One of my shipmates, an engineer who served with me on the Elliot, posted a comment to one of my NSA Facebook posts that made me think. Referencing my cryptologic technician past, he said.

You should have been an engineer. No one would care what you say or think.

This implies that I have something worth listening to – which as anyone who’s ever read this blog knows is patently ridiculous. Tales of my past as a crypto tech are about as far removed from James Bond as possible. It would bore anyone to tears.

Nothing I do or say merits any attention whatsoever from the NSA.

And that is exactly the point. I’m not any different than the other 200+ million Americans who are having their communications recorded for later perusal. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you do, whether you like to meddle in things as I do or you’re a complete technophobe; your telephone and Internet communications are part of the billions of collections the NSA is gathering right now.

It seems everyone is already in the system, and good luck trying to opt out.

A few years ago I noted very strange web requests coming from military bases and large defense contractors. Several of these sites were requesting a specific URL in my collection of over a decade of posts. That struck me as something highly unlikely for a casual web visitor to do, so I became alarmed at the possibility that these defense contractors and military units were compromised by a malware agent, perhaps planted by a foreign government. I emailed one of these groups, doing my patriotic duty by alerting them to this possiblity. Ususally when I point out potential hacking to a fellow sysadmin I receive some sort of thank you email in return. In this case I received no response (I’ll dig up my email and post it here if I can find it). I found the lack of reply unusual (and, well … rude), but kept open the possibility that I’d reached the wrong person.

Today, Techdirt had a story describing how a simple search through LinkedIn turns up a vast trove of resumes containing secret codeword programs. There’s obviously money to be made in surveillance – Edward Snowden made upwards of $200k per year – so analysts advertise the programs for which they have training. The corollary to this is that there are companies willing to pay for this experience – perhaps companies on the list I noticed knocking on my website door.

I can’t help but wonder if the unusual web traffic I noted might be part of one of these secret programs. Whatever it is (or was), it was obviously coordinated, so the only question is whether it was the bad guys or the good guys (i.e. Americans). Viewed through Occam’s razor, it’s more likely that these highly-secure defense contractors aren’t compromised (or at least they have some clue about network security), which leaves the possibility that the traffic came from some as-yet-unknown system. At least I hope our side’s responsible for it – we’re in a world of hurt if it’s not.

So, do I breathe easier knowing these massive defense contractors are not likely compromised as I once thought, or do I lie awake at night scared shitless that they appear to be spying on anyone and everyone?

While the NSA can use the Internet for spying on law-abiding citizens, the same citizens can use it for spying on the NSA. One Internet sleuth searched LinkedIn for a few of these codeword programs and turned up several resumes full of programs:

So, over the weekend, the Washington Post revealed some of the code names for various NSA surveillance programs, including NUCLEON, MARINA and MAINWAY. Chris Soghoian has pointed out that a quick LinkedIn search for profiles of people in Maryland with codenames like MARINA and NUCLEON happen to turn up profiles like this one which appear to reveal more codenames:

+Skilled in the use of several Intelligence tools and resources: ANCHORY, AMHS, NUCLEON, TRAFFICTHIEF, ARCMAP, SIGNAV, COASTLINE, DISHFIRE, FASTSCOPE, OCTAVE/CONTRAOCTAVE, PINWALE, UTT, WEBCANDID, MICHIGAN, PLUS, ASSOCIATION, MAINWAY, FASCIA, OCTSKYWARD, INTELINK, METRICS, BANYAN, MARINA

TRAFFICTHIEF, eh? WEBCANDID? Hmm… Apparently, NSA employees don’t realize that information they post online can be revealed.

via Discovering Names Of Secret NSA Surveillance Programs Via LinkedIn | Techdirt.

I’ve been watching the foolishness taking place in the General Assembly building. No, not the Moral Monday protests, I’m talking about the damage Republican legislators are doing to the state. Yet, for every outrageous far-right bill telling folks how to live and every cut to vital safety-net programs in a down economy, there are legions of Democrats who become rightfully outraged and motivated.

I’ve worked enough elections to know that angry people vote, and they vote in droves. And the anger being displayed at these protests is genuine – it’s not the kind cooked up by rich billionaires as in the case of “tea partiers.” That’s what’s got Gov. McCrory, Sen. Thom Goolsby, and other state Republican leaders publicly dissing this group: the power of these protests is starting to worry Republicans.

And worry they should. The number of North Carolinians fed up with their state being a national punchline is growing and shows no sign of stopping. Come November anyone foolish to stand in their way will pay the price at the polls.

The New York Times decided to report on this appearance by Dick Cheney on Fox News Sunday:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney defended on Sunday the newly disclosed electronic surveillance programs operated by the government and called the former National Security Agency contract worker who disclosed them a criminal and a traitor.

“I think it’s one of the worst occasions in my memory of somebody with access to classified information doing enormous damage to the national security interests of the United States,” said Mr. Cheney, a forceful advocate for the classified programs when he was in office.

There’s no polite way to put this but you’ve got to be fucking shitting me.

Hey, Dick, does the name Valerie Plame mean anything to you? You remember her, the career CIA agent you outed when she and her husband proved your case for war with Iraq was built on a pack of lies? You destroyed her career not for any greater good, but simply as revenge for proving to the world that you’re a bully as well as a pathological liar?

Yeah, Dick Cheney was a “forceful advocate for classified programs” except for those times he betrayed them himself. Dick Cheney recklessly ended the career of a CIA agent. The only career that Edward Snowden ended is his own.

Dick Cheney makes my blood boil. He’s got zero credibility. Zero. He doesn’t belong on TV, he belongs in prison. And shame on Times reporter John Broder for writing this tripe.

via Cheney Defends Surveillance and Says Leaks Were Traitorous – NYTimes.com.

That may be the longest blog title I’ve ever had.

I know I will never be a game developer. I thought several years ago it would be something I’d like to get into, but it’s just not me.

However, I do enjoy playing certain kinds of games – especially the strategy and puzzle varieties.

I would love to see a real-time (like Age of Empires) or turn-based (like Sid Meyer’s Civilization) strategy game where the player affects his nation’s status, power, influence, and vitality via special operations, espionage, and other “non-traditional” game elements.

For example, how fun could it be to play the Barbarians in Civilization? Be the ancient equivalent to modern terror or guerrilla groups. Wouldn’t it be a blast to play the what-ifs of a successful CIA operation at the Bay of Pigs? Or how about being the controller in charge of spies like Mata Hari?

I’d play that. I’d even consult on what I think would make good game play actions and objectives.

Most of all, I’d buy that game.

My previous noting of strange traffic from my mobile phone seemingly going to the Department of Defense seems a bit less far-fetched in light of the recent revelations of NSA spying. I suppose I can still believe that Sprint has simply been squatting on unused DoD IP space but the possibility of straight-up snooping can’t now be ruled out.

I haven’t known what to make of Edward Snowden, the well-paid contractor who revealed the extent of the NSA’s spying on Americans. Is he a civilian version of Cpl. Bradley Manning, the Army analyst whose release of thousands of secret documents put Wikileaks in the news? I don’t think so. Manning isn’t a whistleblower; he didn’t seem to know or care what he was releasing, he just wanted to release it. There was no greater good he was serving other than himself. I still think Manning should be punished for his deeds.

Where does that leave Snowden? After all, he also broke his oath to keep secrets, too, and unlike Manning he was getting paid handsomely to keep those secrets. Also, the type of NSA collection he exposed first appeared in the press way back in 2006 (or perhaps even a year earlier). Is one guilty of revealing a secret if what one reveals isn’t a secret anymore?

Snowden gave up a pretty good life to do what he did: he had a nice girlfriend, a home in Hawaii, and a high-paying job in intelligence. He now has none of these things and is hiding somewhere in Hong Kong. He seems content with his fate and knows full well what he did and why he did it. What did he find so compelling to make him take that step?

