2011-08-31

Wednesday 2011-08-31

Stuff

A bit of a benadryl haze today.. pollen is up and I have the fuzziness that goes with it.

I am trying to track down a study I remember but can't find (so it may not exist). What I remember is a study that showed sarcasm/satire had the reverse effect on "undecided" voters than expected. Basically taking a group of voters and show them something like Laff-In or today the "The Daily Show" and you would see the following effects. People who backed the people being made fun of would be offended, people who were against agreed, and people in the middle would initially agree, but would later be more likely to vote for the ones who had been made fun of. [EG an undecided voter would be more likely to vote FOR Nixon after watching the Laff-In/Smuckers Brothers versus against.]

The theory was that people have brain circuits attracted to "power" and satire/sarcasm looks to be a weapon of the weak against the powerful, and so undecided people would be influenced that X was more power than Y. The reason I remember this for some reason was it was pointed out to me multiple times why my sarcasm never got me anywhere. [Of course it could be that I am horrible at sarcasm.. I have an almost Sheldon level of not getting it from other people, but that is a different blog post.]


Tasks
  • Email Grind
  • Start arpwatch puppeting
  • Stop arpwatch puppeting
  • Try to get an idea of what to watch for from kernel.org stuff.

Music
  • Clannad - Clannad in Concert
  • Clannad - Crann Úll
  • Clannad - Fuaim
  • Clannad - Magical Ring
  • Clannad - Legend
  • Clannad - Macalla
  • Clannad - Sirius
  • Loreena McKennitt - Nights from the Alhambra

Reading

Tuesday 2011-08-23

Why is it wrong to say that the Year of the Linux Desktop (YoLD) has already happened.. its called Android? Yes it isn't "FreeLibreOpen" to the extent people expected the YoLD to be, and it is not what someone from the 1990's would call a desktop. However technology changes, and it is the primary interface that users people are getting to their data. Technology constantly changes how it presents itself as larger portions of a population use it.

Oh dear god, I think I have ranted on this before.. I must be getting old.

Learned that my phone company Qwest is being merged into CenturyLink and it has been going on for a year. I really am not connected with things.

Tasks
  • Email Grind
  • Systemd Grind
  • More APC updates


Music
  • Stevie Ray Vaughn - Greatest Hits
  • Miles Davis Quintet - Cookin' With...
  • Miles Davis Quintet - Relaxin' With...
  • Miles Davis Quintet - Workin' With...
  • George Gershwin - Rhapsody in Blue
  • Miles Davis - Kind of Blue

2011-08-30

Tuesday 2011-08-30

Stuff

Today was pretty easy. The telemarketers didn't call as much and the 2 that did got the message. A sink in the bathroom finally decided to show its age and the faucet had to be replaced by a plumber as my attempt was not good.

Wished there was an opengl-less window manager for GNOME3 that could run the clutter CSS/javascript plugins. Looked at what it would take and remembered that window managers have driven more than one person mad.

Tasks
  • Keep those emails going, rawhide!
  • Fix virthost02-mgmt
  • Fix download02-mgmt
  • Fix bvirthost01-mgmt
  • Try to get new retrace server built
  • Todays bugs I found in F16 alpha all noted already

Music
  • Dead Can Dance - Dead Can Dance
  • Concrete Blonde - Bloodletting
  • Enigma - MCMXC A.D.
  • Clannad - Clannad 2
  • Clannad - Dulamin (sorry for murdering the words)

Monday 2011-08-29

Daily Talk
Had a pretty uneventful weekend due to being sick. Didn't go to the local Science Fiction convention again.. but didn't pass the plague around either :). Sunday night we had a super set of Thunderstorms that went onto about 4 am this morning. I really wish the rain barrels had gotten here.. I think I would have overfilled them quite a bit.

The email over the weekend wasn't too bad. I have decided to take a break from GNOME3 for a bit and just focus on GRUB2 and systemd.

Tasks
  • Email catchup
  • Reset xen04 imm
  • Unable to reset ibiblio RSA2. Card reset only brings back bad


Music
  • Dead Can Dance - Into the Labyrinth
  • Bruce Hornsby and the Range - The Way It Is
  • Mister Mister - the best of...

2011-08-26

Friday 2011-08-26

Daily Talk

I wanted to start off that I realize a lot of issues I have with Gnome3 are my own hangups, and I don't need or want to spew those everyday. Spent the day telling telemarketers to go away, please.

