So much to say about Thursday. The goal was to work on the book all day, but I ended up in talks for much of that time. Highlights were Geoffrey Young’s talk on Apache-Test, and the Perl DateTime BOF.
I know that if I don’t write about this stuff now, I’ll probably never get back to it – like last year – but I’m very tired and and grumpy and still disappointed about missing my geocaching date this morning, so I think I’ll sit and sulk and work on my book instead.
One of the highlights of yesterday was a trip over to Powell’s technical bookstore, which is the most amazing bookstore I have ever been in. Let’s put it this way: This is the only bookstore that I have *ever* been in which has a better Apache collection than I do. 😉
Anyways, Wil Wheaton was there, reading from, and signing, his new book, “Dancing Barefoot.” I have to admit that I didn’t expect much, but I was very impressed. It’s stories about his time on Star Trek, but, more than that, it’s about being young, and a geek, and unsure of oneself, and trying to deal with the world. He read one story, and an excerpt from another. He’s a very good writer. And he was very good at reading it as well.
I got a signed copy of the book, and have already enjoyed a number of the stories.
See also his remarks about it, and about the conference. He seems like a pretty cool guy.
I’m not entirely sure how it became Wednesday already. Sheesh.
OK, last night I was out until 3 this morning, and so I’m a little worn out. Last year, I left everything early so that I could get sleep. In doing so, I missed out on some stuff. So I determined that this time I would attend everything I possibly could, be the last to leave, and get everything possible out of the week. So, this morning I am a little ragged.
Tim O’Reilly gave the same talk that he gave at ApacheCon. Well, different title, and a few different examples, but essentially the same talk.
Next, there was a talk about Eclipse, which is apparently very cool and shiny if you like that sort of thing. I think that if I cared at all about Java or IDEs, I would have had the patience to endure the speaker saying “uh” every 5th word. No, I’m not exaggerating.
Right now, I’m in Justin’s AAA talk, which I will hopefully be able to pay attention to, but I need to make sure I’m ready for my talk, which is immediately after. Migrating to Apache 2.0.
I’ve been in an Extreme Programming class all day, and it has been very useful, although I’m not sure 1) that it is immediately applicable to my job or 2) that I could really say *how* it is useful.
In part, it was cool in that we worked on a cool project, which looks interesting to continue working on after today.
07/07/03 15:45:29
Not much to say so far today. I gave my “intro to apache” talk this morning, which, by some great miracle, I managed to finish on time, even though the first hour of the talk took an hour and a half. This afternoon I went to the first half of the DocBook talk, but was getting nothing out of it. Admittedly, it was a pretty good introduction, but by the end of the first half, I feel that he’s unlikely to get to anything that will teach me something I don’t know.
So, for the second half, I intend to attend Schwern’s talk on testing. I think I’ve been to this talk before, but I’m sure it will be entertaining, if nothing else.
Meanwhile, the network is down, which is irritating me a great deal.
Tomorow I’m supposed to attend the Extreme Programming talk all day. That could be interesting, or it could be a lot of stuff I already know. I really am not quite sure yet.
Some time in the morning, it seems that something on the network was producing a ton of UDP traffic, and killing the network. Now there are signs all over the place telling OSX users to turn off Rendezvous to help save the network.
So, I want to complain and moan on IRC, but, of course, I can’t get to IRC. It’s deeply annoying, and merely serves to increase my irritation. Sort of a feedback loop of sorts.
Work bought me a new laptop. It’s a Compaq evo n600c. Not my first choice, but can’t beat the price.
Two weird things about it.
It is very strange to have a laptop that actually runs for *hours* on the battery. For years no, my ThinkPad has gotten, maybe, 10 minutes off of the battery.
Second, it won’t suspend. This is a shame because I use that feature extensively. In fact, with my ThinkPad, I would go months without rebooting – just suspend. To be more accurate, it suspends, but won’t come back, or comes back with very corrupted video. Hopefully there’s a fix for this somewhere, but I have not found anything helpful yet.
I got a call today from the FBI. The person I spoke to was very nice, if not particularly tech-savvy. She was trying to track down an email message that was forwarded through my server in December of 2001, and would I possibly have a copy of that? She really didn’t give me very much information, so I can only surmise that somebody relayed a message through my server in a moment when it was misconfigured, and so the message had been traced back to me. Apart from that, I can’t figure out what it had to do with me. I suppose I could get all paranoid about it, and try to figure out who is trying to get dirt on me, but, then, I’m not sure what dirt anybody *could* find on me. Still, it kinda freaked me out, and I’m not entirely sure why. Very unpleasant.
But, seriously, does anybody actually log email messages that pass through their MTA? And if so, why, and how?
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Clarification: I’m not quite so clueless as to be unaware that most MTAs syslog that a message was received or sent. I’m talking about logging the *body* of the message. That seems like a recipe for a DoS. Just send a few dozen multi-megabyte attachments, and fill up the log volume.
Starting today, I’m a Linux System Administrator and Security Consultant at System Design Group. It is somewhat bittersweet, leaving a company that I started and tried to make work, but going to something that I’m sure will be challenging and interesting. Time will tell. More on this as the time passes.
And, speaking of things which annoy me, I’m about to return the third scanner that I have bought, brought home, and discovered is not supported. Two of these scanners are listed as supported, but SANE doesn’t find them when I plug them in.
Yes, I expect I could spend 5 hours tinkering and get it to work, but I don’t have the patience for that sort of nonsense, and, besides, that would probably result in something that sort-of worked, most of the time. And I *really* don’t have the patience for that.
Can someone please tell me what scanner I should buy, if I just want to plug it in and have it work? Am I really going to be tied into the $200+ range to get something that will work out of the box? That would suck, but I’d rather know that now than go through the entire inventory at CompUSless one at a time.
It would probably be faster to write down their inventory, and bring it home to compare against the supported list, since the list is 31 pages printed, and I don’t particularly want to print it all out.
I look forward to the day when hardware manufacturers are aware of Linux to a sufficient degree to mention it on the box, ship drivers, and mention it on their web site.
I finally got so fed up with my mouse that I went and bought a Logitech optical mouse. The difference is absolutely astounding. The movement is smooth, regardless of the surface it’s on. It doesn’t get hung up on rough surfaces or inconsistencies in my icky ancient mouse pad. And, best of all, it glows an evil red color when you touch it. What more can you ask for?