1.7.05: A new year.

Well, it's here, the new year. Fresh with possability, hope, and promise. At least, it will be if I survive January. We'll see.

Hot on the todo plate is to replace his page with a (shudder) blog. Personally, I hate blogs. I love to read 'em, but I don't think I'm really all that interesting. There is one great thing about a blog though... you have a place to bitch about blogs. The crewl irony. But, at this point, anyone who is anyone has a stupid blog, and I don't really feel like I have a choice but to participate. It's funny that most things on this site are referenced by others as blog entries, including my Fink responce. It was a plain ol' HTML page; what we otherwise refer to as an "article". You could, I suppose, argue that this news page is a blog of sorts, but I've thought of it more as a "why aren't there real updates?" exuse page. Oh well.

Work is busy this month, and I promised to get hopping on the redesign of Enlightenment.org this month and I doubt I'll have time. No time for code at all; which sucks ass. Time is mostly being consumed by work, my "The (Cuddletech) SA's Guide to Oracle" manuscript which is in editing right now, and various Solaris community and responce related things. The blog roll out is necesitated by the last item in that list. There is alot to be done and little time. Things have been made worse all around by a raging cold I'm trying to get over, so I've been uncharrictoristically going to sleep at 10pm because I just can't think with a massive headache. It's slowly passing though and hopefully I'll be back to normal soon.

Anyway, expect to see more and more Solaris10 and OpenSolaris content on cuddletech in the coming weeks. In the mean time, if anyone knows of a nice solid blogger app thats based on SQLite, let me know. I'd like to write one myself, but I don't have time to do it right.

12.7.04: New Images!

As you have discovered by now (look to your left) Tamarah and I took new pictures! The old pictures hadn't changed in ages because I didn't have a studio enviroment to get the shots. Because I need all the images to have perfectly white backgrounds to blend into the pages I need a softbox (an overhead light) and a white backdrop. Believe it or not, the old images were done in our old apartments kitchen, because the overhead florecent acted perfectly as a softbox and the imperfections in the kitchen wall (that bumpy stuff) worked perfectly with a little touchup using GIMP. My company actually has a small studio setup for marketing photography and so I asked permission to use their studio for my pics and they agreed, so after 3-4 years of stalling we finally did some shots. I'm really really really happy with the results. And, if you didn't notice, yes Tam is wearing a wig. The bright color spruces up the pages a bit. And doesn't she look great!?! How many pregnant women look that hot, really? Call me biased, but she's the hottest babe on the planet... and being married to her is too kool to describe. And I'll guarrentee she knows more about fibre channel disk subsystems than most of you guys. Anyway, the new images provide a fresher look, better fill the pages than the previous, and you no longer need to be afraid of digging around cuddletech when your at work, yet the site is still very sexy I think. Cuddletech is still living up to its matto: UNIX with Sex Appeal... because UNIX is itself very very sexy indeed.

Nothing else really to report. All the recent knews about Sun has been making me so furious that I've not been able to do much without getting a raging headache. The stupidity is more than I can bare. And it only keeps getting worse. Largely, things have gone well and even though the press is so stupid the user comments are 95% positive, but there are just some people that I'd like home addresses for so I can go frickin' fork out their eyes and do the world a favor. How they even can manage to continually breath in and out is simply beyond my comprehension. The other day I got so pissed off that I had to go to my local Sun campus and sit in the courtyard to escape all the crap.. too bad you need a badge to get into the cafeteria for coffee though. I really don't know why I don't work for Sun sometimes... it'd be so so nice to not constantly be around Win32 people without a clue. The only upside is that I have more influence outside of Sun than I'd have inside. Afterall, when you work for Sun your just another voice in the choir, whereas on the outside I'm a unique and rare individual. Damned flip sides.

I'm going to Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco tomorow. If anyone cares in a wrap up, let me know. I'm going expo only (ie: free) but am hoping to see the keynotes by Scott McNeily and Larry Ellison and then troll the expo for a while. If your there, say hello, I'll be the only kilted guy there.

12.1.04: Up down and around

See? This page isn't a blog... 15 days with no update oughta prove it. Anyway, I figured I'd probly outta update with all the silliness going on, so here goes...

So the the Fink responce went over well. I'll only say that anybody who is anybody mailed me about it. While those in the Sun camps thought it was poetry, some of my fellows in the general community thought it was overly harse and childish. Well, perhaps it was... but perhaps it was time we had some type of uncivilized and unpasturized retort for once and just let steam blow. Martin put it on a personal level (thats what a blog is supposed to be) and so a personal responce was made. I thought about a second more tactful responce to that an other issues but realized that I'm unlikely to get the same level of attention again and who probly be taken by some as a "he wussed out in the end". Either way, seemed best to just let it be for awhile.

