recentlog

wayward:



Backticks are your friend. I suppose brace expansion could help you, but of course you mention the zero padding issue. The shell is nothing if not a collection of loosely coupled applications. I won't mention monad. Okay, so I did. But anyways, you're going to want to either write a small script, like "range.sh" (some platforms already have an application called "range", but it is trivially easy to write in perl or shell), and place it in ~/bin, or /usr/local/username/bin, or whatever floats your boat. Writing a function for bash may polish up your skills in bash, but I like that script too, and I might use tcsh. Or zsh. Or hell, even monad. Ack!



Physicman:



The french should be ashamed. But are any of us really surprised? I still remember that grey haired fellow at the UN being an argumentative and contemptuous little bastard. Sabliere? I really forget his name. At any rate, france has long opposed any progress in the world (decades now), as it has ceased entirely to be relevant to the world. Those assholes were testing nukes above ground as recently as what, 1996? In the pacific of all places? Maybe this seems a little off the mark for you, but my wife and I were planning a vacation out to the south pacific recently, when I was shocked to discover that I could "visit ground zero" at .cx. They have been thumbing their nose and generally losing relevance, as I said, for decades. Sooner or later, the world will move on. Without them. Coffin.nail.increment();



cdfrey:



You gotta love libpq. It is too bad it doesn't talk to other databases, but only because it is in fact so cool. Think about this for a moment, however. Postgres is in many ways different than other databases on the market. In order to use libpq with other databases, you would either have to dilute the interface, or you'd have to have vendor specific extensions. The former case sucks, of course, because you lose what makes postgres (and thus libpq) so nifty. The latter case is just as bad as the former, as I can write libpq code for Oracle that won't port to Postgres. Some example code might be worthwhile here, but all I can think of right now is C# code, and I'd probably be stoned (as in rocks, not as in bongs, folks) for it.

Work

So, I had dinner with the Risachers this weekend. We used to spend more time with Dan, but then he got married, and had kids, and then I got married, and we both sort of moved, and got new jobs, and you know, people drift apart. How funny it is that as we have drifted apart personally, we've actually drawn closer ideologically and professionally. It's very hard to straddle the line of "just Alex" and "Alex from the Microsoft Corporation" when you are talking business over dinner. So Dan was on to this whole Windows thing before I ever was. And many an afternoon was spent with him trying to convince me that (since Windows 2000 I suppose) Windows really had a valid platform, and that my (at the time) Unix zealotry was closed minded and bigoted. Now Dan will be the first to admit, he is one of the unwashed RMS faithful. He even runs Linux on some Ultra 60's at the office (this really upset me). But here we were, at dinner, and I'm telling him how great I think C# is, and how impressed I've been with my laptop (a Tecra), and how very cool the Cornell Theory Center was. Where do you draw the line? At least once, I wanted to say "well, if you like that, I can call somebody at work, and I can set you up with free or close to free training on xyz subject". But Alex can't do that. Alex from Microsoft can, and Alex from Microsoft wasn't invited to dinner. Gack.



Bottom line: I had been worrying that my employment here had skewed my original perspective. Talking to somebody who has been my friend for years, and being able to have what amount to the same conversations, back and forth between Unix, Windows, and Linux, reminded me of who I was back then. I don't think I've changed. I've learned a lot. But, you know who has changed? Microsoft.



Lastly, I've been working with some coworkers on a technology demo. One of the things we're demonstrating is single sign on across Linux, VMS, Solaris, Windows, various handhelds, and other platforms I can't remember. I have been very pleasantly surprised. SSO really works. What, though, is Apple's problem? They provide the entire setup for interfacing with LDAP or ADS, and yet they stuff it away in a hard to find place where nobody will use it. With Linux, you have PAM. Solaris understands LDAP just fine. But Apple hides it away in /Applications/Utilities. A control panel^W^W preference pane would be appropriate. A domain login (okay, so maybe that's too reminiscent of windows?). Something. But it seems that where the rest of the industry is moving towards netcentricity (bzz! bzz!), Apple is trying to foist a laptop-as-island platform on us. It's stupid. And not in a cute, sleek, 1"-thick-and-aluminum kind of way.

