Category: Geek

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Xserve en Route

Christmas in June: Found out today there’s a very high chance I’ll soon be able to replace the Win2K server that runs the J-School with an Xserve. Possibly dual. I’m floating on this news. Getting very tired of the tools I want to use not working properly with Windows (e.g. the bad netpbm port to Windows just hung up my attempt to get Gallery installed, and the search engine I want to deploy is only free if you aren’t serving from Windows), and even more tired of Windows consuming itself. It’s appropriate for rock stars to choke on their own vomit — it isn’t appropriate for operating systems. The Xserve will integrate with our systems much more smoothly, and I’ll be able to sleep better at night (like Miles has nothing to do with that :). The conversion should be a great summer project … as if I had a shortage of summer projects.

Music: Duke Ellington :: Prelude To A Kiss
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SpamAssassin / Vipul’s Razor

Realtime Blacklists were working very well — I had seen no false positives in weeks and 90% of spam rejected at the gate — but a customer complained that mail they actually wanted was being rejected as spam (this is what happens when some of your customers are marketing types). No false positives allowed. Disabled RBLs a week ago, then set up SpamAssassin via CGPSA (SpamAssassin as a CommuniGate Pro module). Tonight added Vipul’s Razor to the mix, which works by keeping track of what humans around the world consider to be spam. So the SA/VP combination is essentially a machine detection plus human detection method. Will need to let it run and tweak the tolerances a bit, but if all goes well, this should both stem the spam spigot in my own inbox and give customers the ability to do same.

Another difference between this methodology and the RBL technique is that I am no longer globally rejecting spam at the server level no matter how high its score — now that we have proper tagging, customers can configure the server to delete their own spam at the server level, or let it pass through tagged and delete it at the client level. Elegant.

Music: Cecil Taylor / The Art Ensemble of Chicago :: Nutty
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Apple As Innovator

Tim O’Reilly has some interesting comments on the common notion that Apple is an innovator, Microsoft a copier. His position is that Apple doesn’t really innovate that much more than other companies — what they do is to package and market difficult technologies in such a way that people realize they need them the minute they see them in action — AirPort, Rendezvous… all technologies that were sort of inchoate in the industry — Apple polishes things like this to a high gloss and makes them into fetish objects. By the time MS gets around to similar, it’s clip art.

Example: Tim is especially enamored of Rendezvous, which is impressing me more all the time. The zeroconf spec has been floating out there for a while, but Apple implemented it at the OS level and started building it into apps. Now my browser has automatic, real-time bookmarks to every user’s homepage on every Apache-running Mac on my subnet, iTunes can see the collections of every iTunes user on the home network, and so on.

Aside: Customer Reports on customer satisfaction with Macs.

Update: In the comments, Allistair McMillan points out that Rendezvous actually is an Apple technology – I stand corrected (this takes a bit of the wind out of Tim’s sails as well). FireWire removed from the above list – not sure why that was there to begin with, der.

Music: The Pretenders :: Jealous Dogs
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Stream Sharing Pulled

All my curiosity about whether iTunes 4’s streaming capabilities amounted to webcasting or not turns out to have been on target — version 4.01 is out, and Apple has yanked the feature. Turns out that merely marking the feature “for personal use only” was insufficient — people found ways to list streams for public consumption within weeks. Apple says they’re “disappointed” that a few bad eggs ruined it for everyone else, which strikes me as funny — as if Mac users were a bunch of kids that Apple thought had all grown up, only to discover that, nope, we’re not ready to own a Daisy B-B Gun after all since we still leave our bicycle in the driveway*.

One has to wonder whether Apple’s new relationship with the big labels forced their hand here — I had assumed that the five-listener limit was one of the “reasonable compromises” Apple had reached with the labels, and that they fully knew what they were getting into with this limited form of webcasting. In retrospect, it looks as if either Apple or the labels got cold feet after releasing the feature, and backpedaled. Anyway you slice it, this is disappointing step backwards. I was getting a lot of perfectly legal mileage out of it, too.