I wish I could talk about OpenSolaris, but I can't. I can only say that big things are happening (!!!) and the community (yours truely included) are very happy.

So SAGEwire is dying on the vine again. I'm trying to keep it going but supplying the ammount of news to that site that needs to be supplied is not a one man task, especially if that one man isn't doing only that. My first commitment was to SunHelp.org which I don't do enough of as it is, and it's a damned good site that I'm glad to be a part of. I dunno, I want SAGEwire to thrive but maybe I'm not the guy to bring it back from the dead, especially with no support for SAGE themselves other than "Good luck!".

My new paper "The Cuddletech Guide to SNMP Programming" is out and ready. I'm pretty happy with it. It's not rocket science and it's not going to win me any awards from ACM or IEEE but it will help you learn the basics of SNMP and get you using it. And thats whats important! SNMP is a very powerful and flexable tool that all sysadmin's should be using, but every single book (yes even the O'Reilly one!) just suck ass! They don't explain anything at all except that you should buy OpenView! So, damnit, I wrote my own book. I wanted to give it to the Net-SNMP project, in fact I offered to take over their website or at least just clean it up a bit but I was told that someone is already working on it. That may or may not be true, I dunno. I have offered the paper to them to use as their own with the right obviously to rename it anyway they like, even to remove my name if they really want to, but they just aren't responding to me. The Net-SNMP documentation largely stinks right now and I'd like to help. I asked for help from those guys on their list to verify that some of my ideas were correct but got no responce from anyone. If it weren't for the fact that Wes and Rstory, the guys that run the Net-SNMP show, weren't such nice guys I'd be really pissed off. Either way, I just wanna help them and the community as a whole. We'll see if it goes anyway. I'm thinking that I might trim up a little article to submit to SysAdmin magazine or something since it's high time I got published in a rag.

My Oracle Book is hanging in limbo at the moment. I don't know if or when it's going to be published, I'm sorta hanging on for that. One of the criteria for a Senior Systems Administrator based on the SAGE Job Descriptions is "Publications within the field of system administration", so this would fit that checkoff. We'll see what happens.

Sunday night I came home to find that Enlightenment DR17 hitting CVS had made Slashdot. It hit CVS 4 days earlier and I'd been working with it for months prior but has the general webmonkey of the Enlightenment Project I had to kick into high gear for about 3 hours making updates and putting things in order. We just didn't expect it to get so much attention. All the Enlightenment sites including cuddletech got a massive spike in traffic due to it. You can see the new DR17 page I put together and dig around the site for other goodies. We're now looking at migrating our website to a CMS, which sucks in terms of design but makes contribution much easier since almost everyone is afraid to touch the site right now, leaving most everything to me and raster.... mostly me. Anyway, despite the normal outpouring of utter dumbshits that E brings out to bash it, things went pretty well. We'll see if interest grows as we approach release.. it undoubtedly will.

But, honestly, the last couple days I've just been really really bored. I can't explain it. I've been tinkering, mostly with databases in zones, such as a 2 node Oracle10g RAC deployment within zones on the same system, IBM DB2 in a zone, and that sorta thing, but I'm just not all that fired up. I've had acouple of those days where you just want to eat your own head. I'm hoping that the feeling passes soon... lord knows I've got plenty of projects to work on. I just don't feel like doing anything. I probly should hit the karting track more often to act as a diversion but even just sitting around the house I feel pretty bored. That feeling just sucks and in my experience you just have to ride it out, which is what I'll do. Never the less, more is coming..... stay tuned.

11.15.04: Solaris10 Release Event

Things are starting to slow down. Today was my big adventure... an invitation to the Sun Network Computing Q404 Event, the highlight of which was the announcement of (the not yet finished) Solaris10. I doubt I need to tell any of you how I feel about Solaris10. So, needless to say I was really really excited about attending, and perhaps I made it bigger than it should have been in my mind. Certainly I've been to big posh vendor and industry events in swanky settings and all that, I'm "used" to it, but this was the release of the OS that will change history! I mean, this is a big big deal... and not only is it a big deal but the press, despite all they are reporting, still don't get the full gravity of this release. So, today was vindication day where the press would be informed, analysts made to know, and everyone would be astounded and amazed at the shear insane koolness of Solaris10.

