Topic: Update

• Monday morning, before I left St. Louis, the trash truck or something took out the phone line behind the house. The phone line which carries the internet. Sigh. So while I’ve been driving and have been somewhat out of touch, by the nature of this whole process, the fact that the internet died didn’t help things. Sorry for the lack of posts.
• The midwest (particular the northern and parts that I’m most familiar) is, on the whole, incredibly boring to drive through. Not stunningly boring, but not that bad. By the time you get to eastern Ohio, however, things start to get interesting. The miles and miles of corn fields interspersed with the lone standing tree and occasional soybean crop--you know you’re in trouble when soybeans come as a refreshing change of pace--were replaced with rolling hills, mountains, and the like.

To make up for this, however, it did seem that they were doing a lot of construction/road repair for very little improvement. Parts of the eastern edge of the turnpike were actually pretty good: modern, pretty wide, in good repair; other parts, not so much.

Although, to be sure, heading east was much better than heading west. Better to get the bland out of the way first, and have something interesting at the end.

• I met Chris for the first time, in the flesh. Dude. This requires it’s own sublist:

1. I think the common perception is that things that happen in meatspace are somehow more authentic, and meaningful, and “real” than conversations that happen on line, and often I’d agree. While I’m certainly not complaining about the real-life experience, I do think that there are some distinct disadvantages:

   It’s hard to share links in meatspace, and so “hey I was reading this thing, here’s a link, and I thought that it was nifty and has implications for ____” becomes, not a stepping stone for another thought, but an exercise in “hell, I read something not that long ago and thought it seemed relevant.

   Chris and I tend to have these interleaved conversations where we’ll sort of drift through a few topics at once, and because at least in an ephemeral sort of way chats are logged, it’s hard to interrupt the other person, even if there are a couple of threads of quasi-related material on the table at once. Without the benefit of a running transcript you have to remember more and that’s weird, or at least it feels weird in this context. I’ll adjust I’m sure.

2. On the whole, he is (and the occasion was) pretty much what I expected. I’ve had this theory about “how people turn out to really be in reality versus how they seem online,” which is that after enough time (months/years) it’s pretty hard to maintain any sort of ruse or false facade. Sure, people lie, and people lie in real life, but those amount to little surprises. Big surprises? Unlikely. That held true.

   The cats have been reasonably cooperative. They’re sort of scared of the outside, and were made nervous by the whole experience. Thankfully their response was to cower/sleep in the carrier and not make a lot of noise. I’m leaving them with M.N. in Philadelphia for a night or two while I secure digs for us in New Jersey.

   M.N. and I will have a couple of opportunities this weekend to do shape note singing. Woot!

   It’s nice to know that summer, even early summer, isn’t quite as brutal everywhere as it is in St. Louis (or the other places where I’ve (semi)recently spent my summers: Kansas City, Nashville, and St. Louis of course.) Between that and the Wisconsin winter tolerance, which hasn’t yet worn off, I think I have a freakishly broad temperature tolerance.

   Eastern time is weird. Though, at least for a little while, I like it because it sort of means that my body doesn’t quite get that it’s daylight savings time. And there are very few things that I hate more than daylight savings time.

And I think, that’s all the news that’s fit to print.

Edited to add: I’m going to continue such musing regarding my current state over on my live journal which seems the more appropriate venue for this kind of blathering. Real post tomorrow. I swear.

Deep Breath.

I have news for you all which I hope will explain my absence for the past 10 or 15 days. Actually I’m surprised that it’s only been 10 or 15 days, as it feels so much longer. Anyway, enough suspense:

I’ve accepted a position with Linode to work on (primarily) a really cool technical writing project. You can see the announcement here.

This is really awesome because:

• It’s a job. Writing. About Linux, and Web Servers, and Free Software/Open Source.
• Linode rocks. I applied for the job somewhat before I bought a linode, and I’ve been nothing but pleased with the service which has worked flawlessly for me so far. The best part, is I think that Linode’s approach to technology, to using and developing technology, really fits in with the kinds of values and approaches that I hold.
• Did I mention it’s a writing job where I get to work with Linux and free software?
• It puts me on the east coast, near Philadelphia, where the largest concentration of my non-College friends are located, which has me unbelievably excited. I’ll be able to gossip and dance with M.N. more than once a year; I’ll be able to hang out and with my emergency-backup-big-sister (H.C.) more often; it’ll be feasible to hang out with Chris you know ever and more. I’m so psyched.
• Did I mention it’s a writing job where I get to work with Linux and free software?

