*scottstuff*

I’m still fairly happy with my 20-month-old Powerbook G4 550, and I’m not ready to buy a new computer yet, but this one’s going to need something soon, or it’s going to grind to a halt. I actually ran out of disk space this afternoon; I’m still not sure what ate up the last gig, but I was able to shift another couple gigs onto a spare firewire drive. I have about 12 GB of stuff that I can delete once I’ve had time to archive it at home (about 6 GB of unsorted digital camera pics, 5 GB of iPhoto database, and a bit of other stuff), but after that I’m going to be out of space. At the current rate, I’m going to need to swap my current 40 GB drive for a 60-80 GB model in the spring.

It’s RAM that’s really killing me, though. Panther’s activity monitor tells me that I’m frequently down under 10 MB of free RAM, out of 512, and it really feels like it. I’ve taken to killing Safari off on a regular basis, it tends to grow up to 90 MB or so, and killing Mail and NetNewsWire off once or twice per day. That mostly keeps things in check, but firing up iTunes or iCal causes the box to start swapping again. I’ve ground to a complete stop a couple times this week, waiting for the laptop to respond and let me kill off a couple apps.

So, it looks like I’m going to be DIMM shopping soon. From what I can tell, transintl is cheapest this week; they only want $99 per DIMM, while Crucial wants $140.

Amazing–a book on role-based access control. Enhanced security models like RBAC and MAC have been making their way into Unix and Linux for years, but I still haven’t found a good introduction to either model. Maybe this is finally it. The Linux Journal reviews it:

A good overview of implementing RBAC in the enterprise for students as well as corporate-level decision makers. [Linux Journal]

Amazon has it for $79, or £55 from amazon.co.uk.

Interestingly enough, the UK Amazon has an ebook on HIPAA and RBAC that I didn’t see when searching on amazon.com. That’s strange because HIPPA is a US thing, not a UK thing. I’m not particularly interested in HIPAA, though, and I prefer paper books.

I finally finished Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver. I can’t believe it took most of a month to read it, but I’ve been juggling kids, work, house cleaning, and a few other projects, and I never seem to have time to read any more. All in all, it’s an interesting book, but it’s not at all what I was expecting. Most of his previous works were more or less science fiction, up until Cryptonomicon, which was more “geek fiction” then anything else; it’s frequently called SciFi anyway though, because no other description fits it any better. Before Quicksilver, I’d have ranked Cryptonomicon in his top three, along with Snow Crash and Zodiac (I’m probably in the minority on Zodiac, but I liked it). Some days, I like it better then Snow Crash, and other days it’s down to number 2 or 3, but it’s always up there somewhere.

Now Quicksilver has jumbled things up a bit. First, it’s even less SciFi then Cryptonomicon (although there’s always the Enoch problem in both books). At least it fits into an identifiable genre–it’s clearly historical fiction (err, mostly–Enoch). But, it’s geeky historical fiction, where technical and philosophic advancements mean at least as much as political events, but the two are starting influence each other, as science begins to emerge and the modern world starting being constructed.

I’m going to reserve final judgment on Quicksilver until I’ve had time to read the rest of the set–The Confusion is supposed to be out in April, and System of the World is due out late next year. Quicksilver is clearly just Act 1; at the end you’re aware that he’s spent a lot of time setting up events that are going to take a long time to resolve. Except, since it’s historical fiction, it’s obvious what’s going to be happening–of course Charles II died, leaving the throne to James II. Of course William of Orange took it from James. Of course it passed from William and Mary to Anne, and then onto Sophie’s offspring. Any history book (or Wikipedia) will tell you that. Somehow, though, Stephenson manages to make all of that as interesting as the gold hunt in Cryptonmicon. So, even though he managed to leave characters hanging in the most irritating places at the end of this book, I’m looking forward to the next installment in the set. Even though I already know how it’s going to turn out.

So, we had a pile of family stuff in Bellingham this weekend, so I was planning on driving up from Seattle after work, but my wife needed to be in Mt. Vernon before I got off work. I hate taking two cars to Bellingham; that’s roughly 100 miles each way. So, for a change of pace, she suggested that I take the train–Seattle’s Amtrak station is only a few blocks from work, and the Bellingham station is reasonably convenient. I had a few chapters of Quicksilver left to finish, and my iPod was charged and ready to go. It sounded like a good idea. Heh.

