Ramble On

Last year, I created an eBay account because I momentarily thought that I might advertise a Harley motorcycle that I had for sale there (I didn’t, because I ended up selling it to a peer system administrator on campus). After a few months of getting eBay spams, I clicked the “please don’t send me more mail” link. Which was great, until December 26th - when eBay “revised” their privacy policy, and sure enough, reset my eBay spam preference.

I thought Yahoo! was the only idiotic large internet company that did this. Obviously I was wrong.

The fine print is even worse:

If you do not wish to receive further communications, sign into “My eBay” by clicking on the
“My eBay” link found at the top of the eBay home page and change your Notification Preferences.
Please note that it may take up to 10 days to process your request

10 days?!? Nice webapplication you have there, eBay.

So, on the personal geek side of my life, I decided to take the plunge a few weeks ago, and upgrade my verizon phone to the Treo 650, which I’ve wanted since I’ve been a verizon subscriber, but they didn’t have it yet when I became a subscriber. So after watching my LG phone get worse and worse (it had a problem where the internal screen would just stop displaying) - I decided to get the Treo, retail price be damned.

I like the Treo a fair amount. I’m not very happy with the verizon bluetooth limitations, but I’ll save that post for later.

What’s been annoying me though is that the side button is virtually useless.

If you want to use the camera at all on the thing (not that I really use it, but it’s fun to place with now and again) - the 5-way navigator button doesn’t really cut it as a shutter release. Ideally, I’d like to use the side button, but there’s no built-in tool to remap buttons like that.

Thankfully, I found sharkbtn (and I think Butler by hobbyist software can do this too). Sharkbtn is free, (well, donations accepted, but I’m not really sure I want to pay $8-$10 for a utility that I only use to map a single button) - and it works great. I’ll make up for the donation thing by buying the Sharkmsg app at some point - or something else the kid writes.

I'm a complete tech politics geek. Because this cartoon at channel9 made me LOL

I watched the whole Internet Jerry Springer RSS fights with the same sort of glee that some get from NFL Football or Soap Operas.

But even that isn't funnier than Microsoft vs. Google.

So, hopefully in the next few days - eXtension is going to be hiring a System Administrator as a SPA position (an Operation and Systems Analyst in the IT Career Banding system) at NC State University. The position is grant-funded so it is "time-limited" - meaning that there's a possibility that the grant funding could go away in two years - and employees that are in time-limited positions aren't eligible for severance pay or North Carolina Reduction-In-Force ("RIF") status (we are pretty confident that the funding is going to extend well beyond 2007).

The job description:

65%
Maintain the Linux, Windows, and OSX, database, web, source code control, mail, authentication, and messaging servers within the eXtension initiative, both at NCSU and at partner sites, troubleshooting and resolving technical problems as they arise, and keeping all software versions up to date. Implement and install new servers and service software for eXtension projects.

15%
Keep up with the latest security threats and vulnerabilities; communicate with eXtension staff on problems and issues that may affect eXtension services and those of extension partners through the country. Provide consulting and contact services to pull in other land-grant system administrators where needed.

10%
Work with other eXtension staff and land-grant system administrators in building, debugging, and testing services and tools created for eXtension. Provide programming and scripting services to help integrate those services into the larger eXtension system.

10%
Test and evaluate new server and service technologies in support of the database, web, source code control, mail, authentication, and messaging. Provide consulting for other system administrators in the land-grant system.

Basically, a lot of OS configuration, Apache installation, and installation of various web apps and then other things like mail, jabber, subversion, etc. The position should allow the person to participate in a few community projects that interest them, and there is a good hardware budget, and a good training/travel budget.

You'd have to ask former employees of mine, but I hope that I'm an OK fellow to work for. I'm a perfectionist at times, and more than a little anal about communication, checking logs, keeping configurations up-to-date, security, and trying to "do it right, rather than right now" and tend to expect the same, but I try to keep all in check and balanced with reality Family comes first, and strong ethics and strong morals and wanting a fun workplace are real important to me, both in myself, and in the person that I'd hire. Having independent thinkers that aren't afraid to question the status quo is important and encouraged too. Both Dr. Gamble (my boss) and I are oriented to open source/standards/and related things like creative commons philosophies, both using open software/information and creating it (although we are Macintosh desktop weenies).

