They’re more like cows in India

The Guardian, of all places (think: newspaper from cold & dreary nation reporting on happenings in subtropical island paradise), has a story about “the US DOA possibley fining the Hemingway House $200/day for its cats”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0%2C%2C1834048%2C00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=10.

Having been there a couple of times, I know that I would not want to *be* one of those cats–there are 46 of them, and there’s no real way even an institution can really claim to be taking care of them. Sure, they’re putting food out, and I have no doubt that many of the part-time docents really do care about particular cats, but there’s just not enough attention to go around.

No, those cats are feral but habituated to being around people, much, I suspect, like the cows in India, which are allowed to roam, and regarded with affection, but rarely actually cared for. I seem to remember that many are diseased (tuberculosis comes to mind, but geez, that’s got to be wrong, I hope), and since they belong to no one, their lives are, perhaps, not what they might have been.

If you like Alton Brown

Consider setting your TiVo to record “Alton Brown’s”:http://altonbrown.com/ new show *Feasting On Asphalt* (there’s no good link, sadly).

I watched the first episode last night (I had recorded it on Saturday or whenever it first showed), and it was interesting–the discussion of how mass culture has impacted regional food and small establishments, how changes in the automobile did the same (listen closely for the comment on the ’57 Chevy Bel-Air), so on and so forth.

The most interesting thing, though, was the fact that for all the places he stops, he gives lat-long coordinates. If you have an in-car GPS, you should be able to find any of them. That seems to me to make the whole process something more than your usual “lifestyle program” that natters about places that you’re never really expected to go.

It *is* unreasonably fucking great

Apparently “Tim Bray’s”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Bray Mac died. While it’s in the shop, he elected to use Ubuntu on a Sun Ultra 20. “His experience appears to have been positive so far”:http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/07/31/Ubuntu, but the best line is almost certainly:

bq. You know, this has been said a lot, but it bears repeating: Apt-get is just so unreasonably fucking great. Why aren’t we using it for Solaris updates? I managed to pull together the whole witches’ brew of OSS that makes ongoing go without ever leaving Synaptic. Oops, not quite true, I cruised past CPAN to get DBI and DBD::MySQL, but I’m not sure I needed to, because when I got MySQL, I saw a lot of perl-related stuff go flying by.

Which brings me to this IM conversation with Chet from early June (which I just found with Beagle, which I only just got working yesterday. It’s pretty neat):

bq.. *Chet Farmer*: Mmmmmm, loves me some apt-get

*Michael Alan Dorman*: Yea, verily, it is sweet.

*Michael Alan Dorman*: I suspect few people know that apt, in general, was a topic of much heated debate when it was first proposed, and then later when it had hit the “it basically works” stage and was being reviewed for inclusion. Primary complaint: it was written in C++, not C.

*Chet Farmer*: Seriously?

*Chet Farmer*: I mean, C++ isn’t exactly obscure.

*Chet Farmer*: I must admit, however, that it’s been YEARS since I compiled any code I wrote.

*Michael Alan Dorman*: This was basically a decade ago. Hell, I will even admit that I was on the “please do it in C” side, though it was mostly because I was deeply embroiled in the early stages of the alpha port which had no reliable C++ compiler at the time.

*Chet Farmer*: heh. Alphas.

*Michael Alan Dorman*: And, indeed, the alpha port couldn’t use apt for quite some time after it was available. There used to be a competing thing called…err, shit, I can’t even remember.

*Michael Alan Dorman*: dpkg-ftp, maybe?

*Chet Farmer*: hell if I now

*Michael Alan Dorman*: I am now feeling a thousand years old.

*Chet Farmer*: know

*Chet Farmer*: not quite a thousand.

*Michael Alan Dorman*: The fact is, a lot of KDE people forget that back when the GNOME project was first started, using C++ wasn’t just a personal taste thing, it was a “it doesn’t work well on Linux” thing. Well, and there was the Qt license.

