What's it all about, Alfie?

Work is quiet for the most part but I've had an interesting chat with one of the Unix SysAdmins on one of the several Linux boxes I have in production at the time. I can't have root access, but they allow sudo access, and that's good enough for me as I can do all I need on the boxes assuming that the sudo command is working. Well... late yesterday sudo started rejecting my password on one of my production boxes. No big deal - I'm still able to login to the box with SSH, but it's something I wanted fixed. Maybe it was in NIS, maybe not, but I wanted them to restart services to see if it was NIS. Big Mistake.

They looked at the box and couldn't figure out the problem. This is not a big surprise as these are not the very best admins I've ever encountered in my days and from talking to others around here, this is not an uncommon belief. Their 'solution' to the problem was to first upgrade the machine to '011' - their numbering scheme for semi-custom RedHat builds, and the second was to say that Linux really isn't stable enough to allow for the 201 days of uptime that this box had.

Clowns.

I told them just to reboot the box as that will most likely clear things up and leave it at that. They think it's important to move to their "latest" release when they don't have a good idea of the problem. Holy Cow! I know it's not a really high paying job, but given that these people have a lot of power, it's amazing that they don't screen them a little bit better than they currently do. Yikes!

OK... first, I can't imagine why on earth they make a custom build of the kernel as well as custom OpenSSH packages (to name just two). These can't possibly be kept as up-to-date as the developers of these same packages, but they insist that it's for security reasons. Amazing. Really.

Then when I have a reasonably stable system (on average > 200 days uptime) they want to rebuild it with yet another of their crazy distributions as opposed to just learning the systems they have and be able to fix them. I know there are some in the Linux Admins that are very knowledgeable and could probably figure out this problem, but they are not available to do this work because they are too busy doing hardware verification, creating new builds of the kernel (I still can't get over that), etc. It's amazing that a place like this is run this way.

But life goes on... slowly, and with great gnashing of teeth, but it goes on.

I read an interesting article today about the role of the Artisan in the human experience. Very interesting thoughts - lots that hit very close to home for me. It's a battle with frustration to be sitting in this place where so much can be done, and yet because of some (understandably) important decisions nothing is being done. I understand business decisions - I owned a business for 5 years, there should be the realization that the business of business is to keep moving forward on things. Never sit still. Unfortunately, that's not being done here. So we limp along.

Maybe I'll plan for what should be done and then see if it's worth implementing this. It'll certainly give me something to do while they make the decisions that will decide what direction we're going to take.

I've been around the Intel computing platform since the 8080 was hot stuff. My first computer had a serial interface to a teletype and later to a first-generation video display terminal. I've used DOS on Intel since version 1.3... I say all this to make a point that I've seen a lot and done a lot over the decades and for the most part things have gotten better. For the most part.

Case in point - hardware is much better than it used to be. Also, I have to hand it to Microsoft for coming up with significant advancements in the base OS such as abstracted printer drivers and such. Pre-Windows software had to ship with it's own printer drivers which is why so many Unix software dealt with only Postscript. It was on the network and a known language.

Still, many things haven't improved. This past week I've been "upgraded" at work from Windows NT to XP. Now I've had XP at home on a few computers I don't really use, and so I've gotten all the changes down and I'm pretty comfortable with it, but working on it all day long is another issue. So I was trying to keep an open mind about going to XP in the hopes that things wouldn't be as bad as I had thought they'd be.

Well... I hate to say it, but I was wrong. It's no different than NT, and in many ways, worse. OK, what's the big issue? Well... there are programs like PuTTY that I've used for a long time to access servers that is having a very hard time running well on XP. It could be the install of XP that the Bank is doing, but if that's the case, then there's another thing that Microsoft has done wrong with XP - allowing people to break it on install.

I have moved off NT/XP as my primary development platform, but all my apps have to run on NT/XP and so I have to deal with it every day anyway. This makes me realize what's good about it and what really isn't. I'm totally surprised that in XP the terminal sessions are "old style" window bar and not in keeping with the "theme" of the rest of the windows. Why in the world did they do that? They had to have seen it and known that it was inconsistent... It's totally amazing to me that they let this pass.

Sure, most of the suite of tools runs OK - Office, development tools, etc. But even then, there's the problems with certain tools and the backslash vs. forwardslash difference in Cygwin. It's enough to make a cross-platform developer cry.

But I also have a good upgrade story to tell - I've ordered the 17-inch PowerBook and it should arrive in a week or so. This will be a very nice upgrade and will carry me forward for at least another couple of years. I have been looking forward to this for quite some time and it's getting very exciting thinking about all new and different things the PowerBook has. Certainly, the display is important, but the backlight keyboard is going to be nice, as is the processor and memory. It will be nice to have all that drive space, and the DVD burner will be a nice tool to have.

