Month: July 2008

No way!

http://www.evildeadthemusical.com/

Wow. I totally need to get to Toronto before September rolls around!

Matthew,

I have a process on Fedora 8, let’s call it sslexplorer (namely because that’s what it is.) I want to run a cron job every five minutes to make sure it’s running.

I type in crontab -e */5 * * * * “/etc/init.d/sslexplorer start” >/dev/null 2>&1

Is this correct? Are my quotes needed? Should I write a script that queries sslexplorer status and only starts it if it’s stopped?

If so, how much would it cost to have you write such a script for me? I’ll swap names with you on Sam’s baby, so he can name it Matthew Stephen Graber…

Thanks Weed

Got free tickets to see Mötley Crüe tonight at the Usana Amphitheater. Never was a fan of the band in high school, though, which was the last time I remember hearing about them (circa 1991 or so). Ahh, well, I’ll be the guy standing and singing “watermelon” to all the lyrics ‘cuz I don’t know them.

I’m sure you all have heard that Google unleashed the Beta version of Knol. Knol is Google’s response to Wikipedia. Google is going to try and compete with Wikipedia by paying subject matter experts to post encyclopedia-like reports. Payment will come from % share of ad clicks. Google is attempting to validate the credibility through payment and having others both rate, review and comment on the submissions.

I think I know why this is happening.

Tell me if you think I’m wrong, but it’s almost as though entering a Google search has gotten to the point at which a searcher is expecting one of the top 5 return hits to include a wikipedia link. Meaning, when you enter a search term, such as “labia”, you are inherently expecting a number of returns to pop, with a wikipedia link to be a grounding return. This way, amongst the 12B+ searchable web pages, the wikipedia return link operates as the normal, routine, trusted response amongst those other awkward links…(libiaplasty?). I have become conditioned to expect this, to see Wikipedia in the top searches.

Google pulling or diminishing the ranking of return would be obvious. And what’s happened is that Google has become almost a linked gateway to the true information beyond. It’s getting that way for YouTube as well. Put in any search term on Google and I’m waiting for wikipedia and YouTube within the top 5.

Thus, Google, as well as the other 2 search providers become weakened as the gateway to information. They become the gateway to Wikipedia and YouTube.

To be a competitive employer in Bangalore, India, in 2008, you need to offer a salary that is around 55%-75% of USA salaries. See India Grows Up. This is happening all across the IT sector outsourced to India.

When companies began outsourcing in the late 1990’s, the cost differential was incontestable. You could hire ten highly-qualified engineers for the cost of one engineer in the USA. On any balance sheet, moving certain operations to India made perfect sense. I’d like to offer my perspective on what this wage inflation in India means for global companies like UltraMegaCorp.

There are costs of doing business across the globe. These include meetings at weird hours, employees swinging shifts around to match up more of their co-workers, being tired or late on a regular basis, a time-gap and slowdown in development due to not having engineers local to each other, and communication barriers of language, culture, and expectations. This last bit is critical: what I say and what I mean are usually two different things. English has evolved as the technical language of choice among co-workers, but the huge variety of accents means that written English is the de-facto tech language. When you need to relay time-critical information, often a quick back-and-forth dialog can take the place of a long stream of electronic mail.

I’ll be the first to admit that many of my Indian counterparts seem just as eager and knowledgeable in my field as I am. They are motivated, helpful, communicative, and work really hard. I have been regularly impressed by the ability of some of my Indian co-workers to dive in and come out with a brilliant solution to a complex problem without needing much, if any, hand-holding by more experienced engineers State-side.

Then, just like in the USA, there are the four out of five who aren’t all that. Some people suck at the job. Some are newbies who can’t get a handle on their duties. Some have a bad attitude toward the work The difference is that in the USA, those people get their asses fired. Then they go to work somewhere that the Peter Principle isn’t so obviously working against them.

My complaint today is that lately UltraMegaCorp has been simply relegating those people to my team. I’m not happy having fourteen useless engineers and only three guys I can depend on working with me.

