Google is beginning to crumble. They will collapse under their own weight as I have said numerous times. I hope to see more scale back and more product management. And get better hiring practices!
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/adieu-to-google-answers.html
Here comes PCI Here comes PCI right down compliance lane.
Visa and Mastercard and Dinner club too
Pullin’ on the reins
Encryption is ringin’, Firewalls singin’
All is secure and monitored
Hang your credit cards (masked/encrypted of course) and say your prayers
‘Cause PCI comes tonight!
Here comes PCI, here comes PCI,
Right down compliance lane
He’s got an audit book that’s filled with sections
For companies big and small
Hear those compliance officers order you about,
Oh what a horrible sight
So jump in the data center and cover your head
‘Cause PCI comes tonight!
Here comes PCI, here comes PCI,
Right down compliance lane
He doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor
He makes you compliant just the same
PCI knows we’re all leaking data like a sieve
That makes everything wrong
So fill your day with endless security
‘Cause PCI comes tonight!
Here comes PCI, here comes PCI,
Right down compliance lane
He’ll come around when the credit card companies need more money
That it’s PCI all over again
Secure credit card handling will come to all
It we just follow the book
So lets give thanks to the audit man
That PCI comes tonight!
My solaris 10 media kit arrived. Go me! I got the x86_64 version. I’m so excited 
So I have decided to start utilizing my DMZ server. It is a VmWare guest running debian stable. I am having a friend of mine setup OpenVPN on it. I will be deploying Quagga with IPv6. This is mostly an excuse for him and I to learn routing/VPN setup on non cisco hardware. I will also be deploying Tor.
I want to make it part of a highly available mesh network. Get various LUG members to deploy VmWare and link into a SoCal based collaboration network. I plan to discuss it at the SFVLUG meeting this Saturday and see if there is any interest and how it could be utilized.
I think this will really help get a lot of things developed and pushed out to the community. Many technologies and software packages I am working on under the scope of the OSER project are things that LUG members are interested in. This gives us all a chance to build out various systems and programs and get hands on experience with them.
From the all knowing /.
Bureaucracy.
At least in GE’s implementation of Six Sigma. They found a way to take what is essentially the engineering version of the scientific process, wrap it in so much red tape that it is unworkable (a 12-step process that really had 15 steps) , and put it in the hands of every worker in the company. Originally they gave bonuses for doing it, but eventually they took those away and declared “Thou shalt not get a raise without a Six Sigma Project.” What ended up happening is that people refused to make any process or product improvements unless they were part of somebody’s (preferably their own) Six Sigma project.
It was ridiculous. You ended up with one person optimizing a part of a process, while the person in the next cubicle was eliminating the entire process in favor of a more unwieldy one. Then, six months later, somebody else would start a new project that essentially put the original process back in place. Of course the problem was that they were using a distinctly product-oriented procedure, and trying to use it to solve process problems.
Don’t even get me started on the math. They would assume normal distributions for everything. Never mind that one of the steps was to prove normalcy. If that test proved it wasn’t normal, you were instructed by your “Black Belt” to assume normalcy anyway — even if a Weibull distribution was clearly the correct choice (like in timed exercises). Idiots, I say. And then they had PHB’s (called “Black Belts” and “Master Black Belts”) trying to tell engineers how to do math, when they didn’t even know how to use a simple Q test. If they saw a data point that didn’t support their theory, they just called it an outlier, and deleted it.
You’d think after nearly two years of not working at GE, I wouldn’t get so wound up about it. I guess as an engineer, it really gets my goat when people use math improperly.
Figures. Big companies can’t do anything right. The business units usually can but then corporate comes in and shakes things up.
Oh and of course the oblig reference:
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20061126.html
It’s people like this:
Paul Vixie wrote:
>
> every month or two somebody will ask me “does BIND really drop 20% of all
> queries it receives?” and i say, “um, no, why do you ask?” and the answer
> is always “that’s what the ultradns salesman told me.” i can’t argue with
> their success, but i guess i am ready to quibble over their manners.
>
Hi Paul, just curious, someone over at UltraDNS called and told me my own bind server is dropping
20% of queries. Can you please explain to me how did they log into my systems?
that are the reason so many issues occur. Hello dummy! People don’t need to login to your server to see your dropping queries. If in fact you are. Some people need to get hit with the cluestick.
*shakes head in despair*
http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20061105.html
Either that or:
Phase 1 – Cool new server
Phase 2 – A SAN
Phase 3 – World Domination
Linux is so cool and flexible. Like take what I am doing right now for example. I am logged in via SSH to a (Vmware hosted) Linux box with X11 forwarding turned on (ssh -X). I am working on files which are hosted on another machine via samba. They are mounted under my home directory on the dev server. How am I working on those files? Via the Glade interface builder via the display popping up on my local workstation. I do all this without having to jump through any hoops or set anything up. It just works. The network really is the computer when you have Linux/UNIX as your operating system.
So I (re)discovered StreamTuner. I am using it to listen to music streamed over the net. I like how it allows me to record the streams. I should make a custom mix of Jazz/Classical/Techno. I enjoy instrumental music the most. If I am doing a lot of reading/research I listen to Jazz/Classical. If I am getting work done and need to be kept awake/peppy I listen to Techno. Obviously working as a programmer/sys administrator I have situations where I need a blend of that functionality hence the mix idea. Plus it gives me an excuse to dabble in music mixing and using audacity etc. Now I need to come up with an excuse for playing with Blender and 3d graphics in general.
So I got Beryl to work. I followed the howto. Amazing what happens when you read the documentation
So I have it working and will be demoing it soon.
So status update:
1) Wireless works
2) USB works.
3) Integrated card reader works
4) Suspend to ram/disk works
5) Remote control works
6) Vmware installed
Just need to make the built in webcam/microphone work