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Johnny Said, “Flame On!”

April 10, 2004 / Jim

Oh holy crap, how I am annoyed by both political parties.

On
the one hand, conservatives are for the rights of the unborn, which is
good. On the other, they are against gay marriage, which is bad.
Liberals are against the rights of the unborn, which is bad, but for
the rights of gays (maybe), which is good. What’s a conscientious
person to do?

How come these incongruent beliefs naturally
group like Cheerios in a bowl of milk? Is there some natural
attraction, some political Vanderwaals force or something? How come
there’s nobody out there that’s pro-animal rights, anti-death penalty,
anti-euthanasia, pro-life, pro-gay marriage, and pro-equal rights. Or
just to be internally consistent, pro-euthanasia, pro-death penalty,
pro-abortion, anti-animal rights, anti-gay marriage, and a member of
the KKK. I’m a big believer in internal consistency. How come both
wings of our political system are so off balance? I’m a tree hugger
personally, but I’m also a baby hugger, a lover of dogs and animals,
appreciative of the meat that I eat, anti-death penalty, and see that
those among us that are most disabled, weak, or oppressed are those
that deserve the full measure of our protection.

What is
going on in this country, where what the majority decides, or the
whimsy of popular opinion, can trump the constitution that guarantees
equal rights to all. In California, Gov. Schwarzenegger advocates for
the rights of the voters who voted to uphold that marriage is between a
man and a woman. What?! Their rights? How in the hell do their rights
have anything to do with the liberty of Americans to marry whom they
choose? How can anyone rationalize a certain right applying to one
group of Americans but not another? Pick a right, any right, I dare
you. I dare you find something that is not strictly biological or
geographical (like men can’t bear children or you can’t swim in the
ocean because you live in North Dakota) where you are not allowed some
right by law afforded to some other Americans.

We might say
to gays, “If you want to get married, no one is stopping you.” And as
an aside, with a snicker, “Just let them marry someone of the opposite
sex. Men marry women. Women marry men. Simple.” You have all the rights
I have, as long as you agree with me.

And in an earlier time
we remember all too well, “Well, since you were born a little black
boy, you can’t go to school with little white Johnny.”

“Why?”

“‘Cause that’s jus’ the way it is, boy. It’s God’s law.”

We
as a nation grew up and it became apparent to us that such attitudes
were wrong-headed. We had blinders and hadn’t seen the truth. We see it
now though. Whew! Glad we’ve realized it. Weren’t we fools back then?
So ignorant, so bigoted. Gosh, we’re so superior now. We get it!

Do
you actually have a GOOD reason for not wanting to let gays marry? Come
on, I’m open-minded. I’d like to hear this Truth that gay marriage will
lead to the death of society and the institution of marriage. I’ll
listen, and I’m open to any explanation on how gay marriage will affect
you in your marriage, or your kids marriage, or your grandkids, or or
or. My only caveat is that you can’t use the Bible as proof. The Bible
will only work if its laws are binding in U.S court, and the last time
I checked the U.S. was not a theocracy, and not everyone was a
Christian.

Mayor Daly of Chicago, put it like this, “Don’t
kid yourselves, divorce has done more harm to marriage than anything
else.” I’d agree with that and tack on, TV, popular culture,
consumerism, false expectations, and co-habitation as the true dry rot
of the institution of marriage. What is that bible quote about noting
the splinter in the eye of another but failing to see the log in your
own.

So what can gay marriage do for marriage? I see these
long lines of people in San Francisco, standing in the rain, the cold,
looking to bind their lives to one another and witness before the
state, profess their devotion, and go one better than just shacking up.
They are taking a leap of faith, making a commitment in love. I don’t
see them as subverting marriage. I don’t see them making a political
statement, trying to tear down OUR beloved institution of marriage,
like some ancient barbarians at the city wall just waiting to loot and
sack. No, watching all the couples in San Francisco getting married
does not turn my stomach. It fills me with great hope. Here are people,
who through all the shit that we little monkeys throw at them, given
the opportunity, their first step is toward devotion and commitment to
each other. They are taking a leap. What could be more noble than that?

I’d say we have much to learn from their example.

Rant mode on… or ala Johnny Storm, “Flame on!”

