The Milka summer editions are out. The white chocolate with lemon is nice, the strawberry and lemongrass tastes pretty much exactly like ordinary strawberry (good enough, but meh, little innovation there) -- but whatever you do, don't buy the "Maracuja & Hibiskusbluete" (passion fruit & flower of rose of sharon) kind.
It tastes just like you would expect, but I'm a chocolate completist, so I had to suffer through it.
(Yet Another Annoyance Of The Day)
Dear Sun,
I dearly love your products, but it's really annoying when pprosvc ignores proxy settings made using pprosetup - as documented - but smpatch picks them up first try. Also, why config utilities in the first place?
Your customers are Unixers; we have our $EDITORs and $VISUALs, and there's a perfectly good /opt/SUNWppro/lib/patchpro.conf. Why use screws when we have perfectly good hammers and nails would be cheaper anyway?
The time invested in the whole config tool bull would have been better invested into getting pprosvc not to throw bare exceptions to terminal and syslog when it hiccups, but rather decent one-liners that explain the problem.
TYVM, HAND.
getfacl(1) does not display setuid, setgid and sticky bits. Especially nice if you want to save the perms of a tree for feeding to setfacl.
1word: ambivalent.
When I saw that the update finally arrived, I just ordered my new notebook.
"10-14 days" delivery.
It's a MacBook Pro 15.4". 2GB RAM, 120GB HDD, OS X Tiger, the works. The best machine I ever got (relative to the state of the art) since my old IBM A21m.
But don't be fooled: I deserve it. No, really. Now, for the DV cam to go with it... ;)
Let's just hope I don't have to wait for even longer. By the time two weeks have passed I'll be climbing the walls all day - and wailing to the moon at night - anyway.
While I haven't found anything (yet) that even just matches a Mac as a desktop platform, it does have its annoyances.
The - with me - probably biggest of these is that Apple is quite insistent on pushing all of its software stack and services on its loyal users who just don't have an interest in some of their products.
Mind you, we're talking about people who did pay the Apple premium for the box and OS in the first place [in Austria, that's almost factor 2 at the low and high ends, and less-but-still-much in between] and who generally do purchase their regular updates on OS and applications, if they are convinced that these are useful.
But sometimes convincing people of your usefulness is an awful lot of a bother, so why not just poke them with a stick until they flinch - and buy?
E.g.:
I'm, right now, in a talk about biometric passports.
The technical contents are the usual bullshit about security by obscurity; closed source but monitored code quality (really! we promise!); secret government procedures "to protect against faking them", and the usual arguments of not having anything to hide if you haven't done anything wrong don't apply in that case of course, and so on, and so on.
The really interesting thing is the behaviour of the presenter and the audience:
The good professor is joking, e.g. about weaknesses of the system and the political nature of the entropy-weak cryptography chosen; an (admittedly, impolite) heckler shouts objections that seem perfectly reasonable in content, if not in style, and the presenter just dismisses him with dry jokes, and the audence certainly laughs.
The presenter tells us how much he is distrustful himself, but if poor technological decisions were made, that's political and he couldn't do anything (but he still continued in the process). After all, "just following orders" never gets out of vogue.
Last but not least, he (seemingly proudly) mentioned his good working relationship with the relevant ministry. Well, duh, he is helping them. Good scientist, here's a cookie. Now roll over!
After the talk I heard from another audience member that the professor was against the biometric passports himself, one of the "good guys". Couldn't have told from his presentation.
The idea was that the introduction of such passports had been decided upon, so there was no changing that anymore, and now the question was just getting technologically better ones, "working within the system".
And of course the bureaucrats will dutifully and patiently listen to all complaints, and nod politely and invite critical (but not too critical!) scientists to a cocktail party or two. And once they feel they have done enough to create a feeling of taking the experts seriously, they will do whatever they wanted to do in the first place.
This is a fundamentally bad strategy, because once you let some multinational bureaucracy dictate the terms of the discussion, it doesn't matter much what details you manage to eke out. Appeasement doesn't work. The next time, the basic terms of the discussion gets reset to a position giving even more power to the governments. Then you manage to once again eke some minor compromises out of the deal. And so on.
And you'll feel you have "made a difference" all the way to the camps.
The right strategy would be to protest. Not at the international meetings, which happen in the middle of nowhere or in cordoned-off cities off-limits to the public who has to pay for the cabal.
Where the protests should happen are the private homes of the politicians responsible. If thousand angry people turn up on your porch every day, you re-think some things.
Now, will this happen? The answer is: No, it won't. That would be uncivilised, not inside the accepted terms of discourse. It would even be undemocratic. As opposed to choosing one of a few clubs of power-hungry old people every few years.
