The Lone Sysadmin

I’m sitting here pondering why I drank so much on the eve of New Year’s Eve. What better way to pass the time while the aspirin kicks in than manually syncing my iTunes libraries?

Um, no. You know, if there’s one thing I wish iTunes had it’s the ability to sync the libraries across multiple computers. I have four machines I do work from, all of which have iTunes on them. There’s my home PC, a custom-built machine running Windows XP. There’s my work PC, a Dell running Windows Server 2003. There’s my work Mac, a dual G4 running 10.4, and then there’s my laptop, a Dell running Windows XP. Apple already lets me authorize all of them for playback of my stuff, so why not carry it a little further and keep the libraries in sync for me? Not just one way, either, but multiple-master. That way when I buy a song at work it’ll just magically appear on my laptop, and then my home machine. When I rip a CD at home it’ll migrate to my other libraries.

It should also sync the metadata, too, so when I’m bored sitting in an airport and I rate all of my songs, those ratings appear in all the libraries later. Ditto for the last play times and play counts, including synchronization with my iPods, so that if I play Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek” 485 times on my drive to Minneapolis all of my libraries will know that and increment themselves. If I create a playlist on one machine, have it appear on the others, too. I don’t even care if the RIAA-mentality one-way iPod file sync is still around, just go both ways with the metadata. If there is a conflict between devices let me establish priorities, so my ratings on my iPod win over the ratings on my work PC.

In short, if I have authorized iTunes using valid credentials all of my iTunes instances and iPods should act as one, maintaining copies of the data on discrete PCs for backup and mobility purposes.

I could rsync the libraries together. I could sync them all to my main Linux box running Samba and then sync each off of there. All of that would require a significant effort to ensure that the music files and the metadata stayed in sync, and that I had a record in the library for each file. I’d have to reimport everything, though, which trashes my custom playlists. I could rewrite the iTunes Music Library.xml file but I’d have to reimport it again. That’s what syncOtunes does, but only between two libraries, and a reimport isn’t seamless. I could get the libraries all in sync on one machine and then copy everything, including the iTunes Library.itl file, to the other machines, but then I don’t have multiple-master capabilities anymore. I want seamless, Apple magic, the kind of “holy crap it just did the right thing” sort of feature Apple is famous for.

Apple, I know this is a doozy of a request, but please save me from library management hell!

Holy crap, the upgrade from WordPress 1.5.3 to 2.0 is freaking painless. I think it took me five minutes, including the upgrade to the test copy of my site. Now that is the way software should work. Good job guys! The new editor interface kicks total ass, too.

In unrelated news I have received my first comment spam. Three of ‘em, actually. I don’t know whether I should be excited or annoyed. :-) I’d say that I’ll check out the Akismet plugin that comes with WP 2 but the problem isn’t that bad (yet).

Update: It took a couple of days but the official announcement is finally out. Freaking awesome!

It’s interesting to note how I’ve changed my thinking regarding vacations since I started being able to take them. I’m on vacation from my day job right now, and its blissful. I used to take a vacation day and just basically work from home. Now I take a vacation day and do nothing. I sleep in, I make myself a nice lunch and/or dinner, watch a movie, clean the house, work on a personal coding project, do whatever I can but I never open my email. Never. As soon as I look at my email I get sucked in, in the same way that projects die. “Oh, this will be quick,” I think to myself. It never is quick, though. My email has an effect on my vacation like nothing other, not even people calling me. I don’t even really mind my team members calling me to ask a question, since they’re really good about making it ultra-relevant and short. It also generally highlights severe documentation problems, since the other guys are damn sharp.

I can’t just watch a movie or TV. I always have to have my laptop going. It’s actually the reason I love my ReplayTV, since I can just skip back to something if I wasn’t paying attention. While I’m sitting here watching “Garden State” I did some searching for “sysadmin vacations” to see if there was anything interesting I’d find:

