Topic: Posts

I was originally going to write this post as a “reasons I don’t need a new computer,” piece explaining my current setup (one laptop, a virtual server, and a lot of bailing wire) and explaining that despite some problems (a lack of local redundancy and small screen size) a new computer wasn’t exactly warranted. Though I wanted one, particularly after seeing the new MacBook Air, and I’ve long thought about getting a 15 inch laptop as I still lament my last 15 inch machine. Since I didn’t really need a new machine and there wasn’t a convincing reason to do an upgrade, I was going to write about good reasons to avoid upgrading just ‘cause.

Clearly I failed.

Particularly, since I’m writing this post from a new laptop.

A few weeks ago I saw a very good deal on a current-model 15" Lenovo ThinkPad (T510) with all of the specifications that I wanted: the larger resolution screen, integrated Intel graphics and wireless, a bunch of RAM (4g) and a 7200rpm drive. It even has a Core i7 processor (quad proc), which was a pleasant bonus, and so I went for it.

I’m quite happy with it. Besides a great deal and in many ways an ideal machine, I decided that being dependent on one (and only one!) system for all work and non-work computing was probably a bad idea. Additionally, I’ve wanted to reorganize the way my laptops’ hard drive partitions in a way that requires at least a short period of down time, and a process that I didn’t want to attempt without some sort of back up.

It took me a few days to get everything sorted out on the new machine, as it usually does, and there are some cool new things that I can do that I have yet to get ironed out, mostly around figuring out some virtualization technology to do awesome things with this system. But for the day to day stuff, it’s perfect and works just as I like.

This is the first time in several years where I’ve regularly used two systems for day-to-day work, and it’s the kind of thing that I’ve tended to avoid as much as possible. It’s just a hassle to switch between systems in terms of getting everything synchronized. I’ve got a pretty clever setup sketched out that I hope to be able to share with you all shortly.

In the end, this might not have been an absolutely essential purchase, but I think it was wise (in terms of the redundancy,) it makes some interesting things possible (virtualization, more processor intensive tasks,) and for the kinds of things I do, the extra screen space is very appreciated.

I’m sure I’ll write here from time to time about these things, but for the moment: Onward and Upward!

Fantisque Unfettered is a new fantasy magazine from the editorial team that did the Aether Age shared world project. You can learn more about this by listening to the latest version of the outer alliance podcast. I must confess that reading/listening to all of these things is still in my queue, but I have a lot of respect for the creators of all of these things, and I’d love for this wiki play host to a discussion of any of these works.

I pulled together an archive or collection of my Critical Futures posts that discuss systems administration, administrators, and what “normal” folks can learn about technology and techno/social phenomena from the practice of system administration. I’m calling it “Lessons from Systems Administration.” If anyone has an idea for a more archives for Critical Futures posts, see the archives.

I hope your week is awesome!

Apparently Delicious is shutting down. This is either not news to you, because you’ve been hearing people natter on about it for days, or you don’t have a clue what Delicious is. Which is more likely, because it’s probably being shut down for under-use, which means most people don’t have a clue. Right. It’s a website that allows you to post links “bookmarks” and then tag them, and then search for new links based on tag, with everyone’s links so you can discover whats happening based on what everyone is posting and tagging with what. Nifty idea. It’s also worth pointing out that Delicious was one of the first big web 2.0 startups, and got to the whole idea of the social web pretty early.

Anyway, enough history, and on to the news of the day.

tofu said “with all of this talk of delicious, I am surprised that I have heard little about creating a decentralized social bookmark alternative” which is a good thought and echo’s a slightly more complex proposal that marn made on the topic the other day.

In short, leaders of the contemporary revolution in federated network technology (“web services should be federated and exportable so that everyone’s data doesn’t get hosed when one website closes down, and people can share data with friends who uses different services”) are saying “let’s not make this mistake again, if we’re going to build an alternative, let’s make it better.”

And I think, in typical me-fashion, I’m saying: is social bookmarking still a thing? Have twitter and identi.ca replaced our need for this kind of service? The problem I think lays in the fact that there’s so much Internet that services like delicious very quickly become “lets catalog everything” and as a result “bookmarking” as a concept isn’t very useful for sharing links and exposing information to new audiences.