Great discussion at MacSlash.

*Sorry for the obscure reference — when I was a kid there was often an ad on the back of comics that showed a kid leaving his bike in the driveway in the path of dad’s car, thus demonstrating he wasn’t yet mature enough to own his first gun.

Music: Afro Cult Foundation :: The Quest
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Uninterruptible

90-minute power outage in North Oakland this afternoon. Of course I’ve been swearing I’d get a UPS installed soon, and of course we had an outage before I got to it. Just the kick in the pants I needed — I’ll be ready for the next one. Sorry about the downtime.

Music: Moby :: Straight to Hell
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Little Shovels

OS X client doesn’t include useradd or groupadd utils, probably as small encouragement to spring for OS X Server. That means that if you do a colo with OS X client, you’re screwed if you need to add users. OSXUserUtils fixes that (use the -m flag to override a dir creation bug in this version).

You can run repair permissions from the command line, i.e. via cron job.

Show Desktop: The best thing about Windows, now available for the Mac (be sure to enable the menu bar option).

Lars Duening left a very detailed comment on the Drive Dock post, with his observations on the comparative user experience between Aqua and X11/KDE.

Music: Velvet Underground :: Run Run Run
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Cell Quality

<curmudgeon mode>
If the past century has represented an ongoing exchange of quality for convenience (an admittedly pessimistic, but probably supportable view), I can think of no realm where we have exchanged more quality for more convenience than that of the phone call. It seems half the calls I get these days come from cell phone users, and a frustrating proportion of those calls are static-y, have random drop outs, are too quiet, get weird cross-talk, etc. Sometimes we get cut off in the middle and somebody has to call somebody back.

In almost every area of technology, things are immeasurably better than they were 30 years ago. But the worst phone problems we had in 1970 were the occasional “party line” x-over — hearing a bit of your neighbor’s conversation. Three decades later, with the actual phone hardware evolving at an incredible clip, every other phone call has become an exercise in frustration. Why can’t the carriers evolve their networks as quickly as their phones? Are they cutting corners, or are there unsolvable problems to solve?
</curmudgeon mode>

Music: Loudon Wainwright III :: Red Guitar
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Billing System

Working bit by bit on a PHP/MySQL customer tracking / service management / invoicing system for birdhouse hosting over the past couple of weeks. An hour here and there in the evenings and it’s coming together, slowly but surely. Between this and a professor / bio / course / description / location / scheduling system just completed for the jschool, and I’m learning a lot about many-to-many table design lately (intermediate reference tables).

Music: Will Oldham :: Every Mother’s Son
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Drive Dock

If you nevermind the enclosures, giant IDE drives are cheap enough to use as backup for other giant IDE drives. So just ordered a Wiebetech FireWire Drive Dock (not the bus-powered variant). This will give me easy pop-in access to birdhouse backups, a way to finally back up the audio collection, keep a non-CD software backup all in one place, etc.

Music: Jack Johnson :: Rodeo Clowns
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Word’s Shell Game

When people say MS Word is a standard, I ask them to tell me where the document format is published — standards are published by standards bodies, right? So now MS is moving to something vaguely resembling XML for Office documents, and we’re supposed to celebrate the end of format tyranny. But as Andrew Orlowski puts it, it’s mostly a shell game.

“Well formed” means that the document will parse without errors – it doesn’t mean that the document will make any sense.

That’s exactly what I’ve always loved about Bob Dylan’s lyrics, but that’s a separate topic. Meanwhile (as Sun’s Simon Phipps puts it):

“We continue to live in a world where all our know-how is locked into binary files in an unknown format. If our documents are our corporate memory, Microsoft still has us all condemned to Alzheimer’s.”

In other words, Microsoft’s eternal survival is assured by our need for our data to remain accessible. If in ten thousand years Redmond is destroyed by mutant porpoises, archaeologists may still need to reverse engineer the Word document format before they can begin to read history.

Music: Bob Dylan :: I Shall Be Free No.10