Tasks
  • Daily Email Grind
  • Worked out how to do larger KVM screens.
  • Spent a good part of the day trying to get a PPC working the pain, the pain
Music
  • Apocalyptica - Seventh Symphony
  • Loreena McKennitt - Elemental
  • Loreena McKennitt - Parallel Dreams
  • Loreena McKennitt - The Visit
  • Loreena McKennitt - The Mask and The Mirror
  • Loreena McKennitt - Winter Garden
  • Loreena McKennitt - The Book of Secrets
  • Loreena McKennitt - An Ancient Muse

2011-08-25

Thursday 2011-08-25

I posted something like this on LWN.net earlier.. but I figured once there might as well put it here.

I am the black sheep of the family. For the 3 previous generations, everyone in my family worked on cars or motorcycles either as mechanics, chauffeurs, or even designers. My mom raced cars as a teenager, and my sister helped my dad take apart several engines. I on the other hand can't remove an oil filter without somehow cracking an engine block. However, I kind of know the culture, and what I am seeing in "modern" OS design parallels what I have seen of cars over the last 60 years (just maybe at a faster rate...)

Early cars were great to mod with. You could take apart an engine, play around with it, maybe see what happens if you mill out the piston heads a tiny bit, or change where the spark plugs were. It was a lot of fun for the people who liked to do that, and they learned quite a bit doing it by breaking things quite a bit. At some point though car design changed. It was no longer easy to take apart and change how a car worked because it had either gotten too complicated or a lot of barriers were put in the way on purpose to stop modding.

A good example of this is comparing a 1961 VW bug and a 2011 VW bug. On the outside they look similar enough. The interiors are similar in many ways also. I have even seen a 1964 bug modded out to look exactly like a 2004 bug on the inside.. However dig deeper and the differences are huge in philosophies.

A 1960's VW bug was the epitomy of the vehicle you could take apart and put together in many ways. Most of those ways would be horrible to look at but it was fun to do so. You learned a LOT from being able to break a car and make it do stuff that wasn't what it was originally designed to do, and you could always mill pieces to rebuild it (which is why there are still so many 1960's VW's on the road, because many of the parts are easily replaceable by someone with a lathe. And that was a second core point. Most any kid in high school could get the tools to rebuild a VW to what he wanted.. he just needed gumption.

A 2011 VW bug is the opposite end. (and I am not talking about the engine moving from the front to the back. I rode in a 72 beetle with an engine in the front because someone wanted to do that.) It is a very pretty car, and I will say it is fun to drive where it was designed to drive with. However it is not designed to be changed, in fact seems to have been designed in ways to make sure it wasn't changed. Trying to change it, see how it breaks, see how it can be fixed.. is much harder and more expensive. Especially since getting the tools and parts require a lot of custom items that you have to either be specifically trained in to remove bits off the car.

In the end, it just isn't as fun to play with anymore.

I think some of the frustration people are running into GNOME-3 is that lack of modification fun. It was fun to be able to throw sawmill, fvwm2, icewm, or E as the window manager while having other parts working in Gnome-1. It was still possible in part with Gnome-2 but sometimes not worth the effort. It is definitely not worth the effort in Gnome-3. Trying to get a right click working the way I want it is not really in the design goals of what the Gnome developers want. Realizing that and moving on is about all I can do in the long run.

Anyway off to my tasks and music

Tasks
  • Lets hunt the hidden box
  • Get caught up on researching IMM reset code.. miss meeting
  • Spot a certificate item. Turns out nothing.
  • Thought about buying a Chromebook. Quite taking shots of tequila and changed mind.
  • More javascript reading


Music
  • Altan - Another Sky
  • Altan - Horse with a Heart
  • Altan - The Blue Idol
  • Sarah Brightman - La Luna
  • Bonnie Rideout - Celtic Circles

2011-08-24

Wednesday 2011-08-24

Todays email train on -devel and -test were pretty crappy. I did not respond because a) both sides are impossible people, and b) there is no win beyond going the f away.

Spent most of the day with Gnome3/F16 in either a virtual system or the spare laptop. The laptop was pretty speedy bu the virtual system is just painful. I spend a lot of time trying to right click or look around for something that should be obvious but isn't. I am sure there are keyboard shortcuts but I need either them to be painted on my keyboard or some printout to remind me. After 2 days of this my brain hurts and my frustration levels have not lowered. I will see if things get better by Friday and then see what to punt to.

Systemd is uhm interesting. Yes it has a ton of options but wow its spews out more information than I need to know most of the time. Its like typing 'ls' and getting 'ls -lctZ' and not knowing why stuff is coloured and blinking when all you wanted was to see what files were in the directory. I can see us having to write a SMIT to deal with this complexity.