Wikipedia

Some people on IRC asked me to go over with them the saga of my involvement with the wikipedia. It's heartening to know that other people think the ideological (I'd really call it more like theological, it's so irrational) inertia is worth changing, but I don't see it amounting to anything.



I've also been reclassifying a lot of the firearms pages into their own categories. Only somebody who was an unashamed gun-grabber would insist that all firearms were military devices. We recently purchased an M-14. We have plans to own an AR-15, and in Virginia, we can own an M-16. There are even a few on gunbroker. But anyways, it's kind of sad that the wikipedia is so intensely liberal.

Life

Saw HHGTTG in the theater. It was okay, I suppose. Zaphod, as expected, was a real disappointment. Marvin was great. I think that by itself, the movie was okay. They were really faced with an insurmountable task; you simply can't make that book into a movie. It's impossible. So, I prefer to think of them as separate entities. Alone, both were enjoyable (and I read all of them before Young Zaphod Plays it Safe was published, so I have no idea if subsequent books were any good)



On Star Wars:







1. Ewan McGregor is 100 times the actor that whoever that Anakin guy is. He really carried the film. In the interest of not spoiling the movie, I won't give details, but I really think that the last scene was amazing. At least his part of it. I kept thinking of Renton (another book that was impossible to make into a movie), and how far Ewan had come, and what a great job he was doing as Ben Kenobi.
   
2. George Lucas should not direct movies. Ever. He's not even that great an author. I think what made the movie worth watching, besides Ewan, was the luscious cinematography. I think as we left the theater, I was calling it "filmography" or something. The look and feel was incredible. Oh, except the parts where they used massive. Massive, while cool, has a certain "regularity" to it that just doesn't look real when you've got huge groups of clones, droids, or whatever. Starship Troopers, for all its terribility, had great, plausibly-moving insect critters (gosh, ANOTHER book turned movie!). But Lucas doesn't know the meaning of the word subtle. He can't just have Ewan or Samuel Jackson say "...but the children!". He's gotta show you the baby mulching happening, and then show it to you again, and then have everybody crying about it, over and over again, in order to demonstrate that somebody is evil. Oh. And just as I said about Haldeman's _Forever War_, nobody wants to read a science fiction book about Viet Nam. Well, George, nobody wants to watch a science fiction movie about Iraq. To see (gosh, it's not Anna Paquin, it's um... That one girl with the stupid hair and makeup from Naboo) say "so this is how it ends ..." and then prattle on about democracy and evil... Okay. I get the point. We just went through one of the most polarizing elections we've ever had. I get it. I didn't need to hear it again, and certainly not from you.
   
3. Lightsabers. Okay, so my 1911 (a pistol for you kerryites) has this little loop at the bottom of the butt. It's intended to connect to a lanyard, so that should somebody pull on your gun, it stays connected to your body. If you're a Jedi, you know that every previous Jedi who has been killed has been killed because his lightsaber fell off a building, was cut in half, or whatever. Clip it to your belt. I'll even lend you a badge pull.
   
4. Lastly, this is the first Star Wars movie that is clearly for adults. People bitched about how dark and ominous it was, but come on. We had to get from Jar Jar to the beginning of the original films, which, let's face it, were very dark. It reminded me a lot of Cyteen, even (more books?). Lots of political intrigue. You could have taken all the fight scenes out of it (especially that goddamn lizard thing on that one planet with all the droids), and rough-cut between dialogue scenes, and I still would have liked it. But, nobody's gonna make a film that is even more like that, so I'm just stuck reading CJ Cherryh. Which, really, doesn't suck.
   




Cheryl, thank you very much for the steaks.