It's just amazing to me that even when Microsoft sees what's better they don't take the steps to incorporate those changes in the same way that they've done with Office and the Browser and the TCP/IP stack - all these were separate products, but as they became more important to Microsoft, they started to provide them. It's amazing that XP is as bad as it is.

Anyway... back to try and get some more tools installed, or figure out why the ones I have now aren't working right. It's never easy with them...

OK, I started this entry comparing the place I work to a dead/dieing place and crossing the river Styx. That's probably harsh as there are still reasonable people here that care about what's happening, but they're getting fewer and fewer each day, and I'm concerned that they are giving up like I am. Not that it's a good thing to admit that, but it's honest. So instead of talking about this place in the past tense, I decided to talk about trying to find the "Silver Lining" in the clouds. No matter how hard that may be from time to time.

For example, it's a bad economy - $1 trillion on the sidelines waiting for some movement in the market to get back in. It's also a bad time to be an American with pride in their elected officials - Bush is going against the longest standing effective treaty organization - NATO, as well as the UN. It's also the middle of March and it's 20 degrees below normal in Chicago - below zero this morning.

OK... so let's spend a little time thinking about the good things.

Well, with $1 trillion ready to flow back into the market, when things start to move, it'll be a very interesting time to be in the industry. Like having the only tickets to a great show and everyone wanting them. That'll be interesting to see. Lots of moves, lots of re-investment. OK, that's going tobe interesting.

We only have a few more years of the current administration, but there's a lot that can go wrong in that time. However, with Tony Blair getting into hot water with his own party, maybe it'll be enough to slow down the US unilateral response and allow a little more support from at least our traditional allies in NATO. I'm not a fool enough to think that Iraq won't get hit over this silly business, but going it alone will either look exceptionally prophetic or exceptionally rash. I'm against the extremes as that's typically not a good place to be.

OK, so we're not going to see a nice silver lining from that front, but if things can slow down a bit and a more direct/targeted/measured response tried, then that's gotta be a good thing. If the President thinks a man is a danger to this country, then this country has the right/responsibility to take that person out. In WWII the Allies would have hung Hitler (to the happiness of many), and rightly or wrongly, each nation state has that same choice. The responsibility comes in when other countries think we're out of control and start doing the same thing to our elected officials.

OK, so things aren't looking too nice in the geopolitical area, but at least we still have NATO and the UN. Maybe something good will still come from all this. I will say that if the money flows in due to a more stable market (due to a more stable geopolitical climate) then working here will be a little bit nicer as there will be more money and that will mean some of the folks around here will have more breathing room and therefore can afford to be a little nicer. That'll help, and if things really improve then the economy will pick up and the market for IT types might pick up again and that will mean options - and that's really good.

So it's all about linings, I guess. That or self-delusional behavior. Either way, it's working for me. 🙂

I've never been a big gamer. I wrote a few games that my friends liked, but as for myself, I can't remember a game that held my attention to the point that I was really good at it, or six months passed - with the possible exception of my teens when I'd go to the arcade with my friends. But I have to admit that ever since I played Empire or Xconq or FreeCiv I've been hooked. Not really sure why that is, but it probably has to do with my favorite board game - Risk. So I've been playing Xconq for a long while and I have to admit that the versions I've played in the last year are by far the best I've seen - even in the commercial offerings.

So the latest version available on the Xconq web site runs on both X11 and Mac OS Classic - which, on my iBook, runs very nicely. Sure, it's a toss-up which would run better - X11 or Classic as each has to run in a new environment, but I like the look of the Classic version better so I play it.

I will admit that it'd be nicer to have the multiple screens on my iBook that I have on my Linux boxes, but maybe I'll fix that with a new 17-inch PowerBook. I've been lucky enough to have a windfall that's exactly what the new PowerBook will cost - when it ships. It's about the most perfect computer for what I do and need, and with that 17-inch screen I'd be able to play a very nice, large, Xconq game :).

One of the things that I'm really looking forward to is the Carbon-ization of Xconq so that it wouldn't need the Classic run-time environment on Mac OS X and I know that they're working on it - I just have no idea how close they are to getting it done. I'm guessing that there's a ton of work to do, but again, I don't know how close they are. I do know that one of the main maintainers of Xconq is an employee of Apple, so it's likely he knows what to do as well as anyone, and he is working on it. So I'll wait... if a bit impatiently.

I spent a little bit of time yesterday updating this and that on sherman and fiddled with Vim on OS X. There's the Carbonized version that's really more akin to 'gvim' on linux, and then there's the command line 'vim' with no graphical component. I'm sure if someone really wanted to make one distribution they could, but I'm not unhappy about having to deal with two versions. They are both based on 6.1, so the differences are all exceptionally minor and don't effect me in the least. However, I needed to get the colors on the Terminal windows right, which was as simple as setting the TERM variable to xterm-color and away we go. It's really quite nice.