I think the only way to describe the NSA behavior Snowden exposed is massive overreach. The types of programs now coming to light, with billions of collections on Americans going on with little or no oversight, are frightening in their scope. For Americans who assume their right to privacy is safeguarded by the Fourth Amendment these revelations are shocking. This massive collection turns the notion of innocent until proven guilty on its head. These programs are in essence solutions in search of problems.

Americans should have a problem with that.

Obama won the presidency fueled by a public fed up with the Bush administration’s draconian police state. Once president, Obama saw no need to put a stop to these policies and indeed may have accelerated them. For a former professor of constitutional law, our president has strangely little regard for the Bill of Rights.

I don’t want to live in a country ruled by paranoia, led by fear. I don’t believe America needs to constantly find new enemies. I don’t believe when egregious abuses of our privacy are discovered that we should accept the government’s word that it’s doing the right thing. I don’t believe there should be one set of laws for one class of citizens (i.e., the executive and legislative branches), and another set of laws for others.

I don’t believe the rights granted by the Constitution only apply as long as it’s convenient for the government, yet more and more the excuse of “national defense” seems to trump everything else.

To boil it all down, Snowden has some explaining to do. He must answer for his actions. But Snowden’s actions aren’t the only ones to be called into question. Our leaders have far more explaining to do, how they can justify activity that goes so far beyond what everyday Americans might think necessary and prudent.

If we are a country willing to trade our hard-won freedoms in the name of preventing a few crude pipe bomb attacks, we really need to question what we’re doing. I still believe America is bigger than that, that we can balance our freedom and our security without choosing one over the other. I thought America becoming a surveillance state was the wrong response after the 9/11 attacks and I certainly think it’s wrong today. Now’s the time to hash out what kind of country we want to be.

Remember how Glenn Greenwald speculated that the NSA was capable of listening to the contents of phone calls? It turns out to be true.

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls, a participant said.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed on Thursday that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”

If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

I had heard rumors of an AT&T facility in Kansas that transcribed millions of phone calls. Supposedly AT&T’s voice recognition software was highly developed for this purpose. Can’t find anything about it online, though, and not sure where I learned of it.

Also, read the Washington Post’s story on the NUCLEON program.

via NSA spying flap extends to contents of U.S. phone calls | Politics and Law – CNET News.

I’m reading a fascinating book about the legendary Bell Labs, called “The Idea Factory” by Jon Gertner. I knew Bell Labs was responsible for many of the innovations we take for granted now, but seeing them all in print was amazing.

It is simply astonishing to consider how this research lab changed our world. For instance, Bell Labs invented the transistor, semiconductors, and photolithography, all of which are absolutely crucial for modern electronics. Scientists at Bell built the world’s first communications satellite after serendipitously inventing the major technologies needed for it. Perhaps the most important technology that came from Bell Labs was information theory, which sprang from a brilliant Bell Labs scientist named Claude Shannon. Wikipedia explains its impact:

Information theory is a branch of applied mathematics, electrical engineering, bioinformatics, and computer science involving the quantification of information. Information theory was developed by Claude E. Shannon to find fundamental limits on signal processing operations such as compressing data and on reliably storing and communicating data. Since its inception it has broadened to find applications in many other areas, including statistical inference, natural language processing, cryptography, neurobiology,[1] the evolution[2] and function[3] of molecular codes, model selection[4] in ecology, thermal physics,[5] quantum computing, plagiarism detection[6] and other forms of data analysis.[7]

Applications of fundamental topics of information theory include lossless data compression (e.g. ZIP files), lossy data compression (e.g. MP3s and JPGs), and channel coding (e.g. for Digital Subscriber Line (DSL)). The field is at the intersection of mathematics, statistics, computer science, physics, neurobiology, and electrical engineering. Its impact has been crucial to the success of the Voyager missions to deep space, the invention of the compact disc, the feasibility of mobile phones, the development of the Internet, the study of linguistics and of human perception, the understanding of black holes, and numerous other fields. Important sub-fields of information theory are source coding, channel coding, algorithmic complexity theory, algorithmic information theory, information-theoretic security, and measures of information.

Shannon did work on cryptography during World War II; his paper A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography was so groundbreaking that it remains classified to this day.

Without Bell Labs, we’d have no home computers, no smartphones (actually no cellphones of any kind), no solar panels, no communications satellites, no lasers, no UNIX, no Internet, no C or C++ computer languages, and no Silicon Valley, for starters. Scientists and researchers at Bell Labs literally invented the future.

The Idea Factory is a fascinating look at how so many world-changing technologies could’ve come from one place. Those who walked the halls of Bell Labs were truly giants.

Here are a few other reviews of the book, from BusinessWeek and the New York Times.

I found out about a super cool company a few days ago – CivChoice.

The basic gist is that you create an account with CivChoice, put money into it (which is a one-way street: it’s a “donation” to CivChoice), and from there you divvy it out to the charities of your choice.

You get a single receipt for tax purposes, rather than a dozen small ones from around the country.

And you can use it to quasi-anonymize donations in a workplace donation program – instead of Personnel or Accounting knowing (or choosing) where you donate via paycheck deductions, it all goes to CivChoice, and then you direct it from there.

I have yet to find a peer-to-peer file storage system.

You’d think that with all the p2p and cloud services out there, there’d be a way of dropping files into a virtual folder and having them show up around the network (encrypted, of course) – replicated on some kinda of RAID-over-WAN methodology.

I’m thinking Cryptonomicon’s data haven, but done on the cheap (and not in a dedicated place like the Sultanate of Kinakuta).

I’d use it if it were built.

Law 13

If you need to turn to an ally for help, do not bother to remind him of your past assistance and good deeds. He will find a way to ignore you. Instead, uncover something in your request, or in your alliance with him, that will benefit him, and empathize it out of all proportion. He will respond enthusiastically when he sees something to be gained for himself. –Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power (review)

Once upon a time in my foolish youth I thought it was cool to get a suntan. There were many summers during my teens where I would “sunbathe” with almost nothing protecting my skin. Several times I got a crispy result.

The turning point for me was a visit to Hong Kong with the Navy back in 1991. Many of the crew and I visited a water theme park in the hills above the city. It was blazing hot so I removed my shirt, I had no sunscreen, and I was on a mountain in the tropics for several hours. I had huge blisters on my back for the rest of the week and came very close to requesting a light duty chit to recover from that foolhardy damage. Never again would I take that for granted, I vowed.

I know people my age who never got the word about how quickly the sun damages your skin. Many of them continue to tan and, unfortunately, many show signs of skin damage. While some tan to look younger, the opposite is what happens.

I find it sad, but then again it’s none of my business so I keep it to myself. If that’s what makes them happy who am I to judge? As for me, I’ll keep slathering on the sunscreen, whether it makes me look like a dork or not.

Ok … whether it makes me look more like a dork or not.

I was sad to learn this evening that Zeo, the makers of a wonderful sleep-tracking device, shut its doors late last year. It’s a real shame.

Since late last year it has been something of an open secret in some digital health circles that Newton, Massachusetts-based sleep monitoring and coaching company Zeo was winding down its operations and searching for a buyer. At least one investor was making veiled references to the company running out of money during various question-and-answer periods at the mHealth Summit in Washington DC last year. Zeo’s absence from the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this year — a must-attend for any company selling devices and companion services to consumers — was telling.

via Exclusive: Sleep coach company Zeo is shutting down | mobihealthnews.

Ever notice that your new EAP implementation appears to be leaking threads? Thread dump pointing to AJP? Does your thread usage resemble the graphs on the top, continuously climbing?

Fortunately, the solution is simple- JBoss and mod_cluster are too brain damaged to account for Apache HTTPD timing out threads and closing them down, so it leaves them having open forever rather than have a sane (or even insane) default timeout. To work around this, add the following to your system-properties in your host.xml, standalone.xml or domain.xml:

<system-properties>
 ...
 <property name="org.apache.coyote.ajp.DEFAULT_CONNECTION_TIMEOUT" value="600000"/>
 ...
 <system-properties>

Poof, after 10 minutes of idle time, JBoss kills the thread, resulting in the graphs on the bottom after a restart. Leave a comment if this was helpful.