technology

I recently read about a weapon I'd not heard of before. It's all classified, or at least the actual weapons which (may) have been built are. The principle is ingenious: you create a shaped charge which creates a plasma. Plasma is ionized, so you can essentially create a large, rapidly moving magnet with an explosive. You then direct this explosion (by way of a shaped charge) through carefully positioned superconductors. The result is a huge discharge of radiation. Not gamma rays, although that would be feasible, but an electromagnetic pulse. The nature of the weapon is that it is focused, so we don't have the problem of indiscriminate EMP warfare as we would have from nuclear weapons. Attach a few JSOW's or JDAM's configured as these new "e-bombs" to an F-18 or a B-2, and the range of the bomb (which actually glides to its target rather than drop like a rock) enables the plane to get away before the pulse is generated. The pulse is subsequently generated, lights go out, and you can mop up everything else with a BUFF. Daaaaaamn. Aside from the fact that we're talking about killing people here, the possibilities are really cool. You don't have to make an EMP. You could use such a design (which if you think about it is an explosive-powered generator) to power a laser, or many other devices requiring huge power for short periods. Imagine an ABM which contains an explosive/generator and some sophisticated targeting. You could literally launch a missile that "turned into" a powerful laser and zapped another missile. You could create enormous satellites which were capable of vaporizing huge swaths of troops or armor, burn through buildings, and so on. You could probably even use something like this for space travel. Solid propellants are somewhat inefficient, but I would imagine you could actually use a nuclear explosion in a similar fashion. Incredible.



In other news, Lockheed developed a man-portable missile system which mimics the kinetic energy penetrator the Abrams tank uses.



Have a look.



What you're seeing is a 3,500mph (mach 5, give or take) missile travelling 3/4 of a kilometer, and impacting an armored personnel carrier (it looks like a Bradley or a Stryker, but I don't think that's what it is, I don't know what an "MPC" is). What is really amazing about this is the missile itself doesn't actually carry a warhead. It carries a kinetic penetrator made out of tungsten (which is slightly lighter but much harder than plumbum). You are probably seeing fuel go up, but you're really seeing the conversion of armor to gas. It's just incredible. Nothing short of the fastest missile on the planet (NASA's recent scramjets are probably faster), which happens to be man portable.



The project was killed. So we aren't going to see these in the field. Reminds me of that gun that fired small rocket darts (a pistol) rather than bullets. Kinetic penetrators are just such neat technology.

I apologize for this entry being so long. I feel there was adequate content, and for those of you who already ignore me, it's not as if it was any harder to ignore this entry.

I accumulated this over a couple days, so please take terms like "today" and other things indicating chronologiciousness as relative.

Work

I had an excellent meeting today with the previously mentioned Monty O'Kelley.
We really clicked on a lot of stuff, and it's nice to know that there are more
Unix people than just me at Microsoft. A lot of what he said, regarding MS's
position in the market, seems experientially true. Some (warning, estimation)
80% or so of Unix people are really just interested in maintaining the network,
and making sure that things don't fail, printers work, and users don't come
knocking at their doors. This isn't because Sysadmins (and particularly Unix
admins) are antisocial, really (although quite a few of us are); that's simply
the best metric we have of whether we're doing our job. Do the users need us?



We generally hope that they don't. We generally want our stuff to be up and
running around the clock. I think after that comes "pretty", "open" and "Free"
(note big eff), and probably in that order. Since my job doesn't involve the
desktop end so much, I don't have any real qualms about lots of Windows users
struggling with the occasional unintuitive dialog box, etc. My job is to make
sure that stuff works. And generally, it does.



I'd like to discuss the "open" and "Free" parts of that above equation a little,
since so many of us bang that drum, and it is used so frequently to shoot down a
non-Unix (and really, we're talking about Windows here) solution. I think that
many manufacturers in fact produce "open" products. Solaris, HPUX, IRIX, and all
the Unix ilk all have various implementations of POSIX, and have ANSI (usually
C) compilers. This means that we as programmers and sysadmins can more or less
expect stuff to compile on any of them. They're not necessarily "Free", but they
are "open". Well, as anyone who has used a mac in the last five years can tell
you, even though it might not smell like Unix, if POSIX and ANSI C are
supported, who cares what color box it comes in? If it works, it works. The real
test then becomes metrics. Things that the pointyhairs like to measure. You
know, uptime, TCO, etc. They're all really esoteric numbers, and as anyone will
tell you, benchmarks are frequently entirely worthless. I could get into
why this is, but I think anyone who has really sat down and thought about
benchmarks realizes that it is very hard to come up with an ideal benchmark, or
two closely related benchmarks when the environments are as divergent as Unix
and Windows (or VMS, or Linux, or ...).



