fak3r

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Morrissey’s Birthday today, he turns 49.  It was one year ago tonight that I saw him play here in St. Louis for his 48th…time flies.  Over the weekend my wife and I watched a dvd of a rebroadcast concert from Madrid in 1984 of The Smiths, and the songs still stand.  Here’s hoping many happy returns to the man whose music has stuck with me now for more than 20 years!  In other news, it looks like PETA has put Morrissey up with Bloc Party and Paul McCartney for ‘sexiest vegetarian award‘, whatever that’s worth, and Moz’s new single will feature (another) David Bowie cover.  Meanwhile he’s said to be at work on his latest album, set to be released this Fall.

Yesterday California Supreme Court struck down the ban on gay marriage, making it only the second state to allow/acknowledge same sex marriage.  Here’s hoping this will be the trend, or at least a precident, for the future.  Which will be the next state to grant the basic right of marriage to everyone?  Human rights, what a concept!  The court’s comment is very powerful, “Our state now recognises that an individual’s capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person, and responsibly to care for and raise children, does not depend upon the individual’s sexual orientation, and more generally that an individual’s sexual orientation — like a person’s race or gender — does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights.“

We saw Radiohead last night, and they did not disappoint.  My wife and I weren’t looking forward to the venue, a big shed and lawn ‘pavilion’ that everyone has now, but in the end it turned out to be a great night, with the location not being bad at all. We last saw Radiohead at the same venue twelve years ago during their tour for The Bends, but it wasn’t until just after that with the release of OK Computer that I went completely ga-ga for them for life.  They had a huge chunk of material to choose from, and the show was amazing. After two nice numbers from their recent release, they broke out Airbag and the place went nuts. All the energy seemingly projected via the light show, which was really cool (don’t think I’ve ever said that). And look, I have to say this again and again, but dammit, Johnny Greenwood is so amazing, his composition, the sounds he gets from his guitar, and that shredding sound that he rips from it…outstanding-freaking-standing. Of course he saved the best for last with Paranoid Android coming alive to close the show. I was happy to see the variety of concert goers, considering most were likely getting out of diapers when OK computer came out! The fact that this band has that much pull across a a swath of fans like that without radio play gives me hope for the future.  A great writeup of the show on RFT, be sure to follow their link to their well done slideshow of pictures (it’s where I got the one above). Now to find a soundboard or matrix sourced recording somewhere and we’ll be all set. Full set list after the jump.

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This is a big deal for me, I played with Skype back in the day, but never really used it much since it required a second client, and I have always used Gaim (which is now Pidgin) to consolidate all of my accounts into one client and didn’t want to break out of that mold, but now I don’t have to.  Using the Skype API, Eion Robb has created a Pidgin plugin called Skype API plugin for Pidgin/libpurple/Adium.  Now I just add my user to the Pidgin accounts tab and I can now chat via Skype in Pidgin just like I chat with all my other contacts.  Note that you can’t do the video of Skype on Pidgin.  Mac users note that you can use this on Adium (my fav OS X chat client), which uses libpurple, which is the backend for Pidgin, on Mac.  So now I’m using Skype again, which is a propreitary app, thanks to them providing an API for the Open Source community to latch on to.  Ah, the circle of life…

UPDATE: I’m reworking my config blending in the security ideas found on camomel.org they’re really thought things through on this, this should make for a very secure environment.

I’m always trying new software, and with the webserver I’ve moved from Apache 1.3 to 2.0 to 2.2, and then later I moved everything over to Lighttpd, which I’ve liked, save for some memory issues that popped up.  Now, enter a web server named nginx (engine x), written by a Russian hacker. It’s already proved it’s meddle by running some of the largest Russian sites for years now.  It has the speed of Lighttpd, but with none of that memory weirdness, plus it uses a fraction of the CPU, so scaling should be smooth for highly visited sites.  It also does cool things like load balancing, reverse proxy, IMAP and POP proxy, etc, so I can see it being used in a variety of ways on a network.  It took me some time to understand how to configure it, which was a case of me just making it harder than it really is, so I wanted to post it here.  Look for updates as we go along, but this is currently backing a Production site I manage.

