Good riddance, 2005

I am so ready for this year to be over. 2005 will go down in history as the worst year ever. The story actually starts back in November of 2004 (no, not with the election, I'll stipulate to how bad that was). Here are the lowlights:

November, 2004: Our 2-year old Border Collie "Lucky" (the most unfortunate name ever) dies while recovering after surgery to remove a large tumor from her intestine.

December, 2004: My wife's dad falls and is hospitalized after a brain tumor starts expanding (it had previously been unsuccessfully treated). The prognosis is not good.

Winter 2005: A months-long course of full-brain radiation is performed on him. Side effects are brutal, and I'm not sure which was worse, the tumor or the treatments. Once we figure out that he's not going to recover, Hospice home care is called in -- they provide amazing services and care, but the bulk of the day-to-day home care is provided by family and friends.

Spring 2005: A potential bright spot, we rescue an adorable white border collie from "border collie rescue" and name him "Rogue" -- he's 4 months old.

But, when we bring him home, he's got kennel cough and a nasty parasite. We treat that. When he's neutered in early May, the vet does a "precautionary" check for genetic problems, and they find hip displaysia. We start planning treatment options, and visit a specialist in Portland. Major surgery is planned to fix him, for early July. Shortly after this, Rogue begins the first of several stomach incidents whereupon he pukes constantly, is hospitalized, and then recovers after a couple of days. Initial diagnosis is "pancreatitis" but that turns out wrong (you'll see why later).

My wife's dad continues to slide down hill. He is confined to bed, and the tumors have devasted his ability to communicate. He can barely move, can't read or write any longer, and has major problems speaking. That is the cruelest of tortures to an old farmer that loved nothing more than to BS about anything and everything at length. Nearly all of our free time is spent visting and helping around their house.

July 2005, all hell breaks loose: The month begins well, with a trip for my wife and I to Vegas for my Dad's wedding, over the 4th of July holiday -- that was quite fun. Upon our return, we immediately (as in, the day our flight arrived back in Oregon) have to take Rogue to the specialist in Portland for a "Triple Pelvic Osteotomy" to fix his hips. Several days (and thousands of dollars) later we take home a half-shaved dog and prepare for 16 weeks of confined recovery for him. The recovery period is pretty brutal, and involves constant care, total confinement, walking him only briefly to go outside while holding him up with a sling. He didn't enjoy any of this, and we end up needing to keep him sedated quite a bit so he doesn't hurt himself.

Later in July, my wife has major surgery (planned, but no fun). Mid-way through her week-long hospital stay, her father passes away. In a touch of pure irony, it happens on my birthday. She's devestated that she wasn't there for the end, but we think he's finally let go knowing that she made it through her surgery OK -- he had been quite worried about her.

Emotions, and the recovering wife and dog aside, the rest of the summer isn't too bad.

Fall 2005: Rogue eventually gets a clean bill of health for his hips in October, but continues to have the mysterious stomach troubles about every 6 weeks. My wife goes back to work (she's a 4th grade public school teacher) and life starts to get back to "normal."

December 2005: As I type this, my wife is packing to travel back east with her mom to visit her sister. I can't go as I planned, because one of us needs to stay home and take care of Rogue, who's just had major surgery to remove 12cm of his small intestine and is in the ICU of the OSU vet-school teaching hospital. Turns out that the "pancreatitis" we thought he had, and the cause of seven month's worth of "stomach" problems was the plastic "squeaker" out of a toy he chewed up back in May (a common puppy thing to do). He had evidently eaten it, and it had initially blocked his intestines. Since it was plastic (these squeakers are little plastic "bladders" about the size of a half-dollar coin) it didn't show up on any of the dozens of radiographs we've had done. Because it would only partially block his intestine, he would be fine, until it shifted and blocked it fully again, at which point the puking cycle began again. A specialist at OSU's new small animal clinic at the vet school figured this out, and they performed surgery this past Friday. His prognosis is good, but he's not out of the woods yet.

At least we finally got his problem figured out, and we "squeaked" it under the 2005 wire, hopefully confining the badness to the already horrible 2005.

Hopefully 2006 will be a bit better than this...

TSA

I don't fly all that much (a couple times a year at most) but I think most of us would agree that the TSA folks have made the airport experience a bit annoying since 9/11.

Now, Bruce Schneier of the excellent "Schneier on Security" blog points out just how out of whack their priorities are with regard to their "Secure Flight" program. You should read his post about it, and the report he links to, but basically it's yet another big government database of all of our personal information that the TSA will use in some way or another (that they don't specify) to make us all "safe."

