28 Sep 2000 jonathon   » (Apprentice)

Busy, but not sure why....

A visiting friend has somewhat re-kindled my interest in the Macintosh. I even started using my trusty PowerBook as my main machine again, going as far as to wipe YDL off the spare disk to make space for Mac things. The Mac is a nice thing to use with it's high level of UI integration and consistency. I look forward to KDE (or gnome) becoming as tightly integrated. Who fills the role of the HCI police in open collaborative projects though ?

The details of the MacOS X beta release, however, are not such good news. Charging for a beta with a time- expiry ? What kind of business sense is that ? Recover development costs with the product, not with the Beta release. Apple ships machines with CD-R devices - so why do they not offer a raw iso download and save on manufacturing and shipping costs ?

Exchanged emails with partain about Arusha last week. Looks like our opinions on systems administration (more correctly meta-administration) are closer than I had thought. I was also wrong about the project being "rooted in Academic installations" - turns out that just the opposite is the case.

On the subject of sysadmin, I was thinking about the recurring cycles in corporate technology in general and in sysadmin in particular. partain suggested that with a team of "crack administrators" in an organization, infrastructure like Arusha was not really necessary. I thought otherwise, because the "crack administrators" will generally move on to new things when they get bored. Having some structure imposed on on the machine infrastructure can help slow the decay that occurs after those "crack administrators" are gone. I need to think about how to express this accurately, coming soon to a diary entry near you ....

PS: While I do have some experience of being a sysadmin, I would not consider myself an expert and, besides, I have probably forgotten what it was really like since I stopped doing it.

PPS: raph, is there a tag for projects like the tag for person ?

Latest blog entries     Older blog entries

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!