So I also mention "Free". Redhat sells a very nice version of Linux. They call
it "Redhat Enterprise Linux". They cover both "Free" and "open", and even get
"pretty", some of the time. However, the product they have is not "free". When
I want to set up a dual opteron box to do some development on, I can download
300+ .src.rpm's, and I can go through all the trouble of building those fuckers
myself. But at the end of it, was it really worth my time? I could just pay the
$2200 for the license. (for those of you who just twitched, yeah, have you
looked at the cost of a Redhat license?) How many hours will you sit,
compiling away cross dependancies before you realize that it's cheaper to pay
the $2200? I wouldn't get through my first beer before I downloaded a product
like WBEL, White Box Enterprise Linux, or paid $6 for it on eBay.



I think of Mark-Jason Dominus when I think of the above two arguments. I can
just picture him (sorry mjd) pitching Windows in a meeting. A Unix guy says
"Well, we tried to compile our code on Windows and it didn't work. We estimate
that it will take six months to port." Just imagine mjd throwing back across
the table "you can't just shit in a box and call it code, retardo!"



The fact is, a non-Free system with a modicum of "open" compliance can compile
and run well written code from anyone. From any vendor. If you find yourself
having to recompile, port, and de-specificize your code when the phb's mandate
you switch to {Linux|Solaris|Windows|VMS}, you wrote bad fucking code. You can
sort of get past this by using high-level interpreted languages, like our friend
perl, but even with perl there are gotchas you need to respect when you write
code.



Apologies again to mjd, but I see him as an objective, rational man. He may be
a little more colorful than some of us, but I can't picture any rational,
practical man coming off with some deus ex machina explanation for why there
is no way a Unix customer can move to Windows. The support is there. Is your
code?



So I also have been taking some training this week (which kind of impinges on the rest of my schedule unfortunately... I've never had to use Outlook's calendaring so religiously!), and one of the women there mentioned that Virtual PC can run some odd version of Solaris 8 -- she thought it was 4/02, but that anything newer was "broken by Sun." Microsoft's stance on VPC/Solaris is "Not Supported" (big enn, big ess). This seems strange, but I really wouldn't put it past either of them to break Solaris on VPC. It (VPC Server) cuts into Sun's virtualized hosting customer base, and vice-versa. Frankly, I'm not all that curious to try it except that I am really quite concerned about keeping my Unix skills as sharp as they have been.

Life

In a certain town in northern Virginia, where a certain ISP resides (let's say
UUNet), my employer keeps a campus. And so today I found myself on the same turf
as that very ISP, and bumped into an employee of a certain previous employer.



I really don't have much animosity for anyone in specific. I try not to. It's
unhealthy. But damn, the middle fingers were itching at the thought of actually
having to talk to a certain shortly cropped and gelled-and-pointedly-haired
head. I suppose enough to surprise myself.



The folks at alt.sysadmin.recovery have always seemed to me to be overreacting
and kind of childish in their sheer hatred of management, of the "suits" who
pay them, and the companies that employ them. But today, for a moment, I
completely empathized.



In other news, it's fucking cold, and fucking rainy, in northern Virginia.
The udon isn't exactly warm enough to cut through it, and I'd really rather we
just make with the 100F and humidity and summer. Really.



Ok! Ok! Today it was, well, felt like, 80F or so. I just happened to brainfault on a web form, and got my Fedex package (yay, new headphones, shure for the wife and etymotic for me) dumped at the facility at New York Ave. The whole way there I was muttering about the heat and the sun, and the fact that there were hookers and ambulances everywhere. I mean, who picks up a hooker at 5pm? Isn't this some sort of nocturnal activity that happens in Miami-Dade with a COPS crew watching? To top this off, there were numerous people-who-live-on-new-york-avenue-no-I-really-mean-on-the-asphalt-not-in-a-townhouse sorts, and I happened to be carrying about the extent of my personal electronics in a large black backpack that says quite clearly on it "17 inch powerbook aboard, mug and pawn at will", but there were goddamn luer lock needles and plastic bio sample containers (which I assume have replaced the brown glass crack vial on the streets of DC). I mean honestly. I haven't seen a luer lock needle since Ketamine made schedule 1. (take that, plans for public office!) And while I am at it, I had to explain to a canadian friend of mine (who happens to know I possess a concealed carry permit) that I was not taking a handgun with me (take that, Bill DeStevens!), as it is in fact our fine nation's capitol, where only the criminals are allowed to have guns. Hookers, needles, ambulances, and bums, oh my.