Well,
while we’re contradicting ourselves, let’s talk about animal rights
groups. “Trees have rights. Dogs cannot be owned (only cared for) etc.
in California” While at the same time saying that human beings in fetal
form have NO rights and are useless, disregarding the fact that as soon
as they pass the arbitrary barrier of the birth canal, wham, magically
they have lots of cool rights, unless of course they end up being gay.
Damn, sucks to be you. Glad I’m not an abortion or worse… gay. Tsk
tsk, equal rights don’t apply to you.

All the contradictions only
serve to confirm one fact: Humans will do what they want to do in any
given circumstance because we believe we have the right to do what we
want, that MY rights trump all of your rights, when I deem it so.

When we needed land, we decided that the native inhabitants were only savages and killed them, moved them.
When
we needed manual labor for agricultural work, we went and got slaves
because we had conveniently deemed them non-human, and then later we
compromised and said they were 3/5th of a human. Hey, give us a little
credit, huh? Such nobility.
When we (humanity) decided that our woes were Jew-induced, we decided they were not human and killed them.
When we decided we were offended by those different than ourselves, we decided to call them immoral and abominations.
When we decided that a human life was causing us inconvenience, we decided it was tissue.
When we needed votes, we appealed to the basest instincts, the lowest prejudices, the most primitive emotions.

This,
my friends, is why religion and government should never ever mix. This
is what we get, governments that persecute and oppress those that are
deemed outside of the moral fabric of some arbitrary belief system
based on an ancient book. Jesus didn’t say ala Dr. Phil, “Buy my book.”
He said listen to my message. And his message takes the form of two
rules:

Love each other.
see rule 1.

Ah,
but the list of contradictions goes on and on. Instead of elevating our
lives, our aspirations, we debase them, pawning our tiny little hearts
for a bit of instant gratification at someone else’s expense.

Don’t
kid yourselves. Both we and our parties are big bags of contradictory
hot air. It’s time for us to stand up for what’s right, human dignity.

The Passion of the Christ

March 26, 2004 / Jim

I didn’t want to go. They
made me, sort of kicking and screaming. I don’t know really why I
didn’t want to see it. Maybe it was because it was such a big thing, in
vogue. If it’s in the current fashion, I want something else. Maybe I
felt uncomfortable around religious people. I kept making jokes. "Is
this where the religious wackos hang out?" or "Oh, you’re one of those
religious people." I mean, we all go to church together, so I’m one of
you too. I’d chuckle.

But there was a kernel of truth there
in those off-handed comments, that belied what I really felt.
Sometimes I feel like I don’t fit in. When I’m in mass, I’m one of the
"in" crowd, part of the culture, on the inside. Sometimes, though, I
feel like an infiltrator, like they’re going to find out who I really
am and boot me. Sssh.

In all reality, the Catholic church
bugs me to no end, from the Pope on down. There’s lots of things that
are weird, wrong, or just plain stupid. Many people are sheep. Much of
the hierarchy is lost in the abstract, wrapped around many layers of
dogma, protective coatings designed to preserve rather than serve. And
the people; coming to mass hoping to receive
something, perhaps a magic wafer? They hop into their cars and rush off
to some trivial secular affair, content that they have done their
weekly hour of religious devotion. They learned the right words to say.
Piety comes in a can.

And then there are those that have
mystified things to an unrecognizable degree…Virgin Marys in wet
cement in Guatemala, weeping statues, dripping candles, mystical
lights, apparitions, miracles. Each of these people believing that they
have faith, but really deep deep down they hope that their faith can be
proven, and seek something upon which to rest their salvation. May I
have a coaster for this cup of mine, I am having trouble holding it.

And
so there I am, left lamenting the dogma, practice, and the many faulty
hearts and minds of humanity. I am now forced to endure an epic
produced and directed by a pre Second Vatican Council zealot, a movie
deemed to be anti-semitic by the media at large. What’s more, even
among critics favorable to the movie, it is said to be the bloodiest
two hours in movie making history, hard to watch, and downright
gratuitous. I’m not really in a good place right now, I don’t know if
this is going to help.

Well, let’s just get this thing over
with. At least I am getting out of the house, and I got to see the
Spider-man 2 trailer that’s showing.

