Advogato blog for mperry

12 Sep 2002

Thu, 12 Sep 2002 01:09:44 GMT

September 11, 2002.

Its been a year. What a year it has been. I was up early this morning and watched and listened to the wailful keen of the drum and bagpipe corps that passed through the boroughs of New York. That sound will stick by me for awhile I think.

I found a fireman today on duty at some minor accident and thanked him for being there. These are certainly the heroes.

There are many things we could ask of ourselves, our children, and posterity. But the most important one is:

never forget.

27 Aug 2002

Tue, 27 Aug 2002 05:50:58 GMT

Been awhile since I did a journal entry and I guess I figured I could not just walk away from advogato because I enjoy reading it too much and seeing what friends are up to from my days at Linuxcare.

The first day at LWE was very nice and I got to see so many people that I worked with and we even got a group Linuxcare-alumni picture taken which was a lot of fun. The second day we had a Linuxcare Labs reunion and were joined by ianmacd .

It sure was nice to see the original labs crowd. Most of them have traveled to new places for work but being able to see all of us gathered for a meal was extra special. That night, I went out for beers with a few people including davidw and enigma which was great! I also met up with Vern and Shawn at the Thirsty Bear at 3d and Howard. Very good times!

We are planning a get together at our favorite BAR over by Linuxcare at some point. That should be a lot of fun as well!

27 Jun 2002

Thu, 27 Jun 2002 04:02:50 GMT

bytesplit and others... I have not posted here since 12 April 02 since I decided to start using my own web diary. I have followed several threads in diaries here and I am no bigtime developer or coder and I am mis-cast as a "master" I do believe. A few people have given me that "rating" here on advogato but I am assuredly not a master in open source that I can see. I am more of an apprentice and happily so. I don't have a favorite in any of the agreement or disagreement I see being waged here on a daily basis.

I do think that we need to move past a lot of this though. Nothing is being served by this and, in fact, I think something is being damaged. As I watch the proceedings here unfold, I can only recommend or request that the participants in the rather acrimonious discussions put down that acrimony. Let the things that have happened in the past fade away or this will forver rend the fabric of a thing I cherish; namely this website and its contributors. Instead of being a voice of the community, it will change to some other milieu. I don't want to see that happen.

Another one of my instructors told me a few times as I labored through graduate school in a field far removed from computers, "those who live in the past are condemned to repeat it". Don't let this be the word of the day when we all can move past it.

Thanks for reading this.

13 Apr 2002

Sat, 13 Apr 2002 05:25:19 GMT

Many weeks have passed by and as my notes say, I am pretty much unemployed these days. I am working as a consultant for some ex-Linuxcare friends that do not do Linux except as a server platform. My time at Wild Open Source kind of ended on a mutually agreeable note; so I am moving on to other things.

I cannot see that I will have too much time moving forward to keep up this journal/diary. I am moving on to other things which seem very interesting to me but these things are a different reality and occupy a different place for me.

Its been fun reading the diary entries and seeing how some friends are doing. Best regards to them. New roads call and I have always believed that one should travel the road to see the terrain and the noteworthy places along the route.

I still maintain a weblog which I will add to my notes. The weblog gets updated more often but its more of a personal reflection of mine.

2 Mar 2002

Sat, 2 Mar 2002 07:09:39 GMT

After noting it has been awhile since I posted anything here, it seemed like I should make a few comments about things.

Things seem like they are going pretty well. I have been doing a bit of consulting on non-Linux things which have allowed me some freedom and I work for Wild Open Source now in a management capacity I guess you could say. I enjoy the people there since they are people I have seen somewhere before :).

Other things I have been doing is picking back up some minor bits of consulting work in the systems and software deployment areas. I used to do a fair bit of systems and software deployment at this little clothing company I worked at for awhile.

Other stuff is learning a bit about Apache, PHP, and other things which strike my fancy. I am no bigtime coder but I do like to learn how things work and how I can make things work differently.

I was very sorry to see Lokigames fade away; I was a very happy and challenged customer of theirs and I would like to thank them publicly for their Sid Meier stuff especially; but I also have spent many an enjoyable hour with SimCity and a few other titles.

I have not really played much with my IPAQ running familiar linux lately unfortunately. I noticed that the handhelds.org crew released a new version which I should definitely try. My IPAQ works so well now as a mp3 player with an IBM 1g microdrive in it, its kind of a shame to reflash things. I also have been using dillo on it and playing a bit with the ion window manager both on the ipaq and a desktop I have.

I don't know that I will become more timely posting here since I seem to not get to the site so often of late. I was very sorry to read of the troubles that hacker had with his relocation. I never had that level of destruction but once in the military all my stuff ended up going to the wrong military base. Nothing to compare with his story about the destruction of stuff.

