Frozen Bicycling

Outdoors

Some of you might recall that I’ve been bicycling to work, about 10 miles each way.

Over the last two weeks, I haven’t been able to ride much because it’s been too muddy. Today I rode to work.

It was about 25F-30F out there, so this was my first below-freezing bicycle ride. It went OK, though I was somewhat on the cool side — I’ll add more layers next time.

Today, I wore wool socks, bicycling shorts, tights over that, my short sleeve shirt, a long-sleeve shirt over it, full gloves, and a balaclava. I should have worn probably one more layer everywhere, but I survived and I’m not frozen.

You may now commence speculation about whether or not I am crazy.

Web Design Companies That Understand Technology

Online Life, Software

There are a lot of companies out there that do web design work that looks fabulous.

Unfortunately, a lot of these sites look fabulous only when viewed in IE6 build xxxx, with a 75dpi monitor, fonts set to the expected size, running on Windows XP SP2, with JavaScript enabled. Try looking at the site through Safari, Firefox, with larger-than-expected fonts, and things break down: text boxes overlap each other, buttons that should work don’t, and it becomes a mess.

So, if your employer wanted a web design company that has a good grasp of Web standards and the appropriate use of them, where would you look? A company that can write good HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and still make the site look appealing? A company that has heard of Apache and gets the appropriate nausea when someone mentions ColdFusion or Frontpage?

So far, I’ve seen these places mentioned by others:

WebDevStudios.com
Happy Cog
Crowd Favorite

Converted to WordPress

Online Life, Software, ,

I have been using Serendipity on my blog for some time now. Overall, I’ve been pleased with it, but the conversion was a pain.

Serendipity is a simple blog engine, and has a wonderful built-in plugin system. It can detect what plugins need upgrading, and install those upgrades, all from directly within the management interface. There’s no unzipping stuff in install directories as with WordPress.
Continue reading Converted to WordPress →

Education

Uncategorized

One of the speakers at OSCon this year — I forget which one — made a point that ran something like this, heavily paraphrased:

Education used to be an end in itself, not a means. It wasn’t about having a high-paying career. It was about knowing the world, about having knowledge and wisdom for its own sake. It was, quite bluntly, the accumulation of useless knowledge by the elite — those that could afford to spend time on such things, knowing that useless knowledge has a way of becoming useful in the most unexpected of ways. How fortunate we are to live in an age where the accumulation of useless knowledge is available to so many, and how sad it is that so few take advantage of it.

What a powerful statement, and it rings true to me. I remember in high school, when people from the local liberal arts college would come and talk. They’d talk about the value throughout a lifetime of knowledge in a broad range of disciplines: English, history, political science, religion, science, and the arts. They’d talk about how their graduates went on to lead distinguished lives, how this broad core of knowledge serves a person well through life. I guess I didn’t believe them, because due to their lack of a computer science major, I went elsewhere.

That local school may not have been the best choice for me for other reasons, but as I look back on it, I think they had a much stronger message than I realized back then. Here I am, just two math classes, one computer science class, and one biology class away from a degree. Yet I have had not one class covering the history of east Asia, not one class on different world cultures or religions, and only a very basic understanding of one foreign language (German).

This hits me in the face almost every day. Yesterday I was wondering about the history of slavery and racism in Europe. Today I’m curious about China’s history as an economic powerhouse. Last week I was curious about Roman law and daily life.

The fact is, everything from philosophy to calculus is screamingly relevant to daily, modern life. We hear talk of “an American revolution” in Washington, of a shift of power in the Senate. It seems we forget that the notion of a Senate is considerably older than the United States is — and that we have such a thing because our founders were aware of this. Macroeconomic theory is thrust in our faces on an almost daily basis these days, yet I’ve never had a class on economics at all.

We might feel fear of terrorist attacks, or see our fellow citizens lash out at “the Arabs.” Our own short memories fail to remind us of the light in which we are seen, fail to put the really quite minor terrorist threat in context of what London or Dresden endured in World War II. We demand our government to make us safer, and our government responds by making us less safe but making us *feel* safer at airports.

