Usage stats

I just realized that as part of the upgrade of grommit to Solaris 10, my usage statistics were no longer being updated. (I use Webalizer; you can see the report that it generates here.) I logged in to grommit, and saw at once that my cron job wasn’t running. This was actually a good thing, since the Webalizer binaries were all compiled for Linux!

The natural thing would have been to grab the source and rebuild Webalizer, but when I arrived at the download page I noticed that there was a prebuilt distribution for Solaris 2.8 on x86. The Solaris engineers work hard to maintain 100% binary compatibility, and Brad writes really clean code, so it should just work, right?

And it did. Kudos all round.

Truth

I visited my local Barnes & Noble this evening to pick up a handful of work-related books – necessary stuff, but unexciting. To compensate (yeah, yeah – pathetic excuse), I decided to treat myself to a philosophy book: Simon Blackburn’s Truth: A Guide. Earlier this week I had read Andrew O’Hehir’s review in Salon, which I heartily recommend; it’s one of those delightful reviews that stays with you all the way to the bookshop. I got home and read the Introduction while steaming some asparagus.* By the time the stalks yielded to the tip of my knife, I was hooked. Partly it’s Blackburn’s stance – recognizing the strengths of the absolutist and relativist positions without sliding into the mushy ambivalence that he decries – but mostly it’s the economy and clarity of his writing. I can tell that I’m going to enjoy this.

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* The humidity has finally broken, and I was able to turn off the A/C and open the house up. Bliss! I usually avoid cooking techniques that produce steam when it’s really humid.

Helping…

Inspired by Juan Cole, Majikthise, and others I’ve added the Liberal Blogs for Hurricane Relief ad to my sidebar. If you’re a PayPal user, it’s painless (as long as it doesn’t get overloaded). However, if your employer matches charitable donations (as Sun does), please use their procedure and skip this ad. I want to see the Liberal Blogs initiative succeed, but I’m much more interested in seeing the maximum amount going to the American Red Cross.

Now I can start to blog about it….

This afternoon we finally got the email announcing that the Sun–StorageTek deal had officially closed. I’ve been waiting anxiously for this moment, because for the last month or two I’ve been a member of the Integration Team, working on various aspects of the deal. I’m having an absolute blast, working with some really great people and learning about some incredibly cool technologies*, but I haven’t been able to blog about any of it! All of that changes now, and I plan to post a number of pieces about what I’ve been up to and what this deal is all about.

And those of you that have been through M&A** events will know that the pre-close activity is only the beginning: the real work starts tomorrow, Day One. It’s going to be fun – even if it does mean spending more time at Denver airport and relying on the “high-speed Internet” and “complimentary breakfast buffet” in certain medium-stay hotels near Broomfield, CO.

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* all strictly within the legal guidelines, naturally!
** merger and acquisition

Technical difficulties….

My regular readers (yeah, right) may have noticed that geoffarnold.com has been up and down over the last few days. There have been a series of odd problems, most have which have resulted in Steve spending too much time with grommit when he ought to have been sleeping. The most bizarre issue was that the system was occasionally inaccessible from within SWAN, Sun’s intranet; the only way we could see that it was alive and well was with tools such as Netcraft and DNSreport.

I wonder how long it’ll take the aggregators to find me again. (PlanetSun seems to have lost track of me completely, which is intensely frustrating!)

My first laptop…

I’ve just bought my first laptop. No, of course it isn’t the first laptop that I’ve used: over the last 13 years* I’ve worked with countless systems from various vendors (IBM, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Sharp, Apple, and Acer) in a variety of form factors (from desktop replacements to pocket-sized subnotebooks). But all of them – even the little Toshiba Libretto – were bought by Sun for me to use, and their hard disks have been filled with the documents, software, tools, and other materials that I work with on a daily basis.

As I spend a lot of my time travelling, I find that my laptop does double duty. Yes, it’s a business tool – but it’s also where I transfer digital photographs when my camera is full; where I store the music that I listen to on the road; and how I watch DVDs in the airport or in my hotel room. This is simply a practical matter: I’m hardly going to carry two laptops with me, one for work and one for personal use. But as a result I’ve found recently that more and more of the hard disk space on my laptop was being occupied by personal materials – music, videos, photographs, DVD projects – that have nothing to do with Sun.

So what was I to do? I’m committed to helping my colleagues to make Solaris 10 an excellent laptop OS (for which I use my Acer Ferrari), but I have to recognize that my personal multimedia data is tied to Apple’s iLife application suite. powerbook15toptn09162003.jpg So I started to think about getting myself a laptop for both work and personal use. This principled approach was nudged along by practical considerations: my existing PowerBook (a 12″ 867MHz G4 with 640MB/60GB) was starting to feel really slow: start-up time for some of the big apps like NeoOffice/J was getting painful.

So this evening I visited the Apple store up the road and paid in cold, hard plastic for the first laptop I’ve owned: a 15″ PowerBook (1.67GHz G4, 1GB/80GB). The migration tool worked perfectly: I strung a Firewire cable between the old Powerbook (“medieval”) and the new (“silk”), rebooted medieval in target disk mode, and it sucked everything over – user info, documents, applications, network settings.

And yes, I did buy AppleCare extended warranty. Nobody’s perfect.

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* I think that the first was an IBM Thinkpad 700, back in 1992.

'You haven't explained everything yet' is not a competing hypothesis

Nice op-ed piece on ID in the NYT by Dan Dennett entitled Show Me the Science. Key paragraph:

In short, no science. Indeed, no intelligent design hypothesis has even been ventured as a rival explanation of any biological phenomenon. This might seem surprising to people who think that intelligent design competes directly with the hypothesis of non-intelligent design by natural selection. But saying, as intelligent design proponents do, ‘You haven’t explained everything yet,’ is not a competing hypothesis. Evolutionary biology certainly hasn’t explained everything that perplexes biologists. But intelligent design hasn’t yet tried to explain anything.

Solaris rules!

This is the first entry I’ve posted since Steve completed(?) the transfer of grommit.com to the new system: a Sun V20Z LX50 running Solaris 10. Thanks, Steve – I know you learned more than you ever expected to during the process!
(Composed on my Treo 650 while shopping at L.L.Bean in Freeport, Maine.)

OAK?

I’m flying back to Boston today. Even though I’ve been commuting between the Bay State and the Bay Area regularly for over 20 years, this will be the first time I’ve flown into or out of Oakland. It’s actually not the first time I’ve used the airport; we once had to land at OAK to refuel when SFO was fogged in. (Amazing what a few miles across the bay can do.) I’m stuck with a plane change in Denver; I can’t seem to keep away from that place. (I’ll be back there again on September 6.)