Combine that with the public's mostly-negative view of the airport experience, and we get to my point: if I were an up-and-coming Democrat House Member I'd make harping on the TSA's failures, lack of transparency, threat to our freedom, etc., my pet project as the 2006 elections approach. Just think of this as my free tip to any of those Democrats...

The Clusterfuck

I've been reading a lot about the huge, tragic, clusterfuck going on along the Gulf Coast over the last week. One thing that strikes me from reading both right- and left-wing blogs is just how brainwashed the right seems to be.

Let me explain. During Clinton's tenure, it was fairly common for liberal folks to bash Clinton. Sure we didn't think a blowjob was worth getting impeached over, but we did think it was a stupid thing for him to do, and thought it was even more stupid to lie about it. And we said that, loudly, and often. Oh, sure, there were the standard paid DLC apologists that spun the whole thing, but for the most part I remember actual liberal people saying things like "Yeah, that sure was stupid" and "I can't believe this adminstration is going to be remembered for this and nothing else" and such like that.

Now, during what is probably the most complete and utter failure of government in American history, the vast majority of the right is in full cheerleading mode. Nobody can even begin to think that Bush or his cronies has done the slightest thing wrong. "Clap louder" is the theme of the week.

If Clinton were in charge and the same fuckups had happened, I guarantee that 90% of the liberals in the country would be asking for his head. And the right would've already started the impeachment proceedings.

I guess that's the difference. Being "liberal" means you don't trust anybody in government explicitly, they must constantly prove themselves. Being "conservative" means that you think that conservative leaders can never do anything wrong, and they must personally shit in your shoe, at least twice, before you'll even consider that they might not have your best interests at heart.

Or something.

Oh, and why again did we come up with the "Department of Homeland Security"? I'm sure feeling secure about our ability to survive another attack or disaster right about now, how 'bout you?

Friday Subie Blogging, Noon on Saturday Edition

The race in Medford last weekend was a hoot:

I posted more video stills and both in-and-out-of-car video up at my site.

Friday Subie Blogging, upcoming race edition

I'll be heading down to Medford on August 26th for the SSCC events (Saturday practice, Sunday race) that weekend. I'll be meeting Chris down there. Should be fun.

I've got a new pair of Kumho Ecsta V710 race tires and an adjustable rear sway bar to try out, hopefully the car will handle well.

Solaris is Open!

I haven't blogged in about forever-and-a-half, but I can't let this day go by unblogged:

Solaris is finally open! Go to OpenSolaris.org for the downloads.

Some of the best news to come out of this is that the Sun compiler suite (Studio 10) is being made available free to OpenSolaris community members. Yay!

Congrats to all the Sun engineers (and lawyers) for getting this done, I'll start the build on my home machine tonight.

OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board

The Community Advisory Board for OpenSolaris was announced yesterday. Members are: Simon Phipps, Roy Fielding, Casper Dik, Al Hopper, and Rich Teer. I met Rich at ApacheCon last November, and I've had some good e-mail conversations with Al Hopper, so I'm glad they're both on the team. They should represent the community side of things very well. Casper Dik knows his technical shit, and has been a great resource on the SolarisX86 mailing list. I don't know a ton about Simon Phipps, but his blog is where I got this announcement, so he can't be too bad. I'm quite pleased Sun picked those two as their reps, and didn't pick some other former SolarisX86 list member who shall remain nameless. Roy Fielding is the "big Open Source name" of Apache fame -- he will surely bring some great experience to the group. More details about the members available at the OpenSolaris CAB page

Congrats to all the members, if you decide you need a resident rabble rouser, I'm always available...

Update: Jim Grisanzio has a good article about the CAB selection process and several links to press about the CAB on his blog

Friday Subie Blogging

Saturday evening edition

That's me from late 2003 in Eugene. That was a good day.

Friday Subie Blogging

(almost midnight on Thursday edition)



That's me getting ready to launch out onto the Medford, Oregon track. I need to get back down there sometime, that place is always a hoot.

Rant

People that know me know it's not like me at all to go off on rants about things...



Yeah, right.

But seriously, this shit (via Steve Gilliard) really pisses me off.

Was nobody but me paying attention back in the mid '80s when Tipper Gore pulled this stunt? Remember the PMRC? Remember how well that worked, and how 20 years later now all of the poor innocent children remain pure and unspoiled until they turn 18? OK, even though that last part didn't work out that way, people should still remember the PMRC. God they sucked. Oh, yeah, but that sticker they scared the industry into putting on records made it so you can't buy certain albums at WalCheapChineseCrap-Mart, so that's good. Or something.

