Ramble On

I subscribe to the Omni Mouth for a number of reasons, one I really, really like OmniGraffle, and two, the blog might be the absolute best example of a small company blog I’ve ever seen. The writers of it have style, pizzaz, and it’s just fun. Really fun. Although, pictures of star-nosed moles really don’t belong in my news list.

(they also have full feeds, so they get it).

But I have to admit that not only did I groan when I saw “System Guru Opening” in the titles list in my unread Google Reader items, and I went so far as to give it a “Say it ain’t so Joe” (which is really odd, because I don’t think any of them are named Joe, but I digress), when I saw that the job was at OmniGroup

Omni, guys, gals, pals, writers of great software. For good grief - don’t hire anyone at all that calls themselves a “guru”

People that call themselves gurus, aren’t. Ever.

However, for any system administration brethren that do Macintosh administration - you very likely want to check the job out. It sounds like a great job and a great place to work.(*)

Additionally, they get serious mad props for being up front about throwing your word-formatted resumes away.

But really, I know they say to put “guru” in the subject line - but for the sake of the whole profession, please don’t call yourself that. If they call you that - well you can’t help that, but you should shirk off and mumble incoherently. Or grunt. But do that after you are hired. I really don’t recommend mumbling incoherently in the interview. Been there, done that. I haven’t grunted though. Guffawed yes. Grunted no.

(* I have zero association with OmniGroup and wouldn’t know any of them if I ever saw them. I just really like their software and their blog).

So, if a work created by an officer or employee of the United States Government that’s part of the person’s official duties (see also Cornell Law) - is Public Domain…

Then why on earth isn’t it the same for officers and employees of states, and state and federal funded institutions that are created as part of that person’s official duties?

Or at the very least, under the auspices of a derivable, share-alike license?

Inquiring minds really want to know.

I’m still working on figuring out exposures. The D80 is definitely not a set it and forget it camera.

You know, it wasn’t until I started this job and had more interaction with folks that didn’t have a University background that I came to really understand that there was any kind of us vs. them perception between developers and system administrators.

In the University, it’s typically “support staff” vs. “systems staff” - and “systems staff” are typically system administrators/pseudo-developers - at least on the academic side. There are very few pure developers in the academic side of Universities that I’ve found that only create code and aren’t responsible for deployment, and systems setup. (and then, those system admins doing development have never really done the kind of development that I was aware was going on in software shops).

Anyway, that’s not really what this post is about. I’m just reminded of that perception of “the systems administrator” by a great exchange with a colleague today while getting some background on some errors that I was seeing on one of our servers from earlier in the week. He gave me a pretty funny quote that I think bears preserving for posteriety:

Actually, I know it will happen again too… but that’s just not something I feel comfortable openly admitting to the system administrator. It’s like saying to the parole board, “Well, I don’t want to kill anybody again, but you never know… it there’s always the chance it could happen.”

To which I had to respond:

Not a bad analogy. But I’m your defense lawyer - not the parole board It’s my job to keep you out of jail - or at least reduce the sentence

But in hindsight, I’m really not sure that calling myself a defense lawyer is really doing anything for the system administrators/managers of the world.

So, because you’ll learn far more from screwing up, then getting it always right - here’s the latest screw up from yours truly. Documented for all the world to see

So, I have been making slow progress the last few weeks in updating our account registration application to be a bit more normalized, and collect a few data elements that we weren’t previously collecting. This took surprisingly far longer than it should have taken.

(it actually turns out to be a bigger pain in the ass to implement a selection form with a defined set of options - and include “other field” and have that other field create new, user defined option and have that live properly across submits, than I thought, but I digress)

A lot of the work went into doing things like changing object names from “University” to “Institution” because well, we are associating folks with groups that aren’t Universities, and maintaining the University names makes the app semantically incorrect. Of course, that then creates a fairly healthy rename nightmare, that search and replace doesn’t really fix. I managed to handle that okay.

And I managed to handle the infamous Rails “nil-error-in-views” problem. For those that aren’t familiar with this, inevitably you will run into a situation where you are going to print out something like user.county - where .county is the automagic accessor created for the county field in your user database. Well, when you start normalizing county to actually be a reference to an entry in the county db, and not a copied string - you have to start doing things like user.county.name - where .county is the automagic accessor created to get at the county object that associated through a belongs_to: or similar - and then name is the accessor for the name column in the county db for the county associated with the user.