Avnet (AVT) is acquiring Seamless Technologies (my employer).

Full Press Release (well, the important part): (and WSJ reprint)

Avnet, Inc. Announces Agreement to Acquire Assets of Seamless Technologies, Inc.

Significantly Expands Cloud and Automation Solutions

PHOENIX–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Avnet, Inc. (NYSE:AVT) announced today that it has agreed to acquire substantially all of the assets of Seamless Technologies, an IT private cloud and data center automation service provider. Seamless Technologies provides expertise and services in IT infrastructure software technologies, automation, cloud, virtualization, integration, and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices. Seamless Technologies has developed a robust cloud practice, working with customers of all sizes on their transition to private, public and hybrid cloud environments. The company generated revenue of approximately US$14 million in the 2012 calendar year.

“Recent services acquisitions have been well-received by our partners. This latest acquisition adds a critical component to our expanding services portfolio, with private cloud, virtualization and data center automation services that broaden and deepen our suite of solutions for our customers,” said Tony Vottima, senior vice president and general manager, Avnet Services, Americas. “Our capabilities span presales through implementation, training and managed services, which create new opportunities for our suppliers and reseller partners.”

Founded in 1992, Seamless Technologies has created a unique set of intellectual property and software that enables faster integration and deployment of large-scale private cloud and IT infrastructure environments. This acquisition will be integrated into the operations of Avnet Services.

“The addition of these new service offerings supports our long-range vision of solutions distribution, delivering technologies, services and solutions that provide high business value and accelerate hardware, software and services sales. Seamless Technologies’ domain expertise in financial services, healthcare, and insurance will complement our SolutionsPath® strategy and enable our partners and customers to achieve their business goals,” Vottima added.

This transaction, which is expected to close in approximately 30 days, is immediately accretive to earnings and supports Avnet’s long-term return on capital goal of 12.5 percent.

Today is Hallie’s last day at Conn Elementary school. It was 2007 but it seems like only yesterday we received the thrilling news that Hallie was accepted into Conn’s magnet program. On visiting Conn at its open house, Hallie was thrilled as well:

“I love it so much I want to kiss the whole school!”

“I don’t think anybody is as happy as I am!”

“This is the greatest day of my whole life!”

“I’m so overjoyed I feel like I’ve got a bellyache!”

“I don’t think I can wait one bit for Conn!”

“I wish they’d named it ‘I love it!’”

“When I first went down there I felt a bit scared and look at me now!”

And, on our way out of the parking lot, “Turn around!”

Now our girl is bound for Ligon and the future is just as bright for her. Still, it’s a day that reminds me how fleeting life is, how quickly the days pass, and how we don’t get to do any of those days over again.

Pardon me if I’m a weepy mess today.

It’s refreshing to see Rep. Marilyn Avila express some concern about the lack of broadband.

Avila was praised by N&O executive editor John Drescher in her defense of requiring local governments buy newspaper space for their legal notices:

“Are our citizens going to have to bookmark every website for every department in every division and check it every day to figure out what we’re up to down here?” she asked, adding that many residents don’t have Internet access.

Drescher called Avila a “thoughtful and respected” legislator and deemed the speech “stirring.” I suppose you look for your allies wherever you can find them.

Avila did more to expand the digital divide than any other legislator with her sponsorship of HB 129, the so-called “Level Playing Field” law. All it took was a fat check from Time Warner Cable and she said whatever they told her to. Time Warner trotted Avila out again to pretend it cared about fast broadband.

“Time Warner Cable has been a valued business partner for the state of North Carolina and is committed to seeing the state succeed,” said North Carolina Representative Marilyn Avila. “The additional infrastructure investment Time Warner Cable proposes will position our region with even more broadband capabilities that can lead to educational and economic growth.”

So, yeah. Avila blocked municipal broadband in return for Time Warner moolah, putting real broadband out of the reach of anyone other than deep-pocketed citizens. Forgive me if I don’t take her newfound concern seriously.

My parents joined our family tonight for dinner at Tobacco Road Sports Cafe, as the Wolfpack were in the 7th inning against Rice. The company and food were outstanding and so was the Wolfpack win!

Check out these amazing highlights!

Searching around this morning, I found this insightful comment on NextDoor which echoes my concerns. It was posted on a message board way back in October 2011:

How tragic that I could sign up to *heyneighbor.com* and *not* be connected to all my neighbours who happened to signed up to *nextdoor.com* And every new venture in this space could serve to silo people as much as it connects them. These business models contain paradox – they can only succeed in a neighbourhood if they have a monopoly.

There’s a lot of truth here.

via Post in Another one … NextDoor.com: Locals Online – For hosts of neighborhood e-lists, placeblogs, and community social nets: E-Democracy.org.

The way people moved up the ladder in IT during my early days (starting in 1975) was to take on new projects that allowed them time to master the new software and become the local expert. As you became the local expert on many new software products, management became very comfortable giving you more and more of these new software projects. Now, at this critical time you needed to train your replacement for some of the software that you had become the local expert because you could not maintain forward momentum with the tremendous drag caused by being the local expert for so many software offerings. Of course, you would get management to agree to lighten your workload because your current workload didn’t allow you to work on their next “Pet” project (after all you are now their go to guy). Also, you would push to give up the software that was either too time consuming and/or not part of your future automation plans. If you didn’t give up something (holding onto knowledge is your power trip), you would fail to meet management’s expectations and someone else would get the new projects and your plans would stall (cut off from new software knowledge and isolated).

When you start to automate, you automate your existing manual processes usually by using a wrapper because it is the fastest way of showing progress. However, after demonstrating that you can automate longstanding processes, you now have the evidence to convince management to allow you to automate your next project (beginning to end) because you will become the local expert not only on the new software but also on the automation software. After successfully completing the automation beginning to end, you are in a position to push for the policy that states that all new software/applications will be automated as part of its installation/configuration steps. Now, you push for automation friendly software/applications because wrappers will no longer be acceptable automation options.

The philosophy of automation document was compiled during IBM user group meetings from around 1987 through 1989 when automation was a very hot topic.

The Philosophy of Automation

Automation is not a technical problem it is a people problem.

When you initially automate, you convert your process flow documents into executable code that consistently runs on a prearranged schedule, or through a monitor, or an error message. These executable processes enforce your process rules every time.

You cannot automate processes that are all over the place.

When you automate your processes they will be transformed.

Because you automate your processes automation never ends

Automate as close to the source as possible.

Problems with automated processes occur infrequently but are more difficult to solve than manual processes.

The combining of problem, change, and asset management with automated process management and root cause analysis, improves quality and allows you to consistently meet your service levels.

All automation code is throwaway code.

Automation is very exciting

Automation is very rewarding.

Everyone is on the automation team

---

^{_{Guest Post from one of my colleagues, Dave B}}

In addition to collecting call detail records, there is some speculation that phone conversations themselves are being harvested. Recall this exchange from last month, as reported by Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian:

On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two. He quite clearly insisted that they could:

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It’s not a voice mail. It’s just a conversation. There’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

CLEMENTE: “No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

BURNETT: “So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.

CLEMENTE: “No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.”

via Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government? | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

Yesterday it was revealed that the National Security Agency is collecting millions of phone records from Verizon:

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

Today, the Wall Street Journal claims this extends to AT&T and Sprint customers, too. Yesterday, The Guardian revealed PRISM, a Top Secret NSA program to directly query social media servers owned Facebook, Google, Apple, and others.

I suppose the idea of “innocent until proven guilty” got left behind somewhere in the 20th century.

via NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily | World news | The Guardian.

Great article on the solar revolution.