Ah, but I have digressed. So all this muttering about the heat and the city were immediately quelled upon entering the metro train coming home. Immediately awash in the air conditioning, I happily sat amongst three quite attractive women, traveling separately (attractive women traveling in packs is so much more intimidating, don't you think?), and all wearing very pretty sun dresses. Okay, so one was more of a sun skirt, but still. And getting on the train into Arlington was met with more of the same. Oh happy day, the sun has come back to the Metro DC area, and the clothing has come off.



Except for that beautiful citizen with the USS New Mexico cap on and the absolutely putred BO.

nymia:

sic semper tyrannis is another good one. Particularly when painted on a nuclear submarine.

wikipedia

Been bickering with some users, but then what else is new? It's a community full of people who don't understand software development and collaboration in general. Somebody once described FOSS as "egoware". I don't think that person had ever seen the Wikipedia.

Work

I don't think I can recommend the Cornell Theory Center enough. I learned today that in addition to the training for Microsoft partners at their Manhattan and Ithaca campuses (I would recommend against Ithaca, but if you go, stay at the Statler or get a car. Really.), they offer onsite training, special "concentrated" training for people considering Windows clustering, and consultations for sites which are having issues. Much of this is done without fees.



It has become clear to me that the more I start to accept this technology, more people will label me a shill and disregard what I say. You may have gathered from my previous posts that I really came into this with a healthy dose of skepticism. So, I would suggest to all of those people that I'm still the "Unix Guy" I was six months ago, only now I have a fuller understanding of Windows, and what it is capable of. The stuff that I've seen here at Cornell has been very cool. They're a bunch of driven, competent people, who seem to have a real interest in bringing HPC to a broader market (they use the term "your mother in law", but what they really mean is "we want Bioinformaticists to be Bioinformaticists, not Computer Scientists). If Microsoft can get behind the product and find a way to market it to the audience that will most readily accept it, they really and truly could start seeing a paradigm shift in HPC.



Which brings me to my next point. Besides some of the stuff that they've given us being kind of rough (I feel that honesty is really the best practice here, and they do too. Saying that the training has been polished and end-user-ready would not be true. There's a lot of good content, but you have to be able to extrapolate from what you're seeing.). Cornell is using a combination of products from Verari (their Cluster Controller and their MPI suite) in their clustering implementation. Neither of these are "open" solutions. I find myself wondering whether we can convince members of the HPC community (and not necessarily the "Unix" community, HPC is broader than just Unix) that they can do this with closed, proprietary systems. While Intel does offer an MPI library which is Free (as in Beer, you've got 30 days), Verari does not. Also, while MPI is a mostly agreed upon standard (which even has Perl bindings!), I don't necessarily trust that Intel's implementation will work with Verari's. I mostly think that the HPC community wants to see an open, accepted standard, which they can compile their own source from. I just don't see that here, and I'm frankly not sure that the HPC community will buy it. Cornell seems to think that the benefits of Windows based clusters (which I don't need to go into here) will be enough to entice customers/users to evaluate it. That's heartening, but as I've said before, We Shall See.



I'm personally sold. It is worth mentioning that Verari has a Mac OS X port of their MPI libraries, and MPI is not so hard to code (in C even!!). The hard part is really figuring out how you want to structure your application. Coding for a cluster means you need to decouple your application as much as you can, and that is sometimes hard. The alternative is spending gigabucks on things like Myrinet for your cluster interconnects, and you're still paying a tres cher price for that luxury. Talking across the bus, even on anemic Intel procs, is going to be orders of magnitude faster than talking across even 10GE.

Life

Even when I'm not "Working For Microsoft," I still have to deal with other peoples' impression of me. It occurred to me at dinner this evening, as I was drinking a Murphy's Stout (gack, there was no Guinness at the pub in Ithaca), "does this beer mean anything in the context of my being a Microsoft employee?" All of the people I've met have been very gracious and nobody's given me the kind of shit I or one of my colleagues would have given a Microsoft employee six months ago. However, when I and one of my coworkers couldn't get a particular thing working in one of the labs, it wasn't "Alex and Steve can't fix XYZ problem," it was always "The Microsoft Guys...". It's been hard adapting to the role of somebody who always has to be on their best behavior.