The dreaded nil error is that you have to make sure that “county” is an instantiated object. If the user doesn’t have a county - when you go to access user.county.name - county might be nil and Rails goes “Ooops!” I’m sure there’s a highly elegant idiomatic way to solve this, but if statements normally work for me. As long as I use them.

I managed to check most of all the nil places in my views. Where I missed it though is in the XML response to a third-party authentication request. Our other rails applications and our wiki environments proxy-authenticate via a POST to our account application and get back success/failure and profile data in a xml stub block.

I sort of tested this. I tested one application against it, and watched it authenticate just fine. However, I never checked the local log. As a system administrator first, I should know better. always, always, always check the logs. But I didn’t. I would have know the thing was oopsing then.

Well maybe. Test screw-up #2 was the fact that in order to test the new data elements - I actually put myself in a county. So for my test account, there was no oops - county existed and wasn’t nil. For a good portion of any of the users that would be migrated, they were going to be missing a county. But noooooooo, I didn’t test that.

So armed with what looked to be a highly functioning application - I deployed. And I tested all the authenticating apps right after deployment. With a valid county. “Works for me!” “Whoo!”

Five minutes later - I get an IM, from the director. Who couldn’t login.

I look at the logs that are in-app. hmmmm…. seems to login in just fine. logins from the rails apps work for folks. I hadn’t yet seen the application errors emails that we email ourselves when our Rails apps go Ooops! (yay for exception notifiable) (mistake #3) I go and look at exactly what the auth code is doing from the wikis and it dawns on me at that moment that I left the IF statements out of the .rxml I knew it was the dreaded nil

I can’t remember at that moment if I said “Oh shit!” or not. But I did change my IM status to “Yes I know. Yes I’m working on it”

Then I see the app error emails and see that they confirmed the nil. And 5 minutes after that, James pipes up and says “just ignore the passwords”

(the passwords? yeah, apparently there’s a second bug that was highlighted, our auth code had a debugging feature left over that included the necessary POST params in the querystring. When the wiki auth occurs, it was passing those in addition to the POST. So when the exception mails were sent, while the POST passwords were filtered, the query string really can’t be. Whooops. At that point I definitely said “Oh shit”)

Mistake #4 was ignoring the logs on that one for the last several weeks, which now my web access logs have all kinds of passwords in them - thankfully that’s restricted access to just me (and they are going to get a gigantic search and replace soon).

Well, anyway. Being system administrator has its privileges. So I managed to fix the problem, create a test environment to test the fix, deploy the fix (twice), touch base with Rafe about fixing the discovered wiki authplugin feature - who gets it checked in PDQ, and I got that deployed too.

Report, to fix, to test, to deployment, to fix side effect bug, to the emails to the staff, to recommendations for the group that triggered the exception notifications to change their passwords - 40 minutes. That is definitely the silver lining in this. It’s really hard to be more responsive and faster than that.

The summary?

• check the logs
• watch your rails nils
• check the logs
• test with missing data
• test from everywhere
• check the logs
• clean up debugging code
• check the logs
• know your code so dang well, that you can fix it faster than butter on the morning toast

And word to the wise, don’t use GoDaddy for the service.

Actually, going backwards works well here, - see the <ahem>lawyer </ahem> response first

Unless you’ve been under a rock the last few days, you probably know that the President’s State of the Union address had a proposal dealing with insurance and healthcare - basically trying to use the tax system as an incentive to generate “lower cost” insurance plans. It was on NPR, it’s been the forefront of a lot of news coverage, Barack Obama is stumping about it, as is Hillary Clinton.

Healthcare is incredibly complex. I’ve spent much of my adult life to this point avoiding anything having to do with it. I have the most basic plan that the University provides, which has the university paying all my premium. My wife stayed on her own plan because the premiums were cheaper. I do most of what I can to avoid the doctor. So I don’t even usually know the values and the limits of my own coverage. Any time I get close to it, I get frustrated. I can’t imagine what it’s like for those that are dealing with the system far more than I am.

There seem to be “bad guys” and “good buys” in all the stakeholder groups - from patients to the doctors, to the medical bureaucrats that serve the doctors, to the pharmaceutical and medical equipment industry, to the insurance industry, to the government. While I have had and continue to have my various biases against those stakeholders, it’s impossible to paint the groups with a broad brush. I can’t even begin to fathom how you unravel the gigantic interwoven mess that our system has become. There are no simple solutions. I’m rather wary of the administration’s plan because it seems largely to benefit the insurance industry and manipulating an already convoluted tax code seems to create more hassle - but maybe it starts debate, I don’t know.