Every decadeweek or so some moron comes along and decries our craven media and the destruction of the children. Cries of "save the poor innocent children!" abound. Meanwhile, the same people take money from porn purveyors. (If you don't feel like clicking, that link takes you to a report showing where everybody's favorite enabler, Joe Lieberman (and others), the same Joe Lieberman who's shown working with Hillary and Santorum in the first link above, took $16,000 from various companies that profit from selling porn.) And no, I don't give a shit about the porn, it's the hypocrisy that gets me.

You know what, I think Hillary's actually worse than the PMRC was. I think Tipper and her misguided buddies actually might've thought they were doing some good. Hillary's just pulling the stunt because she's trying to position herself for a presidential run (or so "they" say). Bipartisanship is swell and all, but when Joe and Hillary consistently provide "bipartisan" cover for the nutty crap that their ultra-social-conservative counterparts come up with, they should be smacked.

Sad but sorta not

While I'm saddened that it's not just the U.S. that's got fucked up ideas about freedom post-9/1l/01, I'm somewhat heartened that at least their press is willing to talk about it. Of course, that's not really the press -- more the geeky press -- but the British press seems generally more willing do real reporting than the U.S. hacks.

The best part of the article is this amusing footnote:

We shouldn't allow yesterday's democratic low point to pass unremarked. Clarke's intention to amend the Bill became known as the Commons debate on it was beginning, and his intended amendments effectively made Commons discussion of the first section of the Bill redundant. Clarke's amendments however had not at that point been written, and he proposed to put them to the House of Lords once the Bill had moved there (which it did today). The Commons was therefore asked to vote not for the Bill they had in front of them, but for the one sketched out by Clarke that was to be presented to the Lords, but which did not yet exist. The Commons was therefore asked to vote for a promise - it did.

Sounds a lot like something that would happen in Congress, but then of course we wouldn't be reading about it...

BTW, if you don't get The Register's RSS feed you should. It's probably the best site for technology news out there, along with some gems of more mainstream reporting as well, and a refreshing snarky style.

Bull Moosetified

Since The Bull Moose doesn't allow comments, I'll have to do this here:

In a surprisingly good article for him, The Moose actually applauds a Democrat for doing something other than turning further rightward (The Moose's favorite Dem is Lieberman):

The Moose awards Senator Reid a hearty "Bully!" for breaking Beltway etiquette and offering the chief economic alien some straight talk,

"We had a $7 trillion-dollar surplus when Bush took office. Now we have a $3 or $4 trillion-dollar deficit. That's, in fact, what Greenspan should be telling people."

Then, Harry Skywalker brought Darth Vader back to earth with this choice comment,

"I think he's one of the biggest political hacks we have in Washington."

Senator Reid, live long and prosper!

Now, Starship Commander Greenspan would like to boldly go where no other Fed Chairman has gone before by endorsing a backdoor consumption tax so his wealthy cronies can further shelter their riches. It is very clear that in his dotage, Greenspan is returning to his cultish, objectivist Ayn Rand roots.

Perhaps, he is now lives on Planet Atlas Shrugged.

Beam me up, Scotty!

The mixed Star Wars/Star Trek references are just too much to let go by. He should really pick one or the other, it's like he's trying to be cool with hip cultural references (but seriously how hip are old SciFi references?). Moose, just so you know (yes, I know he's not really reading my blog, just humor me):

• Skywalker and Vader are from Star Wars the hugely successful movie from 1977 (I saw it in the theater during its initial run that year. I was 8.)
  
• "Live long and prosper" "boldy go where no" and "Beam me up, Scotty!" are from Star Trek the campy and fun TV show-turned-movie-franchise.
  

Now that we're clear on that, I'll await his next post telling all us crazy Democrats we need to move even further rightward if we ever want to succeed in politics again. Yeah, 'cause that's worked so well this far. Criminy. For the best dissection of that topic go read Steve Gilliard's post about it.

Friday Subie Blogging

Since the EESCC's annual "Icebreaker" event is this coming weekend, I thought I'd feature a photo from a past Icebreaker event. This is me at the 2002 event:

Falafel boy

I feel forced to link to this because the gym has this shitty show on every night and I'm forced to watch it while torturing myself on the treadmill.

I thought O'Hackly's normal guests were bad, but this just takes the cake. Criminy.

