Wednesday/Thursday 2011-12-14

Woke up in the morning, on the wrong side of the bed. Tried to feel better but drank coffee instead.

Brainstormed with the rest of the IT crew on how to deploy community systems (as in fedoraproject.org/community and NOT fedoracommunity.org) and then started building a special box for it. However after a lot of fights with my own syntax skills I got a preliminary version proxy working. Now its up to the real programmers to do their part :).

My Opinions on Voting

I usually don't blog politics, but since it comes up with my opinions on Fedora lack of voters and some other items... I figured I should just go ahead and do it. Today I received a couple of emails from relatives and such trying to explain how bad the US budget is, and why it should be explained easier as that of a family. One set went to blame the politicians, another set blamed the special interests (tax and spend liberals, cut and spend conservatives). In the end, they both neglected to point out who the real culprits are.. the absentee landlord of the United States, the voter.

Look at the following revenue amounts.

1. Tax Revenue:    $2,170,000,000,000
2. Fed Budget:     $3,820,000,000,000
3. New Debt:       $1,650,000,000,000
4. National Debt: $14,271,000,000,000 

Now some people will cut off the zeros and then compare it to a family budget... or some will go on long screeds blaming the politicians or special interest groups. That misses the important part of democracy. In the end, the politicians are a proxy. They may be influenced by "monied" interests but the special interest they are mostly interested in is the voters who every 2-6 years say whether or not they will get to serve again.

To make this fair, let us change out the regular blamees to the people who actually are supposed to be responsible whether they like it or not.

1. Amount majority of US Voters Want to be taxed.
2. Amount majority of US Voters Want to spend.
3. Amount they are happy to borrow.
4. Amount the taxpayers has to pay back plus a lot of interest we didn't calculate.

Notice, I don't put in voters in the bottom. People who don't vote and most non-citizens in this country pay taxes so they get stuck with the bill whether or not they vote.


If you are outraged about the amount spent versus the amount taxed.. you need to do the following:

1. Register to Vote.
2. Research the candidates who will either up the amount taxed, lower the amount spent, or a combination of the two.
3. When the election occurs, vote for the candidate that fits your needs best. Remember always that there is no perfect candidate, you will have to make do with what you can get.
4. Watch whoever gets elected and ask why they voted for this or that. Keep them on their toes. People who know that they are watched are psychologically more likely to be honest and dependable. They are also more likely to follow the social norms of the people watching them. Most politicians get in trouble because the only people watching them are other politicians.
5. If you don't like how things occurred, vote for someone else the next time.
6. Talk to your neighbours and find out why they don't vote. Get them to register and vote too. They don't have to vote for the person you voted for, but they need to watch the elected just the same as you.
7. Keep at it. It took 20+ years to dig this whole, it will take 20+ years to dig out of it.

If you aren't registering to vote, you have lost any right to be taken seriously.

You can sit in a park, you can show up at the IRS office with bags of tea at the IRS office, or you can email me pithy statements about how horrible everyone else is, but you have given up your most important voice.. and the only one I will give credence to, the vote.

[PS Take the above as my opinion and my default answer when you email, blog, facepoke, etc about the dire straights of a nation. In my limited and very biased view, the above can be used for most nations.. the amount that people will happily borrow because they want it and don't want to save for it will always be larger than it should be. I don't have much sympathy for a bond market that doesn't take that into account in the interest rates and fees they initially charge.]

Monday/Tuesday 2011-12-13

Ok the weekend was a blast playing Minecraft with my kid. My wife says we sound like a bunch of dwarves and should beware. I then play Gimli quotes on Youtube for fun.


Monday

• Email not as bad as last couple of weeks
• Worked on pass phrase tool.
• Worked with Seth on known_hosts item
• Worked with Kevin with collab change
• Spend the evening going over password entropy and to see if we can run a password checker against our old passwords. [Mainly to get an idea of how many weak ones there were so we can be better informed in the future.]

Tuesday

• Work inside of RH on DNS nameservices. Find out that our registrar doesn't do IPv6 yet. WHEEE
• Weekly phone call with RHIT.
• Remove old collab servers.
• serverbeach03 goes whacky when trying to decommission it.
• Wrote a HOWTO on travelling to the colo.
• Dealt with zones we knew nothing about.. it would seem there are quite a few hanging out there that showed up after top level registrar was updated.
• Rebuilt smtp-mm03
• Sync'd over data to archives for F14.