Traditionally my sympathies are with the doctors. I feel like they get caught between the bureaucrats in the front office, crazy and ridiculous malpractice situations, insurance bureaucrats in both the government and private industry, and the relentless pimping from the pharmaceuticals. My sympathies are still there, though the reality is more complex than my simplified sentences could address.

But one thing I’ve seen recently I think highlights the core of the mess that is healthcare. And that is that somewhere between the doctors, the insurers, the government, the lawyers, patients with hangnails, and the lavish marketing of the med supplies corp, the reality of the costs of care have completely gone out the window. I’m not talking about hidden costs of care. I’m talking about the reality of the value printed on the page. It seems completely arbitrary.

I have had some tests recently, in one of the situations the lab sent me a bill in the multiple hundreds of dollars. They for some reason didn’t have my insurance information, and didn’t file a claim, so I got the bill and had to follow up. They did eventually file the claim.

And here’s the arbitrary. My insurer apparently negotiates pricing schedules with the healthcare vendors (labs, doctor’s offices, etc.) Most of you are probably saying “duh” because you know that already. And the claim comes back, and there’s a whole column of the “Amount you do not have to pay” And the vendors apparently agree to that. This isn’t some trivial 5-10% difference, we are talking 50%-80% price differences on bills that are multiple hundreds of dollars.

And that’s the problem I have with this whole mess. If that bill came directly to me, and I didn’t have coverage, And I didn’t feel comfortable negotiating (guess what, I don’t) and I had zero knowledge that there was even such a thing as pricing tiers - I’d be paying hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands over price of what others are paying and wouldn’t be the wiser that person/group A gets price A and person/group B gets price B, based almost solely on some kind of back and forth price haggling.

Maybe those of you in sales or business are also going “duh” - that’s the way the service market works. But in my mind, that’s corrupt. There’s a price that something costs. There’s a reasonable overhead to that price. There’s a risk aspect (those that pay their bills in full and on time deserve better rates), there are expenses, there is capital, there is the right to enjoy a good life for the professionals providing the service - all in all, there’s a fair market price, a price that’s supposed to be largely constant from person to person to person from a given provider.

But what’s happening now is that it’s not fair. It seems highly discriminatory And for those that are underinsured or uninsured, and uninformed - those often least able to pay, they are getting screwed in this (or they are creating a add-on cost burden because they don’t end up paying, and drive up the costs for the next tier up)

I’d honestly love to treat insurance as I think it should be treated - as something reserved for catastrophe. My stomachaches and sprains would come completely out of a high-deductible pocket. But when the paper price difference “without insurance” is so much greater than that “with insurance” - before any money is actually changing hands - something is very, very, very wrong with our system.

That’s what has to get fixed.

Now that Google has released an updated groups.google.com view - I decided to check it out last night. It also looks like that have a far more complete record of Usenet postings than I remember having them last.

For all the warnings about Facebook and privacy to keep the Youth of America from posting stupid pictures of themselves in Facebook or Myspace or whatever - all I can say is “been there, done that” - only in Usenet.

I wrote some awfully embarrassing stuff. Sheesh. Not that I had half a brain when I was in college (not that I have half a brain now) - but wow.

One, I apparently was actually pulling for UNC Chapel Hill in 1993 while posting to alt.fan.jimmy-buffet. Embarrassing.

Two, in protest of some telecommunications bill - where it was rumored that the bill was going to outlaw all discourse on abortion (it wasn’t - but this was pre-Thomas-on-the-web, and I was just reading half-baked media reports, not the actual bill). So in order to practice civil disobedience - I launched into some diatribe about abortion. While I certainly was vociferously in favor of free speech and the right to debate publicly any and all ideas (and thankfully still am that way) - and that’s really at the core what my post was about - I was also at the time a pseudo-brainwashed evangelical right-winger (which thankfully I’m not any longer). Highly embarrassing. (and stupid). There’s a whole lot in life that can’t be boiled down to binary positions and I cringe ever time I think or read my own past binary thoughts on that and similar issues.

They still don’t have the post where I bitched out Timo Salmi in defense of me illegally using Turbo Pascal because I was a poor college student that couldn’t afford the software (actually I had a legal copy of TP, but not wordperfect I don’t think). So maybe there are still some mysteries buried out there.

Ah, usenet. Ah. college.

The continued lack of Atom 1.0 in wordpress reminded me that my feeds were most likely shifted back to RSS2 due to the politics of the wordpress leaders - and recent upgrades and me not paying attention.

Thanks to this plugin for making it easier.

