. In "Hollywood Accounting Terms", that's only just barely breaking even. However, in the first four months of its DVD release, it did another $100M. In other words, it was a sleeper hit, that people were willing to buy to see it at home, but weren't as willing to go see it in a theater.

But enough box-office geekdom about the original. What about the sequel?

From a storyline perspective, it's quite good. The reasons why Bourne comes out of hiding to, as the trailers say, "bring this fight to [their] doorstep," are perfectly valid (and, as I watched the opening half-hour of this movie, I realized more than ever that I want Tom Clancy's Without Remorse to be made into a flick).

Obviously, it wouldn't be a Bourne flick without Matt Damon judo-chopping some consular personnel. That goes without saying. The storyline, overall, was good.

I was not a fan of the cinematography, though. Too much of it is shot without a steadicam and I understand the idea of "trying to make you feel like you're there," but really as a viewer I don't want to feel like I'm there, I want to feel like I'm an observer watching whats happening. There were whole fight sequences that I couldn't actually tell "what happened" because the herky-jerky camera movements left me wondering who was holding what and using it against whom.

Overall, it fills the same spot the first movie did -- it's a popcorn movie. Don't go in looking for deep meaning. Don't go in looking for serious mystery, because "who the bad guys are" is telegraphed in the worst way. It's always a pleasure to see Julia Stiles chewing up scenery (and, frankly, she could have done with some more screen-time). If you go in expecting two hours of cheap entertainment with some cool fights, some cool chase scenes, and Bourne getting to beat a couple people up, you'll get what you expected.

As I've mentioned in the past, I am a firm believer in Steve Martin's advice from My Blue Heaven, in that "you tip everybody," but as I was bringing my car back this afternoon, I had a thought.

Valet parking... do you tip the guy who takes your car (to make sure to keep it safe), the guy who brings it to you (for being quick at getting it to you)? Both? Neither? Just seems like the tips alone could add up after a week of in-and-out valet service. Of course, there's no option for non-valet parking, so I can't make it easy on myself that way.

At least tipping.org suggests only a buck ... I guess $2.00 a trip out and back isn't bad in the grand scale of things.

Spent the entire day on planes today. On my Albany to O'Hare flight, I managed to sleep the entire flight, with the exception of three instances of "five minutes of awake-time". After a two hour layover in Chicago, I was not looking forward to the much longer Chicago-to-Portland leg. But, as luck would have it, I got seated next to someone who I actually didn't mind making conversation with, and we spent the entire flight talking. A bag full of magazines, a fully-charged iPod and several DVDs sat idle. It was a welcome refreshing relief from the usual in-flight boredom, let me tell you.

I was a little disappointed that my rental car wasn't a Mazda 6 like it was in Chicago, but what can you do? Ah, well, c'est la vie.

So I'm sitting in my hotel room, forcing my body to stay up (10pm local time is 1am according to my body) so that I can get on the right clock with the local time. Jeremy apparently isn't showing up til Monday morning, but that's no big deal. Now I just need to figure out what I'm doing tomorrow before registration begins (maybe go see The Bourne Supremacy, or get a haircut or something).

OK, time to go watch The Punisher... that should keep me awake long enough.

Maybe, just maybe, if AT&T is getting out of the long distance business, then isn't just a tad bit possible that the way the government is handling competition in the marketplace is just a tad bit wrong?

It reminds me of a really funny story which I heard once upon a time. I can't speak to the veracity of it, but it certainly seemed plausible.

Once upon a time, GTE and the Baby Bells were offering Caller ID everywhere, and life was good. Except in California, where the CPUC had made ludicrous demands like "you need to spend umpteen million dollars educating our moronic populace how to block their caller ID info" and stuff like that, which neither PacBell nor GTE wanted to do.

Now, so the story goes, a Very Senior Person at PacBell contacted the CPUC one day to say "You know, we're not seeing a lot of growth potential in California due to ludicrous demands by the CPUC, so on $THIS_DATE, we're leaving, and we're taking every piece of infrastructure we own with it including but not limited to poles, wires, switches, microwave stations, you name it, and we're going to relocate those to other places where markets are friendlier. You may want to try and find someone to service those areas effective on that date.

... and then GTE said something very similar within a couple days. Mysteriously, opposition to Caller ID in California vanished, and neither telco threw California back to the Stone Age.

Now, again, I can't speak to the veracity of the story, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least. At some point any industry leader, no matter how large, is going to say "you know what? this bullshit simply isn't worth it" and pick up their toys and go home, and that's exactly what AT&T is doing right now.

More power to them. I know a lot of people are going to talk about how evil AT&T is for throwing around their weight, but so what? Seriously. When bit players say "fuck this" and go home, nobody even notices. It's lucky to get three column-inches on page 19 of the Journal. When the big boys do it, though, that gets noticed.

Anyone who's worked in telecommunications, for a big company or a small company, will all agree that the system is completely screwed up. It's designed for maximum screwage. Big companies get screwed. Little companies get screwed. Residential customers get screwed. Business customers get screwed. The only ones making any money are the lawyers and the lobbyists... and, well, of course, the politicians who take the donations. :-)

Via Tom:

There's an excellent editorial that does a remarkably coherent comparison of "George Bush's New York City For The RNC Convention" and "Snake Plissken's New York, The Maximum Security Detention Facility".