user					www-data www-data;
worker_processes  			5;
pid 					/var/run/nginx.pid;
events {
worker_connections 1024;
}
http {
include				/etc/nginx/mime.types;
default_type			application/octet-stream;
log_format main 		'$remote_addr $host $remote_user [$time_local] “$request” ‘
‘$status $body_bytes_sent “$http_referer” “$http_user_agent” ‘
‘”$request_time” “$gzip_ratio”‘;
access_log			/var/log/nginx/access.log  main;
error_log			/var/log/nginx/error.log;
sendfile 			on;
tcp_nopush        		on;
tcp_nodelay      		off;
keepalive_timeout		65;
gzip				on;
gzip_http_version		1.1;
gzip_vary			on;
gzip_comp_level 		6;
gzip_buffers			16 8k;
#gzip_proxied			expired no-cache no-store private auth;
gzip_proxied 			any;
gzip_min_length			1000;
gzip_types			text/plain text/html text/css application/json application/x-javascript
text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;
server {
listen			80;
client_max_body_size	50M;
server_name 		server.domain.com;
root 			/var/www;
index  			index.html index.php;
access_log  		/var/log/nginx/access.log  main;
error_page   		500 502 503 504  /500.html;
location = /500.html {
root		/var/www;
}
location ~* ^.+.(jpg|jpeg|gif)$ {
root		/var/www;
expires         30d;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string;
fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length;
}
}
}

With the barriers lowering, and other market factors creeping in, Macs are slowly making a move into the enterprise.  While this may/may not solely be Apple driven, the fact is that people like choices, and the Macs are now far more compatible with other systems than they once were, so finally folks have options.  In my recent travels to Woods Hole we had ~14-15 developers from around the world, and there were 4 Macs there.  Of course we had the normal thing where someone couldn’t get something working in Windows, Mac folks would chime in with, “just works on a mac” and later when Mac folks couldn’t plug a projector into the certain Macs, the windows folks throw the, “just works in windows”, so it was all in good fun.  So while I don’t consider these folks “enterprise” as in working for a corporation, it clearly shows that more people can use what they want, and have IT adapt for their needs.  I talked to a friend up there about his MacBook Pro - it’s a beauty of a machine, and he loves it b/c he can do everything he needs, plus run windows for dev work that you can only do in Windows.  Of course if I had such a beast it’d be running Linux, and that’s my argument for my buying my Dell laptop; while the Apple is nicer, it was also ~2500$ more than the Dell.  Yes, maybe when my work buys me a ‘top I’ll rethink it - but now I’m thinking smaller again - and I really like the Xseries Thinkpads (used be by IBM, but now it’s Lenovo - but the same otherwise) and they’ve always had excellent Linux ability.  two devs in WH had those, and I had to borrow them - not to work on them, just to pick them up - nice and light, thin, but with high screen resolution.  of course for a full fledged system like thatI could also look at the MacBook which shares most of the Thinkpads features - but for a Mac I’d prefer the black MacBook after my long, drawn out suffering with my old iBook…but I digress.  Now, what was the question?  Oh yeah, more Macs in the workplace, yeah, it’s how I’ve always said it should be, and it’s more that way now.  I run Debian Linux at work now, on my work provided HP desktop machine, on my personal Dell laptop when I bring it, on my Development server, and (soon) on my production server.  What kind of support do I need from IT?  Gimme an IP and a gateway IP and I’m all set.  So, in conclusion, I believe four reasons for Apple’s success with people using more Macs at work is due to the following reasons:

1. x86 processor which allows the bridge to those who still *think* they need Windows.
   
2. Microsoft’s epic fail with Vista has frustrated users to no end, witness the stay of execution XP has recieved from Dell.
   
3. Apple’s awesome design sense, which cannot be duplicated, puts it in that “wow, gotta have that gadget” bucket
   
4. and lastly (and maybe to a lighter extent) the fact that Darwin is a Unix derivative, so *geeks* can use it and get the same thrill they do via Linux.  I’ve seen this not only on my trip, but to the annual DefCon, where Macs are shown alongside the blocky black laptops of yore.

