Category Archives: Uncategorized

Shiraz retired

I just retired a server that has been doing loyal service as a variety of things over the last 6 or 7 years. It was an old Dell desktop machine, and it served as my mail server, DNS server, database server, and quite a few other things. I think I may have just realized one service that didn’t get migrated off of it – a couple of IRC bots which have been dormant for quite some time.

For a while, it also hosted fajita, the bot who answers most of the questions on #apache, on irc.freenode.net, but that moved off about 2 years ago.

And just a few moments ago …

rbowen@shiraz:~% sudo /sbin/shutdown -h now

Broadcast message from root (pts/1) (Mon May  5 20:36:46 2008):

The system is going down for system halt NOW!
rbowen@shiraz:~% Connection to shiraz closed by remote host.
Connection to shiraz closed.

The goal is eventually to move everything up to slicehost, and I’ll probably move my mail servers to Google while I’m at it. I’m tired of being a sysadmin, but not tired enough of it to just have a normal web host.

bike to work day

Finally biked to work on my 7.3FX that I bought 2 years ago for the specific purpose of biking to work. I never did before, because Harrodsburg Road is a good place to get killed. But now I have a sidewalk (almost) all the way to work, although the last 2 years of construction on Clays Mill have left the sidewalk a rather pathetic shadow of its former self, with breaks every dozen yards.

Took 20 minutes, and I wasn’t above 7mph more than 2 or 3 times. But once I get past the rubber-legs phase, I figure I can do 15mph the whole way and get here in half that time. Really looking forward to not being out of breath after walking up the stairs. Perhaps biking to work isn’t enough to get me back in shape, but it’s a start.

Twitter, revisited

So, it appears that I was wrong. I can deal with that.

I tend to pick up Twitter during a conference, because it’s a useful way to keep track of what other folks are attending and doing at the conference. Then I drop it afterwards.

But after Amsterdam, I kept doing it. I’m not sure why. I think it’s a combination of things. I think perhaps the list of people I’m following got long enough that it was actually interesting to keep track of what someone had for breakfast, or more likely with the group I follow, what continent they are on today. So presumably it’s all about how interesting the folks you’re following actually are.

And, as a consequence, I’ve been posting more there myself, although what I post is hardly as interesting as some of the folks I follow.

Still, I can’t imagine what their business model is, and how they can possibly afford to keep running this service long term, unless someone buys them and starts placing ads, or something. Not sure how far the ad model scales. I have’t clicked on an ad this year. Don’t know about you.

Last Day

Today is my last day at Asbury College. I’ve been there 3 years, 2 months, 3 weeks, roughly, and it’s been a good time. There have been interesting projects, great coworkers, and scads of great opportunities that I couldn’t have had elsewhere. It was a hard decision to leave, but it’s an opportunity I didn’t want to let get past.

A lot of people have told me I’m crazy for not taking off some time between jobs. Perhaps. I am excited to get started as soon as I can, and there are already a significant stack of tasks that I need to get started on.

shell history meme

Here’s my contribution to the shell history meme that I’ve seen floating about. This is just so that I keep my creds as a geek blog. 😉

From my laptop:

% history -n 500 | awk ‘{a[$1]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
121 cd
44 ssh
35 vi
33 svn
33 sudo
24 ls
22 scp
14 mv
13 dig
12 perl

On the server I’ve got this:

[rbowen@buglet ~]$ history | awk ‘{print $2}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
185 cd
174 ls
106 vi
106 sudo
50 tail
31 ps
27 /sbin/iptables
23 grep
19 locate
15 yum

Which strikes me as *really* weird. There must have been some window in there that I was tinkering with iptables an awful lot.

Edward Lorenz

Matsu told me on Friday that Edward Lorenz had died recently. Somehow, I had missed that.

Lorenz was one of the first folks to start talking about chaos theory, and did most of his early work in the area of weather prediction. Going beyond the standard knowledge that weather prediction is a bit hit or miss, Lorenz began to work on simulations of weather patterns, and observed that even tiny, supposedly insignificant, changes in initial conditions made HUGE changes in the final outcome.

This was the so-called butterfly effect – that, theoretically, a butterfly flapping its wings in Mongolia could have a profound impact on weather patterns in Brazil in the months or years to follow. It’s not that the butterfly’s motion *causes* those changes, as some news stories oversimplified, but just that tiny changes in initial data has enormous impacts on final output of the formula. Indeed, this is one of the definitions of chaos theory – sensitivity to initial conditions.

In college, I took a course in Chaos Theory, using Glick’s book as our text book. It was more of a research class than a lecture class – we were learning at the same time as our professor, and there were just two of us in the class. It was a truly fascinating class, not least because of looking at Lorenz’s research. He came up with results that were obviously wrong – at least given knowledge of the day – and persisted in looking at it, rather than throwing it out like many of his colleagues did at the time. Indeed, many advances in the sciences are by people who refuse to accept the common knowledge, and instead pursue results that are, by common wisdom, obviously wrong.

So, every time you look at those computer-generated weather prediction reports, you have Edward Lorenz to thank that they are as accurate as they are, and that weather prediction is anything more than a guess — even though it still feels that way most of the time.