The astute among you will thus, notice that:

• New job elsewhere means relocation. Which means.
• I’ve been busy doing all of the relocation things: packing, doing this and that’s, more packing, getting paperwork in order, even more packing, and so forth that I’ve not been really good at keeping on top of the blog. I have a couple of entries stashed, but my rhythm is all off kilter.
• The job announcement has my real name in it. I have an abandoned a post or two about the whole tycho/sam thing. I should perhaps restart it. I think what I really need is this highly mythologized about page that talks about tycho and sam in different voices.

The truth is, that while I don’t think my reasons for using “tycho garen” these days is the same as it was 2.5 or 3 years ago, but I really like what I’ve done with the whole tycho thing, and I can’t really imagine not using it.

• In a lot of ways, I think, writing this blog for so long is a lot of the reason why I was able to get this job, both because through the experience of writing about technology for the blog gave me the confidence/knowledge/skills that make this tech-writing thing I do possible, and also the blog I think served to demonstrate that I was for real.

This is related to another train of thought that I hope to follow up on in the next few months somewhere, but it strikes me that this, if anything is a marker of success that we’re not particularly prone to attending too. We notice successful blogs that get millions of visits a month and can support their authors on advertising revenue and invited speaking engagements. I think that I’ve achieved some kind of success here, and there are other kinds of success to be had. I want to think about what this means. But first I want to sit with this.

I’ll be in touch, and I look forward to continuing this blog in this “next part” of my journey.

Cheers!

I’m beginning to write this in the evening after a long day of system administration work. For birthday (though, really, it’s been on my todo list for a long time), I ordered and set up a server from these fine folks to serve as the technological hub of my activities. While I’ve been quite fond of those fine folks for quite a long time, there was a growing list of things that I always wished worked better with dreamhost, and it was finally starting to limit the kinds of projects I could undertake in. So I bit the bullet and went ahead and ordered the server and spent some time getting everything straightened out.

For some background: the server is just an instance running inside of a Xen hypervisor, which runs other servers together on the same hardware: this is good, I couldn’t really use a server that powerful all by my lonesome (and I wouldn’t want to have to pay for it all either). It’s also way more powerful that what I had before, and the vitalization allows me to act with impunity, because it’s as if I’m running my own server, really. I’ve been doing computer administration and web development for a long time, but I’ve never had to do anything like this so it’s been an experience to learn how DNS records really work, how all the different kinds of server applications work, how really cool the Apache web server really is. It’s a great learning experience, and I think it would be prudent (and potentially helpful for you) to reflect on the experience. So here are my notes on the adventure:

• I’ve been running Ubuntu on my personal/desktop machines since the great Linux switch, and I’ve been pretty pleased with it. Not totally wowed by it: it works, but my tendencies are toward the more minimal/lightweight systems. But more than anything, I’m really drawn to systems that just work more than I am to systems that work perfectly, and I’m pretty good at keeping systems working. In 5 years of OS X usage I installed an OS twice, and since I got things stable and running, the only installations I’ve done have been to put ubuntu on new machines.

  In any case, this server was a chance for me really explore debian stable (lenny), which I hadn’t ever done before. It’s so cool. It’s not sexy or daring or anything but in a server you don’t want that, and it just works. I think it probably also helps matters somewhat lenny was released only a few months ago, rather than nearly two years ago, but in any case I’m quite enamored of how well it works.

• Email is much more complicated than I think any of us really give it credit for. There’s all sorts of complicated mess with regards to how DNS servers identify mail servers to help fight spam, and then there’s all the filtering and sorting business, and even the “modern” email servers are a bit long in the tooth. I hope that it’s a “set it and forget about it” sort of thing, though to be truthful I just got it all running and set up initially, but there’s a lot of further setup to do, before I move it all around.

• I’m pretty proud of the fact that as i was going thought the set up process, I go to the point where it said “ok, now set up the FTP server, and I said ‘meh’ and moved around.” Turns out that I can do everything I need to do in terms of getting files onto the server with git/scp/ssh/rsync and FTP is just lame and old. Welcome to the new world, where file transfers are shorter, versioned, and more secure.

  This isn’t particularly new, I couldn’t tell you the last time I used FTP, but I think this represents both the utility in moving to a “real server,” and a larger shift in the way we think about webservers. FTP assumes that the main purpose of the webserver is to store and serve files. the ssh/rsync/git model assumes that your webserver exists to be “your computer in the sky.” Which it is. We interact with the computers on our desks in really complex ways; there’s no reason to interact with our computers in the sky by just copying files to and from it.

• I’m convinced that systems-administration work will increasingly be the “hard currency” (basis for exchange) for the networked computing age. It’s sort of onerous work, there are skills and knowledge that most people who need network service don’t have and don’t need to have, there are actual costs, the need is ongoing, and success is quantifiable.