10 Jan 2002

Thu, 10 Jan 2002 03:16:55 GMT

Been over a month since I did a diary thing. Incredible month and a month of really enjoying doing nothing. Went to lunch today with a few Linuxcare and ex-Linuxcare folks. Its nice to see them especially over Burritos at "two pineapples".

Talked about a lot of stuff going on in the world today and a bit about Linux.

I read aftyde is going off to Linuxworld on the train. That sounds really neat! Have a good time, Art. I look forward to lots of advogato diary entries from different spots on the trip!

I spent a lot of time reading a variety of advogato material the last few days. Very interesting and revealing reading. I spent some years in another "community" which seemed, at times, possessed by levels of challenge, dialogue, perhaps even hatred. I actually wrote back then an ethnology of that community because it became an interesting anthropological study to watch them.

8 Dec 2001

Sat, 8 Dec 2001 07:39:31 GMT

The clock rolls around to new hours...

I get to say goodbye to someone I enjoyed working with and hello to a friend I used to work with in another lifetime. Many years ago in some desert wandering I worked with a person who had this particular talent that I found to be amazing. My friend, Theo, not involved at all in Open Source or Linux; but instead a guy that does Human Osteology called me this evening. What is so unusual and unique is that I only saw him once a year if that as he flew through to new places. Theo and I worked together so many times in so many places doing other things; that hearing his voice at a totally unexpected time was bittersweet. It reminded me of other times, of other places, of other things I have done. It also reminded me I should say goodbye to hacker after his recent diary entry and thank him for always being there for us, for never being too busy to help, and for just being himself.

Thanks also to another person that I suddenly feel like finding again. Once, many years ago, I stood at a decision point. Perhaps others have stood the same ground. Considering what would work, what would not, and what direction their lives should embark on. I left one thing I loved truly for something I thought I would love and my friend RWR, told me, "always know where you are and what you are doing". In archeology, one often finds a mentor; a person who guides and helps and fosters an understanding. RWR was mine. He taught me about not only archeology but about life and how to live it in full measure.

Priceless advice I have carried with me and taken out when making a decision. Some of the best and brightest people I ever met were at Linuxcare. But back "in the day", I watched others that were gifted and imaginative and insightful do work so completely different that it invites comparison. Back then I was a nomad, tromping through deserts and forests across the Desert Southwest, the central plains, and the fantastic and beautiful Mojave Desert.

Too much introspection for perhaps one night.

3 Dec 2001

Mon, 3 Dec 2001 07:30:50 GMT

Whoa !

December 2!

Tomorrow marks the first time in 3 years I don't have a job to go to. I still have a few things I want to make an attempt at though. One is using Markybob's debian netinstaller cd on a system here, reading my mysql book to make an attempt at learning a bit more about it, and working on a scalable architecture approach that I may just get paid for.

This is actually a great month to be unemployed. I have two kids which I am really going to enjoy this year without having to rush off to meetings or be on the road on business trips.

I think there are lots of interesting possibilities for things I want to do. I am definitely interested in working on building out approaches to build custom Linux distributions which are modular, replicable, and scalable. I also want to do one of those Linux from scratch things just to play a bit and learn a bit more about how things work under the hood.

I also am being retained by Linuxcare as a contractor which means I am gone; but I am not gone. I always like decisive departures :)

20 Nov 2001

Tue, 20 Nov 2001 01:12:56 GMT

Almost two weeks since I have posted.

I get to see LenZ here and wish him congratulations on his marriage! Long time, no see, LenZ. Hope all is well for you.

From my last post, I had started messing with Amanda to backup my home network which includes a number of Windows and Linux systems and two laptops. This works very well I am happy to say! Amanda is a very nice and easily configurable backup program. I also use it on a OpenBSD firewall box.

Not much else worthy of note. My last day at Linuxcare approaches next week. I have a lot of feelings about it. Its fair to say that I will miss a lot of the people there now and once there.

11 Nov 2001

Sun, 11 Nov 2001 21:35:25 GMT

Sunday afternoon-

Started playin around with AMANDA to get an idea about how it works, what I can gain from it to backup my smallish home lan. Pretty cool and easy to setup. There is a deb package for it that works pretty well too. I am using a Exabyte 8700 tape drive with the 2.4.13 kernel and the "old adaptec driver". The new driver seems to want to get a "message" from the device and the exabyte does not speak that language at all.

I also am exploring backing up my windows systems using SAMBA and a BSD box with a amanda client running on it.

If you want an easily configured backup solution, I think AMANDA seems pretty solid. I also tried AFBACKUP but I could not get the authentication to work right. ARKEIA is free to download but I could not get a network problem fixed that plagued me through 3 days of trying.

I attended the Linux Showcase only one day due to illness but would have liked to attend the Friday evening handhelds.org BOF but could not.

In other news, my days at Linuxcare are waning away and Christmas approaches. Appears that I will be off work during the holidays and this means I can be home with my wife and kids for the whole season. That's a nice change.