Friday Subie Blogging

Chris piloting his STi around a track in New York State.

IDEs

If anybody's actually reading this blog, I'd appreciate some commments.

I've been using NetBeans 4.0 to do some Java development all week.

Previous to this, I'd been a dedicated edit-with-Emacs, build-with-Ant, debug-by-brute-force-of-mind-power type of guy, but this whole IDE thing turns out to be pretty damn handy.

I've also tried Eclipse, but its lack of direct support for Solaris x86 and some weird behavior on the version I have that does run on Solaris x86 has led me to not have the best experience with it.

I tried jDeveloper from Oracle too, but never got far with it. I've also heard good things about 'IntelliJ IDEA' but haven't tried it.

What are other folks using? Any recommendations?

Friday Subie Blogging

Everybody else does dogs, or god forbid, cats, on Fridays. I figured I better do Subies.

Yours truly, getting dirty at the last race of 2004:

Communities and corporations

What role should corporations play in the communities that form around their products?

This is a topic that has probably been beaten to death by folks like Chris Locke and David Weinberger, so of course, since it's the net, I'll add a few whacks.

So, what role? Should they be covert shills, like "journalist" Armstrong Williams and his ilk? Should they openly partake in the community, with full disclosure about their affiliations? Should they post from corporate addresses? In whatever guise, should they try to strongly influence the community's direction toward an end better suited to the corporation's needs, or should they allow the community to move on its own?

How does knowing that a poster is an employee influence your take on their community contributions? How dramatically does the level of disclosure change that? Does your opinion differ on whether they're encouraged to participate "on their own time" or if they're actively encouraged to include blogging or other community activities as part of their day-to-day work activities?

Do mailing lists, blogs and newsgroups have different standards of "quality" in this regard?

Should I ask more wildly open-ended questions? Yes!

What got me thinking about all this again is tangentially related to my post below about the Solaris x86 yahoo list, but mostly the upcoming OpenSolaris release and the community that's forming around it. There's lots of positive buzz from the Sun corporate blogosphere. Unfortunately there is also much suspicion and derision from a variety of Linux folk, and not a small amount of it is based on a strong suspicion of Sun's motivations. My guess is that the maturity of the existing Solaris product, and the already-established Solaris communities will go a long way toward helping OpenSolaris succeed. Sun can help or hinder that effort, depending on its participation. If Sun is too forceful in directing the effort, it will be seen by the naysayers as proof that Sun "can't let go." It also seems obvious that Sun just "throwing the code over the wall" will make the initial community development more difficult. What's less obvious is where the balance is -- and I guess that makes sense, if it was easy, all corporate-sponsored communities would be great successes. I'm sure there are smart people working on it, and I hope it works out for the best. How do you think the OpenSolaris community will best be developed? Will you be part of it? What do you see as examples of well-functioning communities, and how strong is corporate involvement in them?

Hot geeky water

There may be no better way to start a blog than with some controversy. To that end, I submit the following message that got me in a bit of hot water over at the "Solaris x86" mailing list at yahoogroups. I didn't mean for it to be that controversial, but evidently it was. You be the judge -- comment here, they don't want it on the mailing list.

Links were not in the original, but are provided here for non-list-member context.

---

Hi all,

A mostly-non-technical, minorly-humorous, "can't we all just get
along" tirade is approaching, delete at will...

Maybe this stuff struck me only because I sat down and read 7 digests
worth of messages all in one sitting after not reading mail all
weekend, who knows.  (if I had a blog, this would go there.  Again,
please delete at will...)

In a recent spate of several messages, Alan DuBoff spake thusly:

(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/solarisx86/message/20184)

> No, I believe you're wrong. Sun has encouraged the engineers to get out and
> help, and for most that help, this is not a part of their job title in any
> way. Sun is also encouraging the engineers to blog, opposed to some other
> companies that are telling them they may place themself at risk for doing so.
> Maybe Sun will change their view, but I don't see that happening.

An excellent defense of Sun's rightly-highly-regarded policy toward
community development.  Oh, but then Alan, in a brilliant effort at
community building, effused:

(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/solarisx86/message/20189)
> Look, Bob is partially blowin' air up your @$$, and to make matters worse,
> you're bending over and dropping your pants...