So, while you might be justified in suggesting that they should have expended effort helping with gcc development, it wasn’t just a rejection of C++ on petty grounds.

*Chet Farmer*: “doesn’t fit well with Linux?”

*Michael Alan Dorman*: Well, “Doesn’t work anywhere but i386”.

Since I contain multitudes…

..it is entirely possible for me to view the whole Harry Potter business with a certain benign affection, even while agreeing with A.S. Byatt’s “rather negative assessment of the books”:http://www.countercurrents.org/arts-byatt110703.htm (though perhaps I’m biased by the fact that she “recognizes the skill in Terry Pratchett’s work”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/sciencefiction/0,,836250,00.html).

But mild affection would never move me to public declarations (well, aside from this), so I can only assume that “Stephen King and John Irving feel something more than this”:http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=5&id=37356. What a world we live in.

I agree with the article, I suppose

“but what Ryan Bigge doesn’t seem to realize”:http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar%2FLayout%2FArticle_Type1&c=Article&cid=1153000221434&call_pageid=1105528093962&col=1105528093790 is that being outside the 18-34 demographic should *help* you you get the “More Cowbell” sketch–I mean, _Don’t Fear the Reaper_ dates to 1976, so it’s only people who are at the top end of that demographic who are likely to remember it as anything other than a track that had AOR traction when they were 10.

I find myself cutting back

Not about stuff like work and coding and so forth, but about trying to keep up with so much stuff.

I purged about a dozen blogs from my reader yesterday, mostly political ones, some of which I had been pulling for nigh on two years. I find myself deleting _Daily Show_ episodes from the TiVO unviewed. I am still reading _The New Yorker_ from cover to cover, but it can be a bit of a slog.

I know, intellectually, that the world isn’t going to shit any more than it has been on most other days in the last two centuries, but hearing relentless bad news is getting a little old.

Having a Fred Brooks moment

So, one of my consistent gigs is working on “AnteSpam”:http://antespam.com/ for “Ironic Design”:http://ironicdesign.com/. We use “SpamAssassin”:http://spamassassin.apache.org/ as our engine, but we (well, mostly I) have built a bunch of infrastructure around it that allows us to do high-volume, redundant, high-availability deployment for domain customers, present held mail through a web interface, so on and so forth.

For the last 18 months or so, I’ve been embarked on a big rewrite, taking everything we’ve learned from having this system in production for the last three-and-a-half years and synthesizing it into a system that will run more accurately, more smoothly and with less maintenance and upkeep.

The rewrite is vastly superior in any number of ways. It increases performance by finding clever ways to avoid doing unnecessary work. It doesn’t move data around unnecessarily. The interface is largely ajax-based, making for better responsiveness. It changes its message handling to make it possible to do statistical learning on pristine copies of messages for better accuracy. It changes the way it represented various entities in terms of the data they stored for better accuracy. Really, tons of things are different, and it is truly kick-ass.

And about two weeks ago, I finally admitted that there was no way that the rewrite was going to see the light of day.

You see, the problem with starting from a clean slate is simply that of, “So, how do you make a transition.” And it was becoming increasingly clear that making a transition was going to be very, very hard. Nigh on impossible to manage in any reasonable time-frame. And some of the changes way down at the core were ones that we had no way to test under real loads, so it would only be as we started making transitions that we would know if they were going to work. So, really, I started having some real concerns months ago. And they just kept building and building.

And so I had my Fred Brooks moment, where I finally was able to admit that continuing down this path was going to be a mistake. Instead, the rewrite will, effectively, be declared a research project, and I’ll spend the next however long incorporating ideas–and probably even code–from it into the production system. So the grand new features will be introduced incrementally (and even doing that is scary enough in some ways), and we’re much less likely to end up getting ourselves up the creek without a paddle.

I’ve been sleeping a bit easier, even though there’s a fair bit of pressure to get this stuff rolled into the existing system. It’s just much more doable.

Dwarves. Hunchbacks. Samurai. Tarzan. Cowboys. Napoleon. Transvestites.