In my own field, I see some universities buckling to pressure from Business to turn out large numbers of mediocre programmers that know the Java or .NET standard library well, but have no sense of the theory behind computer science, and would be utterly lost if asked to, say, write a recursive QuickSort. I find myself almost completely baffled that some companies that want to hire the world’s best programmers are only looking for people that are already fluent in $LANGUAGE — not ones that are good programmers, and so well-versed in computer science that they can easily pick up any language.

I think there is a lot to the argument that a good, broad, classical education can serve a person well in any career. I wish I had realized that a little earlier.

The Election Results Are In

General

It’s close! In the township where we live, Barack Obama defeated John McCain by 15 votes!

I guess I should mention that the victory margin was 166 to 151. So it’s not like it was 15 votes out of millions.

In all, 333 people in our township cast ballots, or about a third of the total population of our township.

Just to give you a sense of scale, there are an average of 29 people per square mile out here.

And the nutty jail expansion was defeated 3:1. Our county commissioners will just have to figure out some other way to house the county’s prison population (around six inmates) for awhile longer.

Review: Silicon Mechanics

Hardware, Reviews

After some hilariously frightening reactions from Dell support to simple problems, and HP becoming aggressively competitive on price, we’ve been using HP servers for a few years now. The hardware is good, and the support, while reasonable, always… pauses… when I mention that we’re running Debian. I try not to let it slip if I don’t have to.

We put in some HP blades a couple of years ago, and I was annoyed to discover that they have discontinued that enclosure and all the blades in it. I decided this was a good time to look at their newer options, as well as at other companies.

Back in July, I had noticed a Silicon Mechanics booth at OSCon. I noticed their slogan “experts included.” That sounds great; we’ve got software experts here, but not hardware experts, and I’d enjoy dealing with a company that knows more about their hardware than I do. I went up to their booth and asked what they’d say about us running Debian on their hardware. “That would be just fine.” “So you’d fully support it when I’m running Debian?” “Sure.” “What about management software – do you have any of that which I’d find annoying to port to Debian?” “Our servers don’t need any management software other than what comes with your kernel.” Good answers.

So, when it came time for us to decide what to do about getting a new server in here, I figured I’d call up Silicon Mechanics and see what they’d recommend. They put me on a conference call with a sales rep and an IT engineer, and wound up recommending a 1U server for us to start with, and an iSCSI storage device to address some of the storage needs we have (both for that server and others). I had heard of iSCSI only vaguely, and asked how it worked, and what the performance would be like compared to our 2Gb FC SAN. I got back intelligent (and correct) answers.

They probably spent 2 hours with me on the phone before we placed an order. I was incredibly happy with their service, level of expertise, and helpfulness. They even did a webinar to demo the management interface on the storage unit for me.

Today, the 1U server arrived. I unboxed it and set it on my desk to configure. First item: set an IP address for the IPMI card. That’s the device that lets me connect to it over a web browser and interact with the console, power cycle it, etc. as if I was there. I set an IP, but somehow couldn’t seem to figure out the username and password for the web interface.

So I called Silicon Mechanics support at the number that was included on the fridge magnet (!) that came with the shipment. Phone rang once. Then a live, capable American answered. No menus, no fuss. I asked my question. He apologized, saying, “I should know that, but I’ll have to look it up… hold on just a bit.” I had my answer about 90 seconds later. He offered to send me the full docs for the IPMI card if I wanted as well.

So I’ve been very impressed with them so far. From what I’ve heard, their iSCSI enclosure ought to be quite something as well. They even helped us spec out a switch that supports trunking for use with it.

I’ll give them a “highly recommended”.

Looking back at WordPress

Software

I’ve hosted this blog on three different platforms: Drupal, WordPress, and at present, Serendipity.

Back in 2006, I rejected WordPress, noting that most of its plugins were incompatible with the current version, its main anti-spam software wasn’t Free, there was no central plugin directory. And, while WordPress supported PostgreSQL, many plugins didn’t.

Serendipity, at the time, had none of those problems.

However, I’ve been having other problems with Serendipity since then. People have repeatedly had trouble with captchas. The RSS feeds have long had subtle incompatibilities with certain aggregators, leading to duplicate posts.