Solar will be the cheapest form of power in many countries within just a few years. In places such as California and Italy it has already reached so-called “grid parity.” Onshore wind, on a piece of land not constrained by years of planning delays, is already the cheapest form of energy on earth. These are not wild claims – those are figures from General Electric, Citibank and others.

Newly built solar plants are already considerably cheaper than new nuclear plants per kilowatt hour of electricity produced and we are almost at the stage where we don’t need a guaranteed price known as a feed-in tariff because solar energy will compete head on with conventional energy.

via Renewable energy is clean, cheap and here – what's stopping us? | Ashley Seager | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

The problem isn’t with your server, it’s with your cookie manager.

Make sure you’re using the default Cookie Policy with the HC4CookieHandler implementation.

Leave a comment if this helped you out. it took an hour of searching to figure it out…

So the porch cat we adopted, Jupiter, has a little problem … he’s a killer. An accomplished hunter, indeed. He lived by these skills for the three years before we began caring for him and he’s kept those skills sharp ever since. He’s as sweet as he can be to all of us but behind that fuzzy face is an expert hunter. We’ve found all manner of mice, moles, birds, squirrels, rabbits, and lizards who have met their master at the deadly claws of Jupiter. Our yard becomes littered with a dead body of some variety about once every three weeks, it seems.

Last night I was preparing to view the International Space Station, gathering my camera when I heard an eerie wail coming from the front yard. I knew it was a battle of some sort so I leapt up and raced out the door.

That Jupiter had his claws in some poor critter I had no doubt, but what I saw was totally unexpected. Jupiter came trotting happily up to me from a dark figure in the neighbor’s driveway. It was too big for a possum, too small for a dog, exactly. It had a deerish shape but was way too short. I could make out large pointed ears and a bushy tail as it slunk its way back into the woods.

It was a fox. Our mangy porch cat picked a fight with a critter four times his size. Apparently he was winning, too! My walking out interrupted the fight, instantly switching my murderous beast into a sweetly purring kitty again. I can only imagine how I would’ve reacted had I discovered a dead fox in my front flowerbed.

I can’t say I approve of his instinctive need to kill, but I can’t really blame him. He wouldn’t have made it on his own otherwise. If we can’t teach him to play nice, though, perhaps adding a collar with a bell will give his prey fair warning and restrict the bloody dustups to the realm of kitty dreams. I’ll keep you posted.

I started working in our building on June 3rd, 2003, so we’ve been here for over ten years. Granted, while we have several rooms now, when we started out the three of us share one 10 foot by 15 foot room (currently my office), it is still cool to know that for a decade the OpenNMS goodness has been in this spot.

So I thought it was time we had a sign.

Almost every customer we have starts out with one person with the vision to switch from expensive proprietary software such as OpenView or Tivoli to OpenNMS. We refer to them as “internal champions” and without them OpenNMS wouldn’t exist. They are the ones who find OpenNMS, explore its power and then convince their organizations to use it.

One of those people is Eddie van Zanten.

Eddie works for the Ministry of Defense for the Netherlands. They have been using OpenNMS for many years now, and they sent a bunch of people to the US for training. When you come to training you get an OpenNMS polo shirt, but Eddie wasn’t one of them. However, the operation of OpenNMS fell to him. His coworker Dennis Waanders wrote to me:

One guy is doing the implementation of OpenNMS in our department. And he is been busy with it for over two years now. Without him OpenNMS would have died a slow death within our department. He alone is keeping OpenNMS alive within our department. At this moment some OpenNMS features are implemented and ready for monitoring and now people in our organisation do see the benefits of OpenNMS. All because of the persistence of one guy. One guy who had faith in the use of OpenNMS.

That is pretty much the definition of an internal champion.

So I sent Eddie a one of a kind OpenNMS pullover, which he is proudly wearing in the picture above. We are here because of people like him.

2013 will not be the YoLD.

Nor will 2014. Or 2015.

This will be a shock to the fanatical FLOSS heads out there. But not to me. I’ve never thought that “this will be the year of the Linux desktop” – regardless of how many magazine, journal, blog, and other articles have been published about it. Regardless of the ardency of LUGs: it won’t happen.

There will never be a year of The Linux desktop.

And it’s not because Linux is bad. Or because there’s too much of a learning curve. Or because there is not interest in running Linux at home (as opposed to “merely” on servers).  It’s not because you can’t run Office on Linux (see CrossOver).

It’s because we don’t care any more. Linux is here. Windows is here. OS X is here. iOS is here. Android is here.

We have GUI devices ranging from smartphones to tablets, netbooks to all-in-ones, desktops, workstations, portables, stationaries … nobody cares any more.

All anyone has really cared about for the last decade+ is whether or not they can get their work done. For more and more of us, that is being done via web interfaces, email, remote connections, portable apps, cloud computing, and a host of other non-strictly-platform-dependent tools.

I can collaboratively create and edit documents in Google Drive with scores of colleagues (if I wanted) as long as they have a “modern” browser. You can edit on an iPad while I’m running KDE while she’s on a Mac while he’s on a Windows box. I can sync files with tools like Dropbox and Copy (and scores more).

As long as I am running on “traditional” hardware somewhere (ie x64), I can run [almost] any platform’s native applications – I can run VirtualBox on Linux, Windows, or a Mac and install Linux, Windows, or OS X (if on Apple hardware) in the VM. I can even run platforms like Solaris x86.

We have been treading steadily towards platform-independence for years. Major companies like VMware, Google, Salesforce, and Canonical have all been pushing us in that direction, in their own ways – along with thousands of smaller outfits: there is very little reason to ever worry about what platform you are running as your main environment for at least 5 years, perhaps as many as 10.

There used to be lots of underdogs in the race. Ghandi has been quoted as saying something incredibly relevant to the nature of the current platformless monoculture:

First they criticize you
Then they laugh at you
Then they fight with you
Then you win.

How does that apply to YoLD? Red Hat used to have a “Road to Red Hat” monthly seminar series offered to college students on how to get into their internship program. They had an energetic video every month that would lead-off the presentation, and it always had the Ghandi quote in it. They used it in the context of being a then-substantially-smaller company than Sun, Microsoft, IBM, etc – but one that was helping to disrupt the establishment and bring about change in IT worldwide.

Sun and Microsoft for years ignored, laughed-at, and attacked Red Hat because they were not following the mold that so many others had used. They were going into the most staid of technology environments, and acting-out, effectively, a blue-ocean strategy. (Irony – everyone I knew who worked at Red Hat at the time ran Windows as their primary desktop because there were no good (or even semi-good) non-proprietary tools for things like productivity software where you had to continue to maintain “Microsoft compatibility“.)

I remember seeing my first YoLD article back in 2001 – a year or two after I had started “really” playing with Linux (back when Red Hat Linux was in the release 6 family (first edition I ever tried was 3.3 way back when)).

Linux never got “its year”. Instead, it got something far greater – the ability to be healthily ignored. It became ubiquitous.

The same thing was true of Adobe Flash for years: every computer had it installed. It was so widespread, no one thought about it. Adobe never needed the “Year of Flash” – it happened. AT&T never had the “Year of the Telephone” – people got so used to using them that they spread everywhere.

That’s happened with Linux on the desktop. Oh, sure, there are still the ardent fanatics who scream death to Microsoft. There are the religious nuts who get into yelling matches over whether Ubuntu contributes enough back upstream. There are folks who complain that everyone should use the .rpm standard (and those who want .deb, and those who just want .tar.gz files – they can compile themselves, thankyouverymuch).

The simple fact of the matter is that because you can run a “modern” web browser anywhere (Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and more) – there is no over-arching need to worry (in general) about what OS is running the app. The Operating System’s job is to, well, operate – schedule and manage running tasks so users get stuff done. In truth, that should be the job of any tool: enable the user to get work done. OSes should be the concrete and rebar of the computing world – they enable other things to get where they want to go in an organized fashion. The ergonomics of computing – a fascinating area of inquiry, may I add – theoretically has as its ultimate goal that the computer be intuitive, natural, and even invisible.