This job is part of the Information Technology and Application Development team for the National eXtension Initiative. The goal of this initiative is to plan and implement a national web-based information and education network for current and new Extension clientele. By doing business in a new way, it will expand learning choices and methodologies in support of just-in-time learning by providing coordinated access to objective science-based information of land-grant universities. We strongly believe in the mission of the land grant university and cooperative extension.

The upside is the University working environment, the downside is that salaries are likely a little lower than industry average, and there's basically little or no relocation assistance (there are discounts with a local realtor company). But if you or someone you know would be interested, have them drop me a line. Applicants will need to go through the official University application process once the position is posted. And I'll update this post with a link to that once it's up and posted at the NCSU jobs site

Well, thanks to a comment from A. J. at UT-Knoxville - I know that my RHEL/Fedora problems under Virtual PC 7.0 are not only my own.

I have gotten Ubuntu installed. Only to have the X Configuration go wacky and produce screens that look more like fractals:

than Gnome desktops. I've played with the /etc/X11/xorg.conf to no avail at the moment. Great abstract art generator though.

But hey - I'm further along there! (next I'll try suse)

[update] - Well, while I edited my xorg.conf file to remove the option to do 24 bit color, I failed to changed the “DefaultDepth” parameter (I think it's a tad silly that you can set the DefaultDepth to an option not in the file, but that's just me). Changing that gives me a rather happy ubuntu install. I was reminded to look at this from the ubuntu wiki.

For the record, the OpenSuse install appears to completely fail, but the only thing I tried there was booting off the cd - I'm not sure my cd image is even good.

Sometimes Flash is cool

(especially open source flash apps)

Installing Apache and PHP with Fink can be seriously un-fun, as Rafe Colburn, my new colleague at eXtension, discovered yesterday

In fact, after writing up instructions for using fink to do an apache+php install - I seriously wondered what crack I was smoking. I still stick by the fink install, if only to catch up on the soaps while you wait for it to compile, fail, and compile some more.

Thankfully for the "I just want it to work now and not dork with this mess" crowd - Apple supplies a perfectly good Apache and PHP install. And MacDevCenter has some great instructions for using that built-in Apache and PHP - starting here and continuing on through here

The masochists probably want to stick with the Fink install - especially once I get around to documenting the joy that is generating self-signed SSL certificates

Every attempt to try and install RHEL WS 4.0 (the University has a site license) that I've tried with a ISO boot cd has resulted in a "An unrecoverable processor error has been encountered" message.

This occurs when the linux boot image tries to load the kernel.

At the moment, given that I don't know enough to get more detailed troubleshooting - either out of the RHEL WS boot cd or virtual PC (7.02) - I can only conclude that it's not possible to install RHEL WS 4 under Virtual PC 7.02 for the Macintosh.

However, Fedora Core 4 is happily - though really, really sloooooowly installing as I type this.

[update]: I spoke too soon, Fedora Core installed, but also produces the above error. Sigh.

So this morning I download the new Backup version 3 application that comes with my .Mac account. I use Backup at home, and it works - but only if you never let the Backup log get too big (like more than a few days).

I'm hoping that Backup 3 fixes that - and wanted to see what it looked like in the office.

Somehow a blank "keychain access" dialog doesn't bode well

[update]: for the record, running it the second time resulted in a keychain access dialog with the text and buttons that you'd expect in it. It's more superstition than anything else

It looks like Miami University (Ohio) had a lot of SSN and student data on the web for several years. The great thing is that at least they didn’t issue a press release blaming everyone else for exposing information too.

As ITECS Systems Manager I completely reorganized our web presence - almost completely driven by the fact that our “web servers” would point to the top of the AFS filespace to deliver files - meaning that anything that had open permissions ended up in Google - which meant a lot of SSN spreadsheets where professors had been posting grades. It was a design failure perpetuated by the IT staff that brought up webservers in a different era of information exchange - but they never changed as the world changed.

I took a fair amount of flak for this - the faculty were upset with me for making them make changes, for a while, my team members were bemused at my entreaties that this was a severe problem AND HAD TO BE FIXED, and everyone was worried about the support load. My IT peers that had similar environments didn’t change for several years after because they were afraid of this support problem.

