Wednesday September 29, 2004

As reported on by Dave, the chaos really crescendoed last weekend with an electrical outage at the colo facility. The service is on the mend but we still have a ways to go. The database repairs are proceeding. The hardware upgrades are mostly completed and it looks like we're going to setup camp someplace that will be a huge step up from the ghetto colo we've been in.

Here comes the sun. It's alright.

Monday September 20, 2004

One of the recent hassles I've had recently was with a hardware migration that needed to proceed quickly. The clock was ticking down on the disk capacity utilization on some key database hosts. Now suppose one of the sysadmins wanted to perform "preventitive fsck's" and "table consistency checks" -- when you're dealing with over 100 GB (closer to 200 GB, actually) of data, these are not quick propositions. In fact, they might take days. Ergo, just not feasible. Given the time, would it be optimal to sanity check every subsystem's functionality? Perhaps. But when struggling to beat the clock, you just gotta say, "Not now, Poncho!" Sometimes the only effective action is fast action.

First of all, the only times I've ever needed to do a reiserfsck has been after a cold power loss (and reiser is usually fine even after one of those). So the fact that this sysadmin wanted to do a reiserfsck "preemptively" made even less sense. As far as doing a table consistency check, with innodb this is never needed on an anticipatory basis. In my experience, innodb either is able to keep itself consistent with its own journaling or it's just hosed... not a lot of grey in between. Again, the only exception has been in cases of a cold power loss. Sure, sometimes other hardware problems, low level disk defects, will manifest themselves as problems with the filesystem or a database's data file. But usually there are other indicators as well (kernel complaints in syslog, etc). But even with the dependency stack accounted for and checked, it's no guarantee against failure.

Sometimes the optimal course is just the fastest one between where you are and where you need to be. Choosing the deliberate and cautious route, dwelling on unnecessary optimizations, may in fact be the slow and steady road to.... failure! In this case, if we'd followed the course of doing every unnecessary system check possible, we'd have run out disk space and crashed these particular databases.

Stop optimizing. Just shut up and get it done already.

Sunday September 12, 2004

In today's San Francisco Chronicle there's a review of a pair of books I've had my eye on but haven't had time to read (thank goodness for book reviewers who have the time!).

	Blood and Oil by Michael T. Klare The world's rapidly growing economy is dependent on oil, the supply is running out and the U.S. and other great powers are engaged in an escalating game of brinkmanship to secure its continued free flow. Such is the premise of Klare's powerful and brilliant new book (following Resource Wars). [Publisher's Weekly]
	Oil by Matthew Yeomans This examination of a slippery subject suffers from schizophrenia: is it straight journalism or an activist's screed? The strength of this book lies in its first half, when freelance journalist Yeomans shows the importance of oil in world history during the last 125 years. [Publisher's Weekly]

The Chronicle review, THE HIGH PRICE OF OIL: We pay at the pump, we pay with taxes, and some pay with their lives, raises important questions about the future of, well, modern civilization. Are we heading towards a Madmaxian world of armored mobile homes and gasoline pirates? Do we want our foreign policy to be directed by our desire to preserve our freeway traffic jams? It doesn't seem too far fetched that, were Bush re-elected, we'd be pushed further along into an era of aggressive oil supply protection. A future where the military mission of young Americans will be security duty will be on the oil rigs, for the refineries and tankers and the other instruments of the petroleum industry isn't a future I want to our tax dollars underwriting. The future belongs to hydrogen fuel cells, solar energy and other alternative energy sources.

I'll probably pick up the Klare book on my next book shopping episode.

Other reading of interest:

• The End of Oil : On the Edge of a Perilous New World by Paul Roberts
• Out of Gas by David Goodstein
• The Party's Over by Richard Heinberg

In the meantime, I'm envisioning an energy-plentiful post-petroleum world, carpooling, taking BART to get to work and telecommuting when I can get away with it. To hedge my bets, I'll be at the Winnebago dealership today to look for rig that I can harden and equip with rocket propelled grenade launchers.

Friday September 10, 2004

Tuesday September 07, 2004

Think online payments and you think PayPal. But what about micropayments? Is that like "push"/content is king/commerce is king? What ever happened to DigiCash? Beenz? Flooz? Magic-money-button-dot-com-dot-yawn? ....yea, who cares? Well, in an era when anybody and everybody can publish words, music, pictures, movies, three-D models and just about everything else for which the production barrier to entry has fallen, perhaps everyone should care.