IMHO, the days of widespread wage inflation in Bangalore are drawing to a close. The city has turned into a new Silicon Valley, paying wages which, given US Dollar and Indian Rupee exchange rates, are close enough to those paid in California that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to outsource there anymore. You can pay less for engineers in Middle America.

In the pursuit of the Almighty Dollar, though, US companies aren’t giving up hope. One easy target for outsourcing is saturated, but a wealth of engineering expertise exists in third-tier markets like China and Eastern Europe, as well as additional non-Bangalore targets in India with a wealth of untapped talent.

I don’t see this as a bad thing, really. I think it’s a great thing. Although I don’t feel as secure in my State-side job, this natural progression of outsourcing driving up local wages and lifestyles in second-world countries up to first-world Western standards will have the inevitable result of improving the overall human condition. I’m a Humanist; I’m in favor of helping Humanity, and think this is a logical, needs-driven, capitalist method of bringing it about.

On the other hand, I think that our short-sighted focus on reducing immigration in the USA is a policy that is going to kill our competitiveness in the long run. We want the best and the brightest of the world to want to come here; we want to expand the H-1B program and other incentives to encourage highly intelligent, motivated, and educated people from around the world to see the USA as the place to go for a great job in a great environment. Yet we’ve reduced our H1B placements to a quarter of their levels in 2000, and have introduced drastic measures to limit legal and illegal immigration. Our entire stock of H1B visas went in less than 24 hours this year, almost every one snapped up by placement companies who rate candidates based upon how much the candidate could pay rather than their merit as an engineer.

Where am I going with all this?

In the late 1990s, the US was inundated with tech workers. Between tech colleges cranking out applicants looking for a quick buck in the tech sector and a quarter of a million people a year immigrating to the USA under the H1B program, we had a glut of technology workers, and a market willing to scoop them up the moment they got off the airplane or walked off the stage at graduation. Those days ended in the Dot-Com-Bubble-Bust of the early 2000’s, and although the winnowing of the field was painful — as my string of failed dot-com employers attest — today, many of those remaining in IT are the dedicated ones who love the job and are pretty good it.

I’m frustrated with the current state of the tech sector in Bangalore. The rise in wages, and steadily increasing demand, has led to an overall decrease in quality and quantity of work. As in the US, there are a few stand-outs and superstars who make up for a lot of their co-workers, but the quality of system administrator right now is on-par with what I experienced in the late 1990s in the US: too many who are in it for the money, and not enough love for the job.

I love being a system administrator. I didn’t just fall into the job; I wanted to do this, this exact thing, for a living. Tuning, optimizing, deploying, strategizing, purchasing, getting bloody knuckles from wrestling sheet metal and carpal tunnel from writing systems automation scripts and technical documentation. This messy job isn’t for the physically or mentally weak, nor is it a bastion for failed programmers, but a haven for people who really want to get down to the metal and fix what other people break and are willing to get dirty doing it.

I’m a mechanic, but for computers rather than automobiles. And I am thankful every day that the market values my skills at a reasonable living wage.

Let the damn Bangalore Bubble burst already, and let’s get on with wrangling systems rather than fighting incompetent, unmotivated co-workers. I want to work with more of the competent, reliable types who are willing to ride out the bad times for the love of the job, and not the hordes of useless sysadmin wannabes who are only interested in their next 15% pay raise.

I’m going to talk statistics. My wife recently took an advanced statistics course as part of her Masters program, and we ended up talking about what she learned. A lot. In particular, we spent a lot of time talking about how people misunderstand statistics. Common examples:

1. Statistics apply only to large numbers. If you don’t have a large enough data set, you can’t get anything meaningful out of the statistic. For instance, if I poll just ten people, I have too small a sample set to come to a decent conclusion.
2. Statistics apply globally, not locally. For instance, a woman has an 13% chance of getting breast cancer if she lives to age 85. This doesn’t mean your five-year-old daughter has a 1 in 8 chance of having breast cancer right now. Take a group of people over the span of 85 years, and you end up with that stat.
3. Drawing statistics from a small sample set, without looking at a similar larger sample set, leads to incorrect conclusion. If 97.7% of prison inmates eat meat, one might assume a correlation between eating meat and likelihood of becoming a prisoner until you measure the general population and find that 2.3% of the US population are vegetarians. The statistic has no particular meaning in a more limited context, it just reflects the similar statistic of the overall population.
4. Correlation does not equal causation. Just because two statistics tend to have some sort of relationship to one another doesn’t mean one causes the other. It does mean, however, that there is some sort of relationship there which might be worth exploring.
5. Discarding data that goes against your hypothesis. This is called “counting the hits and ignoring the misses”. For instance, people will often blame the weatherman for mis-calling a forecast, ignoring his 90% three-day-forecast success rate* the rest of the year. People remember the days he flubbed it, and forget the days things went as planned.
6. Choosing one point in a data set. Psychics often point to a single or a few tests in an examination that support their claim to be psychics. Although those exceptional results are outliers on the bell curve of probability, since they were not repeatable, they are not exceptional in the overall arc of testing.

Now to my specific complaint:

If I hear one more person say “if scientists can’t even predict the weather, how can they predict global warming?”, I’m going to scream. Ongoing climate change, including the current upward temperature trend, isn’t a hypothesis based on weather forecasts!

The weather forecast in your home town is a teeny, tiny part of an enormous chaotic system. That chaotic system, however, is a self-contained ecosystem, and the overall ecosystem can be measured — and statistics drawn — many different ways to come up with accurate global statistics that have precisely jack to do with weather you should carry an umbrella tomorrow.

For more information on how people misunderstand and abuse statistics, read How to Lie With Statistics.

* Note: Of course, that success rate has its own sub-set of ranges of temperatures and weather conditions where it might be considered a hit or a miss. The forecast for the coming weekend is going to change a lot between Monday and Friday. However, three-day forecasts are currently pretty accurate most of the time, particularly if you look at aviation charts. The moral of the story: three-day forecasts are really useful to plan your weekend, and mostly accurate. Beyond that, anything can happen because it’s a chaotic system.

It’s the 9th annual Sysadmin day today. You know… sysadmins? The people without whom your entire computing network would come crashing down in flaming ruins? According to the System Administrator Appreciation Day website, “on this special international day” you should “give your System Administrator something that shows that you truly appreciate their hard work and dedication.” And don’t mess up your damn PC by fiddling with it, for once.

After a day at work wishing I were riding, I spun the bike around the neighnorhood again, found a parking lot, and practiced entries and exits on turns at speed, plus panic braking, good turn signaling, and looking where I want to go. It makes me realize how lazy of a car driver I have been!

At the end, I was very concerned that I had no tach or idiot lights. I fixed the tach with some solder, shrink wrap, and adjusting, but the computer driving the non-functional LCD display might be beyond saving. The idiot lights should not even be in the same circuit, but they don’t light up when I turn the key.

Anyway, the instrument console is in pieces, and I picked up a new fork seal and fork oil. Figure the bike will be on its stand a few more days while I do a few minor repairs.

This will give me time to find a helmet that fits my XXL, very square head appropriately. I have always known I had a really big head. Trying to find a size helmet that doesn’t make my eyes bug out in pain confirmed this.

My poor, poor children. The wife has a large, square head too.

No pictures, I just wanted to talk about my experiences with my first day of motorcycle ownership.

On Day 0, I had gone with a very experienced riding friend to take a look at the eventual motorcycle I would own: a 1984 Honda VF1100S Sabre V65. It’s an 1100 CC motorcycle, but at a price of $900, it was cheap enough that I could pay cash and own the pink slip on the bike, and thereby keep my insurance rates incredibly low ($75/year). Spent several hours doing all the paperwork and chores to be able to ride legally in Utah.

I had spent several preceding weeks reading instructions, watching videos, and making sure I knew the relevant laws and best-practices regarding riding a motorcycle. But I recognized the same feeling that I’d had prior to trying to fly my first airplane: an unfounded confidence that I would be fine without practicing.