I had my share of screwups. I made decisions in IT that weren't always the best decisions, and my users and peers could have legitimate complaints about things my team did - or more often - didn’t do.

But by golly, I got that web change right.

I am rather frustrated with Mail.app - in fact, I'm pretty close to running Entourage (not really) just to get this feature:

That is, the ability to search mail with different criteria - e.g. messages to/from a given person containing some term in the message body.

Mail's spotlight search only lets you search on the Entire Message OR From OR To OR subject. Which is pretty annoying.

You CAN get multi-criteria searching by creating a "Smart Mailbox"

But that's not all that convenient in an Ad-Hoc search.

One nice thing that I did learn from searching in the Mail Help for, well, "searching" was that Spotlight in Mail (and Spotlight elsewhere) supports Boolean searches. However - the help is wrong - it references using the literal terms "and", "or", "not" And that's wrong.

Apparently, at least with my limited testing "and" is assumed:

jason verbose => would find all messages matching the criteria selected containing "jason" AND "verbose"

jason | verbose => would find all messages matching "jason" OR "verbose"

jason - verbose = > would find all messages matching "jason" but NOT "verbose" (obviously an empty set)

I assume complex queries can be built with paranthesis.

The only confirmation of this I've found is a comment and link from the Wikipedia Article on Spotlight

It's apparently undocumented from Apple.

According to this Windows IT Pro article (via Engadet). Windows Sysadmins will have multiple new Windows Vista versions to deal with. That's right - no longer will you have to tear your hair out fighting issues with convincing the faculty/staff/students you support to get XP Professional instead of XP Home, now you'll be able to choose from a support nightmare of seven different versions!

• Windows Vista Starter Edition
• Windows Vista Home Basic Edition
• Windows Vista Home Premium Edition
• Windows Vista Ultimate Edition
• Windows Vista Small Business Edition
• Windows Vista Professional Edition
• Windows Vista Enterprise Edition

All brought to you by Microsoft, creators of other fine Marketing products in the past, like "Microsoft BOB"

Bonus commentary from the jabber chatroom:

Brian: hey, maybe ultimate edition will come in a nice collector's tin with a few free trading cards
Jason M: ooooo
Jason M: maybe holo foils
Margaret: gotta catch 'em all
Jason Y: just what I've always wanted - holographic foils of the Microsoft Executives
Jason Y: that might could generate revenue though, people will have to buy multiple Ultimate editions to collect the whole set

I wonder if Robert Scoble will get his own card?

Why did you make it a pain to install X11.app? You don't include it already installed in a default distribution of Tiger for those that get new Macs. And by the time that a student or a co-worker realizes that they need it, they aren't going to have their install CD's with them to go run the Optional Installs package off the install CD.

Please to make X11 downloadable again.

Thanks.

Sigh. I need to stop reading Slashdot. I usually manage to be good, and click "Mark all as Read" for their feed.

However, I made the mistake of reading and finding out that MySQL A.B. has partnered with SCO

I think it's time to move everything to PostgreSQL.

(actually probably not, I just wanted an excuse to post the darlman graphic and complain a little. Now if MySQL A.B. goes so far as to call the GPL unconstitutional, then I'm going to have some issues)

Well, it would appear that the lawyer for one of the students charged in Pennsylvania (the so-called "Kutztown 13") has commented on my post about the "IT Responsibilities" in cases like these.

I assume it's the lawyer - it may or may not be. I don't really have much identity verification. The IP Address is a Pennsylvania IP Address though, and searching google for his name shows him quoted in a Washington Post story about the case.

What I assume is that he's blanket posting in blogs his side of the story. I don't necessarily blame him, he's representing a teenager charged with a felony. It's his job as a lawyer to get his client off or at least bargain the punishment down to something more acceptable to his client and to those charging his client.

But I really wish he had read my post. To be fair, I really don't present a position in the matter (other than saying that an opinion column in the USA Today seemed to have the clearest explanation). So in the absence of a definite position, if you have a bias one way or another, you are going to take my words and twist them to whatever opinion you think I have. It's life. I really would hope for better from an officer of the court (as well as having the comment written better, if he actually wrote it)

But I doubt he's actually reading the post. Which did nothing but try and generate discussion about the responsibilities of the IT staff in these cases. This is why I don't have all that much respect for lawyers.

