japester

well, it's been a while. try and remember to post, and well, not much comes up.
Life has been frenetically busy. As usual.

I have some questions for the blogoverse.

Property Managers - Know any good ones? the ones I have asked to come talk about my house (so we can let it out) either fail to comprehend the phone, or are still living in the 1980s without the internet.

removalists - ditto

Employment - I'm looking for Solaris/Linux/Storage work in Melbourne. If anyone's after a Senior in those areas, I'm happy to oblige.
I'd rather go direct to businesses in need, rather than going through recruitment pimps.


...

Packing is progressing. slowly, but progressing.

I discovered Glee a few weeks ago, courtesy of one of my friends, who gave us some (downloaded) episodes. We watched a couple and then promptly bought the DVDs.

We have just finished watching season one, and while I have really enjoyed the season, there are a couple of serious issues I have with the production.

First off, lip-syncing. For a production of this quality, why the hell are they running their singers through DSPs 'fixing' their voices, and then re-dubbing them? It is so obvious, that to anyone who knows it's happening, it's glaring and breaks the illusion of a good stage show.

Second, and the one that has had me fuming, is how the show dealt with bullying, particularly the last two episodes. The message that I take away from it, is that if you are a perpetrator, the system will support and even encourage you. A victim however, is not allowed to react in any way, or they get punished.
Toilet paper a room? That's just playful fun. Egg someone? Glossed over.
Slash some tyres in payback? In my belief, is an appropriate response. however, the Glee kids got punished every time they responded to the very public, very obvious bullying.

What happened in Sydney recently. now *that* is an appropriate response.
video at link.
Will this little turd pick on this victim again? Pretty damn unlikely. Will he still be a turd? Sad to say, he probably will.

Now as much as we like to say that violence is never an option, it is sometimes, the only option. Why else do we have war? Is that not violence? If you say violence is never an option, go and disband your armies, thank you very much. Otherwise you are a hypocrite.

It is a sad indictment upon our society that so much physical and psychological bullying goes unanswered. Schools have quite aptly demonstrated that they will not support victims. From my personal experience and observations, counselling the bully, only encourages them. Getting broken, or being stood up to is what stops them.

I am 15 years on from my private school time, when I was bullied nearly all of those years. The worst 8 years of my life.
20 years on and it's still with me most days. Most of the time, it would be hard to tell that I have had serious internal issues. I can say, it has taken a long time, and a lot of support from a lot of people to get where I am today and I am still healing.

I've been digging into performance trends and metrics over the last few months and trying to find a sane and scalable app for deploying across Unix space. I'm really saddened by the complete and utter lack of useful open source software in this space. There are some of the semi commercial apps which are getting there, but are somewhat difficult to get running on Solaris. The GNU/libre ones are either complete and utter tripe, or suffer serious architectural faults. (And yes, I do suffer from the 'If it doesn't work as described by the documentation, I'll throw it away. Documentation is not hard people)

• Hyperic.
  bloated and awkward interface. graphs? um .... they're there, somewhere. Damned if I could work out how to get it do them easily
  Summary: overweight monitoring app that doesn't do performance metrics
  
• munin
  Just works! I am very sad to say that it gathers data by pulling it from hosts, that's a method that just does not scale.
  Summary: Very easy to use. works well in small/medium environments. Will not scale.
  
• collectd
  collects data well, but there is no frontend worth using. They are all, and I mean all, alpha quality. Heymon appears to have come closest to being able to 'actually work,' but it's pretty ugly still.
  Summary: Reasonably easy to get items monitored and configured. Build a working and stable front end and it'd be just right.
  
• hobbit/xymon
  Also, just works. It has some serious architecture flaws though, like trying to navigate just which file to edit to get it to monitor something, and problems with how it generates rrds.
  Summary: flawed architecture
  

I'll be looking at others in the near future. if you have any good/bright recommendations, I'm all ears. I'm not fussed about alerts/alarms, just performance/utilisation metrics.

Oh wait, the other rant.
Why the f*ck is it so damn hard to build anything on Solaris? I am obviously spoilt by having had the dream life living with Debian (and Ubuntu), where if i want to test some random app, all I have to do is 'apt-get install widget' and voila! It's there. and it runs. If it's not quite what i need, apt-get remove widget, and it's gone. Try that on Solaris? OpenCSW come kind of close, but does not have anywhere near the breadth of app choice that Debian has. Oh, and people don't build stuff on Solaris, so it's fairly common to find that it just won't work.
::sigh::

To get over the 'problems getting stuff built on Solaris', I've spun up a couple of VirtualBox Ubuntu servers and have been developing on them, then porting stuff back to Solaris. That's kept the frustration levels reasonably low.

Getting gender not specified on your passport.

In Australia.

How. What the. I am stunned and amazed in all the good ways. This is good thing.

twenty ten, two thousand and ten, whatever. I say meh to you both. It's MMX.

Sinfest covers the New Year's change quite nicely this year, I think. (over 6 panels, 3401 to 3406)

::boggles::
we're note allowed free thought any more, but we will be allowed to use metal knives on planes again.

http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-news/carryon-restrictions-to-be-relaxed-20091216-kvm2.html

This line sums it up:
The Government has baulked at setting up a centralised aviation security screening authority, arguing it would be "overly prescriptive, more expensive and less responsive to passengers".

TSA anyone?

Friday's
Andre's 40th birthday party and catching up with Nari, even if only for an hour. That lead to us planning a trip to Fukuoka for late next year. It appears my grandfather, at 86 is still partying hard. 死んでない、あいつ。

Saturday,
spending the first day of summer in a data centre
nope, that's an unhappiness.
happiness, is having a 4 hour job start an hour late and finish an hour early, with no errors, issues or delays.

Thankfully, I didn't have to spend time in iiNet's data centre a couple of days ago. As Ian said, "I love the smell of FM200 in the morning."

and happiness still ensues.
Multiple items today,

Seeing the strength inherit in one of my friends, who believes herself to be weak and fragile, and describing that strength to her.

Hearing that my (host-)brother from when I lived in Japan in '94 is here on his honeymoon.
wha?
(Not made contact yet, I only found out late this evening, after leaving my phone at home this morning, and his hotel phone was not answering)

Passing work on to a friend, who is currently enjoying being salary-free.

and Freddy Mercury, rest in peace, 18 years ago, died this day.

This must sooooooooo be spread.