Derailment
A Train Of Thought That Jumped The Track

Apple's icon for their new Thunderbolt I/O port looks suspiciously like the ISO warning sign for high voltage, don't you think?

I put this note on my Facebook profile on New Year's Eve 2010. It's good to maintain perspective on all aspects of one's life. Living as we do at "internet speed" we can easily get caught up in thinking that such-and-such isn't fast enough or that we just can't exist another second without $SHINYTHING. We live in an incredible time and we should appreciate it more.

By the way: this list was somewhat inspired by Louis C.K.'s appearance on Conan O'Brien's show that went viral as the "Everything is Amazing and Nobody's Happy" video.

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Almost to 2011. I'm a big fan of maintaining perspective on things, so here are a few interesting things that happened 100 years ago, in 1911.

First U.S. coast-to-coast flight arrives in Pasadena, California after a journey of 49 days, during which the pilot, Calbraith Rodgers, made 69 stops and 16 crash landings and was followed by a train carrying spare parts. It had only been eight years since the Wright Brothers first flew for two minutes at Kitty Hawk. You can now fly non-stop across the country in a few hours.

The U.S. Supreme Court dissolves Standard Oil using the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Successor entities become Exxon, Chevron, Amoco (among others) which are still with us today.

New York Public Library building at 5th Avenue dedicated by President Taft. 73 years later, the Ghostbusters show up. Taft is nowhere to be seen, however.

First running of the Indianapolis 500 auto race. The average speed was about 75 mph. Today's Indy 500 speeds average over 160, with top speeds over 220 mph.

Ground breaking begins in Boston for Fenway Park. The Green Monster is soon to be born.

The first public elevator begins service at London's Earl's Court Metro Station. The date of the first passing of gas in an elevator remains unknown.

Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen becomes the first person to reach the South Pole. Local penguins are unimpressed.

Procter & Gamble unveils its Crisco shortening as a healthier alternative to lard. Hydrogenated oils enter the American diet and we've been getting fatter ever since.

I'm getting excited about the speaker list at Surge 2010. Lots of top talent, and all will be talking about challenges faced, mistakes made, and lessons learned in building scalable systems. I am particularly looking forward to hearing Bryan Cantrill talk about building enterprise solutions from commodity components, which is a big part of what I do at OmniTI.

Bryan has some fascinating stories from his days at Sun Microsystems, and he's an amazing speaker who has been described as "Tigger on speed". I'm hoping for a reprise of his characterization of a hard drive that unexpectedly reset when a high LBA was requested.

The original meaning of the word nightmare referred to the feeling of suffocation caused by an evil spirit. I like etymology, especially the way it illuminates changes in meaning over time. Americans are suffocating under the weight of endless "security" measures with no end in sight. Will we ever again be able to keep our shoes on at the airport? Will we one day have to be screened in the nude before taking any public transportation? Where does it end?

Maybe it will end if we stop our worst-case thinking. It's a reflex when we think about security, especially for those in positions of authority who are thinking about their accountability should "the worst" happen. That's how we end up with rule after rule, weaving a blanket of "protection" that suffocates the liberty it is meant to safeguard. That's my nightmare scenario.

I'm planning to attend Velocity 2010. I've never been before, and I'm looking forward to learning new things and meeting new people. Devops is a popular term, and we live it at OmniTI, so I'm excited about bringing back knowledge to improve it in our operations and development teams.

Weapons of Mass Dilution and the threat of New Age terrorists. Brilliant! Eerily accurate with respect to the security response:

"Meanwhile, new security measures at airports require that all water bottles be scanned to ensure that they are not being used to smuggle the memory of an explosion on board a plane."

Multiple axes of humor.

It's over. A disappointing end to a record-breaking season for the Caps, at the hands of the lowest-seeded team in the East. Montreal got spectacular goaltending from Jaroslav Halak down the stretch that kept them in the games where the Caps heavily out-shot them. Game 7 had stout defense on both sides, but the lack of power play production was the Caps' downfall. You simply cannot win in the playoffs scoring so little on the man advantage.