Sungo used to talk about how AOL would never put us in cubes, or would realize the folly of their ways if they did, as management would hear the shrieking "cocks, ass, fuck, shit", etc, coming out of the cubes and wafting through the hallway. Sungo is of course a little more ... boisterous than the rest of us, but I don't think it's too far off. Even when I'm not "representing the company," I find that people are measuring me against some yardstick that includes Microsoft. Looking across the dinner table at me, they're not thinking, "Alex from class today," they're thinking "that guy from Microsoft [what's his name?] who came to our class to spy on us today." It kind of makes me sad, but at the same time, I'm glad I've had the experience. It just might break me of my habit of (first uttering, then) yelling "fuck!" when something breaks.



That having been said, it's been very flattering, too. Most of the people I have talked to, when engaged semiprivately, have said that they have a relatively high opinion of Microsoft people, and most of the "rough housing" we get is just because we can take it. I suppose that's both flattering to me, and testimony to how skilled the company is in general. I'm frankly glad to be a part of a force regarded that way. We can take the insults because goddammit, we're good enough to.

wikipedia

I've been avoiding bitching about teh fancy intarpedia lately. But they haven't been disappointing, and have been providing me with plenty to bitch and moan about.




Database error
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
A database query syntax error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was:

     (SQL query hidden)

 from within function "Parser::replaceLinkHolders". MySQL returned error "1053: Server shutdown in progress (10.0.0.24)".




This, in addition to the frequent outages on the Wiktionary makes me think that they're aware that they cannot sustain their current traffic and they're giving preferential capacity to Wikipedia over Wiktionary. I could just be paranoid, but I have much more consistent errors with Wiktionary than Wikipedia. At any rate, they've known about this problem at least since February, and they still haven't fixed it. I think they're still trying to figure out why it's so dark with their heads buried in the sand. But, what do I care, right?

Work

In Ithaca for the Cornell Theory Center Windows HPC training. Ithaca is not somewhere I'm going to put on my list of places to hang out for a while. It's a small town with polite people, I suppose. But really, I had to explain that "Washington, DC" was in fact a city, "Washington" and a "state," "DC", which stood for "District of Columbia". It took her a while to figure out. Although in her defense, she did understand that "Wisconsin Avenue Northhwest" is written "Wisconsin Ave, NW". I understand there are streets like that in Chicago, though. So perhaps that wasn't so hard. She is apparently a student at Cornell. There are also precisely six places which deliver to my hotel. Four of which are pizza joints (including one Pizza Hut and three local places). When I saw this initially, I asked her, "am I seeing this correctly, that there is only pizza here to eat?". She helpfully corrected me indicating that there was a buffalo wings place in the stack of menus as well. Thankfully, there's also what looks like a terrific Chinese place, with the authentic-sounding name "Wok Village". I find myself wondering whether I can survive on blue gatorade and vanilla power bars for four days. I suppose since buffalo wings actually originated in this area, I might try it out. Of course, since I can't consume buffalo wings without alcohol, I may be shit outta luck.



I'll actually followup with something meaningful later this week.

Work

I actually caught myself correcting a coworker on some of the more subtle aspects of the NT kernel today. Kind of freaky, but kind of cool. It's really becoming one more operating system that I know enough to really have a discussion about. It's kind of weird to be learning it from the inside out, as opposed to outside in, which is more typical. I started with .NET and Visual Studio. As a developer, I felt those were more approachable. I was pointed in the direction of the excellent Microsoft Windows Internals, 4th ed (a couple people have asked me what I thought of the book as they were not quite ready to buy it -- I think very highly of it). It's interesting to see the forward by Dave Cutler, as it really indicates where NT came from. Anyways, between those two, I have to admit I still don't have a great understanding of the interface. That is, I understand how, for example, Active Directory actually works, but I haven't gotten to the point where I can configure it via the interface.



I am again confronted by the idea that Windows is a well thought out and implemented operating system with an inconsistent and (sometimes, I suppose) ugly interface. It seems plagued by each application having its own idea of how to do things, from dialogs, to file browsers, to fonts, etc. I could be biased, coming from the Mac, but even in X Windows, you've got toolkits like GTK and the GNOME/KDE apps. They all look very similar. I don't know whether this was intentional or not, but the effect is much better than the hodgepodge we are confronted with when we use Windows. Again, this is probably of little relevance to me, as my job isn't to teach people how to use Office, and I would imagine most of the installs I will be working with will be headless.