Makes for excellent reading.

At work, we recently switched our "default" Linux installation from Debian Woody to Red Hat Enterprise Server 3.0. The main reason for doing this was third-party support. The NetBackup client support for Debian is going away, you can't run the server on it at all, the Anti-Virus solution we wanted demanded Red Hat, etc., etc.

So as I'm configuring a new mail server today, and start locking it down, I decide to go disable portmap the old fashioned way - by uninstalling it. Oh, it's depended on by these other things. So I add them to the uninstall line. And that's when I realize that there's a dependency cascade such that damned near half the system is dependent on stuff that is eventually dependent on portmap.

Except of course, that there's absolutely no reason for that. Obviously, since we're not using portmap elsewhere.

Ugh.

OK, a history lesson for people. Once upon a time, there was a continent called Europe. In Europe, the license plates all pretty much looked the same from country to country, which would have been fine except that people in Europe like to travel from country to country, which makes the task of identifying vehicles extremely difficult.

So, someone in Europe had a really spiffy idea, which was to use a specified and documented list of codes for a given country, make it into a neat little oval sticker (or placard depending on the particular country's tastes) and affix it to the car. Now, a friendly law enforcement agent could tell that a given license plate (and it's car, obviously) belonged to whatever country was indicated by the country-code in the oval.

And life was good.

Later, some people began to see European cars which had been imported into America, and they were jealous that their German car didn't have a little "D" oval on it, so companies started selling replica oval stickers and placards, so that yuppie scumbags could look all pretentious in their Beemer that now appeared to have been imported from Germany.

But, life was still fairly good and decent.

Then, all hell broke loose, because some morons decided "Hey, why does Germany get an Oval and my podunk resort town doesn't get an oval?" So they would fashion up stickers and start selling them in the local tourist traps. Little ovals that said "OB" or "OBX" on them would start appearing on cars. Of course, since there's no central authority for them, unless you actually lived in the Outer Banks, you had no fucking clue what that stood for, so there had to be a little translation at the bottom of the oval.

And then once one tourist-trap loser-town started doing it, every other tourist-trap loser town realized "Hey, we can sucker convince our tourists to buy those as well!" and there were suddenly hundreds of obscure, meaningless oval stickers stuck to the ass-ends of cars all over the country, none of which had meaning really to anyone but their owners.

This story doesn't really have a happy ending, because now I have to believe that like a full 25% of all the cars I see these days have some stupid little oval on them, and I can't help but think how an actually useful feature was just completely trashed by ignorant morons with no clue.

OK, rant over. I feel better now.

Like many geeks, I get a crapload of magazines. The last fifteen copies of eWeek I've received have included stern warnings that This is your last issue unless you renew your free subscription!! yet they keep showing up.

The other day, I got a copy of a magazine I hadn't seen before, LinuxWorld magazine, adorned in the familiar logo from the LinuxWorld conference. At first glance, I thought it was just a flyer for an upcoming conference. Then I realized, "Oh, look! It's a magazine. Yet another periodical has added me to their subscriber list," and tossed it on a pile of other magazines which basically get brought to the bathroom one at a time for quick reading. It's a very big pile I should point out.

Today, I got an e-mail from my Red Hat sales rep, asking, essentially, "Hey, are you the same Derek Balling they interviewed in LinuxWorld magazine for the MySQL book?"

Then it all came back to me... the interview, the interviewer saying "give us your address and we'll get you a subscription so you can see the article," and all that jazz. So of course, I had to find it in the pile, and go read the interview, and refresh my memory on the whole affair.

I felt suitably stupid.

I was reading the sentence from yesterday's post:

If I had to choose between "living in the Loop" or "living in Manhattan", I'd almost certainly choose the Loop.

and it occurred to me that any English major reading that would have a conniption fit. There's no grammatical reason why those two phrases should be in quotation marks, since they're not actual quotations.

I see my friends doing this sort of thing all the time, too, and it occurred to me that the reason we do it is because we now think the same way our computers do, to a certain extent. Quotation marks, in many computer contexts, atomicise a collection of words into a single atomic object. The computer parses foo bar maz differently than it does "foo bar maz". The former is three words, the latter is a single object which happens to contain spaces.

With that in mind, the sentence makes a lot more sense grammatically:

If I had to choose between OBJECT or THING, I'd almost certainly choose OBJECT.

I wonder how many other "computer language grammar quirks" have found their way into the lexicon of usage (and I don't just mean stuff like cya or I OWN3D J00!)

I've got work stuff to do tomorrow and Tuesday in Downers Grove (a Chicago suburb) so I decided to spend a couple days in Chicago andflew out a bit early, arriving on Saturday. Two jobs ago, I lived in the Chicago burbs, with a daily commute of 75' from my apartment to the office I worked in.