I’m looking back at WordPress now. It looks like it is a lot more mature than it was 2.5 years ago. Perhaps it’s time to switch back.

I hope it will support PostgreSQL better now, but I note that its website seems to list MySQL only these days. Ah well, can’t have it all, I guess.

Search for Backup Tools

Software

Since the last time I went looking for backup software, I’ve still be using rdiff-backup.

It’s nice, except for one thing: it always keeps an uncompressed copy of your current state on the disk. This is becoming increasingly annoying.

I did some tests with dar and BackupPC, and both saved considerable disk space over rdiff-backup. The problem with dar, or compressed full/incrementals with tar, is that eventually you have to make a new full backup. You have to do that, *then* delete all your old fulls and incrementals, so there will be times when you have to store a full backup twice.

The hardlinking approach sounds good. It’s got a few problems, too. One is that it can lose metadata about, ironically enough, hard links. Another is that few of the hard linking programs offer a compressed on-disk format. Here’s what I’ve been looking at:

BackupPC

Nice on the service. I’m a bit annoyed that it’s web-driven rather than commandline-driven, but I can look past that. I can also look past that it won’t let me clamp down on ssh access as much as I’d like.

BackupPC writes metadata to disk alongside files, so it can restore hard links, symlinks, device entries, and the like. It also has the nice feature of being able to hard link identical files across machines, so if you’re backing up /usr on a bunch of machines and have the same files installed, you save space. Nice.

BackupPC also can compress the files on your disk. It uses pre-compression md5sums for identifying files to hard link, which is nice.

Here’s where I get nervous.

BackupPC doesn’t just use regular compression, from say gzip or bzip2. It uses its own low-level algorithm centered around the Perl deflate library. And it does it in a nonstandard way owing to a supposed memory issue with zlib. Why they don’t just pipe it through gzip or equivalent is beyond me.

This means that, first off, it’s using a nonstandard compression format, which makes me nervous to begin with. If that weren’t annoying enough, you have to install Perl plus a bunch of modules to extract the thing. This makes me nervous too.

Dirvish

Doesn’t support compression.

faubackup

Doesn’t support compression.

rdup

Supports compression and encryption. Does not preserve ownership of things unless the destination filesystem does (meaning you must run as root to store your backups.)

Killer lack of feature: it does not preserve knowledge about what was hardlinked on the source system, so when you restore your backup, all hardlinks are lost. Epic fail.

rsnapshot

Doesn’t support compression.

StoreBackup

Does support compression, appears to restore metadata in a sane way. Supports backing up to a different machine on the LAN, but only if you set up NFS. Looks inappropriate for doing backups over VPN. Comprehensive, though confusing, manual. Looks like an oddball design with an oddball manual.

So, any suggestions?

Wow

Politics

People often talk about “memorable moments” — times where pretty much everybody in the country remembers where they were at that exact time.

There are probably only two of those moments I can remember: the 1989 earthquake during the World Series and the time 9/11 happened. My car was in for service that day, and I was sitting in the lobby of the mechanics watching it on TV.

So now I have a third: watching Barack Obama win the presidency.

We were installing some new blinds in the kitchen while listening to the coverage on NPR, periodically going over to the office to watch the TV coverage on the computer. (Our TV is upstairs right now, so that was more convenient.)

A few minutes before the election was called, I remember Brian Williams saying something like “We’re going to go to local stations now, but you better not walk away. We’ll have some amazing news at the top of the hour.”

We watched that announcement, then saw McCain’s speech, and finally Obama’s speech (missed the first minute or two of it actually). What an amazing evening.

Then seeing the stories of people celebrating all around the country and around the world: the impromptu party in front of the White House Tuesday night, the small gathering at the Lincoln Memorial Wednesday morning, the Obama parties all around the world. And we watched it on TV in our house while Jacob slept. I feel like I missed out somehow.

Why I Hope

Politics

And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as bright, tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.

For that is the true genius of America: that America can change. Our union can be perfected.

— Barack Obama, Nov. 4, 2008