And isn't the sky still blue and the spring still green? Why worry?
In fact, I'm boring you right now. Let's not talk about policy, it's boring and depressing.
In the end, nothing can save people who want to be slaves.
So far, I only got Sun stuff (now, maybe a Google polo shirt and I'm content), but it's magnificient:
I swiped two beautiful mugs, one light blue and one yellowish orange, and all that after I ranted about the state of Java and Solaris patch and package management for a while. The Machine God is a merciful lord. ;)
OTOH, I got 90% on their quiz - knowing that f(x)="Who wrote x?" is "Bill Joy" for all x really helps there - and raved on and on about how great their T1 chips and Solaris 10 are; so that might have helped a bit. Normally they only gave out one mug, anyway, so yay for me!
Also, WTF? Trick questions in vendor quizzes? "How many disks are at least needed for a 0+1 RAID set?" - of course it's 2, as one mirror to stripe to is still a stripe set, but it's an edge case and I promptly chose 4. My 1337!!!1! clicking skills actually beat out my not-so-"leet" thinking skills there...oh well, I got my swag.
Finally, I got to their booth too early, the orange is great but the light blues are worse than the dark blues, and they opened the dark blue ones just after I left. Oh well, it's not that the light blue one is bad, just worse.
Not at all the same thing, just like better does not make for good; remember that Vista will surely be better than Windows ME.
/me fixes his tieOn an actually useful and still Sun-related note, tomorrow I'm going to see Liane Praza (again!) and Casper Dik (for the first time) live, so I'm really looking forward to it. Yay for conferences.
Yesterday I was in a pretty interesting tutorial on cfengine by Mark Burgess himself.
Mark has not only thought very long and hard about the topic of configuration management, but is a very good presenter as well. I normally like more humorous presenters, but in a pinch passionate competency does just fine. ;)
I always thought that cfengine was too complicated and created too much overhead for something that's a question of a svn up and a script that fixes permissions (which can be right there with the config in the repository - in fact you can use getfacl(1) output and feed it back to setfacl(1)).
Basically, his tutorial more cemented the opinion I already had than challenging it - I'm at "nifty but over-engineered" regarding the toolkit now - but I'm still gonna try cfengine on my playground box. Its monitoring features - including long-term trend and "site normality" learning that takes weeks to create an accurate image but then automates trend analysis - seems more than useful, and if I have to swallow the configuration overkill to get it, so be it.
First things first:
Even in Europe, amongst Unix admins Macs now seem to have a notebook market share of about 50%, and the rest of the notebooks seem to be company issues.
User has to login as an administrative user to be able to get a new IP address when the notebook was on sleep long enough to forget its DHCP lease. Fetching addresses on boot does work. It really seems to be a permission error, as ipconfig /renew doesn't work either.
(a) Why the fuck has the current console (clickety colory in this case) user anything to do with what background services do?
(b) Searching for a registry key to fix the brokenness yielded a load of completely redundant places with the same information. Also, Windows remembers which interface is which not by a short code (as Unix does) or vanity names (as Solaris will soon be able to do), but by an endless string of the "{numbers-numbers-numbers-numbers-numbers-andsoon}". WTF? No, really.
On a real OS, this would be a case for a NOPASSWD sudo entry, a desktop icon and much rejoicing. If things like this happened in the first place on real OSs.
On the other hand, I fail to get worked up much about this obvious breakage, as I'm typing this open-air in the Netherlands, the weather is fabulous, and it's my vacation and I'm just lending a friend a quick hand. But boy, would I ever be pissed off about this if something really depended on having this working, right now.
But on the other hand, if something important was depending on Windows, I'd be pretty much fucked at that point anyway...
Scenario: Mac Updater foregrounded itself to ask whether to reboot after upgrades, I was just typing something. Thank goodness, at least the applications with unsaved data asked whether to quit.
Mac OS X has a perfectly good jumping-in-dock feature when applications want to signal that they need attention - and we have the convention that system dialogs should just "jump" Finder.
Yet, still we can't get rid of focus stealing. We clearly need a campaign here. I offer my face for the "Focus has a posse" stickers. ;)
On a different note - I would pretty much call the focus stealing challenge another benefit of maintaining critical systems using automated and/or text-based interfaces.
The pty/shell interface was never designed to multi-task [within one session] and the utilities that have remediated the drawbacks of the design, like screen(1), have created focus-requesting interfaces that are very much like Mac's hopping doc icons in that they ask for the focus, instead of stealing it.