Coverage summary

Dennis Clarke noticed something interesting in a trailer for Disney's upcoming TRON Legacy movie. A glimpse of an "old" computer interface shows what looks like a window running "top" and another window containing a semblance of "uname -a" from a Solaris machine.

Reminds me of spotting nmap in Matrix Reloaded.

Good news for Habs fans, not so good news for Caps faithful. Last night was a pretty disappointing result despite a high volume of shots on Halak. There's a good summary and links to coverage at Caps Nut.

Sony has announced that it is ending production of the venerable 3.5" floppy disk. Additional coverage at Ars Technica.

Things like this cause me to wax nostalgic (a sure sign of advancing age, at least in Internet terms,) but I'll simply recall that my first OS (MS-DOS) came on something like 3-4 floppies. We also thought the boot-sector viruses that often rode around on floppies were a terrible scourge. If only we'd known what was to come.

A lackluster offense (until the third period) and amazing goaltending by Halak. It's a cliche that elimination games are difficult for the series leader to win, but we've got to snap out of this habit of getting behind or we'll have no energy left.

Another solid game for the Caps, taking the series lead to 3-1 with a chance to put it away at home on Friday. A nail-biter through two (Varly's glove should be bronzed when this is all over) but explosive offense in the third was the difference.

Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win a hockey game. Defense and goaltending. And short-handed goals. And face-off wins. And secondary scoring. Oh yeah, and getting Ovie on the board didn't hurt. Montreal has to ponder their goaltending choice while Washington's seems settled. Something about the playoffs must elevate Varlamov's game, because he looked stout tonight. LET'S GO CAPS!!

The Caps managed to eke out a win in another overtime. Disappointing start to go down 2-0 early, and it was pretty grim being down 4-1, but the comeback was there, and congrats to John Carlson on his first playoff goal. That was a veteran wrist shot from the slot. Nice to see Backstrom get a hat trick to boot.

We'll be looking to steal some thunder from Montreal on Monday.

Every so often I stumble on a book that opens up an entirely new area of knowledge for me. Last Thanksgiving I was on vacation in Florida and picked up Bernard Cornwell's historical novel, Sword Song in a used book store. Only later did I learn that this was the fourth in a series of books set in ninth-century England that tell the story of King Alfred the Great and the defense of Wessex, the last remaining Anglo-Saxon kingdom during the period of Danish invasions.

This is a time period of which I knew little, and though these are novels, they have been thoroughly researched and I've felt transported to that time. When I read the actual historical accounts, I can relate to them much better. That's what I love about historical fiction-- it breathes life into the dry facts of history and fires the imagination. I'm half tempted to try to learn Old English!

My main site was never that appealing, and I'd like to blog more, so now my site is just the blog. Things will be in disarray for a while as I bring over some of my old articles.

So, it's almost 2010 and there's no sign of my jetpack. That's fine, it probably wasn't such a great idea anyway (it would suck to commute in the rain). What I am excited about is smart power grids.

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I love the Fail Blog, as my wife can attest. I particularly like the grammar- and spelling-related entries, like this one. I'd also add one of my own pet peeves, apostrophes for noun plurals. This goes far beyond the classic "it's/its" that many people get wrong. I'm talking about using apostrophes to make all kinds of other things plural, like Oreo's or Wednesday's. Where do people get this idea? I never saw it when I was in high school (at least, as far as I can remember.) I first heard of it during a news writing course in college and ever since I notice it everywhere.

Today I gave a technical presentation at the $DAYJOB about ZFS. ZFS rocks my world. As a sysadmin, I use it literally every day, and have been since it debuted in Solaris 10 more than 2 years ago. It makes data storage simple yet powerful. I wanted to share what I've learned, and why I think ZFS is so cool.

Slides

Ed Felten's latest post on his "Freedom to Tinker" blog, entitled What's the Cyber in Cyber-Security?, looks at the roots of the prefix "cyber" that has become ubiquitous in the public mind. I love finding out the origins of terms that we all take for granted and about which we don't usually think in depth. Thanks, Ed.