As the final movie
credits started rolling, Laura began to feel sick, so I got up to help
her to the lobby. I began to get uncomfortable at the world closing in
around me, like I’d stepped outside naked. I wanted to hide, run away.
I wasn’t ready to leave the darkness of the theater yet. Now, I’m
standing here amongst the popcorn, teenagers, parents, and hustle
bustle of activity. I thrust my hands in my pockets. I felt trapped. I
stepped outside. It was raining torrentially, exaggeratedly. It was a
wall of water. I stood there briefly trying to contain my emotions. I
struggled there uncomfortable, wanting to be alone, so I ran. I stepped
off the curb bursting into tears, and soaked immediately as I made my
way to the car, a quarter mile away or so.

I remembered the
scene in the movie that broke up all the parents in our row. Jesus had
stumbled as the Romans are beating and taunting him. His mother, who
has had trouble facing the whole affair had been hiding on a side
street too distraught to look. She suddenly flashes back to a fall that
her son had suffered at an early age, perhaps 5 years old or so. She
runs to him to pick him up and comfort him, comfort her son who was
hurting. Mommy’s here, don’t cry. She suddenly realizes her place and
rushes to his side. There was not a parent with a dry eye in the house.

We
watched Jesus come to terms with his life, his mission, his vocation.
The movie opens with him pleading to have this burden lifted, why oh
why must it be this way, he asks. Beyond any sort of mystical or
metaphysical possibility of ANYONE being able to lift his burden from
him, was the realization that he was who he was. If he were to run
away, he would not be who he was. He had heard his calling in life and
once heard, there was no other possible course of action. It would be
as if you grew up to be an artist, engineer, politician, leader…
could you be anything but that to which you were called, that which you
knew to be right and natural, that which filled you with passion?

It’s
weird, but there’s nothing religious about this. Christians will say,
"God is calling you. Listen to His will. Do His bidding." What they are
really saying is, "Be true to who you are." Who am I? Well, that
sometimes takes reflection. You’ve got to seek it actively, sometimes
be quiet, sometimes listen to the voices of others, sometimes take
chances, sometimes make decisions. In the end, when you are doing what
you were meant to do, it will feel like love. You just know.

Love
isn’t easy, and neither is vocation, but could I be anything but who I
am? Sure, you may sell out your life, ignore your true vocation, be
moderately happy, and die having been successful, but once you realize
your vocation, your calling, can you ever go back, no matter the cost?

When
Martin Luther King Jr. realized that he had to bring freedom to
America, they told him he was crazy, a trouble maker, stirring things
wrongly. Just relax, play ball, and have a nice fulfilling peaceful
life quiet and tranquil with your life and family. I am sure Martin
Luther King Jr. wished for this at times, worried about his family, his
friends and what he was putting them through. Damnit, why did it have
to be me, I am sure he asked. He was compelled to act, and he knew no
other way to be. He realized his place. It may not have been the path
he would have picked on a multiple choice test, but once he realized
it, that was it.

Laura and I are in Puerto Rico trying to get
a foot-old through Open Source software, trying to reform education,
technology policy, the status quo, and raise two children. Does it make
it any easier to know that there is no other way to be, no other course
of action in which we would be satisfied. If we jumped the tracks, we’d
inevitably find ourselves veering back to this one. As much as we
suffer and struggle, there is no other course of action for us. Why oh
why am I like this? Why couldn’t I have been born a rule follower, a
person satisfied with the way things are? Why oh, why must I attempt to
change things? I cause turmoil both for myself and others. I fail more
often than I succeed. Everything is a struggle. Why did you make me
this way, God?

Jesus pondered that, lamented that a
rollback was an impossibility, but did realize that it was nice to just
vent every once in a while.

The full weight of vocation hit
me during this movie. I think this is the strongest and most important
thing that could possibly come from this, and one that kept playing
over and over to me throughout. It hit me so hard, it knocked me over,
and I lost it for bit. It wasn’t religous, it wasn’t magic.

Jesus
knew what he had to do. Geez, and they crucified him. And he knew it,
and he could have sidestepped it, but he couldn’t, didn’t want to… no
couldn’t, even if he wanted to, because that was who he was.

Los Tres Viejitos

March 24, 2004 / Jim

"Listen, are you waiting for a flood? Man, look at those pants."

"Hey, I like them like that. I’m prepared at all times!"

"And you, look at that old guayabera, VERY stylish."