If any of the estimated 6.5 readers of the blog have their feed readers broken - get a new feed reader.

p.s. See also Shelley’s post - with the appropriate quote:

There’s nothing like syndication to bring out the schoolyard in supposedly reasonable adults. I don’t think even the “vi versus emacs” wars compare.

Internet Jerry Springer. I’ve said it multiple times.

Sometimes the interpreted language equivalent of “compiler warnings” get really quite annoying (this might explain why subconsciously I have always been incredibly pedantic about compiler warnings).

Anyway, with advent of RubyGems 0.9.0, the “require gem” command is deprecated.

And as of 0.9.1 of RubyGems (to which you might want to update because of a security hole) - you know get lovely little warnings scattered all over the place

Warning: require_gem is obsolete. Use gem instead.

And of course things like the mongrel_rails command include “require_gem” - as does feed_tools - which of course is kicked off by cron jobs in our environment, and is now happily filling my root mail with the warning messages.

Sigh.

So because we can’t buy Windows XP anymore, I ended up getting “Vista Business Licenses” for the additional copies of XP that we needed in order to run XP under Parallels so that we can test our web applications with the other Microsoft flaming pile of crap that is Internet Explorer (version 6).

Well, of course I was going to take a look at the product, it’s what I do. As far as I can tell in the maybe 20 minutes total that I’ve had it running over the last month or two is that it’s a fine enough update. I mean, all operating systems stink, some more or less than others. And like OS X 10.4 is better than OS X 10.3 is better than 10.2, etc. Vista seems better than XP.

I was actually looking forward to using it more.

Well, until today, when it told me that my copy of Windows wasn’t legitimate. That is, the official Volume License media that I got from our Volume License vendor, and used the License Key that I officially received from Microsoft - when I called them and asked for a Windows Vista Business License Key.

We have some kind of Key managment service set up on campus, but I apparently can’t run the commands to set that because of whatever reason.

The key provided by Microsoft is “not genuine” anymore apparently.

And I get an error code when I try to activate.

I’m sure there’s a solution in all of this, it’s code, Microsoft has changed to a new asinine activation model, etc.

But life’s really too short for me to try to debug this stupidity. When the official media and official license keys don’t work. What else is supposed to?

That make software applications cool.

Today’s weather graphic for Raleigh, from the Apple Weather widget:

Whether it’s from your kids or your employees (or someone else’s employees) - you should always, always, always encourage their questions - and be ready to answer honestly, and to question your own answers, your own assumptions, and your own bias. That is the beginning of wisdom and trust and well, freedom.

Your zen truth of the day:

Those that always believe that they have the answer will soon cease to have any.

Bonus truth:

Those frustrated by the question, don’t have the answer.

My new camera - a Nikon D80 is here! boy oh boy oh boy do I have a lot to learn, but piddling around the house, I’ve already been able to take some pictures that I just couldn’t take previously.

I still have yet to master the flash though. I’m kinda always been scared of flash photography - all the pictures I ever take with a flash (admittedly the built-in flashes) stink.

My first public pictures with it are a set of closeups from work. For Christmas, Ben gave us all plastic cowboys and indians and dinosaurs. Because well, it just isn’t Christmas unless you have cowboys and indians and dinosaurs. Each still life is perhaps a glimpse into the psyche of each of its owners (I didn’t check out Rafe’s sculpture - I’ll have to get that one later when he’s in).

James’s - is the dinosaur defending or attacking the dad statue? we may never know.

Daniel’s - rather narrow ledge there - which way is the dinosaur going?

Aaron’s - sssh - don’t tell PETA. Or the society for the preservation of plastic carnivorous tyrannosaurs - and what’s up with the triceratops joining in with the plasmans?

Suzanne’s - this is a bit chaotic. Perhaps the most poignant illustration of war:

Mine - stalemate at the J-A-Y corral

Kevin’s : the donkey’s stare makes the picture (better large) (and NO, that’s not a commentary on my boss )

I’ve been under the weather for days now, some absurd combination of allergies and a probable cold. The word of the day, boys and girls is “congestion”

(thought I was going to say “snot” now didn’t you? - ha, that’s that you get for thoughting)

To try and keep from having both myself and my wife up all night with me coughing up parts of my lungs - I’ve been taking robitussin - which is probably quite terrible for me, but it stops the coughing almost immediately.

And I think I have taken a weeeee bit too much of it. While i’m close to within range of the 2 teaspoons every four hours deal - I’m all loopy this morning. According to wikipedia (don’t try this at home kids!) - I’m apparently mildly robotripping.

