Author: matthew

Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day!

Yeah, like Secretary’s day, only fewer people know about it. Anyway, yay me. And if I recall correctly, Yay Weed, too. If I’ve missed you, let me know and keep me in the loop next time, would you?

And to all you other under-appreciated, glad-hearted system administrators, may your data centers stay cool, your networks stay up, and your blood pressure stay down.

So my music collection has ballooned to about 140GB of tunes. I use high-quality encoding, so it’s not a gigantic collection, but there’s plenty to it.

But we’ve run into a snag.

You see, we use iTunes to manage our music. Christy has a Mac; I use Linux, another Mac, or a Windows PC (depending on what I’m doing). Up until the music collection got huge, we just kept the “master” copy on Christy’s Mac, and I’d use rsync to duplicate the library to other systems as needed. Simple, and it allowed us to sync tunes to an iPod which, if you use the Rendezvous stuff that iTunes wants you to, you can’t do from someone else’s shared library.

Now that our library is that big, I’m using an external hard drive, but it’s clunky, and due to filesystem restriction the Mac can’t write to it. It’s totally work-around-able, but irritating. And who wants to lug around a second hard drive when you want to listen to some tunes while typing away on your laptop?

So step forward. Here we have 120GB of tunes. We can’t just share it out over a network easily for iTunes to connect to, because the database format will vary between a PC and a Mac (the paths to files are totally different). I think I figured out how to make it work, but it’s a bit of a hack. Also, we like to take some music with us on trips, and how do you take just part of your collection, other than an iPod?

Some obvious solutions present themselves:

1. Upgrade the hard drives in our laptops and desktops. You can pick up a 250GB for about $200 in a laptop form factor, and for the desktops it’s substantially cheaper ($100 for 500 GB). This is the most expensive option, and not entirely satisfactory since one laptop belongs to my employer. Total cost is around $600, plus massive amounts of annoyance as I reinstall applications and operating systems.

2. Make a computer in my house into a Linux server. Heck, I have one available. Stick a single large hard drive into it, then mount the music collection over the network from clients. This is the cheapest option, at only $100 for the new large HDD, but the downside is that when we’re not at home, our iTunes collections — except on our iPods — are not available. This method also involves some strange hackery to make sure the iTunes databases for the PC and Mac are kept separate.

3. Use some other clever method suggested by you.

So how would you approach the “problem” of having a music library which is entirely too large to put on a notebook PC without a significant hard drive upgrade.

Bill Lodbell, former religion writer for the LA Times, writes movingly regarding his de-conversion from Christianity and move from being a religion writer of 9 years into something less painful.

My soul, for lack of a better term, had lost faith long ago — probably around the time I stopped going to church. My brain, which had been in denial, had finally caught up.

Clearly, I saw now that belief in God, no matter how grounded, requires at some point a leap of faith. Either you have the gift of faith or you don’t. It’s not a choice. It can’t be willed into existence. And there’s no faking it if you’re honest about the state of your soul.

Sitting in a park across the street from the courthouse, I called my wife on a cellphone. I told her I was putting in for a new beat at the paper.

Bill gets it. Being de-converted from faith isn’t something you search for. You look with longing at those who seem to be happy in their faith, wishing you could have something like it, following the recipes piously proclaimed from the pulpit, putting your whole heart into it.. and finding nothingness in return. It isn’t that one day you set out to be an atheist… one day you wake up and realize you are one, despite your best efforts to believe.

Too bad most believers don’t get it. One stinging criticism still rings in my mind, from someone very close to me: “The way I see it, you went looking for a reason to quit”. Nothing could be further from the truth.

With no adequate way to defend your heart from that kind of abuse, there is little solace to be found in acknowledging the truth about yourself. Just a long, empty silence with elephants dancing in the living room while you try to ignore them.

So over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been listening to more Big-Band music. Dean Martin. Frank Sinatra. Michael Bublé. And I’m finding that, far from feeling like an old fart, I’m energized by it. I started my day with “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”, and listened to more hits from the forties — and new music in that style — for the rest of the day.

Dang, it was good. Sure, it’s music older than that which my parents grew up with. Maybe my grandparents would have been into it. But I just periodically find myself tired of the same-old-same-old pop/country/rock/metal that I’ve listened to in new incarnations since I was a teenager, and long for something more interesting.