I've also spent a little time with the X11 xterm on OS X to get the default colors to be white on black. This meant editing the ~/.Xdefaults file and putting in the lines:

xterm*VT100*foreground: white
xterm*VT100*background: black

But the really interesting part was that the file had to be a 'Unix' file for it to be read properly. On Mac OS X you can have DOS files, Unix files and Mac files - all with their different line endings. Well, X11 needs to have the Unix 'newline' endings or else it won't work properly. This is a very nice thing to know, and it would have saved me quite a bit of time to know that. But, in the end, everything worked out and the defaults look great. Once again, the command-line vim works great in the xterm session.

One more little thing I updated was to the latest version of iTerm - a very nice little tabbed terminal emulator. It's come a long way since it's initial releases, and I have to say that it's pretty darn close to being my preferred terminal program because it will make it possible to get more terminals in a smaller space, and there isn't an abundance of space on my iBook's screen. Very nice.

Safari seems to be coming along, and I'm hoping to see a new release in the coming days. Also, the iPods are way past due for an update, and while I'm not going to get one of those until my existing MP3 player craps out, it's still exciting to wonder what the next generation will bring - besides increased storage.

I've been working on a few changes to the code for these projects at work and I've gotten myself to a point today that I've tested everything, but there is so much to release it's going to be a pain in the morning. I've changed more than I probably should have for one day, and while I'm not worried about the changes working (I have tested them), there are still a lot of things to do when rolling out new versions of the apps that it's going to be a very busy morning tomorrow to get everything done in time for the first traders.

Thankfully, I stopped changing things when I realized that I'd pushed the limits, and so I've had time to write everything up, update the docs, and make a good To Do list for tomorrow morning. I'm pretty sure I've got everything covered, but it's going to take a bit of final testing to make sure that everything's OK in the morning.

Yikes!

On a lighter note, it's interesting to see how interdependent everything is when you build a large number of large systems and each feeds data into the other. Yup, it's circular data time, and it just makes keeping things straight that much more important. However, it is interesting to see that all these systems work together to get the complete job done. Of course, no user is really interested in the least, but they aren't really supposed to either.

From here on out, I'll be planning my daily changes a little more carefully so as not to get into this spot again. Just a little bit uncomfortable this afternoon keeping everything straight.

I know I've said it before, but here's another reason to switch to Mac OS X - the Mail client that comes with Mac OS X is the next generation of the mail client that was in OPENSTEP/NeXTSTEP. The advantage is that in these earlier versions, there was the capability for developers to add plug-ins into the Mail application simply by placing their plug-in bundle into the proper directory and restarting the application.

The developer of httpmail plugin has used this capability to add to OS X's Mail the capability to download mail sitting at Hotmail. This means that email sent to a properly configured Hotmail account appears as though it was sent to your normal email account - be it IMAP, POP, whatever. Since I have a Hotmail account for the MSN Messenger (really Fire which does a lot more than just Hotmail) I end up getting a bit of spam to the Hotmail account. Normally, I'd have to pull up the web page, login, and then delete the emails. Now with this plug-in, I can let OS X's Mail application get the spam and let it's spam filtering take care of it.

While this isn't like getting a new machine for free, it's a very nice little functional addition to an already excellent application. I don't have to hassle with the problems of getting to Hotmail, and yet I don't have to worry about having hundreds of junk emails there that need to be cleaned out every month or so.

It's really an incredible platform - OS X... I haven't found something that I wished it could do that it can't. And then there are these wonderful little surprises like
httpmail plugin that makes something good really extraordinary.

Let's not forget that in the past few days Apple has released the second version of X11 for OS X in an elegant little package. I'm really not able to think of something that I might want to do that I can't do with this machine. Wow... that's nice.

I had a bad case of The Blues this past weekend - I wanted to get a few things done and as it turned out, none of them got done. I've put too much emphasis on the weekends as a recharge cycle for these weeks I've been having. Too bad it took me until today on the way in to realize this. But I guess I had to have something snap me out of it, and that little something this morning was the realizition that there's a company that will upgrade the hard disk in my iBook from the existing 20GB to 30GB, 40GB, or 60GB. One of the problems I had this weekend is the realization that my iBook was not very user-servicable and I was running out of space on the 20GB internal drive. I didn't want to believe that it was a dead-end, and with finding this company this morning, I know that if I don't want to do it myself, I have an option.

The other thing I wanted to do this weekend was look into getting an additional drive for barney my SGI Indigo². It's getting closer than I'd like and while it's easier for me to add the drive because I have the enclosures and cables, it's still a couple of hundred dollars to get a 36GB SCSI drive - as oppoed to 80GB+ if it was EIDE... but that's the cost of SCSI, and it's worth it.

