General Rambling

Jars of String

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It’s been another busy week here (and I promise some new sysadmin material next week — God knows I have plenty of topics from the last couple weeks). Sometime this week my RSS reader went nuts and crosslinked a bunch of blogs. As I was sorting it out I ran across an older post over at caterina.net that I hadn’t read yet. Her blurb about her grandfather’s jar labeled “pieces of string too short to use” reminds me of my dad. His jars of washers, bolts, wingnuts, springs, etc. still power little projects and fixits around my mom’s house. Heh. Today would have been his 60th birthday, actually.

Bye Kirby

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My Minnesota Twins cap replaced my Widespread Panic hat yesterday morning, in celebration of spring training. As a kid I wasn’t really into sports, but with no compelling sports teams in the southern Wisconsin area I’ve found myself really following the Twins. Maybe it’s one of those things where you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. I’m guessing it’ll be like that for friends of Kirby Puckett. He certainly had some problems, especially after he retired. I can’t even imagine what it’s like to wake up blind one day, and have to give up the job you love and are so good at. But it sounds like he was just starting to get things under control again, getting …

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Beating People Up

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Guy Kawasaki links to a post about the “Spread Firefox but don’t be a fanatic” article. Amen. Want to guarantee that I never do what you ask? Beat me over the head with it. As a sysadmin I see this a lot from coworkers and vendors, where someone will walk up to me and tell me that I should be doing something in a specific way. I shouldn’t use Windows on my desktop, I should use Mac OS X, or BeOS, or Linux, or OS/2. I should really install Konfabulator (now the Yahoo! Widget Engine). “I can’t believe you’re not using Opera,” or Firefox 1.0.7, or Flickr, or OpenOffice, or Java 1.5. It isn’t that they’re suggesting it, it’s that …

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ACLU & Google

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I just read Ars Technica’s analysis of the whole Google, ACLU, and federal government COPA thing. I really try to not get too political, here or anywhere, but in this case I don’t like where Peter Pollack leaves his analysis of: Because the government has refused to divulge any details about what it plans to do with the information requested from Google, it is impossible for Plaintiffs to ascertain if they need to conduct their own follow-up discovery from Google. If the motion is granted, however, Plaintiffs will very likely need to obtain further information from Google to understand what Google’s response actually signifies. In my opinion the ACLU is helping Google. Google is the darling of the tech industry …

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Brandi Carlile

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Country and folk music is something I’ve developed an increasing taste for over the past few years. There’s just something about acoustic guitars that I fall for, that I can sit and listen to them forever. It’s really not a surprise, then, that I like Brandi Carlile’s music. What was a surprise was the range of people that showed up to see her and the twins play last night in Madison. Older folks, lots of younger people. It was encouraging. She played a bunch of stuff from her album, but also a number of songs that weren’t on the album. Excellent stuff. I always sit as close as I can to the sound board, as the sound will be good …

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Bad News Jones & The Blend

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Alas, it’s negative 12 Fahrenheit out right now. My friend Ann wanted to punch Mother Nature on Thursday after we got a foot of snow. I now second that, after needing to jumpstart a friend’s car in the wind chill. It’s actually too cold to snow. Like, WTF. I was thinking that going out tonight was a bad idea. My original plan was foiled by a packed bar, so we progressed into the wind to Montmartre to drink wine and be merry. When I see a band setting up I am usually wary unless I’ve checked it out ahead of time, but we had half a bottle of wine left so it was inevitable that we’d catch part of the …

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B.S.

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“I value your opinion because you have an even lower tolerance for B.S. than I do.” These are words I never would have guessed I’d hear, especially from a manager.

Fresh Air

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Today is one of those days where you can tell the transplants from the natives. It’s 53 degrees Fahrenheit, which is an excellent Valentine’s Day present if you ask me. All the natives are walking around with light jackets on, if they have a jacket on at all. As I was walking to my Jeep the girl walking in front of me was removing her coat. Definitely a midwestern woman. All the transplants from warmer climes are still bundled in their puffy down coats. Brrr. The natives are driving around with at least one window down, sometimes with a hand hanging out. The transplants think we’re crazy. The first USENIX conference I attended was in Anaheim in January, 1998. I …

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Law of Charting Complexity

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Over the weekend I was thinking about my last post about clusters. That is, when I wasn’t discovering that adding Dave’s Insanity Sauce to boiling water makes it airborne, and consequently hard to breathe in the kitchen. I just wanted spicier pasta, not fluid-filled lungs. I haven’t felt like this since I inadvertently made chlorine gas in my parents garage in junior high. Anyhow, I think there’s a deeper thought in that post: “The complexity of a diagram of a system is proportional to the amount of your life that system will waste.” And it is definitely O(n^2) or worse.

When to Cluster, When to Build Big

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When you’re building a medium-large sized service there’s a fundamental choice you have to make: do you build it on one big machine or do you cluster smaller machines? If you choose a cluster do you make it fewer, bigger machines or a bunch of smaller machines? A cluster is hard. A cluster usually means a shared filesystem. A shared filesystem means a SAN. A shared filesystem usually means an IP-based lock server, which means your network needs to be as reliable as your SAN. It also means that file accesses will be slower. Sometimes a cluster means weirdo stuff like multicast, or things your network guys might not like or understand. You also might need to do heartbeat via …

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