Having said that, I think the notion of writing a tool to use identi.ca or a status.net installation to replace delicious functionality seems like a great idea. Similarly, while it’s not federated pinboard.in has been around for a while and while it’s not federated, (or open source, particularly,) I like just about everything they’ve done.

Ponder that!

This used to be a knitting blog. No really, it did. Then I got a technology job, move east, and started singing and dancing constantly, and didn’t really have a lot of spare time to knit. Compound this with the fact that I came of age as a knitter in Southern Wisconsin, and the heavy sweaters and thick socks that were essential there were pretty much unwearable in everywhere I’ve lived since.

Which isn’t to say that I’ve stopped knitting, hardly, but I have slowed, and I’ve tended to choose particularly boring projects for their meditative quality rather than for their knitterly interest. Not that meditative knitting is a bad thing, but it means I’m less likely to be enthralled in a project in a serious way, which means they take longer. Such projects are probably also uninteresting for you all to read about. But I have been knitting and thinking about knitting things.

I gave away a bunch of yarn that I acquired during college and in my dark period after college. Yarn that I got because it was a good deal, yarn that I was given, yarn that I didn’t have a plan to use, and yarn I didn’t particularly want to knit. It felt really good, to pare down the stash to yarn that I really liked and yarn that I really wanted to knit, and I’ve never been a serious knitter when I’ve had a legitimate disposable income, so I’ve never really been in a position to say “I want to make a sweater, let me go buy the perfect yarn for it.” Now I am, and it means I need to keep a lot less “rainy day yarn.” Good feelings.

As for what I’m working on now? I have a cowl/scarf device mostly done in a ribbing that’s my “current” project. I also have a sweater that just needs sleeves, and the collar hem sown down, and I’m stalled on a Alice Starmore-inspired Aran sweater (needs sleeves and some hem’s) because I’m probably going to run out of yarn, and I don’t really know how to precede properly (it’s also going to be unwearably warm.) And some socks. I seem to almost always have a pair of socks in progress, but they’re never interesting, and I don’t wear many wool socks most of the time.

I’m not sure when I’m going to have more time, but I am hoping to clear some of the decks soon and finish some of the above lingering projects, and perhaps move on to more exciting knitting. With luck!

I’ve been on vacation this week, if that wasn’t clear to you all. There’s been a lot of “doing things,” notably this website, a nifty lunch at a big tech company you’ve heard of, family stuff, bumming around New York City with R., and writing seemingly thousands of emails regarding projects, events, and possible meetings that I will probably not have time to commit to or maintain once I return to my regular routine. But it feels good to be able to pay attention to all sorts of work that I’m forced to neglect most of the time.

I really like this new wiki, and I really like the new publishig work flow, the way that people have interacted with the site and the ability to blog casually again. Here are some exciting links/thoughts:

• Willie Taylor, an English/Irish folk song, sung in this version by a couple of friends at Bard College (Jeremy Carter-Gordon and Ben Bath). It’s nice to know that I’m not the only person in my generation who’s into this kind of music
• pinboard.in, a delicious (rip) like, link-sharing/storing service. The thing I like most about Pinboard (I have an account, but I don’t really use it.) is that they charge a nominal fee for creating an account. This supports the site and controls who gets an account. While I’m not sure I like a world where content/services on the web are all pay-to-play, I really don’t like the world where no one is willing to pay for anything digital, because there’s an expectation that things ought to be free.
• I wrote about this more than a year ago, but I think that halvm (an implementation of Haskell that runs on bare Xen) is really cool, and probably an indicator of things to come, but it’ll be a while before this (and other tools like it) are really ready for general use. Which is probably a good thing because engineers and IT people need some time to adapt to thinking about software in this way.

Keep warm!

I’m going to present this post somewhat out of order. Here’s the proposal.

I want to think about moving this blog (or starting another?) to be a blog/wiki hybrid, and at the very least, moving forward I’d like the “discussion” or comment’s link to link to a wiki page rather than a comments thread.

I’ve been thinking about the blog recently. I really enjoy writing posts, and there are days when I rely on writing a blog post to get me thinking and moving in the morning (or afternoon!) and kinds of projects that I don’t think I would be able to work on if it weren’t for having the space to write and the opportunity to have conversations with you all.