It’s been a long running joke with “Chet”:http://mischeathen.com/ that if I am unaquainted with some particular bit of American culture–movie, TV show, what have you–it is because I was in Germany at the time it happened.

In many cases, of course, this _is_ actually the reason, but it eventually morphed into an all-purpose response.

So, after Chet pointed me to a “Stevie Wonder video”:http://miscellaneousheathen.com/music/060630stevie-sesame.html, I ended up doing a little YouTube archaeology (which spawned “another post from Chet”:http://miscellaneousheathen.com/music/060630vh-zz.html) to find something I’d always heard about but never seen because, well, *I was in Germany when MTV launched*.

It is somehow nothing like what I expected, and yet exactly what it should be. And it includes everything in the title to this post.
I present to you, Van Halen’s video for _Pretty Woman_. Because in 1982, no one knew that this wasn’t what music videos were supposed to be like:

You never know how long it’ll last…

I mean, I don’t think anyone expected them to be gone for two months. But just for the moment, Fafblog is back.

bq.. “I always used to figure God would show up at the end a the world an beam me up to Raptureland in his magical funk-powered mothership,” says me. “But that was before he got eaten by Supergod.”

“Serves him right!” says Giblets. “If God wanted to go to heaven he should’ve accepted Metajesus as his personal lord and savior.”

I was fortunate

My parents were willing, and able, to pay for me to go to college, even though I spent four years doing what would certainly appear from the outside (and often from the inside) to be drinking and goofing off.

I’ll ruminate on what I learned in college, and how differently I would approach it now, some other time. Right now, I’m here to note that the interest rate of student loans has been raised _35%_.

I don’t know how much the government spends on student loans, it’s true. I would be surprised if it’s more than a billion dollars a year (remember, all domestic programs except Social Security and Medicare are *dwarfed* by military spending in this country), and I can’t think of a better investment than making it easier for people to make the choice to go to college.

Yet, when the time comes to try to rein in the budget deficits created by tax cuts that go overwhelmingly to the very rich (like the 72 billion dollars that the super-wealthy stand to reap by elimination of the estate tax, which is “paid by only .3% of all estates”:http://www.citizen.org/documents/EstateTaxFinal.pdf, or a projected 6300 estates out of 2.3 million in 2006), the Republican government decides that people who are not wealthy trying to get an education are the ones should have their lives made harder.

Many years ago (though the paper I reference is dated 2004, I seem to remember reading a draft of it quite some time earlier), “Phil Agre”:http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/ suggested that to understand the agenda of the Republican party, “one needed to think about what conservatism was”:http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/conservatism.html–and he suggested that “the true goal of conservatism is to establish an aristocracy, which is a social and psychological condition of inequality”.

Making it harder for people without wealth to send their kids to college will certainly help fullfill that goal, and it’s shameful that it’s happening in this country.

Chicken *and* eggs. And Orzo.

While I was working up in DC, Alex–my primary partner in crime–and I would often go to a greek restaurant a on Pennsylvania Avenue a couple of blocks down from the Senate buildings. I don’t remember the name. It was not particularly distinguished in any way.

Their spanikopita were kind of scary–they looked more like burritos, if you can somehow imagine that–but the had good gyros, and Alex introduced me to avgolemono soup: the restaurant made one that was just wonderful, especially as October wore on and the days started to get colder.

Anne and I stumbled across some wheat-free orzo a while ago, and I decided to grab it Just In Case. And then I had to find a recipe. I cruised the net a bit, and came up with a few options, and then hacked around a little bit to arrive at this:

* 6C chicken broth
* 1/2C uncooked orzo
* 3 eggs
* 1/4C lemon juice
* 1C shredded chicken

# Bring the broth to boil in a saucepan.
# Add the orzo, cover and simmer until the orzo is al dente. Remove from the heat.
# In a bowl beat the eggs until fluffy, then beat in the lemon juice.
# Temper the eggs by slowly adding a cup of the heated broth to the eggs while beating vigorously.
# Reincorporate egg mixture into soup
# Add shredded chicken

Gypped, kinda

So, I had “earlier”:/2006/04/omg-wtf-holy-shit.html commented on the premiere of Ben & Jerry’s “Black & Tan Ice Cream”:http://www.benjerry.com/our_products/flavor_details.cfm?product_id=180 with some shock.

