Concepts in the Paradox

My sister would have been 37 today.

I got the first bunch of gifts for the holidays today. I have one more shipment from ThinkGeek, then I’m going to make a trip to BigLots and perhaps a few “stuff” stores in the Sunset to round out my shopping.

I finally tracked down a copy of The Logic of Failure, which the local library doesn’t carry. It’ s supposed to be an excellent book on why even experts fail at complex projects. I also have How to Solve It, a good on Mathematical Methods, and Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, on loan from Keith.

Tonight I spent most of the night cleaning up the mess that started to gather in my apartment. I feel a little bit better now that books aren’t laying in a stack on my floor and papers strewn across my sofa.

Tomorrow is a full workout day. ZG/L13 plans are looking pretty thin, unless someone can seriously motivate me to go out after 2 hours of self-inflicted hell.

What is your programmer type?

I went to the 24 Hour Fitness at 45 Montgomery this evening, and I was surprised at just how clean and new it looked. I haven’t been to the gym in about 3 weeks, and having a clean and uncrowded place to go to is a big motivator for me. Also, it is one hop on Bart or Muni, or a 2 minute average wait if I select Muni at any time during the day.

The Zaurus is up with pdaXrom, which is pretty slick if not minimal. It’s fast too, way faster than the stock Zaurus ROM. I guess they are keeping the code page in the ROM, because ABIword loads in a half-second. The Wifi isn’t working yet, but it’s more likely the case of I don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to iwconfig. I might get a CF Bluetooth card if I can find one on the cheap, they run about $89 anywhere I look. Having internet-via-cell phone would be nice; I already do that with my Macbook. If you have a CF BT card kicking around, I’d be willing to take it off your hands.

The problem with the buzzer going off when I leave a store is that I have to wonder, “What do I do?” My first reaction is to just keep walking — I’ve done nothing wrong, and I have better things to do than to participate in a store’s shrink reduction program. But where should I draw the line when it comes to store security wanting to rummage through my personal and private effects? As it would turn out, my temper easily draws the line. Yes, I felt like an ass, but I had no choice in the matter. My button had been pressed, and so someone had to receive my bacon.

I’ll let my email to Burlington Coat Factory explain what happened this evening:

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(meta: hmm, I sure am posting a lot)

I’ve decided to do the Xen BoF again this year, after talking to William Pollock of No Starch Press about his plans for a book on Xen. I guess his author for the Xen book he had in production fell through, and now he is thinking of starting up a Wiki. Of course, a couple people recognized me from last year’s BoF, and wondered if there would be another. I really didn’t feel like doing the BoF thing again, it’s sorta stressful, but the gears started to turn, and I filled out a slot on the BoF schedule anyway. (9pm tonight, Washington 3).

Topics from brain storming:

1. Distro support: XenSource (RHEL3), Debian, RHEL, Fedora, Suse

2. Management tools
3. Features, what have people used? 64/32-bit, migration, LVM vs. loop back, imaging, fail over
4. Resources: mailing lists, blogs, wikis, forums
5. Hints & Tips in general
6. OS’s you’ve virtualized: Windows, Linux distros, OSX, BSD, etc.

Cory Doctorow, co-editor of Boing Boing, had some interesting points during this morning’s keynote at LISA this morning. His message was that we are once again starting to lose the battle that we were winning in the ’80s with our right to own what we purchase. Companies such as Sony, with their “root kit on a audio CD” and the FCC with the broadcast flag, or even Apple and their DRM-crippled iPod, are treating their customers, and ultimately owners of this equipment as criminals. Real criminals, at least by a small stretch of the imagination, that download material from sharing sites such as Kazaa, Bittorrent, or eMule, have far more control over their illegal downloads than legitimate customers.

Cory went on to make the point that even “click to agree” clauses, often known as End User Agreements, have become deceptive and almost impossible to get out of. Simply by having a laptop delivered to you, in the case of Lovato, is enough for you to “agree” to terms that are not only stated in a lengthy agreement, but any future terms they might want to define.

The keynote did carry a positive message, even on top of all of this denial of our freedom to simply own what we pay money for, saying that big companies are starting to wise up against this, and are joining customer advocates such as the EFF. AT&T, for example, is being sued by the EFF because of wire tapping ($150 per customer per day that was tapped), has joined in with other companies like Sony against anti-consumer companies such as the MPAA.

On a different note, overheard on the way out of the keynote:

“…oh, I was in the back of the room for power. I fell asleep while coding drunk, and ran down my battery last night.”

I met up with some LISA attendees I was talking with on IRC during what became a very boring and non-applicable talk on VMware ESX. It was almost a sales pitch in a way, which irritated me.

After the class, we went to a sushi place near Duponte Circle and ordered about $187 in sushi between the 4 of us. I must say, all of the sushi was very good, even though I had no idea what any of it was. My stomach was a little unhappy, but my tongue was overjoyed.

Being the pro-transit person I was, I asked how people got to the conference. The gal from San Jose of course flew, but one guy from Pittsburg took the train and another guy from North Carolina also took Amtrak, both first time train riders.  It would seem that they weren’t alone, at least two other people I talked to took Amtrak rides that were under 10 hours, $84 round trip.

Maybe Union Station was a big temptation, maybe parking and traffic were intimidating, or maybe people are just tired of dealing with the whole car and gas ordeal.   I will say that there is a change in the air.

Tomorrow are the technical sessions, where I get to learn random techie things in hour and a half spurts. Yay information!

Today’s LISA class involves VMware ESX server. It’s starting out slow like Sunday’s day-long class, but I’m hoping to walk away with more knowledge on good practices on deploying virtual machines. Some key things I’ve gained so far:

• SAN and LVM are the best way to seup partitions

• Configuring too many virtual CPUS causes contention if you don’t need that many VCPUs
• You can’t mix and match CPU types (Intel Vs. AMD)

Also, no power outlets in this room. I’m playing power vulture during the breaks. :\

I’m here in DC for LISA.

Yesterday’s class got better toward the end of the day, covering topics I was only weakly familiar with. LVS, OpenLDAP, PAM, and even OpenMP were covered. I even took notes!

Today’s morning session is THE LATEST HACKING TOOLS AND DEFENSES by David Rhoades, which has started out with a bang. I know none of his material, showing how far behind I am in computer security. For every question you ask, he throws a little monkey at you. As of the break, I am still monkey-less.

Also, VMware seems to be the hot testbed tool here.