April 2007 Archives

Long time no blog. Feeling a bit down lately, busyness, stress, life, work etc all sucking, so I've been pretty quiet. A nice change from that was Saturday myself, Dana, Wim and Tammie and Clayten went down to Linuxfest Northwest, the yearly geek fest down in Bellingham. Definitely not a place for non-geeks though... there was lots of heavy heavy geeking out going on :)

We were a bit late getting down there due to border traffic, so I missed the Xen presentation given by Reverend Ted. I chose to be a complete bastard and not go to Dana's presentation on strong authentication, and instead went to the Production Grade Scripting by Brian Martin. Quite a good presentation, though the first half was a bit slow. I was impressed with the way he set up his scripts and how output was filtered, and the shell of the script has all the fun stuff already set up to go.

Next on the list was OpenID which was kinda meh. Lots of interesting discussion about security afterwards, but since OpenID is still relatively new, and hasn't really found it's place in the world, it's sort of hard to address what it does right and wrong when no one really knows where it's going or what it's trying to do (or rather, where it should be going).

Last and best IMHO was Stuart from Real networks talking about scaling web services, especially in relation to their Rhapsody online music service. Stuart was a really good speaker, no powerpoint, just him talking passionately about what he does, lots of joking and very high energy, moving from hyperbole to reality and then back to hyperbole again. A few things gleamed from the talk was:

• "The same is better than better." - IE: having a computer that is the same as the rest of the computers in the data center is much better than having one or two that are tweaked, or different in anyway. Obviously exceptions are going to happen, but if you're rolling out 30 webservers, do you want them to be built automagically from script / PXE all exactly the same, or each one built by someone different with a slightly different configuration?
  
• "A reactive sysadmin is better than a contemplative sysadmin." - IE: Someone who has lower knowledge / training but who knows that when condition X happens hit button Y is better to have than someone who sits with his feet on the desk wondering why condition X happened....
  
• "Document startup and shutdown procedures." - Everyone needs to know how to take down a server, what it will affect, and what else needs to be done before after to it or other systems... nothing sucks more than "ooops, so that was tied into that system!" :)
  
• "Documentation sucks!" - Both hyperbole and truth. It's written for the wrong reasons for the wrong people by the wrong people.
  
• "People are idiots. You are an idiot." - Ain't that the truth! And knowing that, make sure that everything is scriptable so that you don't have to rely on anyone knowing anything other than "hit this button when that happens".
  
• "Script everything!" - Similar to the ideas of Extreme Programming, where devs just need to hit a button and get a "everything ok" or "something wrong" indication. Since everyone is an idiot, no one should ever log into a server and type anything, and if they do it should be a script. I assume that at Real they have scripts run from web pages or something. Obviously way more important in larger scale installations of course.
  
• Testing environments suck. - IE: you can spend $15m on a complete duplicate of your web service, but is it worth it? Basically all testing environments suck, and it sounds like at Real they basically poke at it and say "yup, it should work ok....", then swap from test environment to production, and swap back the second that anything goes wrong.
  
• ... much more....
  

We also ran into a guy from the One Laptop Per Child project with a real OLPC laptop. Looked like a fisher price toy (or like the original iBook), but was super cool. Semi-sucky hardware (128mb ram, 100mb flash disk, geod processor) but it also has some neat stuff. High resolution screen, built in camera, wifi (with cute little ears) and the display has a black and white mode that is actually more readable the brighter it is outside (ie: you can use your laptop outside in the sun). It's also running a stock (ish) fedora Linux distro, so you can even play around with it if you don't have the hardware (which hardly anyone does) via LiveCD. It also sounds like the price will be about $175 USD, which is pretty cheap for a cool toy to play around with and hack on. There was a rumor that there was a "buy 2, get 1" deal where you pay for two OLPCs, got one and the other goes to someone who needs it, but that's just a rumor.

Other than that the day was pretty uneventful. Other than a mishap driving home (apparently if you keep going north on the I-5 you don't get to the 264th border crossing :) it was all home and I was back for a yummy dinner cooked by my loverly lady.

Great post on the DPReview forums on Selling Motocross Prints from Daniel Diaz who took a few shots at the local motocross track and has been overwhelmed with work. Now I'm not saying I can duplicate the work that he does, but being that I live right next to a racetrack, and indirectly know a pretty high end motorcycle racer who races there (for fun when he's not gallivanting around the country winning races for sponsors), it might be an idea to investigate looking at that to bring a bit of extra income on the weekends.... Definitely wouldn't hurt to see anyway!