  There’s definitely space here for people (like me, and others) to provide these kinds of services to people. Sort of “boutique” style. Clearly I have more to learn and more thinking to do on the subject, but it’s a start.

• Ejabberd is peculiar, and the Debian package is… less than ideal. I knew going in that there was a “web administration” interface which sounds cool until you realize that, it’s… not an administration panel as much as it is a sort of “web dashboard.” You still have to tweak the configuration file which is written in Erlang, and wow. That’s pain right there.

Having said that, it seems to work just fine, without much fussing, and I’m want the jabber-server to do a very limited set of things: host my own IM account and transports; host muc-chats (created by me); and that’s about it. I’m a bit worried that it might be a bit too heavy for this.

That’s about all. More to come, I’m sure.

Hello folks!

I’m going to be away from early early in the morning until late in the day on Monday, and (likely) asleep until late (for me) morning on Tuesday, following the Midwest Morris Ale that I’m participating in this weekend in Minneapolis Minnesota. The following notes are of interest:

1. I’ll have my Blackberry, so if you need to get a hold of me, call, email, text, whatever. I can’t promise that I’ll be super responsive, but I won’t go completely silent, but I’m mostly offline for the next four days and some change. Sorry if this is a problem.

2. If you’re in the twin cities, I’d love to see you. Check out the Ale Website for more information. If you happen across a Morris dancer in the twin cities this weekend (May 22-25, 2009; likely on saturday) say, “I’m looking for Sam of the Capering Roisters” and someone will find me.

3. No blog post on Monday.
4. Take care of yourself.

So, I feel like, in honor of the fact that today is my birthday, I’m going to write a little bit of a self centered and reflective post. Don’t worry. I have a post ready for you for later today that’s… of more general appeal.

I feel pretty good about the way things are going these days. I still have a pretty big todo list, of course, but I don’t really find myself going to bed wondering “how did it get so late and what did I do with my day?” which is a sign that I’m in rough shape. Nonetheless, I’ve been distractable of late, to combat this I’ve been working more concertedly on the laptop, and using my desktop-rig as a more social environment. I’m not entirely pleased with this setup, but I’m getting work done, so that’s worth something.

I’ve also been getting up early (wake-times before 7:00 am) and asleep whenever it feels required, usually 11 (on average), and while I haven’t been exercising regularly (as in walks), I have been dancing a lot. It’s Morris Dance season, so that makes up for things--slightly. Our ale, the gathering I go to every memorial day, is this weekend (of course) and that promises to be a lot of fun. In any case, I think good self-care/activity levels are a big reason of why I’m not in the loony bin. Also, I think my stamina has improved as a result and I’m able to do Morris dance without my knees giving me problems, and/or wearing myself out quite as much. At the same time I’ve spent a lot of time in recent days getting ready for the Morris Ale (it’s amazing how many pairs of socks one needs/wants at an ale!)

I fear that I write with too many parentheticals. I’m able to counter this tendency in fiction, but I’ve failed at it in blog posts. My brain was made for footnotes, I suppose. I’ve not found a suitably fast markdown converter that supports footnotes, so I’m not writing with footnotes, and as a result parens usage goes through the rough. I wonder what’s going to happen when I have to write real academic things again. As a corollary, I’m pretty sure that my blog-writing “sounds” very much like the way I talk, if you were wondering.

And that’s about it. I’m not doing anything really special for the day, be in touch, though, it’s always fun to talk to you all.

Cheers!

As those of you who microblog may have noticed (or were there) I attended and went to a cool little bar camp last weekend. It was a small affair in Central Illinois (I also visited friends, which was amazing.) but there were some cool freelancers, and some folks from NCSA, and I think we all learned something from the encounter. Good times.

Since I got back, however, I’ve had a serious case of the stupids. I don’t mean to make an excuse for my lack of productivity. I sat down, I did things that were on my todo-list, I made progress, but I feel like my brain rotted out for a little while there. It’s a strange feeling. In any case, I spent some time on Wednesday afternoon pulling together notes, thinking about things, and writing some stuff. Anyway, the brain seems to have un-rotted. Here’s a brief list of the things that are on my list of things to write about for you soon.

• Oracle’s Purchase of Sun Microsystems

• Co-op business models, and Open Source

  This marks a revival of some of my thinking and writing about economic issues. I’ve been thinking about (and the Sun/Oracle deal brought this to the surface) about how competition works (or is irrelevant) in cooperative business, what role open source and free software plays in technological development

• Jekyll.

  I sort of assumed that after I made the switch to this new content management system that all the people who were interested in it already knew about it. Not so apparently. I need to talk more about this.

• I upgraded to Jaunty.