This grumpiness was sponsored by the letter R, Z, and the number 9.


Tasks
  • Morning Email Grind
  • Morning Fedora F16 update grind
  • Try to figure out if I missed some hardware somewhere


Music
  • Anonymous 4 - 11,000 Virgins Chants for the Feast of St Ursula
  • Anonymous 4 - La Belle Marie
  • Altan - Another Sky

2011-08-23

Tuesday 2011-08-23

First day of Fedora Alpha. Head mirrors run fine and things look good. My installed systems have over 360 updates to make. Yep smells like Fedora :).

Learned that my phone company Qwest is being merged into CenturyLink and it has been going on for a year. I really am not connected with things.

Also learned that my favourite New Mexico Apple,
the Champagne Apple
, may go away. The farm has had a lot of changes which have made it unsustainable. I am not sure if the Apples can be grown elsewhere and as Melinda Snodgrass says in the article, they are ambrosia to eat.

Old Man Rant
Why is it wrong to say that the Year of the Linux Desktop (YoLD) has already happened.. its called Android? Yes it isn't "FreeLibreOpen" to the extent people expected the YoLD to be, and it is not what someone from the 1990's would call a desktop. However technology changes, and it is the primary interface that users people are getting to their data. Technology constantly changes how it presents itself as larger portions of a population use it.

Oh dear god, I think I have ranted on this before.. I must be getting old.

Tasks
  • Email Grind
  • Systemd Grind
  • More APC updates
  • Work with Nirik on getting IMM located


Music
  • Stevie Ray Vaughn - Greatest Hits
  • Miles Davis Quintet - Cookin' With...
  • Miles Davis Quintet - Relaxin' With...
  • Miles Davis Quintet - Workin' With...
  • George Gershwin - Rhapsody in Blue
  • Miles Davis - Kind of Blue

2011-08-22

Monday 2011-08-22

Good morning, Universe. I had a wonderful weekend working in the yard and visiting old friends. Didn't get much computer time which was probably a good thing.

Tasks for day
  • Email Doom. *1*
  • Get to labelling ports on our APC*3*
  • Deal with various APC issues
  • Spend the evening trying to get a system working, and decide that I am having a monday.
    • my xfce settings decided not to put a window around java applet so I could move it.
    • the system sees its disks in the uefi setting but does not show the LSI controller for me to edit
    • for some reason the RHEL-6.x kvm keeps capturing the mouse when I am sure it didn't... and then it can't find the up/down keys when it does that.
  • Decided I had hit my whine quota and needed to go do something else for a while.


Music for day *2*
  • Sara Bareilles - Little Voice
  • U2 - War
  • U2 - The Unforgettable Fire
  • U2 - The Joshua Tree
  • U2 - Rattle and Hum
  • U2 - All that You Can't Leave Behind
  • U2 - How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
Notes for day
  1. Did I miss the memo that this was whinge fest weekend?
  2. It helps to plug in your earphones when you listen to music. I had to restart the queue after 2 hours of unexplained silence
  3. Power plugs these days are made so loose for safety reasons that I constantly have to get systems replugged in

2011-08-19

Friday 2011-08-19

Another warm muggy night so not a lot of sleep. Plus the dog decided it was wakeup time on the hour starting at 4am. Did the guard duty walk around with her and she was happy... and I got 55 more minutes sleep. Got to the computer and found the network was knocked off for a couple of hours last night.


Tasks
  • Read the email flux.
  • Spend most of the day figuring out IPMI.
    • It is turned on by default sometimes
    • It is turned off by default sometimes
    • Sometimes its accepts SNMP traps with NULL community
    • Sometimes it doesn't
    Anyway a lot of tracking for not much accomplishment.
  • Deal with an outage of proxy servers.

Background Music
  • Los Straightjackets - Viva Los Straightjackets
  • Los Straightjackets - The Velvet Touch of...
  • Scottish National Pipe & Drummers - Sounds of Scotland
  • This Mortal Coil - It Will All End In Tears
  • Tish Hinojosa - From Texas for a Christmas Night
  • Pink Floyd - The Division Bell
  • Pink Floyd - The Final Cut
  • Queensryche - The Warning
  • Bonnie Raitt - Luck of the Draw
  • Reta Ceol - Celtic Hymns
  • Bonnie Rideout - Celtic Circles

By the way, dear ACM. I have asked you 4 or 5 times not to send me membership reminders. I have had SPAM organizations who have had better memories than you. Please QUIT. kthnxbye.

2011-08-18

Thursday 2011-08-18

Lots of rain last night from late monsoon moisture which cooled things down quite a bit. We also had a good thunderstorm which caused the electronic toys to burp from all the EMPs going off.