So what music have you recently discovered — or rediscovered — that has you tapping your toes, humming at work, and waking up in the morning dancing in front of the bathroom mirror?

So it turns out the world’s fastest way to text someone… is Morse Code. Yep, the world’s fastest texter is now a 93-year-old man, and not some teenager.

All I gotta’ say is “right on!”

A recent article in the Washington Post outlines expansion of aid programs to laid-off computer workers who’s jobs have been moved offshore. Last year, there were 1400 petitions approved and 800 denied. The denied ones were predominantly IT workers with jobs that were off-shored. Up until now, they were denied aid because they did not create “goods” to reach the market.

What do you think of this expansion of government aid to off-shored IT jobs? Unnecessary intervention in free trade? Not enough aid? A valuable contribution to a growing problem of IT workers requiring retraining due to jobs shipped to India and Uzbekistan?

HPATDH just came out this weekend. We picked it up at 2:10 AM on Saturday morning. I finished reading it at 8:00 PM, which time also included two hours of sleep, an hour of chores, four hours of absolutely disgusting clean-up of toxic slime, rusted barrels, and old tires which were a breeding ground for who-knows-what at my flying field, two hours of flying and eating lunch, and of course the rest of the time spent reading. The book is currently in my daughter’s hands, and she’s about halfway through.

Maybe being able to read quickly is genetic in some form.

Anyway, spoilers follow, so stop reading if you haven’t read yet!

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I was surprised at how well Rowling brought together so many lingering issues from previous books and wrapped them up. Her attempts to do this, in my opinion, gave the first half of the book a sort of “distant” feel, as the direction-less wanderings of Ron, Hermione, and Harry brought them into contact with former friends and acquaintances.

It didn’t really feel like the book had a very distinct purpose until the moment that Dobby died. Harry’s refusal to use magic to dig the grave for the sole free house-elf seemed to mark a changing point where Rowling said “OK, preamble’s done, now on with the show”.

I was appalled at how free her pen was with killing off favorite characters. I understand why she did it, though. She had to impress upon the reader the seriousness of the situation and show that it could happen to other favorite characters, too. Kind of like the “red shirts” of Star Trek fame.

I still don’t quite understand the wand-ownership deal, though. Voldemort stole the wand from Dumbledore’s corpse… at what point prior to that had Draco taken it from Dumbledore, and Harry had taken it from Draco? I’ll probably have to re-read to get that detail if someone doesn’t explain it.

I wish Snape had been able to explain himself earlier in the story. That was a very unsatisfying end. I guess death is never neat and clean, but the use of the Pensieve for memories which Snape just happened to be carrying with him at the time of his death felt like an “oh crap how am I going to fit this in?” plot device. Rowling’s a bit famous for those, and I think just about any book or movie which has more than a few episodes written after one another rather than as a cohesive unit is going to have similar troubles unifying the storyline.

Regardless, a good read which I thoroughly enjoyed.

So I still play City of Heroes from time to time with some real-life friends. The only reason I even log on these days is to hang out with people that I know, and have some fun experiences together.

Anyway, for the next issue of the game, the Rikti invading again, and some players participating in the Beta of the new issue have released a video promoting the update. It really does look to be pretty cool, with high-level players participating in the Rikti War Zone being able to cause or avert invasions across the entire CoH world. The villains and heroes are also united in this zone, with new story arcs to play through and new Rikti factions to defeat.

One of the more nifty features seems to be that Rikti drop ships will appear elsewhere in the CoH/CoV universe based on the actions of the player, with players who participate in repelling the invasion in that suburb given some kind of in-game reward for their actions.

Yeah, the game still has a lot of “go to this random map which looks like a lot of other maps, defeat everybody in there, and click on the glowing objects” for it, but the new stories they are producing are kind of nifty.

A man and his wife were having an argument about who should brew the coffee each morning. The wife said, “You should do it, because you get up first, and then we don’t have to wait as long to get our coffee”.

The husband said, ” You are in charge of the cooking around here and you should do it, because that is your job, and I can just wait for my coffee.”

Wife replies, “No you should do it, and besides it is in the Bible that the man should do the coffee.” Husband replies, “I can’t believe that, show me.”

So she fetched the Bible, and opened the New Testament and shows him at the top of several pages, that it indeed says:”HEBREWS”

Money doesn’t fix everything… but it fixes a lot of things.

–Kelly Clarkson