So, folks, there will never be a Year of the Linux Desktop.

And I’m OK with that.

Many of the neighborhoods in and around mine are signing up for the Nextdoor social media site to manage their neighborhood communication. Nextdoor is a social media site which provides a forum for neighbors to post. From Nextdoor’s About page:

Nextdoor is the private social network for you, your neighbors and your community. It’s the easiest way for you and your neighbors to talk online and make all of your lives better in the real world. And it’s free.

Thousands of neighborhoods are already using Nextdoor to build happier, safer places to call home.

People are using Nextdoor to:

• Quickly get the word out about a break-in
• Organize a Neighborhood Watch Group
• Track down a trustworthy babysitter
• Find out who does the best paint job in town
• Ask for help keeping an eye out for a lost dog
• Find a new home for an outgrown bike
• Finally call that nice man down the street by his first name

Nextdoor’s mission is to bring back a sense of community to the neighborhood, one of the most important communities in each of our lives.

Sounds groovy, doesn’t it? The problem is with the fourth word in the description:

“Nextdoor is the private social network …”

Nextdoor is all about walling off neighborhoods from others. It’s the online equivalent of a gated community. There’s nothing in the above list of Nextdoor features that can’t be done with a neighborhood email list, one that the community can own and control, not some private company.

I tried out Nextdoor last year and was immediately frustrated that my little 19-home neighborhood was cut off from the larger community. Apparently I can’t be a member of Bennett Woods and be a member of the larger East CAC community. On the other hand, I’m easily able to subscribe to email lists which have different scopes. Nextdoor couldn’t handle this when I tried last year and as far as I know it still can’t.

Here’s my main concern with Nextdoor: it kills cross-neighborhood collaboration. My neighborhood can’t communicate with the one right “next door” to it because of Nextdoor’s virtual walls. Is there a suspicious person on the way to the nearby neighborhood from this one? Tough luck! Nextdoor won’t let me tell my nearby neighbors if I don’t live there! Do adjacent neighborhoods want to team up on a litter collection project along the street or creek we share? Too bad! If you’re not on Nextdoor’s map you don’t exist!

Nextdoor used to have a “Nearby Neighborhoods” link but the company disabled it. The company says:

While we heard many stories about the positive impact Nearby Neighborhoods was having in communities, we also heard lots of feedback from users about ways the feature needs to be improved.

We will restore the ability to communicate with nearby neighbors once we have addressed those suggestions. We are confident that the right implementation of Nearby Neighborhoods will advance our shared mission to build stronger and safer neighborhoods.

I’m not holding my breath that Nextdoor will find that “right implementation,” since it seems to be all about raising barriers instead of breaking them down. The result is neighborhoods that circle the wagons instead of reaching out across neighborhood borders to strengthen the larger community.

No thanks. Email may have colossal faults but at least it doesn’t discriminate against where one lives.

I read Feed (review) a few weeks ago, and just finished the 2d installment in Mira Grant’s Newsflesh trilogy, Deadline. The frenetic pace of book 1 was upped a level in book 2 (along with some more language).

Mira is a fantastic author, and I cannot wait to read Blackout (it’s on my library queue).

“You know why corporate espionage keeps happening, no matter how bad they make the penalties for getting caught? … People stop caring. Once you reach the point where you’re working with more people than can comfortably go for drinks together, folks stop giving as much of a shit.”

…

“There’s always been something nasty waiting around the corner to kill us, but … [t]his constant ‘stay inside and let yourself be protected’ mentality has gotten more people killed than all the accidental exposures in the world. It’s like we’re addicted to being afraid.”

…

“It never pays to insult computers that are smart enough to form sentences. Not when they’re in control of the locks, and especially not when they have the capacity to boil you in bleach”

I know that it’ll sound a little self congratulatory and somewhat artificial, but for the first time our annual developers conference, Dev-Jam, has sold out.

This will be the eighth conference in nine years. The first one was in 2005 when I invited anyone interested to come to Pittsboro, crash at the farm, and spend the week hacking on OpenNMS. In addition to the three founders, we had four other people show up for the week (and most of them have been to every one).

This year 30 people will descend on the campus of the University of Minnesota for a week of coding and camaraderie. While the University can support more, it becomes a lot harder to manage the more people show up, and besides, I only bought 30 tickets to the Twins game, so 30 it is.

On my way out the door this morning I walked into our garage and was instantly startled. It was light in there! There’s normally light coming through the windows but this morning there was a bona fide sunbeam!

The front of our home faces almost due north. It turns out this is the time of year when the rising sun actually shines on the the front of our home. I hope to leave a little time tomorrow morning for snapping a few pictures during the rare moments the front of our home is illuminated in sunlight.

The Southeast Linuxfest (SELF) is one week away, so be sure to mark you calendars and register (it’s free, but consider becoming a Supporter to insure that these types of shows will continue).

I am also happy to announce that Charlotte’s own nerdcore duo, Mikal kHill & Sulfur, aka The ThoughtCriminals, are also going to be performing as a special guest of MC Frontalot. It promises to be a fantastic weekend and I hope to see you there, and be sure to check out Mikal kHill’s website for the geekiest tumblr I’ve ever seen (although I must admit I thought tumblr was just for pr0n).

I found a page about this solar farm in Bath, NC yesterday. It quietly generates 15.5 MW over 85 acres, selling the power to Duke Energy.

Earlier this year, Duke Energy shelved plans to build another reactor at the nearby Shearon Harris Nuclear Plant. The plant property encompasses over 20,000 acres. If Duke were to build a 20,000 acre solar farm on the Shearon Harris property it could generate over 3,000 MW of safe, clean electricity: more than that produced by 3 nuclear reactors. The cost would be about $3 billion, which is 1/3rd of what just one reactor would cost to build.

While nuclear plant construction costs continue to skyrocket solar PV costs continue to plummet. Which technology does it make sense to invest in?

Over the past few days we’ve had too much gorgeous sunshine for me to let our power station go idle. I had the inverter on all day Saturday and banked about 18 kWh for the day. Sunday morning had me wishing I had shut down the inverter the night before, though, as its antics woke me up.

I was snoozing in bed around 6:52 AM when I awoke to a loud popping sound from my clock radio. Since this was about the same time the other inverter issues took place, I suspected the inverter had gone offline again.

Before I went outside, I checked the eGauge power graph. It showed power was being generated but, more than that, it showed a very strange anomaly at the time I heard my clock radio pop. All power to the house had been interrupted at that moment: it seems the inverter had malfunctioned yet again.

I let it run the full day yesterday as it seems fine once the sun gets going. I did, however, shut it down overnight last night, and noted no power anomalies.

I’m thinking now that the problem is with the inverter, specifically when the panels produce enough energy for the first time of the day to cause the inverter to resync with the grid. I wondered if the inverter isn’t syncing properly, sending a power surge through the wiring instead. At the time of Sunday’s blip, the panels were up to a mere 100 watts, which is basically nothing.

I’ll leave the inverter shut off until the Southern Energy techs can give it a good going-over. My electronics are at stake here, you know.

Saturday afternoon I went for a 21 mile bike ride on the Neuse River Greenway. Afterward the family and I went to a friend’s pool party.

Sunday the family joined me on another bike ride, this one about 12 miles, lingering in Horseshoe Farm Park. We hoped my brother’s family would meet us there but they ran out of time to join us. We had fun on our own, though.

Three separate groups of people stopped me to ask about the greenways. Something about me must have identified me as the expert! I enjoy helping folks out and am now considering joining the city’s greenway volunteer program.

Today (Memorial Day) we didn’t have solid plans. I went to the dedication of Marshall Park along the House Creek Greenway and was impressed at the ceremony (military honors and all). Afterward, I rejoined the family and hoped we could get out for another bike ride. The kids weren’t interested, however, and so we went about our own projects. Kelly and Hallie picked up vegetable plants at the farmers market and we all planted them. I also sprayed Round Up on the weeds in the garden and then mowed the yard. It all looks very good now.