I’ve done some work recently to streamline and simplify the publishing process, which does a lot to make me more likely to post on the fly, but I’m not sure that the tone of this site, or the current design, or my own habits would really support a different kind of publishing schedule.

As an aside, I think the technological shift that made blogs possible were “content management systems” and website building tools that made updating a website with new content incredibly simple. While blogging has come to mean many other things and is defined by a number of different features, having the ability to publish on very short notice has a large effect on the way people write blog content.

So here’s the thing about blog comments: I don’t think that they’re used particularly well, and there are some important flaws in so many of the options around. First, the best systems, like the one used on LiveJournal, IntenseDebate, and Disqus (which I use on this site) are all proprietary systems that are depending on an external service to function. The worse systems all have independent authentication methods, often lack proper threading (which most comm enters aren’t terribly good at using anyway,) and it’s very difficult to prevent all these systems from being filled with spam.

What’s more, people don’t really comment that much. At least for most blogs.

• better comment systems, better discussions.
• catering to people who want to write a lot. in comments.
• allowing the conversation to grow from comments, in productive rather than purely discursive ways.

And once you’ve moved comments into a wiki, why not move the rest of the blog as well? My preferred engine, ikiwiki, has support for blog-like content so while there would be some work involved, it wouldn’t be a major hassle to manage. And the worst case scenario is that the old content remains in the old system, which might not be a bad thing in the end.

Anyone out there in reader land have any thoughts on the subject? While I’ll probably make some sort of revision to the way I blog/maintain tychoish.com, any such change is probably a month or two in the future.

I have misgivings about Open Stack. Open Stack is an open source “Cloud” or infrastructure/virtualization platform, that allows providers to create on-demand computing instances, as if “in the cloud,” but running on their own systems. This kind of thing is generally refereed to as “private clouds,” but as all things in the “cloud space,” this is relatively nebulous concept.

To disclose, I am employed by a company that does work in this space, that isn’t the company that is responsible for open space. I hope this provides a special perspective, but I am aware that my judgment is very likely clouded. As it were.

Let us start from the beginning, and talk generally about what’s on the table here. Recently the technology that allows us to virtualize multiple instance on a single piece of hardware has gotten a lot more robust, easy to use, and performant. At the same time, for the most part the (open source) “industrial-grade” virtualization technology isn’t particularly easy to use or configure. It can be done, of course, but it’s non trivial. These configurations and the automation to glue it all together--and the quality therein--is how the cloud is able to differentiate itself.

On some level “the Cloud” as a phenomena is about the complete conversion of hardware into a commodity. Not only is hardware cheap, but it’s so cheap that we can do most hardware in software, The open sourcing of this “OpenStack” pushes this barrier one step further and says, that the software is a commodity as well.

It was bound to happen at some point, it’s just a curious move and probably one that’s indicative of something else in the works.

The OpenStack phenomena is intensely interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it has a lot of aspects of some contemporary commercial uses of open source: the project has one contributor and initial development grows out of the work of one company that developed the software for internal use and then said “hrm, I guess we can open source it.” Second, if I’m to understand correctly, OpenStack isn’t software that isn’t already open source software (aside from a bunch of glue and scripts), which is abnormal.

I’m not sure where this leads us, and I’ve been milling over what this all means for a while, and have largely ended up here: it’s an interesting move, if incredibly weird and hard to really understand what’s going on.

I was writing a blog post about the ideological tendencies in free software and I found myself on a side note that I think really wants to be it’s own post. Funny how that happens. I was thinking about the role and importance of system administrators in free software communities and development. This post is part of an ongoing thread on dialectical futurism about systems administration and its implications.

One might think, because free software communities produce software, that free software communities are communities of software developers. Programmers make software, free software is software, ergo… But I really think that a significant differentiating factor between free and non-free software is that free software tends to be created, shaped, and designed by people who are systems administrators by trade and inclination rather than people who are primarily software developers.

This is a somewhat difficult argument, and one that requires us to presume that the boundary between developers and administrators is impermeable (it isn’t,) but I think people who are programmers first and administrators second approach technological problems. Systems administrators write code. Lots of code. Any system that must be administered (deployed, modified, and maintained) “by hand” is probably a broken system. Scripting and automation are the keys to making systems maintainable in the long run. And the boundary between writing a few (dozen (dozen)) scripts and writing an operating system is probably not that great in the grand scheme of things.