So I didn't get either of these things done and I realized this morning that there's no one that's going to get me out of The Blues except me. I'm the one that's responsible for my own happiness. Yeah, it's the standard party-line from the counseling I had years ago, but it's easy to forget and blame other things.

The Road less Traveled is less traveled because it's harder... Every now and then it's important to remind oneself.

One of the things that's been bothering me for a while is the inability for me to run scp and sftp to sparky from my iBook, sherman. I could ssh to sparky OK, but when I tried to get one of the others to work I had a lot of problems. Well... last night I decided to give it a real go and upgrade OpenSSH on sparky with the hopes that this would solve the problem. Of course, nothing's that easy.

Since sparky is a SPARC 20, I went to SunFreeware to get the latest packages for Solaris 7, SPARC edition. I really have to tip my hat to these guys... this is a lot of work to put these packages together for all the different combinations of Solaris and CPU, but they do a wonderful job of it.

Anyway, I get the latest packages for OpenSSH, and realize that I'm going to need to get the latest OpenSSL as well. No biggie, I get both and install them with pkgadd. Then I try to run it. Begin the detour to get it really working. You see, the latest OpenSSH/OpenSSL needs to have an entropy server running so after reading the OpenSSH install page on SunFreeware (which is, thankfully, exceptional) I get the three other packages I needed and installed them. Then it was a matter of about a dozen commands to get the entropy generator going and then OpenSSH ran. I was able to ssh into the box, but alas, still no scp or sftp.

So I go to Google and I get a few ideas - like making sure the path to scp is correctly set. It was, of course, but in doing that I noticed that something wasn't quite right. I was getting an environment variable error, so I went into my .login file and fixed that up. Still no luck, but closer, as ssh sparky 'which scp' worked as it should.

The final step came putting my girls to bed for the night: I've had GNUstep running on this box for a while as I've really liked the OPENSTEP object library, and in my .login the GNUstep app to 'make services' is run. This came to be because there was a process id showing up at each call to ssh, scp, and sftp. When I finally put it together it seemed obvious - GNUstep was sending something or blocking something that was OK for ssh but wasn't OK for scp or sftp.

When I commented out the call in my .login everything worked great! Now I can move files to sparky with scp which is not only faster but a lot more secure than ftp.

I'm very impressed by Safari on Mac OS X, and when decided that the KHTML engine that they used was in Konqueror for Linux I decided to give it a try and see if it would replace Phoenix as my browser on Linux. First off, it's always been clear to me that browsers on Linux are going to suffer from a lack of plug-ins and support for the latest Flash, etc. But that's OK... all I really expect out of my Linux browser is to be able to render standard pages and not hassle with Flash or QuickTime, etc. For that, Netscape was a good first attempt but locked up far too often. Mozilla was better, and Phoenix was even better because of it's stripped-down design on the same Mozilla core.

Then Safari gave me really impressive rendering speeds and I decided to try Konqueror - not bad. But I'm running RedHat 7.1 which is not the latest and so I decided to try and upgrade KDE (and therefore Konqueror) to something a bit more current. So I went and got the 7.2 RPMs and updates for KDE and the necessary support packages. Got it all installed and it's not bad at all. The speed is nice - on par with Safari.

I've been a GNOME supporter because of the CORBA infrastructure and I still believe that using CORBA in this way is the way to make the computer more tightly integrated with the network it sits on. If I had to make a new trading system I'd focus on making the system a group of small, inter-working components that all had universal interconnections that flowed through so that systems could be built by simply plugging components together and when necessary stringing together a few different kinds of components to get the desired function. This is nothing new - CORBA has been all about this from the beginning. But making an OS where this level of interconnection is supported at the lowest levels makes it that much easier to build these types of systems.

Anyway... GNOME is nice, and it's OK, but I have to say that KDE is nice as well and while it's not rooted in CORBA, most current systems aren't. While this isn't a real benefit, currently it isn't a serious handicap either. I haven't been asked to write this mythical system, and were I to do it, I'm guessing that one of the restrictions would be that it had to run on Windows and that would leave Linux out of the running right from the jump. But it's important to support The Team, and so I've been running and supporting GNOME since I started using Linux a few years ago.

The latest RedHat (8.0) solves a little of this problem for me as it has a modified version of both that is it's new desktop of choice. Sure, you can get straight GNOME or KDE on 8.0, but the default is strong motivation to leave it just as it is. I haven't used 8.0 yet, and probably won't until we upgrade all the servers at work which isn't planned anytime soon. After all, they work, and upgrading eight servers along with four workstations isn't going to be fast and there should be a compelling reason to do it.

So I'm running Konqueror on top of Ximian GNOME and have to admit that it's pretty nice, and support for the mixture is really nice.