Though I was uncertain of the palatability of a stout-based ice cream, I am mildly disappointed to report that there is, in fact, no beer in this ice cream at all. _Cream stout_ is apparently just a bit of clever marketing to refer to the most horrifyingly rich–mind you, not a bad thing–sweet cream ice cream they’ve ever done.

So: good ice cream, no beer. I shouldn’t be sad, but I kind of am.

So, I had occasion to rebuild a 3ware RAID array under Linux

And as I had a damned hard time getting it to go, I’m noting what I did here so that it might benifit myself and others. This is using the 9.3.0.X version of the 3ware CLI software–though it says that it’s for the 9500 series of controllers, it’s really for any kernel after 2.6.10: the 9500 controllers introduced a new way of talking to the controller, and the driver for the 7/8000 series was retrofitted with it.

So, you had a drive fail, and you pulled it and swapped it, now you want to get things rebuilding so you feel nice and safe again.

So, all the action here is going to be within the tw_cli interface, which you start with something like:

bc. william:~# ./tw_cli
//william>

*If you hot-swapped the drive*, you will first need to get the system to rescan and notice the new drive. If you cold swapped the drive, the act of restarting the machine will get it to rescan. To do this, you would use a command like:

bc. //william> rescan
Rescanning controller /c0 for units and drives …Done.
Found the following unit(s): [/c0/u1].
Found the following drive(s): [none].

So then you might look at the status of your system:

bc.. //william> /c0 show

Unit UnitType Status %Cmpl Stripe Size(GB) Cache AVerify IgnECC
—————————————————-
u0 RAID-1 DEGRADED – – 74.5294 ON – –
u1 JBOD OK – – 74.5304 ON – –

Port Status Unit Size Blocks Serial
——————————————
p0 OK u0 74.53 GB 156301488 3JV92V3H
p1 OK u1 74.53 GB 156301488 3JV8XXVK

p. So, you’ve got your degraded RAID-1 unit, and *fook!*, the stupid controller thinks you want ot use the second drive as a separate unit. What are you to do?

First, you need to delete the spurious unit. Needless to say, type carefully, and double-check everything here:

bc. //william/c0> /c0/u1 del noscan
Deleting /c0/u1 will cause the data on the unit permanently loss.
Do you want to continue ? Y|N [N]: y
Deleting unit c0/u1 …Done.
Now you’ll see something like:

bc.. //william> /c0 show

Unit UnitType Status %Cmpl Stripe Size(GB) Cache AVerify IgnECC
—————————————————-
u0 RAID-1 DEGRADED – – 74.5294 ON – –

Port Status Unit Size Blocks Serial
——————————————
p0 OK u0 74.53 GB 156301488 3JV92V3H
p1 OK – 74.53 GB 156301488 3JV8XXVK

p. Now you need to recreate that unit as a spare:

bc.. //william> /c0 add type=spare disk=1
Creating new unit on controller /c0 … Done. The new unit is /c0/u1.

//william> /c0 show

Unit UnitType Status %Cmpl Stripe Size(GB) Cache AVerify IgnECC
—————————————————-
u0 RAID-1 DEGRADED – – 74.5294 ON – –
u1 SPARE OK – – 74.5304 – – –

Port Status Unit Size Blocks Serial
——————————————
p0 OK u0 74.53 GB 156301488 3JV92V3H
p1 OK u1 74.53 GB 156301488 3JV8XXVK

p. Once that’s done, you can tell it to attach that spare unit to your degraded RAID and start rebuilding:

bc. //william> /c0/u0 start rebuild disk=1
Sending rebuild start request to /c0/u0 on 1 disk(s) [1] … Done.