As I drove down Lake Shore Drive from the Gold Coast, and gazed upon the Chicago skyline, I realized how much I miss Chicago. If I had to choose between "living in the Loop" or "living in Manhattan", I'd almost certainly choose the Loop. The only thing that might give me pause to think otherwise is that living in Manhattan would give me easy access to eighty-one Yankee games a year, and living in the Loop would only give me access to six or nine of them.

I'm torn... I love the country. I love its lack of traffic jams, the low cost of living, the feeling that the people you meet at the local grocery store actually are your neighbors, etc. At the same time, I love the ... well, the "life" that is a bustling city, and Chicago certainly has it. And while Chicago certainly has its share of "bad neighborhoods", by and large, it feels a lot safer to me than most of New York City does (for example, I still won't take the train to a night Yankee game because walking a block through Harlem at 125th at 11:30 at night doesn't appeal to me at all).

I firmly believe life will bring me to live here again some day, and the next time, I won't live out in the 'burbs, but right in the heart of the city, so I can enjoy every ounce of it.

I can't review this movie without accidentally including spoilers, so click for more info.

My TiVo announced to me this morning that my cable company had made a lineup change. Turns out it was a shuffling of the digital-audio channels that lots of cable-companies provide these days but one made me laugh out loud:

632 MCRGGAE

McReggae? :-) I know, I know, it's M.C./Reggae, with MC being Music Choice (or something like that), but still I had this vision of Scotsmen singing about peace-through-ganja and stuff. Hey, why not, as Jeff pointed out to me this morning, Scotty may be senile, but he's still pretty virile at 80.

So I got a virus spam today:

From: "Dballing" <dballing@yahoo-inc.com>
Date: July 6, 2004 1:27:54 PM EDT
To: "Dredd" <dredd@megacity.org>
Subject: Hidden message

It was from my old Yahoo-inc.com address to my present address. Except here's where it gets funny, my megacity.org address is set up to auto-forward a copy to my GMail address. Except that gmail didn't like it, and bounced it.

451 4.4.1 reply: read error from gsmtp171.google.com.
... while talking to gsmtp57.google.com.:
>>> DATA
<<< 552 Illegal Attachment
554 5.0.0 Service unavailable

So my mail server dutifully tried to tell the sender "Well, I couldn't forward it to where it was supposed to..." except I haven't worked there a while:

... while talking to mrin2.yahoo.com.:
>>> DATA
<<< 550 5.1.1 <dballing@yahoo-inc.com>... User unknown
550 5.1.1 <dballing@yahoo-inc.com>... User unknown
<<< 503 5.0.0 Need RCPT (recipient)

which then caused the double? triple? bounce to end up in my inbox since my mail server officially now had no idea what to do.

I just think it's funny that this message literally bounced off of every major address I've had in the last four years. :)

There are some things in this world, I'll never understand, and people who, literally, turn themselves willingly into wage-slaves are the ones I will never ever understand.

It is, in fact, possible to work too hard. I'm a firm believer in making sacrifices in order to succeed, etc., etc., but there have to be limits to that.

My friend has a job where he travels a lot. Like he catches a plane Sunday night to $SOME_CITY and returns home Friday night, spending the entire intervening time elsewhere. When Sunday rolls around again, the process is repeated. My friend enjoys his job, and that's extremely important in life. That type of arrangement can be kinda hellish on a family, but it's something that you can work through, usually by making weekends be "all about the family".

Except that's not what he does. He's had a side-business for a while, and on weekends, he spends the entire weekend doing work for $SIDE_BUSINESS. For example, it's a holiday weekend. The wife and kids are all off camping, enjoying a Fourth of July Weekend like a good number of other families are doing. What's he doing? Some crap for his side-business.

Not a day goes by that he isn't doing work. And I don't mean just like "He did an hour of work sunday morning" type thing, but several hours or more (frequently much more) every day of the week. He does it, he says, "to pay the bills". And I can understand that, to a point...

People get too caught up in having the latest and greatest toys, houses, cars, whatever. I would much rather live in a crappy apartment in a shitty neighborhood, and drive a beat up eight-year-old-car with rust spots, and know that I get "me-time" (or, some day, "family time") than to have my entire existence defined by "what work I'm doing today".

All the cool houses, toys, cars, and shite don't mean a lick of difference if you don't actually have time to enjoy them. If you're only paying for the crap so that others can enjoy them, then you're doing something completely fucked up (hint: slaves used to bust their ass quite a bit so that other people could enjoy the fruit of their labor).

Worse still, it's a self-reinforcing condition. Once you feel like you "need" to work that hard "to survive" (for your perception of survive), it's very hard to break free and realize "I don't need to kill myself in order to enjoy life, and in fact, it's kinda counterproductive to do so".

I've known my share of workaholics... Yahoo, back in the day, was literally populated to the brim with them. But even then, the people who were pulling 60 hour work weeks still made sure they arranged for quality time with the family. Even when they had (literally) millions of reasons to dedicate every waking minute to their employer, even those guys saw the value of time away from work.

It makes me sad, because I know that years from now my friend will look back upon his life and realize he's wasted it. The time he had to enjoy it will have past, squandered trying to squeeze every ounce of available "working time" out of it.