"This shirt is quality. Q-u-a-l-i-t-y. I’ve had this shirt for over 15 years. You can’t get that kind of quality today."

"Oh, sure," he laughed poking the man’s shirt.

"Man, check that out?" pointing to a sexy bombshell on the morning TV show.

"Ay Dios Mío mami."

"I’d like a slice of that!"

"What are you gonna get?" Another asked.

"Coffee and some oatmeal."

"To go?"

"Hey, let a man finish his coffee and toast. You have some hurry?"

"Well some people have things to do. We can’t sit around on our asses and pretend to be useful."

Chuckles all around.

(Overheard conversation of a group of three 60 year old+ in a local bakery in Puerto Rico).

Sharing of the Pipe

March 13, 2004 / Jim

Just got in from a wonderful party, so I’m a little buzzed. Well,
actually, I can’t feel my fingers as I type this. Chuckle. My
sister-in-law, who is Lebanese, had an Arab-Lebanese party. Wow, what a
nice time. We drank, smoked the water pipe, laughed, told stories, ate
tabbouleh, babacanush, humus, kabobs of chicken, and a bunch of things
that I will never ever be able to spell.

Juan Carlos
brought some fabulous Rioja red wine. That got the thing rolling as we
took liberally of these fermented red grapes. Todd, an ethnic American,
who became friends with Miray’s brother, Lebanon and his party crew,
was an old hat with the whole thing. He knew most of the basic Arabic
terms and greetings, and seemed comfortable with his assimilation into
his adopted context outside of his own. He reminded me a little bit of
myself with the Puerto Rican crowd. Something about them demanded my
attention. They accepted me and I fell in, eventually marrying into the
culture. Todd, Mikey, Lebanon and Rami were a party group
extraordinaire.

Then somebody brought a couple of water
pipes, one of which was new, being used in a group setting for the
first time. They fiddled with it, complaining about the tightness, the
newness of the fitting, poking holes in the aluminum foil to aerate the
tobacco. No good, and away and away we puffed pulling the heat into the
tobacco through the water and into our mouths trying to get a good
draw. The cherry infused smoke was aromatic and we were even able to
convince most of the women to give it a go.

A dance began
with a particularly rhythmic song, as the hostess and her brother,
Lebanon began to circle in a traditional form. Arm in arm they circled,
laughing and dancing, winding their way through the house.

Most
of the evening was spend chuckling, drinking, sharing stories and
trying to get a good draw on the water pipes. I spend my fair share
drawing deeply. It was truly wonderful, and eventually we began to get
a good smoke. "This pipe is smoking good now," they would say, as they
fiddled with the other. I came and I went, as I chased down Jaimito,
checked on Olaia and Laura to see how they were and what they were up
to, but I kept making my way back to that pipe. There was just
something about it.

I was an extremely nice time because of
how differently the experiences played out from what I’m used to. It
was interesting and wonderful to enjoy good times, but in a slightly
different context. The brotherhood of man, shared over tobacco,
something as old as human-kind itself, takes on a perspective of
closeness, seen from an angle that makes me take notice. Sharing the
water pipe, puffing, and laughing and passing, gives a visceral and
immediate context to our lives. Sometimes we forget about the
commonality we all share, and it is a dead dried plant and some spittle
that brings it back into focus. What am I talking about? What else
could that be? We all come into this life the same way and we all leave
it eventually. What we miss is all those wonderful details in the
middle, those simple banal things upon which we rarely focus, quickly
and recklessly moving onto the next thing, the next destination. The
same feeling, I believe, can be found in other rituals around the
world, a Japanese tea ceremony, a Basque cider house, Catholic mass,
tribal or native dance, or a simple sharing of the hunt, alcohol, or
smoke. Taken in moderation and shared amongst people in a certain
context they can be powerful rituals of remembrance.

Bah,
but I write such drivel. Perhaps tomorrow I will be able to communicate
this in a better fashion. I feel like I do it such little justice with
these numb fingers and this swirling "mente" of mine.

I Shall Remember You, Little Apple

March 11, 2004 / Jim

This is for you, little apple. I write these words of remembrance.