Friday 2011-12-10

Spent the evening with kid playing mindcraft. Was told by kid that I couldn't take a sick day for him and me and play today... "Dad I don't want to go to truancy court." Sigh.. ok well then off to work it is

Talked with some people on Google+ about running email oneself versus using a service. I used to have all my email go to my private SMTP server where I could filter spam, ham, lamb, etc however I wanted. At some point in 2000 I just got burned out by it. I think it was because it was my day job and that pretty much made any problem at home more work versus fun. Oh well.. I can take Parental Computing for a while longer.

Discovered the Piano Guys this week. They have some seriously cool music they make per day. I really love Cellos (though I find the Viola de Gamba for some reason nicer to my ear [And yes that is a joke on multi layers].)

Wondered if Santa Claus would get me a computer... looked at the one system76. Santa says I have not been good enough this year for that though.

Wednesday/Thursday 2011-12-07-> 2011-12-08

Spent most of Wednesday tracking down issues with ipv6 and Linux network bridges. Somehow, somewhere we finally stomped it out... but I will admit that by the end of it I was tired and using a hammer to put in screws... One of the following fixed it:

1. Different kernel
2. Removing an ipv6 address from the bridge or its parent ethernet port.
3. Some changes in guest network drivers
4. 2 pints of Marble Red Imperial Ale. [Ok I don't drink, but I really really wanted to after the mysterious "it works, but no new ips are allowed.. now it doesn't work.. now it does." ]
5. Magic pixie dust (it takes 8 pixies to make an ounce of dust.. and man are those things hard to catch.)

A lot of email was dealt with during the day. And then I made the fatal mistake at 10pm of putting stuff in the bin without thinking about what i had selected.

Thursday morning and afternoon was dealing with the fact that 2 weeks of email had been deleted and I needed to figure out which ones I really cared about. Wheee. Thankfully I hadn't emptied the bin but there was still a lot of emails that needed to be sorted out from all the stuff I had deleted earlier. 

And then I got a ring of the doorbell. And there was a box on the doorstep. And the box had another box in it, and that box had this

and all my cares went away. Now to see how much it would cost for us to make say 20 of these for Fedora for next release.

Worked to move a DNS server from one colocation to another. Found out that the IPs couldn't be routed as easily as first claimed. Moving to plan A. (Plan B was doing this after we were told they could reroute at the border.) Then spent the day looking at what would be needed for updating our server at internetx01 to rhel6.

Tuesday 2011-12-06

Looked at desktops this morning. It would seem that there is a constant rule about computers and me. The computer I would like to have is about $5000.00. I think it has been that way since 1994 and I first tried to come up with what my home linux box should be. In the end, the computer I end up is usually 1/10th of that.

I can see that the US Thanksgiving holiday is over and people are gearing up for various end of the year holidays.. the email volume of patches and such have gone up. Thankfully most of the arguments seem to have gone down for a while.

Monday 2011-12-05

It is snowing quite alot around where I am living. Sadly, I seem to live in a heat bubble of some sort, we ended up with a 1-2 cm while most of the state seems to have gotten from 12 to 25 cm.

Most of the weekend was spent playing minecraft with my son. I put a server on a box and then we played for more hours than we should have. This originally was meant to be a study of how simple graphics can make for a playable game.. i think the 14 hours I played shows that it can be for certain audiences.

Spent most of the day catching up with email. Worked on getting a new DNS nameserver at Peer1 ready for us this week. Saw that the Fedora elections ended with not a lot of people voting. I wish voting was mandatory at times.

Friday 2011-12-02

Had to get off the computers early last night due to a heavy windstorm which had 80 mph gusts. The internet went up and down for a bit but I did get to watch some "How Things Are Made" on Netflix.. don't ask me why but I find the show fascinating.

Fedora Elections are going on without a lot of fanfare this cycle. Larry Cafiero, Bob Jensen AND Christopher Wickert are running for the board. That should make for some excitement. Spent part of the day hacking on a version of the javascript password generator.. hope to ahve a test page on Monday.

2011-12-01 - Thursday

This week has been a mass of emails mostly about doing anything. If anything I have learned that some set of people and I are never going to agree (or it seems to move towards seeing each others point of view.) It is probably just better to put their emails in the "Read When I am NotDepressed" folder. I guess they do that to mine :).

It looks like there will be a snow fall of some sort this weekend in New Mexico... everything from storm of the decade to minor puffs of snow. I stocked up on Hobnob cookies and canned soup so will be able to make it through the day. That and a large generator should allow me to keep the laptops going while I play minecraft.

Putting a redundant power supply into a system caused it to crash out badly. Glad we had a redundant powersupply to fix that (thanks to AdamW for giving me that one). Then putting in cleaning tapes but forgetting to eject the tape in the drive already... just makes the day go round.

The day got crappy enough that the music went from Classical to the Doors to Evanescence to Metallica.