So I broke out my mountain bike during the week my wife was away and spent some time getting used to riding on two wheels again. I loved it; I was reminded why I’d bought the bike in the first place. I had read about counter-balancing and counter-steering on a motorcycle, and realized I did this naturally on my mountain bike. My experience with many years in a stick-shift car had also taught me the necessity of having a soft touch on the clutch to ensure smooth acceleration.

Day 1: My friend drove the bike back to my house, we had a few words regarding operation and what all the switches and buttons do, how to shift properly, and then I took him to lunch at a local Irish-themed restaurant to thank him.

Once I got home, I got over my fear, and sat down on the bike for only the second time. I re-acquainted myself with the controls: clutch, front brake, rear brake, gearshift, neutral, first gear, horn, lights, emergency kill, choke, turn signal… all good. Turn the key. Beep the horn. Play with turn signals. Fiddle with high/low beams. Verify turns signals are all in working order. Break out the PSI indicator and make sure the inflation matches the recommendation in my owner’s manual. Check the suspension… hmm, looks like the left front fork has a bit more oil/dirt than the left. Need to plan a fork pressure/leak check, maybe before I hit highway speeds.

Back it out. Turn it around. Face toward my gravel cul-de-sac down the driveway. Full choke. Squeeze both levers. Go to neutral — all clicks down, half-click up. Huh, neutral is easy to miss. Try again. OK, press start. 30 seconds on full choke, 60 seconds on half-choke, then no choke.

Eased it into first. Remember to brake with the back wheel for slow-speed maneuvers. Begin a gentle left circle around my cul-de-sac.

I’m not breathing.

Stopped the bike. Killed the engine. Paused. Took several deep breaths. Went back into the house, got a drink of water, talked with the wife.

Went back and got on again. Now let’s do right-hand circles. Remember to use the rear brake in slow-speed, not the front. Don’t dump the bike! Let out the clutch a bit, hey, look, it straightens itself out just like the book said!

OK, my circles are getting better and tighter. My cul-de-sac is fifty feet wide. Feels big enough to do figure-eights. OK, right-hand figure-eights are fine. Left-hand? OK, try it slower. Use the rear brake and feather the clutch to keep RPMS up while making a really tight turn.

The gravel is pretty slippery in a tight turn. Probably best not to try to go any tighter until I get some experience on asphalt.

Took another break. Total time on bike: 90 minutes so far. Unfortunately, I live on a cul-de-sac attached to a main road. The only way to get any asphalt driving is to cross the highway. Well, nothing to be said for it.

Rode to the intersection. Chickened out, duck-walked to turn around because I wasn’t confident of my U-turn ability yet. Went home. Had dinner. Waited for rush-hour traffic to die.

Tried again later. Chickened again, went back to my cul-de-sac and practiced not stalling out the bike when moving into first gear. Finally got up the gumption, waited for a HUGE gap in traffic, and crossed to the 25MPH neighborhood streets across the way. Kept the speed down to around 15-20MPH, played with the speed bumps, found a parking lot. Practiced hard stops and starts. Imagined an obstacle, practiced a weave, realized I still suck at it and won’t be ready for the highway for a while yet.

Left the parking lot, found the right road back to my house. Virtually no traffic, easily rode back and parked it in my garage.

Total time riding: 3 hours. My hands ache. I’m very sweaty from my thick leather jacket and gloves.

Stayed up until 1AM reviewing motorcycle safety and instructional videos. Watched crash videos and analysis. Realized that there are a bunch of ways cars can kill me that aren’t much under my control. Resolved to work more on SEE techniques, swerving, and hard braking tomorrow. Riding an 1100CC motorcycle is decidedly different from riding an human-powered mountain bike.

Today is tomorrow. Stuck at work, and all I want to do is go ride 🙂

The comet Swift-Tuttle left an enormous trail of debris in our solar system, and each August our little spacecraft Earth flies through this trail again. The meteors are beginning to be visible, and will peak between August 8 and 12.

The falling stars are most visible from 11PM through dawn, increasing spectacularly a few hours before dawn. Schedule some time with your loved ones and watch this beautiful annual event.