  …and changed a few things in my system configuration that make it a bunch more lightweight. Still on ubuntu.

  I also need to do some more hacking about on things.

• I should cover other topics that I’ve touched on in the past that I’ve continued to think about, but not continued to write about. Things like git, Awesome, org-mode, my knitting.

At the time of writing, I’ve been going through a rough spot in my (day-to-day) travels and have had some trouble focusing on writing things. I suspect it will pass, but as I’ve been going through my todo list and my brain for things to write about, in the mean time I’ve noted something of a pattern in the way that I lead in my blog posts.

Even though I read something a few years ago that said, basically, the way to be successful at blogging is to write your posts like newspaper articles: strong lead, details to follow, everything but elaboration in the first paragraph. The thought is that this style of writing is the most effective way to reach people and hook them into what you’re saying. Expecting reader efficiency. It’s a good idea.

I’m remarkably bad at this. I blog like I talk, I fear, and so my posts are often bottom heavy and meander around to the point. I know my flaws.

In any case, I think I’ve uncovered a (small) list tropes for the way that I begin posts:

• I mention that something has been on my todo list and then write about something that’s tangentially related.
• I tell some sort of semi-funny, self deprecating introductory story, and get to the point at the beginning of the second paragraph.
• I talk about previous posts that serve as background to the post that I’m writing now. May or may not include links.
• Some sort of abrupt but not all together straight forward beginning, eg. “So I was thinking that…”

Did I miss any?

I write you from the future! I, as predicted, made the switch over between the wordpress powered version of tychoish.com and the jekyll powered version of my site. I’m quite pleased with this development. Basically it works by taking a repository of posts with all the content from my site and then compiles a website of static pages whenever I trigger an update. Though it hasn’t worked flawlessly, I’m pretty pleased with how this has worked out, and as I clean things up and get to using the system a bit more I’ll write up a post regarding jekyll, but I want to get used to it some more.

The biggest change is that I’m now calling the short form posts, “notes” and the long form posts, “essays” (as usual) and I’ve changed the landing page a bit. In all I think it’s an improvement. I’m not done tinkering around here: I hope this system will make it easier to develop and “curation” lists of related content. If I learned nothing else from this project, it’s that I have a lot hanging around in the archives, and the chronological list of content isn’t a particularly good presentation of this. So new ways of visualizing the content are in store.

Also, if you’re inclined, you can get a copy of the repository that powers this site over on github. I’ll set up local hosting/cloning of the git repository, in a bit.

Anyway, Onward and Upward indeed!

So I was hoping to write you this morning from a brand new blogging system powered by jekyll that I did a little bit of tweeking on. Unfortunatly, all the pieces aren’t all in place, yet. So tychoish is still a wordpress event still on wordpress. The highlights:

• It seems to have not worked, because it’s notion of categories isn’t a bit more firm than my own notion of categories (ie. coda and tychoish), and there isn’t any clever (or not so clever) way to get around this. It’s way more geeky than normal, but basically there’s no way (that I can figure) without categories to get an array/object of some segment of the posts without using jeykll’s categories.

  The categories that jekyll has are really powerful, and my problem isn’t so much how they work, as it is that I have 1300-ish posts written “in the old way” that I need to figure something out for. I’ll do that, but it’ll take a bit longer, and it’ll mean that there’ll be a more substantive update to the site.

• I did something that I think improves jekyll, by adding an aditional permalink format to my fork. I’m not even passingly familar with Ruby (and I may have a slight professed disdain for it) and while it wasn’t a big change nor did it require a bunch of logic/smarts, it works and I think I did it “right” for whatever that means.

  I also, in the course of this, got sed to work right, which was mostly just a case of me reading the manual wrong for years and then avoiding it. But personal victories are victories all the same.

I can explain my jekyll issue/need in more detail if anyone wants to help me hack on this. Cheers!

I wrote an article for my friend Melissa Barton about how to use computers/technology more successfully and more effectively, and it went live over the weekend. I’m really happy with it, and it represents all of the things I’ve been working through here, except tuned for a more general audience. It’s also under my given name (gasp!) as if the tycho thing wasn’t confusing enough as it is.

Emacs is great, and I’m a huge fan, but it’s not for everyone, and for those audences, thinking about what we learn from “advanced useage” and then workind to apply that to more general use can be quite powerful. This is a different take on the “how to attract general audences,” process. I guess I’m mostly arguing that rather than make software/hardware more “friendly,” better to (also) educate users to be more gruff?

In any case, that’s up. I’m also posting an extra tychoish essay on Wednesday because it didn’t get posted (as I would have hoped) due to my error a few weeks ago. Stay tuned for that. Also, maybe new Critical Futures this week?

cheers, ty