Still, I say "confronted with", because it's very hard to accept that Windows might have some redeeming value. As a Unix admin, and a Mac user, it's kind of hard to go back on years of vitriole and spite for the OS. It might be a case of MacOS 9 vs OS X -- I don't think I could ever defend the former, and the latter has really changed the image and capabilities of the Mac platform. Most of my work so far has been on current platforms and future platforms (eg SQL Server 2005, VS.NET 2005, VCS 2.0 ...). I could tell you a lot of things wrong with Solaris 6 and 7, but I would hope you would judge Solaris by 8 and (primarily) 9.



Anyways, I've actually been engaged on a couple of accounts, which is nice. It's kind of refreshing in a way. I am hearing the same kinds of arguments for Linux (against Windows) that I heard from people against Solaris. After a long discussion with one of these people (who shall remain nameless), we got down to it and he said, well, yeah, I just really hate CDE. I could make that even broader and say that most Linux users like the gnu fileutils and binutils. It's nice to be able to say "tar xvzf foo.tgz", but it doesn't really take THAT much more time to say "gzip -dc foo.tgz | tar xvf -". So again, we're judging an entire OS by its interface. I think this is Fundamentally Bad. For users, sure. If you spend all day plodding through Word and Visio or Omnigraffle or whatever workware you choose, I apologize. You may complain about the interface all you like. But as a software developer, or a sysadmin, what have you got to complain about? If your code works, it works. If the platform is stable, even better. And, if you can do it cheaper, hey, that's a bonus.



What I'm getting at is I seem to be in the position of mediating discussions where people are ideologically entrenched. I'm happy to come into a situation and dissuade silly (incorrect) beliefs about the platform they're using, or the platform my employer would like them to consider. I'm not going to browbeat anyone into a solution that doesn't work for them. But if you come to me and tell me that, as an example, Linux is a better operating system because the grep is friendlier, the tar understands gzip, and you dislike CDE, I'm going to call it for what it is. Bullshit. And I'll sleep well at night, because I've been doing that for years.

Life

We must really have gotten some virus or something. We've been back from Hawaii for less than two weeks, and we're already planning trips back to the Pacific. This time it looks like we're going to do Oahu again in October and Fiji (or Tahiti, that's still up in the air, waiting on the travel agent) sometime in 1Q06. Can't wait.



Talked to a coworker who is clearly more into photography than I about "going digital." He mostly agreed with me, that I should just keep the celluloid cameras. I'm partial to my SLR's and celluloid. My question for all the people who have really pushed me to move to digital (a Canon 20D) has been "well, what if I want to shoot slides?" Nobody's been able to answer that. I personally like the.... "romantic" color and texture that slides give a picture. You just can't duplicate that with a digital. Sure, you could come up with some filter to do it in photoshop, but why bother? The cost argument only really applies to film processing. If I can do that myself, then my only cost, really, is the film itself. And film is cheap from Adorama. So, I'd rather spend $1400 that I'd be spending on a new 20D on lenses for my EOS and my AE-1P. For that kind of money, I could buy a new wide-angle lens (like an 18) and a new zoom, maybe even a 300. Or, I could buy one really nice lens. The point is, I like film, I'm comfortable with it, and I don't mind getting it developed. Besides, the celluloid will always be higher resolution than the CCD. At least for the foreseeable future.



Lastly, I'd just like to say that I thought my last job had great benefits. This was before they had this meeting telling us what ungrateful shits we were for costing them $XYZ million. At any rate, the current employer pays for everything. I mean, 100%. It's just phenomenal. I don't want to gush or anything, but having gotten off the phone with HR after trying to clarify some stuff on the benefits, I was just shocked. I left the last job feeling like they were lying to us when they told us they cared. It's hard to feel that way here. Time will tell, I suppose.