I
was eating an apple while driving home from the Puerto Rico Products
Association today. I was travelling through the urban setting, a
decidedly un-vegetation friendly environment. I reflected that if I had
been in the country, I would have tossed my apple core from the car
into the tropical foliage. Drat, I am here in the city. The apple core
is an eye sore. How would I like apple cores on my side walk, sitting
there, collecting ants and turning brown in the hot sun? The apple that
falls on the concrete of the city has no chance for life, and in the
best of cases is an ugly mess.

In the country, though, it
would have a chance to grow into an apple tree. Ah, but I have eaten
the flesh of the apple, the flesh that would give its small seeds the
nourishment for new life. I have done such violence to these poor
little things. They would stand no chance to achieve life if left to
their own devices. They are done whether on the side walk or the
forest. They were done in by me, by my hungry apple flesh eating mouth.

The poor devils.

How Linux will Save the World, part II

February 26, 2004 / Jim

to be read while listening to Queen’s "I’m Going Slightly Mad"

Everything and everyone is a file, no more than a file, no less.

We
all strive to be big monolithic programs, with fancy buttons, big
memory footprints, environments where people, if they want to do
anything, must go through us. We strive to be pre-eminent on the
desktop, world stage. We crave fame. Look at me we say. Look how
important I have become. I am an Office Suite, hear me roar. Look how
much I can do. If you want to do any work, you must come through me.

Yet,
quietly, the hand of the messiah shushes us and compassionately tells
us we don’t want that burden. You do so for your own glory and not the
glory of the community, the glory of your siblings. You channel them
through yourself because you deem yourself important and indispensable.
You are indeed talented, he gently says laying his hand on your
shoulder, but where do you wish to go with this? To what end do you
hope to arrive? Sooner or later the load on your shoulders will be too
great, the bloat uncontrollable, unwieldy. You will not be extensible.
You may be the greatest that has ever been born, but the strain is not
something I should visit upon you. Why do you think I gave you brothers
and sisters – GNU?
Bash? These are your salvation. These are your tools to
interconnectedness, these are the gifts that will lead you to the
sublime.

Be at ease, big program, you are but a file, but
you are not JUST a file. You are a node that links together this
network, wherein shall you fish. They made you fishers of data, I shall
make you fishers of knowledge.

I still haven’t been able to shake this mania that I’ve been under… it’s like a Linux
spell. I have been hacking on Altamente’s server products for like two
months straight, going to bed around 2 am every night. If I didn’t know
better, I would have thought I’d wound up on the night shift. In my
delirium, today, I had a vision, a waking dream, a incandescent
glow-induced hallucination about the universe and my place in it.

In
the paradigm of Linux, everything is a file. I see files everywhere, I
interact with them, their inodes, links to them both symbolic and hard.
They are physical tangible objects to me. I know this interaction like
an old shoe. I’ve been using it off and on since 1989, and it fits, or
perhaps like that old shoe, I’ve broken it in, and I fit it as much as
it fits me.

Take MDA’s for example (Mail Delivery Agents),
where mail goes before it winds up in your Outlook folders *rolls
eyes*. Some use a format called mbox, which was one big glommed
together gigantic pile of bits, a big sloppy ball of wax, just waiting
to explode in your face every time a new mail arrived. You had to have
all kinds of special tools to extract, prune, or otherwise manipulate
this file. Everything had to be custom written especially for that
stinking format. Delete a mail? Well, first, lock your mbox, then back
it up, then rm. No? Oh, you need a special delete program specifically
designed to work with that file. Wah, I want to use rm.

When the choice of Maildir delivery arrived with qmail,
it was like that old familiar world of Unix. It made sense again. I
could use regular filesystem tools to deal with these mailboxes. If
wanted to clean out old mails, cron, grep, find, rm, and bash were all
I needed. Fantastic!

 #!/bin/bash

 find /var/spool/qmailscan/quarantine/ -name "*mango*" \ 
 -a -type f -a -mtime +2 | while read file

do

    rm "$file"

 done

This is a bash program I use on mango to wipe out any quarantined
virus email after 2 days. We get a ton of them, and without this tiny
little program, the server would fill up. However, we’d still like to
have a disposition of a couple of days in case we need to check it out
before deleting it. See how simple this is? We use cron to run this
little script every day at a set hour. The above is a program. The
above is just as sophisticated as anything with buttons, checkboxes,
and a gui – but it’s better. This little jewel is an autonomous agent
capable of performing the same task every day without failure for as
long as it has electricity. In short, after I write this little thing,
I never have to look at it again. It does what I need it to do,
reliably and without intervention.