My day begins at 5:20 tomorrow morning, so we’ll see what kind of week it is. At least it will be a short one!

I took the time today to install the Tiny Tiny RSS newsreader, a replacement for the doomed Google Reader. Switching back to my own newsreader allowed me to immediately see how many feeds that I once followed have since vanished. It seems many blogs have dropped off the Internet entirely, and many of these only very recently.

Like the word “croatoan” carved in the tree that became the last word of the Lost Colony, some of these blogs left us with a “last post” entry but no real clue where they went. Is blogging dying? Are the walled gardens winning?

I have to admit myself to not posting as often as I once did. Yes, I use Facebook but only post updates there every few days. The job I took in February has sucked up much of what was once free time. And frankly, I’m saddened to see how our state legislature is now hell-bent on destroying this state. There’s not much inspiration there.

I still have a few more observations in me, though, and will post them when they’re ready (or even when they’re not ready – that’s never stopped me before!).

Law 12

One sincere and honest move will cover over dozens of dishonest ones. Open-hearted gestures of honesty and generosity bring down the guard of even the most suspicious people. Once your selective honesty opens a hole in their armor, you can deceive and manipulate them at will. A timely gift – a Trojan horse – will serve the same purpose. –Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power (review)

Tomorrow will be two weeks since our solar panels were installed by Southern Energy Management. When we first got them, I jokingly complained on Facebook how the panels only lasted 12 hours and then quit working. Some of my friends caught on to my joke (it was nighttime) right away while others scratched their heads.

Unfortunately, it’s no longer a joke. Twice over the last week the inverter has failed with a ground fault error, indicating a wiring problem in the panel side of system. What’s more, last week the main breaker tripped, indicating a problem with the grid side of the system. A tech came out on Tuesday and wrapped tape around a nick in the AC cable’s insulation which fixed the breaker issue but the panels are still down until the ground fault gets fixed.

For anyone considering getting a solar PV system, the best advice I can provide you is to be patient. It is a long wait until anything even gets put on your roof. Then the install itself can take a couple of weeks, depending on the difficulty, weather, crew availability, and other potential setbacks. Finally, even if all the parts are supposedly in place, there still might be work to do in ironing out the kinks, as we have found out this week.

On several days I made arrangements to work from home during this process, taking time away from the office that would have been very beneficial to me in my new position. The same work could have been accomplished in half the time had the communication and coordination been better. I don’t think my time was considered as valuable as it probably should have been.

Communication was also a problem. We got handed off to various crews who evidently don’t talk to each other. The first technician who came out to scope out the project needs didn’t tell the next technician (who ran conduit) what the plans were. The conduit guy had to start from scratch. He did a very good job, mind you, with what he had to work with but ran the conduit to the wrong place relative to the future panels. The team installing the panels replaced half the conduit and moved it further up the roof.

We were handed off to a project coordinator, which would ordinarily be a wise move and cut down on confusion but in our case was of little help. Day one of the panel install I was assured the team would only be there for “a few hours and gone by lunch.” Um, no. It took multiple days to complete the roof deck installation.

Once the gear was in place, the project coordinator scheduled an electrical inspection, which (understandably, this time) required me to be home. We needed two inspections, however: electrical and building, and a city building inspector showed up a few hours later thinking he would be doing the final on the project. By that time the SEM tech was long gone, and the inspection had to be rescheduled for this morning. The inspector required the consulting engineer to seal his building plans before the inspector would sign off on the project. I was told by SEM this was highly unusual.

Then the ground fault issue hit us last week. I let our project coordinator know about it and asked for a tech to be sent out to fix it. The tech who arrived knew nothing of the problem and had to be told by Kelly what the issue was.

Yesterday morning, I wrote the project coordinator about the latest ground fault and asked that a tech look at it today. The coordinator came out this morning for the final building inspection and, after the inspector had departed, asked to see the inverter, declared it needed fixing and that a crew would be out on Tuesday, and then left. I essentially wasted a day I could’ve spent in the office for something I could’ve accomplished with my smartphone’s camera. It was very frustrating.

Oh, and our project coordinator was not aware that our “certificate of completion” had been sent this week to the power company. If you’re the project coordinator and you don’t even know when a project you’re supposedly coordinating is complete, you might not be doing your job right.

The only bright side to this is how quickly Duke Energy Progress came out and installed our new bidirectional meter. My fellow solar PV owner, Jason Hibbets, said it took Progress Energy eight weeks to put in his meter. Ours came well within a week of filing our completion papers. That’s the way to underpromise and overdeliver!

So, what would we do differently?

Better project management. I chose Southern Energy thinking they would provide us with expert service. I’m not sure what we got was expert service. Too many pieces seemed to fall through the cracks, so to speak, to give me confidence in them. Having a real project manager would have made all the difference in this regard. There are other solar installers out there, so find one that also excels at customer service.

Better contract terms. We paid the full price near the front end of the project. The SEM salesperson told us they needed the 12-months same as cash loan signed over at the start yet the bank providing the loan stressed to pay it only at project completion. Thus our “12 months same as cash” was whittled down by two months. Also, we wrote our last check at the completion of the “material installation” stage but in hindsight should have insisted that the last payment occur only once we were fully satisfied and all inspections had been completed and passed. Dumb, dumb, dumb. You should treat getting solar PV system like closing on a house: only when you’re completely satisfied with the work should the bill get paid in full.

Overall, we’re pleased to be joining the solar revolution. We’re the envy of the neighborhood, with many neighbors contemplating their own moves to solar. No matter what promise our panels bring us, though, they’re just very expensive roof ornaments if they’re not creating electricity. The thrill of going solar will start flowing as soon as the electrons do.

This should have been titled “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective – but incredibly rigid and hard to to please – People” by Stephen Needs Coffee.

But it’s not. Stephen R Covey’s work is extremely well-known, and millions have purchased The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People since it was released.

I’m sure I have read more boring texts … but I cannot recall – maybe in my philosophy of ethics class?

There may be some nuggets in Covey’s writing, but other than to-do lists (which everyone recommends), I can’t find them.

Definitely happy I didn’t waste $12 on this book.

We got this email in today from Duke Energy Progress. We got our bidirectional meter on Tuesday and are officially authorized to generate electricity!

We have received the Certificate of Completion verifying the installation of your solar PV system, and your residential meter has been exchanged with a bi-directional meter. You are fully enrolled in the Duke Energy Progress SunSense Solar PV Program effective June 2013. This 60-month commitment requires your participation on our Schedule R-TOUD, Net Meter and SSR riders in order to receive a monthly SunSense bill credit. Here’s what to expect:

Your next Duke Energy Progress bill statement will reflect your previous rate structure (i.e. Residential rate or TOU rate if previously enrolled) from the time you placed your system in service until your next meter read date. Any excess solar production will be tracked for net-metering purposes, and will be displayed as “Energy Received by Duke Energy Progress” on a bill insert.

Billing under Schedule R-TOUD, Net Meter and SSR riders shall begin with the next full billing cycle. That statement will apply the first SunSense monthly credit. The bill insert will track and display any excess solar energy production for net-metering purposes.

Your rebate check will be mailed in 8-10 weeks to the mailing address listed on your SunSense Application. The approved AC-rated capacity of your PV system is 3.33 kW AC; your rebate check will be in the amount of $3,330.

If you move, or if your PV system becomes inactive during the 5-year commitment period, please contact us at DEPhomesolar at duke-energy dot com for information regarding termination fees or program transfer to the new homeowner.

A copy of this letter will be mailed under separate cover.

We appreciate your participation and dedication to the expansion of renewable energy in North Carolina. We hope you enjoy generating solar energy and bill credits!

The SunSense Team at Duke Energy Progress

No OpenNMS content, but since at least one of my three readers is into home brewing I thought this might be of interest. While I love the chemistry behind home brewing, my waistline could never survive it.

