These Things Matter To Me

Yay extra effort!
Emoticon pumpkin, via WillPate on Flickr.
Christy the Ipod ad. Starring Christy. Via Stereogum.
“Ricky as Google Image Search, via kottke.org.

Reason number 1. You Spend Less Time Repeating Your Message.
(from Weblogsinc’s/ AOL’s Jason Calacanis)

Recently I went to lunch with another CEO who doesn’t blog. He spent half the time explaining his business to me. I asked him if he had any questions for me and he rattled off like 20 facts about our business—really inside stuff. I asked him how he knew all that information and he said he read my blog. It was as if we had five meetings already. I could save my breath, he knew all about us.

When I asked him why he didn’t blog he said he didn’t have the time. Ironic considering he had just proved how much time a blog can save for a CEO!

I can’t tell you how much I appreciate and enjoy Sun’s public blogs. Does this mean I always end up eating up the hype or enthusiasm for the stuff they’re working on? No. Sometimes reading their blogs even helps me to realize I’m not interested in a particular solution of theirs. But either way, I understand where they’re coming from, and both parties save time and evergy pursuing a relationship that’d go nowhere (as if they notice my relationship with their downloads).

Oh, you. Lil Vanilla.

Two projects I’m working on right now require a nice forum/ discussion system. I’ve been digging the Lussomo Vanilla Forum software by Mark Sullivan for a while now. The user interface is the best forum stuff I’ve seen, with a really light way of drawing the ubiquitious forum tables. It also keeps the software branding toned town, and doesn’t overload the admin and users with lots of noise for features that are rarely accessed. (Also, not only is it easy to install on Linux, but it installs without hacks on Windows XP.)

But a downside of Vanilla is its inability, at least via formal documentation, to integrate with other login systems within an environment. I’d love to use it with with either WordPress logins in certain sites, or with LDAP. As of today, you can’t. This doesn’t totally turn me off, but it bugs me.

But I was reading the forums, seeing if anybody had some hacks, and I read this promising note from Mark:

I am in talks with a client to do some work on Vanilla that will make it possible to have the user authentication separated from vanilla a little bit (making things like integrating vanilla with an existing login system a lot easier). In order to accomplish this, I will need to rush the development of Vanilla 0.9.3. Further to that point, the client’s deadline is very short (mid-November from what I understand at this point), so it looks like the next rev will happen right around when I was predicting.

Very cool. It was part of a larger thread about moving the GPL’d project into CVS or SVN.

Matt Asay leaves Novell. And sometimes expertise leaves to do other stuff. (BTW, the place he’s going, Alfresco, sounds pretty cool.)

Novell will probably have to lay off 10% of its employees. I continue to wonder if it’s possible to buy expertise.

(the wee VMware Player in action)

VMware has released VMware Player. It’s free. It can’t create images on its own, but it can “play” and take advantage of almost everything VMware Workstation can set up in an image, like shared folders, and vmware-tools. VMware also set up a cute little Ubuntu-based “browser appliance.” Endless uses. Using right now.

Ubuntu announced Ubuntu server 5.10.

Firefox-based browser Flock finally has seen the light of day! Not that it was late, but it’s been months of anticipation. That’s a long time these days, to not get to touch it. The browser has hooks for lots of web services like blogging and social bookmarking.

Better Desktop is a usability project sponsored by Novell, working towards understanding how people use GNOME and KDE. (It features videos of how people approach every day tasks in the Linux desktop environment.)

Ubuntu 5.10 came out. Even for HP PA-RISC (finally!). (If operating systems had smells, Ubuntu 5.10 would smell like a beautiful summer rainstorm.)

Have you played with Solaris 10 yet? Is that a weird question? It’s a strange time, my friend. The world seems so Linux crazy that I second-guess how much time I should be investing in learning other OS stuff, especially when even other operating systems, as different as they may be, seem to be adopting lots of Linux-isms, and striving for Linux compatibility.

Being a sysadmin, there’s a constant fight inside my head about what to learn, what to put aside, what to investigate further, where to be shallow, where to be deep. I guess everybody struggles with that stuff, in every job, in every personal interest, responsibility, and creative pursuit… but when you’re a system administrator, there’s like this serve-and-protect vibe, and pride and sense of preparedness that comes in to play. I feel so bad when I get approached about a tool I know little about. I wanna choose tools that will serve me in as many situations as possible, and that will prepare me to learn new stuff, too. Sometimes, it seems like investing time and energy in Linux stuff is such a no-brainer, when it’s so likely that it’ll be applicable to non-Linux things, too.

I thought in Solaris 9, I saw signs of a Linux mind-meld, that Solaris was veering towards a similar administrative experience for both Linux and Solaris boxes. But with Solaris 10, there is no doubt that Solaris is feeling bold enough to be really different from previous versions of Solaris, and Linux.

A big example of this, is the SMF, a.k.a., the Service Management Facility. The SMF does a lot of work, and can manage a lot of stuff, but the most urgent thing about it is that it replaces “rc scripts,” and the traditional way of checking on the status of any services run at boot. Phew!

When I get exposed to a new tool, I never feel immediate pressure to take advantage of its new features, but there’s definitely pressure to learn the the new way of maintaing services that already exist. With SMF, Solaris 10 has given me both new toys that I look forward to playing with, and some kinda urgent homework. In some coming posts, I will look in more technical detail at how SMF has changed the boot process and service management, and how it can possibly improve things. For now, check out Sun’s BigAdmin page on the SMF.

tags: solaris, unix, sysadmin, sun, linux,system administrator

I was just looking at all the O’Reilly conferences coming up, and noticed that they weren’t having a Mac OS X Conference this year. Not that it means that O’Reilly conferences are slippin or anything. They’ve been adding conferences like crazy: Where 2.0, Web 2.0, Emerging Telephony… So don’t go there. O’Reilly conferences? Crazy successful!
But then on their conference archives page, the most recent Mac OS X Conference they list, is the 2003 one. One did happen in 2004. Anyway, none of this is that big of a deal, but I wonder the reason for the change. There are lots of reasons not have a conference. Sure, it could be lack of attendees (doubt it), or scheduling problems (doubt it). But I wonder if it’s just more strategic. I wonder if O’Reilly Media is seeing a role for itself mostly in covering things that don’t get covered so well elsewhere, and Mac stuff isn’t as wanting as other stuff? Just thinkin. I love Tim O’Reilly’s Perl-is-so-popular-but-nobody-talks-about-it story in the NerdTV interview (it’s free people, check it out). It demonstrates not only his ability to distill trends from lots of noise, but how his company can also go on to become advocates for things that don’t get the proportional attention they have coming to them. Anyway, Macs… Yeah. They don’t have an O’Reilly conference this year.