I’ve written tons of
little one or two line programs to do everything from take poorly
formatted word documents of data and massage them into suitable formats
for publication in HTML or injection into a database or mailing list. I
get these things sometimes in such poor shape. I run a few tiny teenie
little bitty itsy one function programs like grep, cat, tr, and awk and
I’ve got a nicely formatted list, table, or structured document.

My
point is this: I wonder if there is a place for people like me in the
future of IT. I don’t even fancy myself a programmer. I do okay, but
I’ve never written a program over a 1,000 lines in my life, and 99% of
the them are less than a 100. See what I mean? I almost always can
string together pre-built GNU utilities, rm, find, grep, cat, sort, gawk, bash, cp, touch, tr, bc, diff, mv, sed, tar, and many others.

I
feel like this monk of the arcane, cloistered away from the buzzing of
corporate dollars, fancy slogans, glossy programs, big deals. I am but
a little worm hidden away from all of this, competently hacking out one
useful task after another with no more needs than a square meal, a
comfortable bed, an old PII, and a decent net connection.

We
must teach our brethren the ways of the Unix shell, for if we don’t we
will forever be trapped handcuffed in that big shiny plastic bubble of
modern life, where we see but we can’t interact. We must go back, back
to the beginning and learn the first lessons. We must relearn that it
is only through connection, collaboration shall we achieve, shall we be
saved.

Hacking Gentoo

February 22, 2004 / Jim

It’s late at night, and I’ve been hacking on my home network of Gentoo
Linux boxes. I’ve been performing rigorous analysis and system tests
(does the shit work) for nearly a year. I think it’s all culminating
here and now at 0100 AST 1000 miles off the coast of Florida on the
Caribbean island of Puerto Rico.

One of the biggest challenges in
maintaining more than one Linux box is the updating. The Open Source
community moves so fast, it’s impossible to maintain more than one box
by manual methods (ie performing updates physically yourself via CD or
Internet). You have a couple of options. You buy a distro, slap it in,
install it, firewall the hell out of it, and forget about upgrading for
at least a year. You’ll get lots of work done because you won’t be
constantly tweaking your machine and breaking things every other week,
and you’ll have good solid security more or less for a year. Or you try
to keep up with updates and end up breaking something, having to
install something that is not vendor supported, overwrite something
else, want to remove it, but can’t, and end up wiping and reinstalling
a new version. So on the one hand you don’t have access to usability
upgrades, and new features, on the other you end up spending more time
in administration for your machine than actually doing useful work. A
computer as a tool shouldn’t become the focus of the employee. The
computer must be able to take care of its needs with little interaction
from the user. Or if you prefer, the computer is too important to have
its well-being left in the hands of a user. Say it with me IT
professionals, "If you have to depend on the user for anything, you’ve
failed."

Now, this is where Gentoo comes in. It’s a distribution
based on the source code of the programs themselves. A Sparc, an old
Alpha, an MIPS machine, PPC, Intel, AMD Opteron all update the same
way, automatically, seamlessly. It’s beautiful, in theory of course

In
practice stuff still breaks, libraries still get whacked, and things
sometimes don’t work as advertised. For example, the library issue:
When you compile a program some of them dynamically link to certain
library files, for example openssl-0.9.6 a library for secure socket
layer encryption functions. A literal ton of programs (that’s funny
only if you realise that programs are electrons), link against this
library and use its wonderful features. What happens when you move to
openssl-0.9.7? This happened recently in the Linux world and it was a
pain in the ass.

I mean, you could go through all your binaries
and check to see with what they are linked. If it returns an error,
well there’s your culprit. There are thousands of binaries, and you
don’t want to do this stuff by hand. I really don’t care how long it
takes, I’d just like the computer to take care of it on its own, behind
the scenes, like a secret little administrative agent.

So
this is what I’ve been doing today. Turns out this openssl-0.9.6
business is now trivial thanks to Gentoo’s package tools, namely
revdep-rebuild. It takes a look at your installed package database and
draws all the lines between libraries and programs that link to them,
then recompiles the programs to link against the new library (I think
it just really brute forces the whole issue, but I have to investigate
more thoroughly). Pretty cool, huh? This is actually pretty heady stuff
and a lot more significant than it sounds. It allows you to hit the
moving target that is OSS development, maintaining integrity of your
Linux distribution, taking advantage of the fast pace of development
with absolutely NO manual intervention with any of the hosts you’re
maintaining.