Delightfully colorful!  Would've had a bit more "oomph" without the
self censorship of "ass", but we can't have it all.  Next, slightly
backing down from his more enthusiastic comment above, Alan then
proceeds with the following:

(all the rest of Alan's quotes from http://groups.yahoo.com/group/solarisx86/message/20193)
[snip]
> Agreed, but to imply that this list has better support is misleading. This
> list has better expertise in only the hardware are of x86/x64, and partially
> it's due to the involvement of Sun's engineers. But Solaris is Solaris is
> Solaris, and Sun does provide decent Solaris support.

A nice positive step of giving props to the non-Sun folks on the list
with good x86 hardware knowledge, excellent.  Also a good defense of
the Sun support folks (I personally have had nothing but good
experiences with them), and also a good plug that a big reason this
community is so successful is the participation of Sun engineers.

[snip]

> There are Sun customers that would laugh in your face if you told them to go
> get support from yahoogroups. This is not to dis this list at all, I feel it
> is a decent place to get help, but many of Sun's customers just cannot put
> their business on the line to use yahoogroups as their sole support backbone.

Creative use of the "dissing while not dissing" defense, I like it.
But, now this community is simply a "decent place to get help" -- not
really a ringing endorsement, but not all that bad.  I agree that
relying on this community as a sole support provider would be silly
for many commercial enterprises.  I think the "laugh in your face"
comment was a bit over the top though, especially given the "better
expertise in hardware" comment above.

[snip]

> And I really don't think it matters much for Sun to do public relations for
> this list specific, I want to see them make it known to the world, however
> that may be.

Now Sun's involvement with our piece of the community is disparaged,
putting forth "the world" as more important.  A bit of a confusing
conflict -- I am under the impression that it is easier to take the
world by storm if you get a good mob going first.

[snip]

> You wouldn't believe how many engineers don't read this list because they
> feel that too many people whine all the time. If this list had better
> manners, more engineers would hang out here. Most of them could care less to
> read the latest in politics, so that turns them off also. This list is what
> it is, nothing more, nothing less. It's certainly not panacea.
>
> -- Alan DuBoff Software Orchestration
> GPG: 1024D/B7A9EBEE 5E00 57CD 5336 5E0B 288B 4126 0D49 0D99 B7A9 EBEE

Here we find out that the list is what it is, which is then defined
only as *not* being a panacea.  *I* think the list is a
technically-themed community, and agree that it isn't a panacea, but
Mr. DuBoff doesn't explain what he thinks the list is, only what it
isn't.  If we take this recent group of postings, we get the
impression that he thinks it's a group of generally annoying folks,
with an occasional gem of x86 hardware experience, tied together by
some whiners, too few engineers, and bad manners.  (I think we may be
able to agree to extrapolate that last bit all the way out the the
whole Internet ;-)

I have no personal relationship, either good or bad, with Mr. DuBoff,
and I generally greatly appreciate his efforts here.  With that said,
there are several conflicting messages in the above snippets, which
indicate that Alan seems to have a love-hate relationship with this
community.  Note that I've been using the word "community"
specifically, because it has become a key buzzword in the blogs of
many of the uppity-ups at Sun (see e.g. Jim Grisanzio recently) with
regard to OpenSolaris.

Although there are some more vocal, yes even whiney, members of our
community of yahoo(group)s, Alan (i.e. Sun) best come to grips with
the occasional "bad apple" and/or "whiner" -- if history is any guide,
they aren't going away unless the community dies.  As much as we may
hate the next-door neighbor with all the dead cars in his yard, we'd
probably really like to have him as an ally if somebody tries to put a
hideous strip mall in the neighborhood.

Let's *all* try to continue building our community, not the
"non-whining Sun engineers only" Solaris x86 community, but "The
Solaris x86 Community" -- we're all in it together.

Thanks, and again, sorry for the diversion,

Sean

---

I really didn't think it'd be that big of a deal, although I was concerned enough about it that I did wait quite a while before hitting "send" on my mailer (unlike some posters on the mailing list, I might add). It was really meant as a general, and humorous, "can't we all just get along" post, to relax a bit of the tension.

Live and learn. I should've just waited and built this blog and posted it here. Now I know.

So, comment away: Was it too controversial for the "technical" Solaris x86 mailing list? Does it matter that I was commenting on an already long string of mostly non-technical posts? Does it make it worse? Was it even remotely funny? Do you think that Sun employees might take it the wrong way? Is a controversy really the best way to start a blog? Bonus points for predicting the types of mail I've received on the topic, and for guessing the paragraph that caused the most violent reaction (so far).

Next up: How should corporations influence the communities that form around their products?

Sean

Climbing Aboard the Bandwagon

Yeah, another blog. Woohoo.

Hopefully mine will be interesting.