But, Mike, since you accused me of calling the kids criminals. Here's my view on the matter.

I think it is absolutely and positively ludicrous that teenage and college students are accused of felonies in matters like these. I think that more often than not, the IT staff or the programmers, or similar screw up, those screwups are taken advantage of, the organization in which they work gets embarassed, and that organization's administration completely overreacts. Maybe because educators don't like to be embarassed, probably because they do not understand the technology.

The reactions are not the same when the maintenance dude leaves the paint out, and one gets graffiti all over their building.

I also think it's ludicrous that "computer trespass" in North Carolina is treated as a felony when it involves a government computer. But that's a matter for the legislature and a whole other discussion another day.

That being said, I have little respect for students that try (and continue) to play the system, and cry foul when they get their metaphorical hand slapped. But they don't deserve felony charges.

I don't know the facts in this case, and I'm not going to editorialize any further about it. I don't know whether the kids are right, or the school is right. I imagine both sides are doing whatever they can right now to cover their behinds.

What I do care about is three things:

1) I think this is what happens when the IT staffs and administrations, especially in educational institutions, try and control the student desktop. It's a losing game. Turn over the computer to the student, teach him or her how to use it, or more, how to find the information that they can teach themselves how to use it. When they screw the system up and can't complete their assignment? Call the Waahmbulance. The problem is, the students are often smarter than the IT staffs which leads me to…

2) I'm very keen on seeing that the IT staff start talking about what they can do, and how they can seek training opportunities that keeps them a step ahead of the technologies, and work with those that they support. I was unable to get discussion about this generated on our campus mailing list. But my core tenet was:

So, mistakes that *we* make are leading to felony charges and identity theft. This isn't just "I can't print my word document" anymore.

Which is serious business. I do not ever want to see a mistake that I make escalate into felony charges for students (unless they have malicious intent) or identity theft. It's my responsibility to do my best with data and information and the systems that store that, to keep that from happening. It might happen anyway. But if I'm the one that screwed up, I don't want to see an over-reactive administration go after students. And in the identity theft case, I better be treating that data like it's the data of my family.

3) People turn their brains off when it comes to computers. It's high damn time to start teaching the users of the system that they have a responsibility for the use of that system too (which goes back to (1) - when you control things tightly, the users of the system don't take responsibility for their own use of it - because they think someone is always "taking care of it")

I hope he gets his client off, or better, the charges reduced.

But what I really hope is that overall IT industry starts getting their act together here.

[update] It appears, from the aforementioned Washington Post article that the felony charges might be dropped, in a deal. I have no opinion on whether the punishment in the deal fits in this case or not.

From my friend James Robinson following up my query (as posted to the campus list):

On Aug 23, 2005, at 7:01 AM, James E. Robinson, III wrote:
>On Aug 22, 2005, at 3:50 PM, Jason Young wrote:
>>
>[snip snip]
>
>[snip, snip snip]
>
>[snip snip snip, snip snip snip]
>
>[snip, snip, oh good grief, (cranks up chain saw)]
>
>[waaaaaahhhhhhhhh, waaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh - Timber!]
>>
>>So, my question(s) for discussion are these: (and any you want to add):

I admit, I laughed heartily, out loud even. At myself

(And in an ironic twist of fate, while writing this I just managed to stretch out my leg and put my foot down right on top of the switch for the surge protector [still waiting for the desktop UPS's to get here]… and blam-o-lam, instant self-denial-of-service)

So three varying tales of customer no-service in my RSS aggregator this morning.

Alexei Kosut a series of conversations with Cingular this month, where customer no-service doesn't seem to know how to deal with data service and a family plan at the same time.

(for the record, the only time I have ever in my life cursed at a customer service person was at Sprint, where I cancelled my service, and Sprint kept charging me three months in a row, and when I called Sprint customer no-service - multiple times - put me on hold, hung up on me and finally in the third month, transferred me to collections. I was livid by then. I sincerely and deeply apologized to the person I did it to, but that's how frustrated I was.)

Jeremy Zawodny quotes another page from Seth Godin regarding experiences at a bank.

and last, but certainly not least, Bruce Schneir links to an article about the TSA detaining toddlers whose names show up on the No-Fly list.

Complete…. lack…. of… common…. sense.