Today is infrastructure meeting day and I am going to see about getting some IBM x3650 servers reinstalled.. I spent yesterday learning about the joys of IPMI systems on a network and what they can do without you knowing it. Wheee.

Tasks
  • Morning crunch of emails.
  • Read lwn.net weekly summary
  • Investigate issues with IPMI
  • Investigate PXE configs
  • Infrastructure meeting
  • Play around with DHCP files to break them
  • Check permissions for Alpha16 release
  • Find the mirror scripts and update to 16

Background Music
  • Pink Floyd - Echoes (Best of ...)
  • Queen - Greatest Hits
  • Queensryche - Empire
  • Queensryche - Queensryche
  • Queensryche - Rage for Order
  • Queensryche - Operation Mindcrime
  • Bonnie Raitt - Longing in their Hearts
  • Dar Williams - The Honesty Room
  • Ventures - Greatest Hits
  • Los Straightjackets - Viva Los Straightjackets

Hmmm can anyone tell when I went to college?

2011-08-17

Wednesday 2011-08-17

Wow today is humid here in the desert. While 50% sounds little to the 110% I remember showing up in South Carolina as a kid.. it feels heavy and dead everywhere you walk. [I am not sure if it was really 110%.. the air was foggy and supersaturated so that if you opened up a refrigerator or freezer it would "rain" where the two airs would meet.]

Laptop running F16 alpha didn't shutdown from overheating.. so we are better with GNOME3 than we were in F15. it still runs very hot though.


Tasks for the day
  • Start the day with the overnight email queue..
  • Do my morning Astronomical Photo of the Day
  • Read through more javascript code
  • Search through DHCP logs. Your packets move, but I can't hear what they are saying.
  • I tip my hat to the new desktop revolution..
  • Fight a long fight with the qxl,vmvga, and cirrus video drivers.
  • Find lost IMM management cards
  • Spend some learning about the undocumented evils of IPMI
  • Looked over allura for project sources

Background Music Albums
  • Pink Floyd - Ummagumma (or what acid soundchecks are like)
  • The Who - Who's Next
  • Pink Floyd - Obscured By Clouds
  • Clannad - Clannad
  • Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon
  • Pink Floyd - Echoes (Best of...)
  • The Police - Synchronicity
  • Queen - Classic Queen
  • Rachael Yamagata - Happenstance

2011-08-16

Tuesday 2011-08-16

Tasks worked on:
  • Get kid to school at ungodly hour of 0800
  • Really this much email? More filters needed
  • Google meetup with Seth and Kevin on cloud strategies
  • RHIT meetup on boring old conference phone
  • Put up ips for PDU's.
  • Give a fellow employee a nickel and tell him to get a real computer.
  • Corporate Training.
  • Remember that burning cd's to dvd disks works but do not play in player.
  • Do evening QA while watching 2nd season Big Bang.
    • Install works for default disk layout and custom packages.
    • Gnome 3 does not crash immediately.
    • Spock should beat lizard.
    • Gnome temperature runs as hot as it did with F15. (64 Celsius vs 42 in XFCE). Non critical (except to my lap :)).

Background Music
  • Pearl Jam - Yield
  • Tom Petty - Greatest Hits
  • Pink Floyd - A Momentary Lapse of Reason
  • Pink Floyd - A Saucer Full of Secrets

2011-08-15

Monday 2011-08-15

  • A ton of backlog email
  • Try to build a past couple of weeks progress and decide to start fresh using blog like spot/rbergeron have been
  • Remedy my old friend, we meet again...
  • Learned via irc the joy of facl's
  • Set up meetings for next couple of days
  • Download F16RC4
  • Trying GNOME3 again... hopefully it will go better.

Background albums today
  • Simon and Garfunkel - [just one song]
  • Grateful Dead - American Beauty
  • Grateful Dead - Workingman's Dead
  • Alanis Morrisette - Jagged Little Pill
  • Alanis Morrisette - Under Rug Swept
  • Pearl Jam - 10
  • Pearl Jam - Vs

2011-08-08

Living in the Past

Read through Bradley Kuhn's article on Living in the Past. I think it pretty much says many of the things I have said before, though maybe more eloquently. While I have pretty much converted to XFCE in the last 3 months, I can appreciate that GNOME is working towards a different audience set. I also agree with Bradley that ranting about it doesn't make anything better.. it just makes people more entrenched which clearly makes things work less. So I am happy to use XFCE and will work in whatever way I can to "make it a stepup from GNOME-2.32" for Linus and the like.