Concepts in the Paradox

I was able to get into the Serenity pre-screen at the AMC Van Ness, only a short Muni ride away from me, thanks to a link from Edgan Llama. That means I’ll get to see the flim twice: Once in advance and once late on Thursday at midnight with Sam Llama & Co.

Here is a Synopsys of the movie:

Joss Whedon, the Oscar(R) - and Emmy - nominated writer/director
responsible for the worldwide television phenomena of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE,
ANGEL and FIREFLY, now applies his trademark compassion and wit to a small
band of galactic outcasts 500 years in the future in his feature film
directorial debut, Serenity. The film centers around Captain Malcolm
Reynolds, a hardened veteran (on the losing side) of a galactic civil war,
who now ekes out a living pulling off small crimes and transport-for-hire
aboard his ship, Serenity. He leads a small, eclectic crew who are the
closest thing he has left to family -squabbling, insubordinate and
undyingly loyal.

I’ve started my work toward learning more about the open source virtualization software known as Xen. My target is Xen 3.0, or Xen-unstable as it is called, which I will evetually deploy as a production system at work.

Here is where I am at so far:

OpenSuSE 10 RC1’s packages don’t work properly. This is unfortunate, because I work at a Novell shop. The problem I am having are:

1. While the Xen kernel is installed at booting, new domains hang

2. Stopping a hung DomU hangs xend
3. Only rebooting clears hung DomU’s from memory

This is a problem dealing with both the OpenSuSE yast2 created images and from pulling a SLES9 image from the imaging server. I’m going to try QEMU packages from FreeOsZoo next.

Giving up on OpenSuSE for now, I pulled down Fedora Core 4 with updated Xen packages. The main bug here is that Xend doesn’t work out of the box; you’ll have to make some magical directories in /var for it to start up, otherwise it’ll go on and on about a missing file or directory.

mkdir /var/run/xenstore /var/lib/xenstore

I’m glad I archive the xen-users mailing list. Grep is my friend. The Wiki is useful too.

The next step is to try to bring up a DomU once I pull down my SLES9 image again. If it works in FC4, then I’ll play in FC4 until the next milestone in OpenSuSE is out and about or try and fail again to pull xen-unstable from cvs.

I really hate email. It is a system that is broken, misused, and abused, and designed that way. For a long time I used Evolution, but when I switched to Mac from Linux I started to use Mail.App. What an abortion: No fixed line width, crazy variable fonts, no built-in pgp support, and worse yet, a junk mail filter that would mark mail as junk even if it was legit!

So I threw in the towel and went back to my old standby[0]: mutt. It is ugly, it is text based, it doesn’t view html mails, it doesn’t have auto-mail filters. It just does one thing and does it well: mail.

Throw in a mail fetching program, fetchmail, a filter program, procmail, and all I ever need is there. Need a pgp plugin? Mutt supports it out of the box. Address book? That’s what .muttrc is for. And to top it all off, since this is a program that runs in a terminal or console, I can use screen to check my mail from anywhere, including my cell phone! And since I don’t keep old mail on the pop3 server, I can check it using the Treo’s Mail app for offline reading on Bart.

In short: mutt is ugly, but it makes email bearable.

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[0]This was for work email. I still use pine for personal mail, but that may change soon.