Look, business is like everything else, to survive it must evolve.  Plus, choice is freedom, which makes it an inherint human desire.  Wouldn’t you rather work somewhere that allowed, and TRUSTED, you to work with whichever OS you perferred?

Last week I traveled to Woods Hole, MA to attend Nomina 2.  Woods Hole is the home of the Marine Biology Lab, and it’s where Encylopedia of Life is based.  EoL played the host, and did a wonderful job at making us confortable in a very quaint, peaceful town.  The meeting was organized by TDWG - an international group that proposes biodiversity information standards and protocols for sharing biodiversity data. Basically they’re a taxonomic group that have and collect data on zoology, biology, botany, viruses, insects, (don’t know what *logy those last two fall in) etc, in order to be able to provide that data to the world in a way that can be shared between different groups.  So standards that disparate groups can abide by for now into the future to permanently organize their collections.  This was the second meeting of Nomina, (Nomina means “Sacred names” in Latin) with the goal of coming up with a way that 1) unique names can be assigned to specims in biodiversity so that they can be used to share data across disciplines, and 2) a global index of all of this data can be generated so individual nodes can search across all of it and know where to find the details.  So the cool thing is I get to work with all of these people from around the world (during this conference we had people from the US, England, Ireland, Holland, Denmark, Belgium, Russia, India, New Zealand), so that it’s not only a true Open Source, community effort, but it’s focused to provide a certain goal, that a ton of people are either behind, or will be once this large of a group builds/adopts it.  You can see my photos from the trip on Flickr, and some in session meeting shots on the Encylopedia of Life’s blog.  TDWG’s next meeting is in October in Perth, Australia, and they’ve told me they want me there for that.  This is getting fun.

So, as I mentioned earlier, last Saturday was the first ever Record Store Day, and yeah, it rocked. I took the whole family down the street to our local Euclid Records, where tables outside the store hawked BBQ and cheap cds, with a crowd inside buying records, cds and enjoying local bands rock out. We just missed The Bottle Rockets, but did catch Finn Motel, which featured a neighbor on drums, who we didn’t know was in a band or even played drums! The kids claimed it was too loud, but really enjoyed seeing a live band again. It was very cool that there were so many kiddos there, I love seeing that, and my daughter even picked out a cd she wanted after listening to it on one of the kiosks in the store. I picked up the current Mountain Goats cd, my wife opted for Liam Finn’s debut offering, before heading out for some grub outside of the shop. The staff seemed to really enjoy it, and I was sure to give Joe (the owner) a thumbs up and a ‘thanks’ for the years he’s helped fuel my addiction. Views from shop employees can be found on their blog.  A favorite picture from that blog shows an employee playing DJ while The Bottle Rockets get set up on the stage behind her.  Notice the vinyl, and the resurgence of turntables in the background!

Image via Wikipedia

Heading out today for Woods Hole, MA - it’s supposed to be beautiful (expect pictures on my grossly underused flickr account). I’m representing the Biodiversity Heritage Library in a meeting with the Encyclopedia of Life folks as we discuss standardizing data streams for upcoming sharing of data. It may not sound like it, but this is fun. While I’m on more of the technical end of the spectrum, the way these things will be shared/directed/pushed along the wire is where I’ll come in and I’m very interested in their efforts and methods, so I expect to learn a ton. For more info on EOL and what they’re working towards, check the links to some articles below. (that Zemanta feature is pretty slick)

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Our DSL went out last Friday, and didn’t come back up until yesterday…frak.  I’ve hosted all of my websites on homebuilt servers for over 7 years now, and I love doing it, but when the temps change or some phone repair guy plugs something in wrong, we’re down.  It’s never the internal wiring, it’s never our ISP (the still wonderful Speakeasy), it’s always something funky with the line.  This time they had to send out a new modem before they could dispatch the phone company, and being that it was the weekend I couldn’t get it until Tuesday, so that was that.  Oh well, at least no one got hurt - and I could still get my email (and that’s one of the main reasons I stopped hosting email at home).  And with what we pay for DSL to have the static IP so we can run servers, the 250$/bonded T1 that they offer starts to look pretty attractive.  Get that, pop one of the old routers in an outdoor box attached to some small solar panels and start building an open network to blanket the neighborhood.