Glog

F’ing awesome!

I also have one from Compaq.

Ben Horowitz, one my most admired, all-time management masters, has started writing at Marc’s blog (he also wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital publication). The ATD piece was interesting in that it brought back a lot of memories about Loudcloud and the events that transpired back then. I am definitely looking forward to more of his posts.

Update: Now, his own blog!

I don’t normally curse (ok, ok, when writing) but fuck!

Update: I ended up nuking and paving the laptop after grabbing data via target mode. The effort late last year to finally organize my apps, data, and such is paying off. The FileVault image works, and I was able to mount it elsewhere (so I expect to drop it back in the laptop after I finish reinstalling). Eating my own sysadmin dog food: anytime!

Update: Really, a little thinking about the chain of events that may have caused this. Just before the Finder bent itself into oblivion, I just attached my video camera and (gasp!) poked around its file system from the CLI. I had attached the camera before without problems (but this was the first time I sniffed around). I’m not sure this has anything to do, other than folks seem to think this issue is related to external disks.

I found out recently that Nagios was forked into Icinga. It looks interesting, and the new web interface is heading over to sexyland fast. I will take it out for spin soon and see how it handles our current configuration (which relies heavily on object inheritance). The team at Icinga has already built a fair number of improvements for Nagios proper. It may be the fastest path to nirvana to a more usable Nagios install for shops heavily invested in Nagios.

Mi primer recuerdo literario “serio” es Las Ratas de Miguel Delibes, al cual siguieron otros como La Sombra del Ciprés es Alargada, El Camino, La Hoja Roja, El Disputado Voto del Señor Cayo, Los Santos Inocentes y Mi Idolatrado Hijo Sisí, entre muchos más. Así, Delibes se convirtió en su día en ese autor en el que la gente a tu alrededor piensa a la hora de hacerte algún regalo sencillo.

Hace ya probablemente poco más de diez años que no lo había leído, y esta mañana, al oir por las noticias de su fallecimiento, sentí una pequeña punzada de tristeza por una persona a la que nunca conocí pero que al mismo tiempo me era muy familiar, que me contó historias de un mundo lejano y cercano a la vez, un mundo que nunca conocí de primera mano pero del que de alguna manera o de otra formé parte de la mano de un autor tan magistral como humilde. Con el tiempo, otros autores llenaron mi tiempo, y Delibes quedó en el recuerdo del olvido. Nunca pude llegar muy lejos con El Hereje, pero estoy seguro de que algunos de esos recuerdos volverán al presente cuando los encuentre y los desempolve.

Or so iTunes tells me. No, this isn’t a rant about DRM, iTunes, Apple or anything along those lines. Ranting requires energy, and I rather devote it to more productive matters. I prefer, as the saying goes, to “vote with my wallet”.

A couple of months ago I went on a limb and purchased a HD movie from the iTunes Store, mostly as an experiment. After checking out the goods, I decided I probably would not be buying any more movies, given subtitles (which are generally a strong requirement for a multi-lingual household) are not available. But I wasn’t ready for the surprise of not being able to watch said movie with or without subtitles at all. It turns out that now that I have upgraded my desktop system (which has a Mini Display Port), the movie will simply not play. Jemery Horwitz has a write up on why this is the case. This is annoying, especially given the fact that the system is Apple branded end to end.

I said this wasn’t a rant on DRM, and it isn’t. I subscribe to the mantra of use what works for you, and this doesn’t work for me, so my response is that I will not be buying any movies. I will live, and the $15 I spent on the movie will have to do for SD (vs HD) for that one movie. Live and learn.

Dumb.