Work

I've been coming up to speed on the Microsoft platform, which really isn't anywhere near as hard as I thought it would initially be. I've also been spending a lot of time actually using Windows (don't laugh, that wasn't immediately apparent to me, I brought my iBook to work initially), on a Tecra M2 and a Tecra M200. More on that in a minute. So, the more I read, the the more I talk to people, the more I am honestly convinced that Microsoft really does have a solid operating system in Windows. I think the main problem is in their interface. Thankfully, my job is primarily concerned with the DOD and HPC sectors. I would imagine the vast majority of installs in those two organizations are going to be headless anyways.



Let me also make a brief note on .NET. So, traditionally, I've been a perl hacker. This is largely because my development platform has historically been Unix. As I moved my desktops from Linux to OSX back in 2000-2001, I found that I couldn't write a lot of the applications I wanted to write in perl unless I used CGI. So I largely gave up on writing applications with a GUI (or even a CLI/curses interface), and focused on writing daemons, system tools, and contributing patches to software other people had written. Part of my job is to be familiar with the whole platform that Microsoft offers, including their development environment. Now, I'm using the 2005 betas at work, so I can't comment on the older versions. However, I've been very impressed with Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005, and especially Visual C# 2.0 (forgive me if I've gotten the nomenclature off, it's kind of numbers-and-letters-soup at MS). I really see it as C, with a nicer syntax, without going so far as Java did towards the "ruby" end of the spectrum. What I'm missing so far is closures and code references. I also disagree with the notion of "iterators as state machines." (past coworkers and friends alike will know that I am partial to state machines)



There's also the ActiveState perl .NET and Komodo, but I haven't gotten into that yet, and the price of admission ($500!) is a bit steep. We're looking in to whether a site license exists at the office.



So about tablet PC's. I have one, this M200 here (well, actually, I write this on the iBook, but I'm looking at the tablet). I must say that I'm a little disappointed, both with the hardware and the software. The hardware is otherwise rather slick, except for the fact that the screen is unviewable from a "in my lap sitting upright" position, eg, the viewing angle is something like 45^. So I wind up propping it up on something, because if I leave the tablet "open", and try to write on it, it only pushes it closed. And speaking of writing, I refuse to blame my poor handwriting on my failure to get software to recognize what I'm writing. When I write "USAFSPC" (the US Air Force Space Command), in all caps, in print, and then ask it to turn that into "text", it fails with almost 100% certainty. This is because it combines text recognition with a preference for words it can look up in its dictionary. Eek. This makes it useful, perhaps for taking notes in class, but almost useless in meetings, where most companies operate on a foundation of internal jargon with natural language and slang. To say nothing of shorthand. So I think right now it's at best a curiosity. Although I like having 2gb of ram in a space as small as my 12" iBook. Neat, that.



Let me lastly say (and I'm sorry that I have to be so blunt about it, but some recent events have forced it), that while I am an employee of Microsoft, nothing I say here, or on the wikipedia, or anywhere else, is the official opinion of Microsoft. I am here in a personal capacity as the rest of the people here are. If that changes, I will make specific note of it. If you have questions about this, email me.

&c

Finished reading _Broken Angels_ by RKM. Liked it more than _Altered Carbon_. RKM, again, appears to have a predilection for violence and gore, but this time there's a lot more story involved. I'm thinking about buying the next Kovacs book from Amazon UK, along with _The Algebraist_ by Iain Banks, but again, irritated at the transatlantic shipping and paying in GBP. Reading _Threads_ by Joseph Abboud in the meantime.



Still waiting for photos of our trip to Oahu to get back from NGS. Will post when they are done. Also, been working with black and white film some. We'll see how that works out. I think also we're approaching a hundred rolls of film sent through the Canons, and it occurs to me that I really should have my own darkroom. We're paying a fortune in film development.



Thinking of trading the Buick in on a Corvette C6, if you can believe it, in the interest of mileage. The C5 gets 30mpg in 6th gear at 70mph. The Buick is lucky to get 24. Most times when I fill the tank, I get something like 16-19mpg. Supposed to be doing a lot of travel for MS, so it makes sense to get a car with a more efficient engine. Plus, I've wanted a C5 for some time, and the C6 is comfier. It also trounced the 911 in a recent C&D test. Neat. Ironically, I'd have to pay "gas guzzler" tax on it because it's a 6.0L V8 instead of the 3.8L V6 I have in the Buick. Sigh.