Entries in Life

Except for Tempuscidaphobia, I’ve got the guru phobias (though this does not necessarily mean I’m a guru, of course).

When I was 14, I raised money from the people in my church and went to work in Haiti at an orphanage for the summer. Of course, I had to write thank-you notes to everyone who gave me money. This was a pretty irksome task and as I was in a hurry one day I wrote on one of the cards I had “I’ve been having a good time. I am having a good time. I will have a good time.” That particular card went to my father’s co-worker.

When I got back home, my dad told me that the man had been very touched by the positive note of the card. Evidently he was going through a rough time and the positive outlook of the words I wrote really meant something to him, even though the spirit in which I wrote them was less than wholesome.

Somehow, that incident has stuck with me for the past sixteen years. Even the most insignifigant things we do can have a much larger than expected result on those we interact with. Too often I forget this and I end up hurting other people.

So the Columbia crashed and the News Media paused the war drums for a few days to focus on the shuttle, NASA, and space exploration. I can’t say I cared too much. Seven people died a spectacular death. But I didn’t know them and wasn’t even aware that they were up there with some grade-school science experiments.

All the media coverage was just distracting. I usually enjoy the “A” section of the Sunday Times-Picayunne because they put some good human-interest stories in from the wires. But not this past Sunday. How much can you read about the shuttle? Apparently some people can read quite a bit.

I wouldn’t have said anything, except that I came across Jeneane Sessum’s comments which included the following gem:

I think blogland responded much like mainstream media [...] leading and controlling our grieving, and the decision of whether we grieve at all or not.

I’ve been installing several Perl modules from CPAN on a Solaris box. I’ve been carefully constructing SysV Packages for each one. Since the repitition has been painful, I finally paid attention to my own advice to never do anything twice and created cpan-to-pkg.

It contains a couple of simple implementations of SYSV programs (pkgproto and pkgmk) and hopefully, I’ll be able to replace more bits and pieces as time goes on. However, these two pieces will fit nicely in the SYSV conversion work I did for alien last year.

Ben writes:

When the Challenge exploded I worked for a firm in Cambridge that had written some of the key software. Most of the company was seated in a large atrium watching the television. The launch had been scheduled so school children around the nation could watch. When the shuttle exploded every single person who’d worked on that software could only think: “Am I responsible.”

Have I mentioned that — contrary to the commonly accepted thinking — qmail is the flakiest, least stable MTA out there? Upgrading is a real pain: unless you’re careful, all five qmail users will be re-created with a different UID. And, since the UIDs are different, the newly installed qmail binaries will refuse to work with the (previously installed) qmail queue directories.

Sendmail has its problems, but it is rock solid. There isn’t the same fragility to the installation and it is much more verbose in its error reporting so it is easier to find problems.

I think a big part of the problem is that D.J. Bernstein set out to replace too many components of the standard UNIX system at once. Instead of syslog, he has multilog. Instead of init scripts, he has a supervised services. Instead of using the stock resolver, he prefers djbdns. This much change means you have to learn the “D.J.” way of doing things in addition to the conventional way. You can’t get away from syslog, init scripts and the stock resolver without a substantial amount of work.

Maybe I’m only complaining because I’m in the middle of a big qmail/spamassassin installation. Once it is up and running, it should work fine for months if not years. Its the getting it up and running that is the problem.

This past week has been pretty good. Excepting Friday (when I was sick), things have been rolling along smoothly work-wise. Alexis and I filled out forms to create our LLC, I talked to a potential client, and I got a nice little raise at my full-time job — large enough to surprise the contract holder. Remember: you don’t know unless you ask and the worst they can do is to say “no”.