And knowing how operating systems work is probably a key to making them work. In this case, we can imagine that systems administrators like open source operating systems (i.e. Linux and GNU based ones) because their inner workings are knowable, so system administrators are likely to reap much larger benefits from free software than other classes of users.

I’ve often found that understanding the richness and complexity of the “value” of Free Software and Open Source software is important for understanding why free software continues to exist and may be worth adopting. The value of free software comes from: the fact that there are no licensing costs, the freedom you have to modify the software to your needs and potentially largely ameliorate development costs, finally free software is valuable because it creates smarter users by virtue of its origins in academia and the way that it promotes user independence and community involvement.

Business decision makers might like the fact that the initial cost of free software is minimal and controlled, but most software related costs are probably support related and free software may not do much to minimize those costs. Developers may like that free software could make their jobs easier, but they may also suffer from “not invented here” syndrome, and be resistant to working on projects that (potentially) suffer from design decisions that they disagree with. Systems administrators may have preferences regarding certain pieces of software, but will generally like the additional control that free software offers them.

I wonder about the inverse: has the involvement of systems administrators in free software had an affect on the shape of that software? Do we use Linux and BSD-Unix because they’re easier to administer? Does this extend to the network protocols and technologies that get used more frequently?

Let’s file this under “questions I wish I knew how to answer…”

Onward and Upward!

Welcome to this new little blog/wiki project. I made a post to the ‘blog about reorganizing the way I did my blog comments and blogging called a modest blogging proposal.

I wrote this post a few weeks ago. I was so inspired by the prospect of reorganizing the blog, and also so frustrated by the less-than-useful structure of my blogging that, I did the “big reorganization” of the blog the very same day that I published the post that started it all.

This proves, it seems, the neccessity of these changes, which are:

• Moving the “dialectical futurism” blog to my “Critical Futures” domain, as an “essay” blog. I’m planning to post a new essay here every Tuesday. I might also add a second day a week for some other feature (podcast? contributed essay?)
• Move the “wikish” wiki that I’d been hosting on the “tychoish.com” domain to be tychoish.com, and add a more short-form blog to the “blog/wiki.” I’m calling it “Rhizomatics,” and this is the first post. I’ll be writing here pretty regularly, and with less intense posts.
• Do all of the above in a way that doesn’t break all of the existing links.

And I think I’ve done it all. I’ll be doing some tweaking in the next few days and weeks to make it all work a bit better, but suggestions are always welcome.

Stay tuned!

I do some work as a systems administrator, both personally and for friends. And I work with a lot of admins, but I don’t really think of myself as a sys admin. Though you may feel free to argue the point. Nevertheless, I spend a lot of time trying to figure out the way systems administrators think and work. This makes sense: as my professional work is written for entry level systems administrators and I work with a bunch of admins. But I think it’s probably bigger than that. This post is part of an ongoing thread on dialectical futurism about systems administration and its implications.

The best systems administrators are unnoticed and unremarkable. When a system is working smoothly, it works and no one has reason to think about who is maintaining the system. Thus, to be a better systems administrator you have to become confident in your abilities (leading to a somewhat grounded stereotype in arrogance) and you have to be resistant to change.

For example, take this slide deck of a systems administration problem. It presents a thorny sysadmin problem where the chmod utility (which is used to render files executable) has been marked unexecutable. The presentation goes through a number of different methods of fixing this, however (spoiler alert) the final solution is “the easy fix is to reboot the machine and fix it then (or something), and the machine’s running so there isn’t a problem.” While this is a funny example, I think it’s also largely a true example of the way systems administrators approach and resolve problems.

I’ve seen this kind of “well it’ may not be perfect, but it works,” logic as well as the “is it worth building something new and different that might be better?” reasoning at work, and I think it’s probably apparent in all sorts of free software and other discussion forums where sys admins discuss things.

Thus, I wonder: Does this ideology extend beyond the administration of systems and into other spheres of life and thinking? About technology? About politics and economics? I’m not sure, though I’m of course inclined to say yes, and I think it’s something that requires some deliberation, and further thinking.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts, and figuring out the best way to answer this question.

Onward and Upward!