I travel a lot for my job, which means I’m lucky enough to eat and drink in nice restaurants (the downside is that I’ve had more than my share of meals purchased from convenience stores as well – the joys of travel). One thing I’ve seen over the last year or so is a resurgence in the art of the cocktail.

I’m not talking about a rum and Coke or a seven and seven. I’m talking about drinks that take time to prepare, like most of the cocktail menu a the bluezoo restaurant in Orlando. Some good friends of mine introduced me to that place, and the General Manager there has been kind enough to share with me some of the recipes, usually involving infusions, shrubs and/or foams.

One thing they do at bluezoo is barrel age cocktails to create a much richer, complex flavor. I’ve always been interested in trying that, so when I read an article by David Lebovitz about a barrel aged Vieux Carré I decided it was time.

I contacted my friend at bluezoo who sent me to Thousand Oaks Barrel Co., and I dutifully ordered a 2L oak barrel for this project.

The barrel is oak that’s charred on the inside, and while the barrel itself seems well built, I’m not happy with the little spigot. You have to assemble it yourself, but even though I was very careful, the handle came off. I’ve attempted to glue it back on, but I might end up using pliers to turn it. A little disappointing since otherwise it looks pretty cute.

In any case, I was now ready to assemble my Vieux Carré. I had my Canadian Club (per the recipe), a decent Cognac and the only Sweet Vermouth I could find in Pittsboro. I also had the required Peychaud’s bitters via Amazon.

Since it was a 2L barrel, I decided to go with 600ml of each spirit and a teaspoon and a half of bitters. Once done I placed it out of the way on the bar.

Now all I have to do is wait 6-8 weeks. I believe I’ll need to decant the drink once it is done as too much aging is not a good thing, but I plan to experiment a bit with it.

I think Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is one of the most stable operating systems I’ve ever used, deserving of the “Long Term Support” label.

I haven’t been as happy with later releases. I still run 12.04 on two machines, but my work machine is running Raunchy Ramjet. It tends to die in a spectacular way a couple of times a week (always Compiz) but now I’m getting some weirdness in the unread count for Thunderbird.

I am very e-mail driven, so I always find myself looking up to the left hand corner of the screen to see if I have any new mail. While it works some of the time, quite frequently the unread counter is missing when I have a number of unread messages. But what I thought was even weirder was that once the indicator actually looked crooked:

Odd huh. Haven’t seen it since, however.

Still wish I could get .WAV files to play properly on 13.04.

I just got back from Sweden (my third time this year) and was given permission by the client to discuss the project we are working on there.

The client is Bonnier Digital, part of Bonnier AB. Bonnier is a huge media conglomerate based in Sweden that consists of over 175 companies with more than 10,000 employees. If you read Popular Science then you read a Bonnier media product.

With so many individual companies, Bonnier was dealing with a lot of duplication of IT infrastructure. Bonnier Digital was founded to both consolidate their IT operations as well as to build a business providing world class IT services to other companies. They are deploying thousands of kilometers of fiber around Sweden to bring together various data centers, the largest of which will house nearly [redacted] shipping containers (a lá Google) filled with servers and related equipment.

(I was asked to remove the actual total by the client, but it’s “lots”)

OpenNMS has been chosen as the application platform which will manage this huge infrastructure, and in doing so provide state of the art surveillance for IT operations in general and the media business in particular.

It was interesting to be in Sweden when it wasn’t frozen. While it wasn’t warm, the leaves were starting to emerge on the trees, and the days were very long. The first morning I was there I woke up in a panic that I’d overslept since the sun was streaming in the window, but my handy reported it was only 05:58. I liked the fact that the woods were carpeted with this plant with little white flowers.

Note that while I’m still curious, I have yet to try that other white thing one finds in Sweden:

Due to this project we spend a lot of time in country. I was there for two weeks, along with Alejandro. To make being away from home easier, we encourage our engineers to bring along their spouses, and for this trip Carolina joined her husband.

I hope she had a good time, because most days we work until late in the evening and during the week I only saw her a couple of times, but I did get to see her on the weekend. It was pretty gray where we were, so I did a Google search on “sunniest place in Sweden” and we decided to go to Karlstad.

Karlstad is a pretty neat town. There are lots of statues, and for those of you who play Ingress, that means lots of portals. Alejandro and Carolina followed me around as I played the game. I had my picture taken next to a statue honoring Sola i Karlstad (the Sun in Karlstad) a waitress known for her sunny disposition.

Karlstad is located in the province of Värmland (Bonnier Digital is nearby in Dalsland). There is a museum in Karlstad featuring the art of Värmland, which includes a replica of Viking runes. Fans of Lord of the Rings will recognize them as the inspiration for runes in those books.

Karlstad is at the top of Lake Vänern, so we drove down to see the water. Vänern is a huge fresh-water lake that is the largest in the EU, and the 26th largest in the world by area (as well as by volume).

It was a nice trip and we did see lots of sun.

My friends Lars and Linda (from the great Moose expedition) invited us out on the lake on the following Tuesday. While it was still a little cold, I can imagine how much fun it would be to be out on the water in the summer time. We saw tons of fish on the fish finder, but they just weren’t in the mood to bite.

As part of the tour we went out on Vänern proper, and you could see the waves getting choppier. Vänern is dotted with hundreds of little islands, and you could see several as we bobbed on the water. Since it was cold and the wind picked up on the open water, we turned around and headed back, doing about 27 knots.

When we got back to the dock, Lars got a call dealing with a security issue and so we sped off at high speed in his Range Rover to try and catch some bad guys. It is something to be doing 60 mph on backcountry Swedish roads, although I must admit that Lars is an excellent driver and I didn’t feel unsafe at any time. Still, when I had the chance, I did feel the need to rid myself of some extra fluids I’d been carrying around (grin).

So once again I left Sweden with a few more adventures (Lars and Linda took Alejandro and Carolina out on ATVs the next night, but I was a little too beat to make it) and I look forward to many more in the future.

Okay, I know that this was probably federally mandated, but I found this funny example of over-labeling:

This is label is from a spray bottle used for cleaning. DI Water, or Deionized Water, is a purified water product in which the trace minerals have been removed, which makes it nicer to use for cleaning since it won’t leave behind any scale residue.

What I found funny was the warning label, for water:

Yessir, drink enough water and you can suffer from convulsions. I’m a little upset that they don’t include death, since drinking absurd amounts of water can lead to death, not to mention if the product is used in ways contraindicated by the label (i.e. in the lungs). And be sure to wear the appropriate protective gear when working with water, or else your skin might get all pruney. It continues:

Now the key words are in the second picture: MSDS Reference. As a commercial cleaner, even if it is just water, there has to be an entry for it on the Material Safety Data Sheet, and I’ll bet that most of the wording for this label came from that document.

But I still have to ask myself if we, as a culture, haven’t gone a little too far.

Today was the first work day for our summer intern, Joe.

When he came to interview, he was all dressed up in a suit. I strongly recommend wearing suits to interviews unless told specifically not to. It demonstrates that you own a suit and can put on a tie, and thus we are likely to imply that you are conscientious, chew with your mouth closed, bathe periodically and don’t pass gas in public. These implications may or may not turn out to be true, but it is nice to see someone make the effort.

Since today was his first day, we decided as a joke to come to the office all dressed up.

( Click to embiggen )

The non-smiling, non-tie-wearing guy is Joe. Next to him are Emily and Carolyn, our account managers, Ben, Donald, myself and Matt.

Seth and Jeff, who were remote today, dressed up for the daily scrum call.

Many (if not all) companies have provisos when you become a salaried employee that you not discuss your salary/compensation package with other employees.

Most people have been raised in a mindset, largely because their parents have worked for companies like this (and maybe their grandparents, too – it is 2013, after all, and this is not a new phenomenon), that they shouldn’t ever discuss how much they make doing job R when their friend does job H – even at a different company.