• The SysAdmin Price List, culled from alt.sysadmin.recovery. I love that newsgroup. My all-time favorite is “calling up with a problem which ‘everybody’ in the office is having and which is ’stopping all work.’ I rush over to look at it, you aren’t there, and nobody else in the office knows anything about it. $1700.” Usually the next stop I make is to the person’s manager to find out, or more likely inform them of, what is going on.
• A discussion about web-based configuration of vacation autoresponders. This in itself isn’t thrilling, as it’s basically just some people saying that they’ve done it with exim, MySQL, and some PHP. The response is what caught my eye, where the original person asking dismisses all of this outright with the comment “I’d rather not install mysqld on the email server.” Why? Security? Am I missing something here? Maybe I’m just spoiled because Red Hat ships all of that with their OS distribution so it’s easy to deal with. Rather than fighting the pesky LAMP fad (just kidding), or having 84 one-off MySQL installs we decided to standardize them, and with about 3 hours of work now have a script that installs the MySQL packages, sets the admin passwords, and configures nightly database dumps so the data is backed up. Plus, with our default-deny firewall rules the database is only accessible locally. I look at posts like these and am thankful that my team has valid reasons when they object to something.
• An experienced admin is not necessarily a good admin… hot damn, this guy gets it. Especially when he says that systems need to be self-documenting. “The more ‘indispensable’ an admin seems to be the more likely they are a bad admin.”

Maybe that’s it. With all the effort we’ve put into documentation, specifically self-documenting systems, standardization, and automation I guess it isn’t surprising that I can enjoy my day off. :-)

Standardization isn’t a task. It is a mindset, a very long-running process.

Standardization isn’t staying the course. It’s adjusting the course to stay standard.

Standardization isn’t a manager’s orders. It is a grass-roots effort.

Standardization isn’t one month. It’s two years.

Standardization isn’t a fad. It is a religion.

Standardization isn’t manual labor. It is repeated, evolving, simple automation.

Standardization isn’t overreacting, or mountains from molehills. It is fire and motion.

Standardization isn’t some herculean effort undertaken periodically by organizations. It’s something to be done every minute, with every task.

Standardization isn’t “how do we make this server look like the rest?” It is “can we make all the other servers look like this one?”

Standardization isn’t a procedure. It is a vision.

This post inaugurates the “outright rant” category in this blog. Today it’s remedial English, specifically the unforgivable mistakes that scream “I’m a total and complete idiot.” Now, I can and do excuse people who speak English as a second language. I know enough Spanish to not get into serious trouble, but I’m positive that I sound like a complete idiot to a native speaker. Having had that experience I’m not going to hold second languages against anybody. Hell, my gripe isn’t even with people who can’t spell well. I’ve got a friend who just isn’t wired to spell anything properly, but when it matters he has someone check his work. Half of the native English speakers in the U.S. speak as if English is their second language, and not because they don’t know how, but because they don’t care at all. Grunting and beating their chest would probably work just as well.

First, “lose” versus “loose.” Nothing drives me more batshit crazy than when you get the whole word wrong. I just stop reading, and my brain shuts off. As Lewis Black would say, “it’s when your left brain looks at your right brain and says ‘Boy, it’s dark in here.’”

lose – to suffer deprivation of, or part with in an unforeseen or accidental manner.

loose – not rigidly fastened or securely attached.

• “If that bolt comes loose you’ll lose it.”
• “You will lose your account privileges if you can’t communicate with me.”
• “Your mother is a very loose woman.”

Second, the word “the” is spelled “the” and not “teh.” Seriously. It’s all of three characters. I’d understand if it’s an abbreviation, but it isn’t. You’re lazy. I hate dealing with lazy people. Maybe it is an abbreviation for “I am the biggest pile of crap on Earth, as I cannot be bothered to backspace twice to correct my simple error.”

Third, I will not answer your email if you substitute:

• “U” for “you”
• “R” for “are”
• “2″ for “too” or “to”
• “4″ for “for”

U R not texting me, dumbass. You have a full keyboard in front of you. R U 2 lazy to type three extra characters? Don’t complain when I am 2 lazy 2 reply 2 U. And if you’re going to pull out that tired “I can’t type very well” excuse, maybe you should realize that with a little practice of doing the right thing you’ll get better.

Actually, now that I’ve vented, I retract all of this. Keep being an English retard, and I’ll keep on being able to sift you out from the people I want to talk to. Morons.

Update: Darren Chamberlain points out I missed the “4″ to “for” mapping. Thanks dude! I’m just glad I’m not the only one that is driven nuts by these things.

OMFG, I haven’t posted since the beginning of November. The last 30 days have been basically a crisis a day, and this blog has suffered. Sorry. My friend Finch was commenting the other day that we should ditch New Year’s resolutions, and go for the Martin Luther King Day resolutions that start with “I have a dream.” I like that.

I have a dream that I will post once a day on this blog, for the entire month of January. Hopefully by January 30th it’ll be a habit.

It’d be funny if my New Year’s resolution for 2007 is to stop blogging so much.