One of the problems with working long hours in a windowless office in a big office building is that you completely lose touch with the weather. I hadn’t noticed that western Washington was suffering from a big storm, and that most of the rivers were flooding. And I was completely unaware that mud was covering Amtrak’s tracks somewhere (no one was ever clear exactly where, and Google isn’t helpful). So, when I went to get onto my nice, comfy train, I had a How Few Wheels You Have, Grandma sort of moment, and found myself on a bus, with crowded seats, weird lighting, and lousy heat control. Fortunately, I had two seats to myself, and my Shure earphones did a nice job blocking out the road noise. So, I was mostly able to ignore what was going on around me and concentrate on Quicksilver. I ended up getting off of the bus in Mt. Vernon and meeting Cynthia at the station. Of course, she got held up trying to get directions to the station from her family, and 2 minutes after the “train” pulled out, the Amtrak parking lot was plunged into total darkness, leaving me standing in the middle of nowhere in the dark in a storm (“It was a dark and stormy night…”), carrying about 25 lbs of computer, camera, music, and reading equipment on my back.

Fortunately, they made it eventually :-).

It’s amazing how long old websites can persist. My college home page still exists. It’s kinda out of date now, though…

I try to avoid commenting on business news, but this one really caught my eye:

SCO Group, the company embroiled in legal action around Linux and Unix, announces a $50 million investment by BayStar Capital, marking a reversal of plans it discussed in May. [CNET News.com]

This was driving me nuts; SCO running out of cash was one of my personal favorite scenarios for the end of the SCO/Linux/IBM/Redhat mess. My first reaction was something like “BayStar must die.” My next reaction was “their other holdings must die.” Still excessive, but it leads to the obvious question–who is BayStar, and who do they own? A bit of research into this shows that they’re already dead. They have bits of Multitude, Beenz, and a handful of other mostly-dead .coms. They proudly list Burst and Roxio (lawsuits, anyone?). Plus Pumatech, which seems to be singlehandedly killing off the Sidekick from within, at least according to my few remaining sidekick-owning co-workers.

Okay, it’s not strictly accurate, and the rest of the series seems to go downhill from there, but I kind of identify with this User Friendly.

Sometimes I miss being a sysadmin.

Mark Bernstein, the author of Tinderbox, took a bit of offense yesterday when I called Tinderbox slow.

Okay, first of all, it’s kind of crazy to compare NetNewsWire and Tinderbox. They’re utterly different programs, with different purposes and different goals. It’s kind of like comparing Excel and Safari because you can do math with either of them. Tinderbox is a unique brainstorming/organizational tool, and NetNewsWire is an RSS reader. You can use either of them for writing blogs, though.

Now, here’s my main problem with Tinderbox for blogging (I really hate that word): I’m already running NetNewsWire 95% of the time. It’s easier to pop up its editor then it is to start up Tinderbox. Unless Tinderbox wants to become an RSS reader (yeah, I know that it can import RSS, but that’s not exactly the same thing to me; I don’t see it tracking what I’ve already read), it’s going to lose this battle.

But, the first 20 or so posts here were written with Tinderbox, before I started using NetNewsWire. Before that, I maintained a work to-do blog with it; its powerful searching and sorting abilities were really useful there. So, here’s my other problem with Tinderbox: it’s text entry box is slow after I get 5 or 6 paragraphs in it. In less then a screenful of text, it’s too slow to keep up with my typing, and after that it just gets slower and slower. This is with Tinderbox 2.0 under assorted versions of Jaguar on a 550 MHz PowerBook. It’s not the zippiest laptop around, but it’s not a complete slug. On the document that holds my weblog, I can easily get it down to 2-3 characters per second in either Explorer or Outline views.

Strangely, on a new, blank document, doesn’t exhibit this slowdown. I’m not sure what’s up, my weblog is only a 140K Tinderbox document. I’ll take Mr. Bernstein’s advice and visit the Tinderbox techsupport page and see what I can do to speed it up later today.

But, even once we’ve worked through the speed problem, I’m still going to use NetNewsWire for writing here. And that’s okay; different tools for different jobs. Tinderbox is still really nice for organizing other types of information. If you haven’t seen it, then you’re missing out; it’s one of the most original programs that I’ve seen in a while.

So, Apple released a new version of iTunes (with Windows support, gift certificates, and a bunch of minor stuff) a half hour or so ago, along with an upgrade to the iPod’s firmware. I’m such a sucker, I’ve already downloaded and installed them.

This was actually a rather painful upgrade, by Apple standards. The iTunes update is over 9 MB, and the iPod update is over 16 MB. My powerbook crashed in the middle of the iPod update install (admittedly, I was burning a CD, copying 1 GB of data over the network, installing two programs, and trying to run 600 MB of apps on a 512 MB laptop, but it’s still irritating). After I rebooted, everything re-installed correctly, but it took three tries before the iPod update program successfully found and upgraded my iPod.