And, after a while, you will see something like:

bc.. //william> /c0 show

Unit UnitType Status %Cmpl Stripe Size(GB) Cache AVerify IgnECC
—————————————————-
u0 RAID-1 REBUILDING 27 – 74.5294 ON – –

Port Status Unit Size Blocks Serial
——————————————
p0 OK u0 74.53 GB 156301488 3JV92V3H
p1 DEGRADED u0 74.53 GB 156301488 3JV8XXVK

p. Dry, boring, technical, and presented without a warranty, but I sincerely hope it helps you in rebuilding your drive.

Diane Lane with baby fat

Seriously, “_Streets Of Fire_”:http://imdb.com/title/tt0088194/ is not too good a movie. This may or may not really surprise anyone, but I hadn’t seen it in likely 15 years and when I stumbled across the fact that Diane Lane was in it, along with a positively young looking (though 29) Willem Dafoe, well, I decided I had to see it again.

So I fast forwarded through most of it because, well, that’s what it deserved. _I can dream about you_ is still a pretty good song, but boy, just not a great movie.

OMG! WTF? Holy shit!

OK, that may seem excessive, “Black & Tan Ice Cream”:http://www.benjerry.com/our_products/flavor_details.cfm?product_id=180? I love Guinness as much as the next guy (depending, I suppose on “who the next guy is”:http://www.musicmademe.com/show_sng.php?d=98542), but damn, stout ice cream? That’s demented.

BTW, thanks to Tim for introducing me to “Ode to Guinness” which is one of the cleverest songs I’ve heard in years.

Prototype really is that cool

I’ve been stuck in javascript hell for the last couple of weeks, and “Prototype”:http://prototype.conio.net/ has been a large part of keeping me sane. That people then write all sorts of extensions for it, including one for “using data structures to generate HTML”:http://www.arantius.com/article/dollar-e is just great.

Ruby On Rails 1.1 is out

“Ruby On Rails 1.1 has been released”:http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/articles/2006/03/28/rails-1-1-rjs-active-record-respond_to-integration-tests-and-500-other-things.

Although I’m not using it now–my current project has too much code that’s always going to be Perl for me to consider switching languages–it’s something I’d seriously consider using for the future. It does seem silly that they just came out with a book about using it and then introduced a major upgrade, though.

Sometimes I miss Miami

While it’s true that I love where we live, sometimes I feel a burst of nostalgia for Miami. It’s especially true when I read about a an “exhibition of Dale Chihuly’s sculpted glass”:http://www.fairchildgarden.org/publicprograms/Chihuly_at_Fairchild.html at the “Fairchild Tropical Garden”:http://www.fairchildgarden.org/ (we have the map of the FTG that we got when we joined hanging up on one of our walls.

Fortunately, GNOME guy Luis Villa was there “and he took a lot of pictures”:http://tieguy.org/pics/v/Miami/Chihuly/.

Simon Willison teaches about JavaScript

Or, more accurately, _taught_ about javascript at the ETech conference. And he has very graciously made both “his slides”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/simon/sets/72057594077197868/ and “his notes”:http://simon.incutio.com/slides/2006/etech/javascript/js-reintroduction-notes.html available from his blog.

These are mostly oriented towards people who already know how to program, but haven’t taken JavaScript seriously. I’m definitely in that camp, and I found his notes to be a very clear, consise introduction to some of JS’s more advanced programming features–some of which I’d been exposed to already because of my spelunking around AJAX code, but I’d just been inferring their use rather than knowing exactly what was going on.

Coming back from being AWOL

“An interesting article on coming back to things you’ve fallen away from”:http://www.insidehighered.com/workplace/2006/03/01/mckinney.

Although it’s couched in terms of a graduate student and things like theses and dissertations, it all rings true for me and my experience in being AWOL from a side-project (I was AWOL from Debian far too often) or even from blogging or just keeping up with email. I think it’s influenced in part by my mildly hermetic lifestyle–it’s all too easy to draw in and ignore things–but it’s also a learned habit.