Uhhhhhhh, ya, well that was the plan but not exactly was happened. To be honest, it was BORING AS ALL HELL!!! I almost ate my own hand for something to entertain me. I really had three missions for the event: 1) Pimp Solaris Systems Programming by hualing it around in plain view for all to see, 2) Try to get Jonathan Schwartz to help Rich Teer out with a job/cash/small island (or just an Audi TT for him, and a BWM M3 Convertable for his wife), 3) Meet and hang out with Jim Grisanzio and the Solaris Kernel Team or any fellow OpenSolaris developers there. So, mission 1 went well, people asked about it and were interested plus it turned out that every member of the press was given a copy which helped my cause immensely. Mission 2 didn't quite go acording to plan, the first chance I had a wimped out as Scott and Jonathan walked by me, I then waited outside the analyst/press Q&A session for an hour to get a second shot, which I did... however Jonathan just gave a glance in my direction and darted to the next meeting with a massive trail of snivling suits behind. I made a shot at handing him my personal copy of SSP with a letter for him inside, but he didn't hear/care but his body guard (yes, believe it or not) was nice to took it to give to him... so, we'll see if he opens it or just trashed it. And mission 3 was a total disaster. I didn't talk to anyone the whole damned time. With everything going on lately (see older news below) I kinda had that "I'm kool enough to sit at the kool kids table" feeling, which went right out the door after about an hour. I sorta tried to talk with some of the kernel guys (Andy Tucker, Brian Cantrel, etc) with the only in that I had "You guys seen Jim around?" but my asking a question seem to signal the other cronnies around that they could bug them too, so I got a "I think I saw him over..." and then I was standing there with their backs to me while I kinda just muttered. So, apparently my "peon" status has been returned and my "worthiness" cache is depleted. I can't be terribly shocked, I guess, these guys get mobbed everywhere and are showboated around. And I don't think they saw my tag or knew who I was. Maybe if I'd said "Hey, I'm Ben Rockwood, how are you?" it would have gone better, but damnit I'm a hermit! I don't think up useful ideas in a social setting untill about 6 hours after the fact. Oh well...

I took some pictures, I might put them up. The place was buzzing with suits and seemingly hundreds of Sun employees who do who knows what (read: marketing and sales people). I counted maybe 20 geeks total. And out of those, at least 10 of them would have been self proclamed "I'm a hip techie weenie who golfs on the weekends" sorta people. The most interesting thing to any of you non-Sun Zealot people would be that Red Hat flew a "Just another day at Red Hat" banner behind a plane for most of the day. I thought it was a nice touch, so 2 points to Red Hat. But anyway, the event was just boring. I guess if I'd had people to talk with it would have been more engaging, but I didn't, so I just sorta drank tons of coffee and walked around like an idiot. I planned ahead for the "wall flower" bit, so I wore my urban camo kilt for alittle extra flare. Sure, a kilt at this sort of function is probly not appropriate but it does acouple things: 1) You DO get noticed, 2) People definately remember you, 3) Many people know I wear kilts, so it might attract their attention, 4) It clearly diferentiates me from the marketing drones, internal employees and press, and 5) adds that extra "I'm clearly a developer who doesn't give a shit" flare. Did it work? Well, I got noticed, no doubt, but still no interesting conversation. I got several "Nice Kilt" comments, and even some "Nice Utilikilt" comments. Even 2 people who mentioned they had one at home, but no one said "Your that cuddletech guy right?". Oh well. I packed jeans jic, but didn't need 'em.

I won't even go into my detailed thoughts about the presentations... I'll simply say that it was dull and understated. I wanted excitement and joy and some fireworks, and the whole deal. What we got was more of a monotone "it's great, here is 20 reasons why". Maybe it's just me, but I wanted some passion, and I didn't see it. I'm a passionate guy and an outright zealot, I love to scream the joys of Solaris10 from the rooftops, but apparently I'm just over excited or something. Anyay..... it was just disappointing all around. I was going to put a full review with pics and everything on a seperate page and then send it to slashdot, OSNews, etc, but I don't think Sun wants that sorta press after all the work. Most people thought it went well (read: Sun employees in blogs who hung out with their buddies and enjoyed the open bar) but I was so bummed out that I actually wished I'd go to work instead and had to go to my local Karting Track to pound out some laps to put me in a good mood before coming home. I guess it worked because I improved my best laptime by half a second which put me in a great mood for the rest of the evening. But, anyway, if you missed the event, don't feel left out, you didn't miss anything. Even though everyone wants to embrase community members, those of us who are midnight engineers are still just wall flowers wondering when the damned coffee pots will get refilled.

We'll see what happens from here. I can tell you that I don't like the new Solaris logo. It's just lame.. how many hundreds of thousands did they pay to design it? I'll gladly take the old one back. I'm almost tempted to create my own press campaign for Solaris10. I dunno, if there is any good thing about not working for Sun it's that at least you can complain freely. :)