It works like this. You set up a central master
server that is responsible for, downloading, compiling, and serving
packages. The network of client machines each pick up prepackaged and
pretested packages and install them at set intervals, every day if you
like. Gone are the days where you have to either wipe the client’s
machine and reinstall to upgrade, or tell them to just deal with it
until the following upgrade cycle in a year.

Man, it’s late,
and I don’t know why in the hell I decided to write all this down. Just
what I’ve been doing for the past couple of weeks, seamless automatic
maintenance of multiple (hundreds) hosts on a network. This rocks!

Now to bed.

Linux is Dead, Long Live Linux

February 13, 2004 / Jim

My ode to Dave Barry

I
have to say that this most recent Linux kernel 2.6x that just came out
is WAY better than the first few releases of the last 2.4x series,
which were a disaster. The last series got out the door with some
serious virtual memory issues.

For instance, under heavy load,
the kernel would go into crisis management mode, like a middle manager
at an end of the year performance review. Yeah, I know, not pretty. And
as the boat was sinking, the kernel had its handy dandy thimble and was
dutifully bailing. This was the infamous disk thrashing kernel^TM (up until 2.4.12, I think).

So
you’d – get this – click on one program too many and the performance of
your system would deteriorate until – and I’m not making this up – it
became unresponsive and you’d have to hard reset it. That’s all fine
and dandy for that OTHER OS, but this was the first time that had
happened to me with Linux, and it was damn embarrassing. Yes, even more
embarrassing than all the crap I have stuffed in my garage, and no,
Viagra wasn’t going to fix it.

I checked around for a bit, and by a bit, I mean Slashdot,
but the Linux press was decidedly quiet, too quiet. I smelled cover-up.
Then one fine day the waters burst forth as Linus announced that he had
ripped the guts out of the VM (virtual memory) module, given it a
severe thrashing, and put in something more agreeable. I quickly
upgraded, and things seemed to be better, but I never quite got over my
trust issues. It still seemed dangerously, recklessly stupid under high
load, and by high load, I mean listening to mp3s and surfing the web.

Well,
I’d have to say that 2.6 is as beautiful and wonderful as 2.4 was ugly
and miserable. Wow, what an improvement and not just in desktop
responsiveness (which is very nice but not why we uber geeks use it in
the first place), but overall stability. I have confidence that it
won’t decide to push up daisies at an inappropriate time. In fact, my
primary desktop machine here, is my development database server,
webserver, nfs server, instant messaging server, remote update master,
print server, desktop publishing platform, multimedia player, video
machine, office suite, web development platform, and multimedia
authoring system.

Angry with God?

February 4, 2004 / Jim

Are you angry with God? Do you look around at all the injustice, hatred, and pain in the world and ask yourself, how could a God that is all love and compassion allow this to happen. How can He let us live lives filled with such sorrow and torment? How could He let my loved ones die such cruel deaths? How could he let rapists and murderers steal our little children and do such awful things? How could God let beasts such as Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Genghis Khan, the Black Plague exist in this world where he lets his children play.

Why not baby proof the place a bit?

It’s a simple question, possibly the simplest question ever asked. It’s incongruous to us why God would let such awful thing coexist with his beloved children. Would you tell your children to run out and play by the in-ground pool. Oops, you fell in and drowned. Free will… what’re ya gonna do? You fell in. I told you to be careful. I told you to take care. I guess it was meant to be.

And it burns us up. It makes us angry. Does it make you angry?

I was doing my weekly session at the juvenile prison last week and I had occasion to express to my young pupil a bit of wisdom that came to me in a flash. It was inspired by these children, some of them murderers, car thieves, drug addicts, robbers, and petty crooks. It was inspired by what I saw in their faces, their innocent baby faces.

"You see," I said, "It’s like a child with its father. You have any kids?"

"No," he said.

"Cousins, nephews, nieces?" I asked. He said that he did, but I realized that he might not get what I was about to say. I’ll try it anyway, I thought. Can’t hurt.