The new “music quiz” game isn’t all that hot (it plays clips of one of your tracks, and shows you 5 track names. The faster you pick the right track, the more points you get. Just hope you don’t get a song with 5 seconds of dead space at the beginning.

I’m off to play with the new, improved music store. Apple is making an incredible push to own the online music market, partnering with Pepsi (100M track giveaway) and AOL (use your AOL ID to buy, no credit card required).

I got fed up with the stock MovableType template color scheme, so it’s gone now. The new setup is a bit too bright, but at least I like it better. Feedback?

I’ve been feeling curious about when I first used a web browser. I’ve lost most of my email from before 1997 or so, but fortunately, Google (as usual) has the answer: June of 1993. That’s slightly over 10 years ago; in the decade since then, everyone has used a web browser. My cell phone has a web browser. My grandmother sends me email, my parents have multiple computers, my siblings IM me from time to time, and swap gift lists for the kids online, and as often as not have Amazon deliver the gifts.

At the time, it didn’t seem like things were changing all that quickly, but in the aggregate, we’ve seen huge changes in just a single decade. The next one should be interesting.

I finally broke down and bought NetNewsWire. I’m really impressed with how well it works for reading RSS feeds; it’s really changed the way I read news sites online. Since I’ve been doing things more or less the same way for years (I think tabbed browsing is the only major change since at least 1997), that’s quite an accomplishment.

I’ve also started to use it for writing; I was using Tinderbox, and while it’s absolutely an interesting program, it’s not quite what I want for writing here. Plus, it was getting really slow when editing long-ish chunks of text.

I’ve been a Unix sysadmin for years, professionally since 1994 or 1995, but my current job is more programming and embedded design then traditional system administration. Since we’re just a small startup, there really isn’t anyone here working on the servers unless things break. When I started, I asked my boss “how much time should I spend as a sysadmin working on our servers” and the answer was “as little as possible.” So I did. When things broke, I fixed them, and when we needed a new box internally for something, I set it up, but that’s pretty much it. Someone else, yet to be hired, will be the sysadmin.

That is, until last week, when we finally broke down and decided that we needed to fix a bunch of things, including printing, LDAP, and Samba. So, I had 3 days in the schedule for sysadmin work, but LDAP ended up taking most of a week to get straightened out. Even though things worked correctly in testing, they didn’t quite work right in production. Plus, I had to wait until after 6:00 or so to work on production systems, and I needed to be in the office at 8:30 or so to verify that things weren’t broken when people showed up. It was a pain, and everything took longer then it was supposed to.

At my previous job, stuff like this was still irritating, but actually rolling things out in production tended to go very smoothly. That’s because we (a) could clone the production environment to produce an accurate test environment and (b) once the test environment worked, we could merge the changes made back onto the production environment.

Of course, we don’t have any of that here, at least not for IT servers. We do have that for our product, but that’s not strictly relevant here. The way that Internap did it was wonderful, but I don’t think it scales down far enough–it’s great with 700 servers, and probably even with 70 servers, but with 7 it’s probably overkill.

Testing is absolutely one place that system administration can learn something from programming. No matter what you think about XP, it’s obvious that automated unit tests are a major win for program reliability. I’ve never worked any place that put any thought at all into automated system testing (outside of a few things like DNS and ping tests), but it seems obvious that it’s a good thing. Or, rather, once the tests exist, running them would be a good thing. Actually creating tests (and a testing framework) is, as always, a pain.

This is one of the things that I want so fix with the server management stuff that I’m slowly working on. Smaller servers are (obviously) easier to test then bigger servers, because the number of weird interactions is lower, and the server’s function is much more obvious.

If anyone has a good source of 27 hour days, let me know.

Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt’s The Pragmatic Programmer is one of the best programming books that I’ve read in years. Dave’s talk at last year’s Ruby Conference was one of the highlights of the event for me. Now, they’re back with a pair of new books:

It’s been a busy couple of months here as we prepare to launch our new book-printing imprint, The Pragmatic Bookshelf. We spent the year writing the first two books, Pragmatic Version Control and Pragmatic Unit Testing. [PragDave]

Time for two more entries on my to-read list.

My build server died yesterday. I was working along, minding my own business, when I smelled smoke in my office. A bit of olfactory detective work lead me to my build server, which currently sits between a couple bookshelves behind my desk. I killed the power and discovered that the video card in the box had died, leaving a crater along the edge of the card and a big pile of soot on the motherboard.

Gotta love technology.