For screen-newbies, I'm of course talking about C-a M (monitor for output) which creates a message when a window shows output, or, on the other hand, running commands with ' ; echo -e "\a"' appended so that the user will be notified of a bell on that window once the command returns - which is especially nice for long jobs that you can't just "monitor" because they should generate terminal output all the time, like make-runs, as in './configure && make && echo -e "\a" && sudo make install'.
I really wonder how often bad things happen to Windows Administrators just for lack of such a facility; things that just don't happen to terminal-bound roots.
Please note that I haven't had any chance so far to play with OS X server, so I don't know how reasonable the server tools are in this regard. Judging by the client OS, this could affect Mac administrators just as well.
We were coming in on the motorway, the usual mind-numbing strip of asphalt stretching on and on like a desert in and of itself, carefully shielded away from the world by endless hedges of carelessly planted arbitrary green, lest anything disturb the drivers in their stupor. I was still passing out every now and then, lapsing into shallow sleeps whenever the memory of yesterdays bender got me.
We reached the town and suddenly everything was so old; the artificially grave podunk marinated in history as if it had been made for tourists a thousand years ago, the sorry lot that had to live there only staffage that gave an imitation of normal life to the tourist trap that had been so richly bestowed by our graceful lord who had obviously deigned not to give a fuck for the poor children who grew up in that timeless imitation ye olde normalyte for paying strangers.
The exercise in absurdism was perfected by some schoolchildren who their minders had driven in front of the washed-out concrete monstrosity that had been built next to the house were the Great One had been born. The uncultured brats obviously couldn't have cared less, and who could blame them.
We finished our walk back to the car and took off.
Swerving a bit to avoid a young hare that shot back into the meadows as if it had been stung instead of almost squished like so much dead meat on the borders of our concrete veins we broke out of the carefully preserved neverland of Stratford; and in the glowing green of the English spring glory was restored to life.
...the poor serve the rich by keeping prices low for those who would not comparison shop and the rich serve the poor by doing the bleeding at the leading edge.
It's all in Schumpeter, and then it wasn't new. Now think about it. ;)
It's incredible how beautiful this city can be when the weather is good, and the weather is absolutely fabulous.
I'm pretty much in the process of maxing out my credit card though, as there are three Apple stores in this city (of which I have, due to varying availability of kit between stores, already seen two). Mini review: iLife '06 makes iPhoto finally usable on my iBook, it's about one to two orders of magnitude faster than the craptastic iPhoto '04 that was included with my trusty old G4. Griffin's iTalk is a fun toy, but the sound quality seems worse than expected so far so I'll have to see whether it will be useful. iWork '06 doesn't look too shabby either, let's see what I'll come up with.
What's more out of character is that I've been shopping for clothes two times in three days already - I love Marks & Spencer's: The clothing there isn't flashy but looks pretty cool; in Austria there is a lot less to be found in the space between "business dress" and "stuff that makes you look like a parakeet" - which in turn, by python transitivity, makes you look like Henry Kissinger, which is obviously a Bad Thing.
Take that, sk8r bois with your garish shirts and atrocious baggies!
But I digress.
So, bottom line is that I enjoy London; and since I'm travelling alone (until today in the afternoon), I can avoid all the tourist traps and sightseeing spots and just wander around aimlessly, watching the crowd, blazing electronica on my iPod* and spending like a drunken sailor (I am, in fact, not a sailor).
* In one of the Apple stores, I got a new one yesterday - without engraving this time, so "steal this iPod" ;-( - after the hard disk crapped out on me the second time in two months the day before. Not to speak of the battery exchanges. If not for the garish looks and horrible interface, I would have ended up with a Creative Labs player long ago.
** While I'm at it; I'm only now going online once again with my iBook because I had problems with SysPrefs not updating my resolv.conf properly any more; the Genius Bar at the Brent Cross Shopping Centre helped there - "Repair Permissions" in DiskUtil seems to be a cure-all with such things, as it seems to repair much more than just wayward mode bits.
somecomputer : Apr 19 12:39:07 : someuser :Note that it's always the users with such a fine understanding of what requires which privileges who are first to cry for full root access, "or I can't do my job".
command not allowed ; TTY=pts/4 ; PWD=/some/home ; USER=root ;
COMMAND=/usr/bin/ssh someotheruser@someothercomputer
Also sprach sudo:
somecomputer : Apr 18 19:18:45 :"But guvnah, how shoulda RTFM! 'TFM' wasint there after the copy!"
someuser : TTY=pts/4 ; PWD=/ ; USER=root ;
COMMAND=/bin/cp *.* /some/path