So the real question for me is that most sane people will all read these incidents - our cell phone companies, our banks, the airlines, and will deride the lack of common sense, yet we will go back to our jobs and do very similar things, follow procedures, fail to think for ourselves, fail to allow our employees to think for themselves - and implement the same asinine procedures.

Do they address this topic in business schools anywhere? How can organizations create environments that foster people thinking for themselves and to not pay victim to the "procedure" or when the "computer says I have to do this". Even more, how do you also have people think to ask their peers and supervisors to help sanity check their own thinking and to maintain consistency (which is why all those "procedures" are created in the first place)

Because I'm in a bit of a dead spot at work (we are largely in "startup" mode - and the funding to get the hardware we need to begin to ramp up and create new services is there, but it is still caught up in the bureacracy between the various contracts and grants groups, and the people to help create those new services aren't here yet either) - it's given me a chance to chip away at the mile long "Flagged Items" list in NetNewsWire.

Everyone and their mother's brother's cousin is linking to the trampling and all-around mayhem that was the Henrico County iBook sale. So I won't link to it. Okay, I will - but only to Dave Barry's link to it which is rather appropriate.

Sometimes security through obscurity is not a bad thing.

Via Chuq Von Rospach: a great list of recommend software for your macintosh. All of the linking to it apparently killed the site. All the more reason to get cracking on updating my own list today.

I've switched from Safari to Firefox again (I really missed type-ahead-find) but it was driving me nuts to switch between tabs with the mouse because I got used to CMD+Left Arrow and CMD+Right Arrow to switch between tabs. Thanks to the Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts list, I'm less frustrated, but still want to figure out how to change CTRL+TAB to CTRL+Right Arrow.

Switching to Firefox meant that I needed a way to synchronize my bookmarks between three Macs. Thanks to the Bookmarks Synchronizer. I can do that. And because I didn't want to stick my .Mac password in the configuration for that synchronizer. I needed to setup both WebDav and SSL to go along with my Apache2 install on my Macintosh.

Setting up a SSL Certificate Authority and a signed certificate is a royal PITA, and something that I'm really not looking forward to writing up as a companion to my Apache2 article. Which is why finding this lovely menu item:

which produces this dialog:

seems to hold a tremendous amount of promise. Knowing what's going on with a thousand obscure openssl commands is great - but if there's a GUI to make that easier? All over it. I'll hopefully figure out whether that dialog is actually useful or not today.

Speaking of updates. Another tutorial that needs to be finished is how to install Subversion via Fink. Which in turn will let me update EWE. One of the first things I'm doing is going to change every mention of RSS to "FEED" and likely add Atom support. Asa Dotzler is right RSS is a silly name. And I'm honestly tired of the internet Jerry Springer rants surrounding the whole thing, web feeds make a lot of sense to me. (The funniest commentary I read about that was this one, about Dave Winer living in a van…. by the river). I also need to build a few more wiki-friendly features in it - and I think I'm going to call the ewe categories what they really are - tags.

Most likely, I'll end up screwing up the regular expression matching - so this Redet Software will come in handy. At the very least, it's the best list of other regex tools I've seen so far.

I think all that will keep me occupied for a bit.

Excellent! Your very own BSOD on your Macintosh!

Funny, somewhat related story. My friends, after a few years of jokes and more than a few rants about Internet Explorer vs. FireFox, know that I'm Macintosh-oriented. They come over to my house on mondays to play Diamond-Mind baseball - which is owned by our league "commissioner" and one of the other guys has to bring their PC laptop (because I only have Macs). I have a new Airport-backed wireless network in the house - and was giving the WPA2 password to one of them to join the network. As soon as he entered the password in the Join Network dialog for the Windows XP wireless and clicked "OK" (or "Apply" or whatever it was) - the machine blue-screened on him.

Classic. Of course, now they think I've jinxed all windows machines in the house

(and to be fair - his Dell gets much better signal than my Powerbook G4)

I think I've mentioned before that there wasn't a combined RSS feed for this site.

Well, I lied, there is.

And there is for every EWE-based site. I just mentioned this in the EWE "space" but the combined RSS feed can be had by using "all" as the space name for the feed.

In English, that means the combined feed for this site is:

http://people.engr.ncsu.edu/jayoung/site/rss/all (FEED)