C/Net's TechRepublic cracked it open a little today in Digital content spurs micropayments resurgence. Interesting to ponder. Instead of recurrent payment subscription fees, perhaps a little non-commitmental micropayment is a better fit in some cases. It seems like there are "big media lite" blogs (Gizmodo,Gawker, etc) and blog authors' who "hit the big time" by affiliating with a traditional media outlet. But I'm imagining that any highly ranked attention hound could some someday soon be able to draw a nickle-n-dime pay-to-play audience in the same way that iTunes has popularized selling small units of music in small denominations. The article quotes BitPass' CEO Michael O'Donnell

That first wave of payment technologies, the currency companies especially, were too early in the development of e-commerce to succeed, and the content companies weren't ready to handle it either.

Are we heading towards a creative utopia where we can all live an iLife, post to our blog, pursue our creative endeavors, stoke our iEgo up and maybe even be paid for it? Probably not. But it might not be so far fetched either.

Sunday September 05, 2004

Having observed the blog author populations and the aggregate posting behaviors through the Democratic and then the Republican National Conventions, my qualitative assessment is that conservative blogs as a whole are just boring.

OK, so that's too sweeping of a generalization but my net impression is that conservative audiences are adequately served by big media (heck, Fox News will spoon feed tory slanted rhetoric on a 24/7 basis). The conservative communities don't have the breadth of opinions and underserved voices that the left-leaning ones do, ergo the blogging amounts to trite jingoisms and vaccuous flag waving. Big media has certainly been far too timid about pursuing the dishonesty behind the Republican administration's policies ...it's just not as saucy as Democratic oval office blow jobs. So from what I reckon, last week's conservative blogs that came over the wire on politics.technorati.com were mere cheerleaders enraptured with the bundling of Iraq with Al Queda, swallowing the lies hook, line and sinker (there ya go: "liberals suck, conservatives swallow"). Judging by the poll numbers released this week, it sounds like the American public as a whole is oblivious to the outrage that should be directed at the present White House. The Bush administration's weapons of mass distraction threaten our freedoms far more than Saddam's ficticious weapons of mass destruction ever had. And now I wouldn't be surprised to see Osama in shackles showing up as a contemporary October Surprise. These poll numbers from Newsweek/Reuters are really saddening. This government is running up unprecedented debts, deficit spending to underwrite a war that needn't have been waged. Bush says he's a compassionate conservative, that there was an Iraq-Al Queda link, that there were weapons of mass destruction, that the policies of containment vis a vis Saddam Hussein were failing. Wake up America: Don't believe the hype!

Man, I love my country. I sure would like to have it back from these right-wing nut bags.

Saturday September 04, 2004

There are lots of ways to skin the content management cat and where there are many, there is oft much confusion. Bricolage aims to provide templatized publishing and automation that facilitates high productivity with workflow heavy editorial environments and complex story structures. Yea, that's a tall order.

In a series of articles for O'Reilly's perl.com, David Wheeler is covering the Bricolage solution. Certainly, there are a number of publishing cases for which Bricolage is not a good fit; simple story and hub page structures for which blogging software is more appropriate won't use a lot of the CMS features of Bricolage. However, high editorial throughput, workflow and complex story structures demand more than blogging software can deliver. High page view websites that can't be well served being bound to an application-server CMS demand more. For modern day distribution and integration requirements, Bricolage also provides hooks for syndication and a web services interface. So yes, there are lots of CMS choices out there. But for industrial strength web publishing requirements, Bricolage warrants a look.

Friday September 03, 2004

Here's my little tale about Mac OS X/MSIE versus Apache/mod_ssl.

Some gripes about a self-signed certificate and compatibility with MSIE on Mac OS X for SSL access jumped to the foreground again recently. At first the assertion was that the name mismatch between the certificate's hostname and the actual hostname was flummoxing MSIE. So I generated a new certificate with a matching name. Still would bomb out with a "protocol error." Then I tried adding the site to MSIE's "trusted zone." bzzzzt! "protocol error" again!

Then it hit me: this code has languished at Microsoft for years. It's low-level protocol stuff could just be waaaay behind the times. So I changed the Apache configuration to include this directive

SSLProtocol all -SSLv3

ding ding ding ding!

So now I can accept the self signed certificate and move along. Does this mean that sites with CA-signed certificates can't use SSLv3 or does MSIE only require dumbing down the protocol when the certificate is self signed? Maybe this is a long standing FAQ but I'm kinda new to Mac OS X and haven't had to chase this down before.

Wednesday September 01, 2004

Targetting the RNC crowd coming to New York for this week's goosestepping, apparently a Republican Blond was able to elicit quite a response.

Ah, the things that turn up on Craig's List. Apparently the text of the ad read

I'm just in town for the week, and New Yorkers haven't been all that friendly yet, so I figure I better make the most of it. Let's keep it simple, I'm hot, you're fit, and you're gonna take it all out on me.

The replies (apparently including pictures) made their way to Gawker. Oy, I wish I had so much free time on my hands that I could spare some to pull a funny like that, I suppose the republican's economic policies that have led to high under-and-unemployment had to come back to bite their butts sooner or later.