Groovy duuuuude.

(the people that would even think of doing this recreationally are seriously messed up in the head, sheesh. I can’t wait to see what kind of programming adventures come out my head this morning)

Nope, corporate bureaucrats do too.

Via iLounge Apple’s charging $5 for an 802.11n “enabler”

Oh, and get this, the company that brought you the lovely ridiculously persistent QuickTime nag screens to get you to upgrade to QuickTime Pro - blames this charge on “Accounting Rules”

“Because of the Act [Sarbanes-Oxley], the company believes that if it sells a product, then later adds a feature to that product, it can be held liable for improper accounting if it recognizes revenue from the product at the time of sale, given that it hasn’t finished delivering the product at that point.”

So they have to charge for new “features.” Good Grief.

Phil Windley on Government use of YouTube

Government agencies could already make much better use of video, podcasts, and screencasts than they do. Once they catch onto their importance, they’ll need to realize that content aggregators like YouTube are a much better alternative than burying these services on some agency Web server.

Can I get an Amen?

And thankfully I didn’t get really excited about anything.

I think a lot of that has to do with the fact is that there were zero software announcements from Apple itself. If tens of thousands of so-called pundits that have lamented for years that Apple Computer Inc. wasn’t porting their operating system to beige boxes only to be told that Apple was a hardware company.

Well, there’s further proof. Apple Inc. is a hardware company. They just happen to write really great (well, mostly great) software to sell the hardware.

I already have a perfectly functional Airport setup - so no new Airport Extreme for me. The Apple TV is intriguing - but I don’t have a widescreen TV that could do 720p. But that’s actually the most tempting product for me.

And the iPhone? Well, it pretty cool. And exciting. And the whole wi-fi thing is intriguing to me.

But I’ve had a treo, and tried to do things with it. Biggest complete waste of money I’ve ever made. Mainly due to Verizon, but it’s not like Cingular is probably going to be any better.

It took awhile for the iPod to shake up the business (as a second-generation iPod owner that later became a brick, I know). Wait for the 3rd generation of the iPhone.

So - no temptations yet for the new computer that I can’t afford. Aperture is the only thing that would really drive a computer purchase for me, and I think Lightroom is going to work out better for me anyway. So my Powermac still has some life.

We’ll see what the year brings. But for us software weenies - MacWorld wasn’t all that exciting.

I haven’t actively listened to much music in a while - I’ve been listening to mostly Imus and NPR on the drive to and from work - and I don’t like wearing headphones all that much, so I haven’t been listening to music at work much.

A friend of mind made a CD of the Wallflowers a few days ago and gave it to me - he’s a big, big, big Bob Dylan fan and likes Jakob Dylan too, and thought I might like the Wallflowers (I really haven’t paid them much attention prior to today). I did enjoy listening to it, and plan on listening a fair bit more to let it sink in before I give the review on them.

Well, the Wallflowers CD inspired me to finally take my iPod nano to work and start listening to some music again. As I was walking out the door to work this morning - I decided to buy an album from iTunes.

Yo-Yo Ma’s Appassionato.

This is one fantastic album. If you like classical and/or jazz - you will like this. I’m not going to get all New York Times snooty and write some music review about florid overtones or whatever things that music reviewers like to write about. I’m only going to say “get it”.

P.S. One of my favorite Yo-Yo Ma stories comes from the late Fred Rogers, from a speech that Mr. Rogers gave at Marquette University in 2001 (that was somewhat similar to the kind of speech he gave at my graduation from NC State in 1996). He said this of Ma:

“One day I was privileged to sit in on one of Yo-Yo Ma’s master cello classes. Now, Yo-Yo is one of the great appreciators of our world. It seems that people always walk taller after they’ve had an encounter with him. The only thing that’s larger than his talent is his heart.

At any rate, during that master class one young man was struggling with the tone of a certain cello passage. He played it over and over and Yo-Yo listened with obvious interest. Finally, Yo-Yo said, “nobody else can make the sound you make.” That young man looked at Yo-Yo Ma and beamed. What a gift those words were not only to that cellist, but to everyone who was there. Nobody else can make the sound you make.”

Buy it. You’ll like it.

James pointed out this commentary on a study from USC that “better-educated older adults had greater declines in word memory than their less educated peers”

I’m not surprised in the slightest. What I’ve found in 10 years of working in higher education is that while I’ve been around brilliant people, people that have the ability to change the world - and sometimes have - that for many of them “better educated” most certainly does not equate to continually exploring, problem-solving, and actually using the cognitive parts of their brains.