I asked him if he saw babies crying because they were hungry, tired, or needed a diaper change. I asked him if he had ever tried to explain, or saw someone explain to the baby why it was crying. "Did the baby respond properly? Did the baby stop crying because it now understood. The irritation, its angst, now made sense, so it calmed down. He laughed and said no. Of course not. His laughter lifted me. He was going to get this, I thought.

It’s interesting to note, that parents will never ever be able to fully explain, allay all fears, take on all burdens from their children. In adolescence, parents attempt to explain the feelings of awkwardness and rejection as normal. Everybody feels that way, they say. Meanwhile, the child thinks or says that they couldn’t possibly understand. How could they? How could they understand the pain I feel right now? I’m living it. You parents can’t understand what it’s like.

Every time a parent tries to explain, or convey experience and wisdom to a child, the child rejects it. You won’t understand until you live it. You will try to explain it to your children but they will reject it. All you can do is be there to pick up the pieces and try to cajole, motivate, and guide. All you can do it change the diaper, bring the food, soothe the restless nights and hold them when they cry.

If you believe in a God with whom to be angry, can you at least see through that clouded consciousness of your childhood and see a father who wants to help? Can you at least realize for a brief instant how we can’t possibly understand what’s to come next, and by next, I mean tomorrow? Can you see yourself as a child who cries and doesn’t know why?

If I know anything about being a father, it’s that when I hold Olaia or Jaimito, I would do anything to take away their pain, their frustration, but I can’t. I can’t because there is no way in the universe I can convey experience. And what is experience if not a combination of pain, joy, suffering, and happiness?

You don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath water do you? It’s okay, though, if you’re angry with God, I’ll give you a hug if you need it. I understand. I empathize. I hurt too, but I know someone who hurts more. He’s been locked up at the age of 17. He has no father. His uncle is in prison. He best friend was gunned down. He has no education. He’s poor and a drug addict.

In Observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day

January 19, 2004 / Jim

‘Cause
somebody has too. It seems in Puerto Rico, that this day passes without
so much as a glance. Only Federal facilities are off today, while most
businesses (including banks) comport themselves as if it was a normal
workday.

Hispanics in the U.S. complain that THEY don’t
have a DAY. They ask why the influential Hugo Chávez who fought for the
rights of immigrant workers doesn’t have a day… as if everyone needs
a DAY, a special day to call their very own, to love him and pet him,
to squeeze him and hug him. Is Martin Luther King Jr. Day just a token
black holiday?

Our honoring of Martin Luther King Jr. is not
an acquiescence to black pressure, an ethnic hero of choice for those
darker Americans so that they may feel like they are somebody. I shout
an emphatic NO! even though the road to a national holiday was frought
with much debate over this very topic. He’s just a black leader. He’s a
womanizer. How can we put him on a pedestal with the likes of
Washington, Lincoln? America finally "gave in," and bit by bit they
adopted the national holiday that was to become Martin Luther King Jr.
Day. I imagine there are many still grumbling, and I wonder if white
folks don’t like the feeling that maybe there’s a black man telling
them what to do.

Folks, Martin Luther King Jr. was not a
great Black American, he was a great American. Martin Luther King Jr.
restored OUR sullied, tattered, torn constitution to what it originally
intended. Martin Luther King Jr. restored your rights, whatever your
ethnicity. He restored your dignity whatever you call yourself. He gave
back to you what was stolen from you. He fought, suffered, and died for
YOU, you Americans, you Hispanic Americans, you Native Americans, you
Chinese, Korean, Philipino, Croatian, Polish, German, Italian, Irish,
French, Scandanavian, Russian, Indian, and Arab Americans. Martin
Luther King Jr. wrestled with the soul of a nation, a lethargic broken
lost shadow of its former self and fought to restore its heart, its
core. He struggled to return to YOU what you deserved, what every
person deserves.

I say to every American citizen that did not
take time to reflect on what Martin Luther King Jr. did for you
individually, shame on you! Shame on your shortsightedness. Shame on
your selfishness. Shame on your cluelessness.

The arc of
the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Martin Luther
King Jr. pulled many a long night by himself, hands bloody, arms weary,
against apathy, hatred, bigotry, and even physical death. He pulled and
pulled and pulled a sinking America kicking and screaming back into
focus, back toward justice, back toward righteousness,

For you.

El Gringoqueño