Ben Franklin's famous quote about liberty versus safety frames Bruce Schneier's latest column for Wired, in which he sums up post-9/11 politics as a false dichotomy between security and privacy. As is typical for Bruce's writing, it is full of links to supporting information and is well worth your time to explore.

We do indeed have a reason to be terrified in this country-- we should be terrified that our republic may well be undone by the very government that exists to safeguard it. As long as we're quoting 18th-century luminaries, I'll add another favorite. In a 1783 speech to the House of Commons, Prime Minister William Pitt said:

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."

I couldn't agree more.

Where's my jetpack?

Happy 2008. We're a little behind, you know. We're supposed to be going to Jupiter by 2010. As it stands, we might make it to Mars in my lifetime. Apparently we're too busy with all the other pressing matters before us.

Computer technology is a fast-paced industry. Even though I'm directly involved in it, I'm still sometimes unaware of just how quickly it evolves. Today I was thinking back to my first semester of college, which began 15 years ago this month. Yikes. I already feel some perspective coming on, the kind where you find yourself saying things that begin with, "In my day..."

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Recently I saw one of Shell's Real Energy TV ads. I have TiVo, so I'm used to zipping through ads, but this one caught my eye because it was a good bit longer than the usual ad. This spot featured a Shell engineer working in Southeast Asia, who was being interviewed by a local reporter about the work Shell is doing there. I won't go through the whole story, but to summarize, after the interview, the engineer is sitting in a restaurant with his teenage son, who is drinking a milkshake. The kid slurps the last bit from the glass and his dad says, "Do that again." He has a "eureka moment" which leads to a design for a flexible drill that can snake into otherwise unreachable places to extract oil.

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As any admin knows, OS upgrades can be painful. Despite the best intentions and efforts by the vendor, bad things happen. This is especially true with kernel upgrades. It's one thing to run a blanket "yum update" or "apt-get upgrade" on your average Linux desktop, but even the tamest patch can ascend to truly ulcer-inducing levels when it applies to a critical system that can ill afford any extended downtime.

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At the $DAYJOB we use a lot of open source code, as do the vast majority of our clients. While not always the best solution, it often permits us to build excellent solutions at a low cost. This week, we launched OmniTI Labs as a place to collect various bits of code developed in the course of our business and share them with the community. We have some phenomenally talented people on staff, so expect good things.

I'm proud to have had a small part to play in one Labs project to this point, Zetaback. Zetaback is a backup utility for ZFS. It's the brainchild of Theo Schlossnagle. It's still in alpha, but we're running it internally with good results.

OmniTI Labs will be a great place to find lots of other useful tools that may be just what you're looking for to solve your problem.

I consider myself a pretty good speller. I recognize that not everyone puts the same degree of emphasis on correct spelling as I do. Nevertheless, I think that if you're going to write something that will be viewed or used by the public, then you should make sure it's correct. This applies especially to program code. Read on for some fun.

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At the $DAYJOB, we have a cluster of build systems that we use to test source trees on various platforms, including FreeBSD, Linux and Solaris. Some of these machines are fairly old, and have relatively puny hard drives by current standards, yet they continue to do their job just fine. We've simply begun to run low on local storage, as the source trees grow and developers need to work with multiple branch and tag checkouts.

Rather than try to boost local storage with extra drives (not a surefire solution everywhere), we focused our attention on a shared storage solution. The idea was to reuse some decommissioned hardware and create enough storage for every build system to be able to mount its home directories and give developers the space they need to do their work.

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Just read a fascinating post which describes an AP report on how fake IDs actually help people survive sectarian violence in Iraq. Since Iraqi surnames refer to tribe and clan, you can be targeted as a Sunni or Shiite by name alone. Being able to travel under an assumed name makes your daily life safer. It's an interesting real-life example of the law of unintended consequences.

Security is a topic I frequently think about. Computer system security is part of my job as a sysadmin, but I enjoy thinking about it as a larger socio-economic issue. Good security reading can always be found at Bruce Schneier's blog.