The last few days I've been slowly importing my photos into Lightroom and having lots of fun tagging, organizing, etc. I really want to get to the point where I can go through and really get the best out of the collection, or even just pick out something that is say, yellow and a flower as something to get on the wall. My thinking is that if I can do the import and tagging of pictures, then it'll be easy. So I've been (mostly) resisting the urge to do any rating of images, or editing, or playing around and doing the "what'd this look like in black and white?" or "would a LAB conversion make this look better?" thing.

Anyway, to the right you'll see a shot from late summer of last year that I wasn't able to resist the urge to tinker. Some levels adjustment and then ran through the Alien Skin Exposure black and white plugin (harsh landscape setting I believe).

Update: For Fozbaca I've posted the original image and the pre-black and white versions below if you care to continue reading and check 'em out.

Good link from Fozbaca, Digital lomography, in which the author goes way into exactly what makes a LOMO looking image and how to duplicate the look from the early Russian camera in photoshop.

Strobist (again) has a good link with The Strobist Bookshelf and a nice selection of recommended books. Dang, I just maxed out my credit card over at Amazon.ca!

Cool tutorial on how to Build your own Ring flash (via strobist).

From what i see you basically you mount a flash pointing into a cereal box which has had the insides covered in tinfoil, and direct the light out in a circle cut in the cardboard that your lens is poking through. Pics and instructions on the page provide a better view of it though, but it did take me a few minutes to grok what the heck it was doing :)

Darn you Darren, first not coming out this week and then pointing me to clonesumating as a possible drop in replacement for the aging P2P.

Note to self so I don't forget about this link....

OSNews reports that OS/2 is 20 years old today. Wow, that makes me feel ooooold. My first experience with OS/2 was the 2.0 version (I think) around the end of highschool. According to Wikipedia 2.0 was released in 1992, so that's about right. I think I remember going with Fred to go over to someone's house to copy it even (lots of floppy disks). I do know that dad got mad at me for creating several levels of boot menus in our computer (a 386DX-30) that had had to navigate through just to get to anything. The menus of course would change on an almost daily basis as I played around.

The first "real" version of OS/2 was 3.0, or Warp, released in 1994, just before Windows 95. At that time I wasn't a Microsoft hater, but I could see the marketing hype. As Windows 95's ship date got closer (or slipped, depending on how you looked at it) people basically had the choice to either believe the Microsoft hype of "it'll be so good and awesome and amazing you'd better wait for it and not go with the competition!" or go with the product that was already out, OS/2. I went with OS/2, cause while running Doom in a dos window sounded super-cool, full 32 bit multi-threaded multi-tasking sounded even cooler.

And OS/2 was cool, it could crash and still recover easily (not even affecting a modem download!), ran windows 3.x apps, had lots of cool free downloads, had a really neat "feeling" shell. Guess you have to have used it to know what I mean about that though. Something to do with the object-oriented workplace shell I guess.

They did a lot of marketing around this time I remember. Something I vividly remember is going to one of the Comdex shows in Vancouver at Canada place (before Comdex started sucking and way before it was canceled) and seeing an IBM demo where they illustrated the object orientedness of OS/2 vs. Windows 95's shortcuts, where if you move the source, the shortcut breaks under Windows, but under OS/2 it would keep the same. Last time I checked Windows still had this issue 7 versions later. Obviously not a big enough issue for people to complain about.

I actually bought OS/2 at one point, I know this because I threw out the box a couple of weeks ago. It was a big box as well, multiple CDs and a huge manual. None of this pansy "software box is the size of a DVD case" BS. I resisted throwing it away for ages cause it was something I actually bought for one, but also just because it was such a cool system. Course, when I tried to load it up into VMWare and it told me basically for OS/2 under vmware, "you can't do that". Also I saw some screenshots of the OS somewhere and realized just how far we'd come, and while it may have been cool back in the day, nowadays with things like Vista, OS/X and Linux/Beryl/Compiz, things are a LOT sexier.

Anyway, as it turns out of course, Microsoft won this particular battle. Still, 20 years, wow. Interesting to see what would have happened if things had gone the other way.

The Online Photographer points to an absolutely gorgeous slideshow of pictures taken in Namibia with the Leica M8, the "fairly" expensive latest from Leica. Related forum thread.

Like Darren did, we got snow last night. Unlike Darren though, I don't live in the frozen north. Luckily it didn't extend far past home, and wasn't more than a bit of slush on the car, and I'm pretty sure there won't be any evidence of it when I get home. Still, crazy weather. Dang global warming!