All things must pass

He was a little big to be a shoulder-cat

So, around 8:45 this morning, we had Ford put to sleep.

It’s been about three years since he was first diagnosed as diabetic, and just over two since he finished radiation treatment for the tumor that caused his acromegaly. The treatment wasn’t an unalloyed success–though we never had them do another CAT scan to verify it’s continued presence, his need for insulin never left, and there were other issues–but without it, his prognosis was closer to 9 months than the 25 we had.

Five months ago, he had some sort of swelling on his face that caused him trouble eating (though that cleared up), and he quit drinking water from a bowl–Anne’s been giving him water from a syringe and we’ve been giving him subcutaneous fluids; every few days at first, and then every day for the last three months.

Two days ago, he started breathing noisily and seemed to be working a little harder than normal–when we took him to the vet, they suspected pleural effusion (fluid in the chest cavity) or pulmonary edema (fluid in the lungs). An x-ray showed no fluid anywhere; in fact, we couldn’t come up with any direct cause of his condition. Since he wasn’t in crisis, we brought him back
home.

Yesterday he started having trouble eating, and he was bleeding some in his mouth. We fed him some lighter food, which he ate, and decided to take him back in this morning.

Once we were there, we faced up to the fact that even though he wasn’t really in an acute crisis, things were just going to continue getting worse and worse, however slowly. There’s probably an argument to be made that we were five months late in admitting this, but we just weren’t prepared to lose him then.

Honestly, we still weren’t prepared to lose him. I have never seen a cat more devoted to his people than Ford. He was always at the door when we walked in. He always appreciated being near you. He always wanted to watch us, and to be involved.
It would be hard to get over even if he had never gotten sick, but in the last three years the house has come to move in rhythms dictated by his condition–we got up at 6 to give him his insulin in the morning, we always made sure we were at home by 6 in the evening to give him his other shot. I would take a break from work at 11am to feed him, and then again at 3pm or so. We had the ritual of leaving out food for him at night. Everything reminds me that he’s not here any more.

So if for the next few days I’m not on IM, or I don’t seem especially chatty, it’s probably because I’m sitting, thinking about what I’d be doing with Ford if he were still here.

I guess I’m going to be learning how to use this eventually.

“Ingy”:http://blog.ingy.net/ has produced a javascript-based templating engine that can actually use templates intended for the Perl-based Template Toolkit. “He talks a little bit about it on his blog”:http://blog.ingy.net/2006/02/jemplate_a_template_toolkit_fo.html. The scary part is that this may have just made it much more reasonable for me to support both an Ajax-based and a “conventional” implementation of the AnteSpam front-end; no more having to maintain two ways of presenting data, etc.

This could not be real

I don’t think most of these colors actually appear in nature. “Check it out”:http://www.sauria.com/blog/2006/02/07#1473

I literally don’t know what to say

Well, “Wow” for a start, I suppose. “Huh?” follows along sharply thereafter.

Microsoft is using recordings of Robert Fripp in one of their Windows Vista sound themes, “and they’ve got the video to prove it”:http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=151853.

Now, Linux-head that I am, I’m not really all that anti-Microsoft, I just don’t see why people put up with it. Maybe this is a good reason. 🙂

Oh, I lied, I *do* know what to say. Fripp uses a Mac.

I don’t even think Fafblog could make me smile over this

Under the guise of collecting signatures to change Massachusetts blue laws to allow grocery stores to carry beer and wine (the lack of which I don’t remember from when we lived there, but we came from AL, where it’s similarly not allowed), some people have been fraudulently gathering signatures for “a petition to ban same-sex marriage”:http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2006/01/index.html#008790.

This is the first bit of news I’ve read in a while that has made me want to go be violently ill. All I can say is that these people have given up their souls if they’re willing to go to such lengths to forbid people to do something that, as the saying goes, neither picks their pocket nor breaks their legs. Some day I hope to be enlightened enough to be sad for them, but right now all I can manage is revulsion.