Let me state, first, that I am not going to promulgate the idea that everyone should go around bragging about how much they make – especially if you are in front of either mixed company, or in front of someone you know is having a difficult time financially- after all, who wants to be the one guy in the room making $35000 when everyone else is in the 6 figures and gloating about it? I sure wouldn’t.

However, (and maybe I’m weird – though I don’t think so) I have never cared about how much you made in comparison to myself. If we are doing the same work with the same experience and we do not have the same compensation, it implies that one of us negotiated better (I have some thoughts about negotiating, too, both published and not). If you manage to get an extra $1 an hour ($2080 more per year), that’s awesome.

Given that the previous paragraph, outside of “basic” jobs like warehouse work, cleaning cars, etc, never happens – why should anyone be surprised that not everyone has the same compensation as the next guy? Somewhere along the line we got the idea that salary+benefits needed to be “fair”. “Fair” is a concept that only exists in economic theories not based on effort. (The first thing to know about compensation is encapsulated in the book Everything is Negotiable – and a related, but highly specifized¹ form for salaries.)

There are services like Glassdoor that help to provide “competitive” salary information … but salary is only a small portion of compensation. Let’s say you and I both make $5000 a month ($60000 a year – make the math easy). But you have 2 weeks of vacation, and I have 4. But I took the lower-deductible insurance option, and you took the higher. Which one of us is bringing home more per month? Who cares! My individual desires and needs are, apparently, being met on my package, and yours are with yours. So why does it matter that we not discuss salary information with each other? Transparency is vital in the security world, it also is internally in a company. And between friends (though, of course, the amount of data we dump, and the methods we choose, will vary) it establishes trust.

Do I care if everyone in the world knows how much I earn per year? No. Tax returns are not public, but they’re not exactly private, either (they’re not that difficult to get if you want them). House sales prices are matters of public record. And from a house sale, along with known mortgage rates at the time of sale, you can determine how much someone is spending on their housing payment every month within a decent error margin (eg, $200000 home, 4% interest, 30 year mortgage, 10% down, you have in the ballpark of a $1000 base mortgage payment² – within about 5-10% (to cover taxes, insurance, and PMI)). Presuming you’re not living on your credit cards, that means you’re making at a minimum $1500 a month ($18000 a year) just to afford to have a house payment. Add-in other normal essentials of 21st century America (car insurance and maintenance (or bike/bus money), groceries, phone, internet, tv, student loan, etc), and you’re at least at the household income level of $40000 (pretax). Likely quite a bit higher – especially if you have a car payment of any kind.

Why go through the miniature exercise above? Because no one seems to mind comparing they car insurance premiums. Or how often they eat out. Or what they like to cook at home. But SALARY! Heaven forbid you ever talk about THAT! That’s the one no-no in discussion of financial data between friends and coworkers. But it’s irrational when in just a few second you can ballpark the minimum someone earns.

We can compare generalities – vacation time, insurance plans, sick policies, maybe even bonuses (but only as percentages – don’t you dare use real dollars when discussing them) … but not the salary.

I read recently an Atlantic article discussing Millennials and the slow break-down of corporate boundaries to sharing compensation information. I think that’s wonderful.

Publicizing (at least internally) salaries (even if it’s in bands, a la FogCreek, HP, IBM, or the Federal Government (and Military)) is extremely positive. It doesn’t disclose stock options, bonuses, etc, but can give some kind of indication between colleagues of their relative value to their employer.

At one former employer, I found out shortly after I started that another recent hire (with more years of support experience) was being paid barely more than half what I was. And had had no options when he started (just weeks before me), when I had a modest issuance. Neither of us was upset about how much I was being paid, but I was disappointed to finally see “in the real world” such salary discrimination going on. The entire reason he was paid so much less than me? He didn’t negotiate well.

It was technically against company policy for him to tell me how much he made. And me him. Technically, it was a dismissable offense.

That’s the ridiculous part of not sharing compensation data – that by sharing it you can have your employment terminated. Employers who are worried about little things like whether a given employee knows another employee’s salary are [most likely] micromanaging – at least from the Personnel Department³.

Additionally, if the company is concerned that finding out how much someone else is earning is going to cause unhappiness amongst the team, they’ve done several other things wrong. They’ve [at least]:

• hired people whose only motivation is money (or believe that’s the only motivator)
• intentionally tried to undervalue their team
• established an immediate sense of distrust
• decided to treat their employees like children instead of adults who can rationally and intelligently discuss differences between themselves – and not just on their preferred lunch joint

I would love to see this aura of distrust disappear.

If you really do have people whose only motivation is money, you need a better team: they’ll jump ship as soon as something more lucrative comes along – instead of changing only when the work becomes more boring .. or more interesting elsewhere.

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^{1 _{I know it’s not a word – I’m using it anyway}
2 _{Divide the mortgage amount by 180, and you have the rough base payment on a 30 year mortgage (for the under 5% mortgages I see in mid-2013); your base payment is the home’s cost *2 / 360 (number of months in 30 years) – or just price/180}
3 _{I positively despise the term “Human Resources” – employees are only “resources” to the MBA types: they’re people, and should be accorded good treatment (including referentially) as such}}

I was at work Friday, working my way through an increasing pile of work when I took a brief moment to check my Twitter account.

Yikes! WRAL’s Twitter feed had the headline “Raleigh considering pet ban in parks, on greenways.”

That’s just ridiculous and wrong.

The news media had latched on to a city press release that had a similarly-misleading headline: “Parks Committee Seeking Input on Possible Pet Ban in City Parks.” Though the gist of the press release was correct, the media saw “pet ban in parks” and assumed the worst.

Working as fast as I could, I tweeted back to WRAL that their headline was wrong and their story was misleading. To their credit, they promptly corrected the story but not before many, many of their Twitter followers had a tizzy.

The N&O’s city reporter, Colin Campbell, soon called me up for an impromptu interview. The story the N&O ran was far closer to the truth.

So what is the truth? Responding to citizen complaints and staff input, Raleigh’s Parks board was tasked by the city council to study what might be done to restrict dogs from certain areas of parks, such as athletic fields and playgrounds. Many citizens have reported aggressive dogs approaching their kids at playgrounds, and dogs have made a mess of several athletic fields, affecting the kids and adults who play there. Staff informed the board at its meeting last week that some of the city’s park playgrounds are apparently being used to train fighting dogs. Maintenance staff have found teeth marks in the leather swingset seats where some dog owners have apparently been hanging their dogs to strengthen their jaws for fighting.

So, we’re looking at whether keeping dogs off athletic fields and playgrounds makes sense. Dogs would still be welcome elsewhere and on greenways, too.

So, why is the Parks board’s greenway committee looking into this? Only because of convenience. Raleigh is not looking to ban dogs from greenways. One thing that might be considered with regards to dogs and greenways is a rule that dogs must be on a leash six feet long or shorter. That, however, is a separate issue.

The Parks committee will hold a public comment meeting this Wednesday in the municipal building (at the time of this writing). It may turn out the meeting gets moved somewhere bigger, but no other venue has been mentioned yet. Also on Wednesday, I will be discussing the possible dog restrictions on WRAL’s morning news, possibly around 6:10-6:15 AM. I hope I am coherent on live TV at that time of the morning, and I hope I remain coherent for the public comment meeting twelve hours later!

Bonus link: This afternoon the N&O’s editorial page weighed in on the side of restricting dogs in an editorial that possibly will run in tomorrow’s paper. While I appreciate the support the paper is showing the Parks board, I have to say that I’m personally not certain which way I’m leaning on this issue. Many times I’ve taken the dog with the kids and me as we’ve walked to nearby Lions Park. I’ll tie the dog to a bench on the playground, have a seat there, and watch the kids as they play. Never am I away from my dog and never is the dog allowed to roam freely.

I feel I’m a responsible dog owner. Would what I did be considered against the law? Should it be? I look forward to hearing what the public has to say at Wednesday’s meeting.