sixtyPercent: Cochlear Implants, Aviation, Technlology, and Philosophy 2005/05
Admiral?
I saw this article on BBC today. It turns out the head of Bolivia's armed forces is Admiral Luis Aranda. Admiral? Bolivia? What am I missing?
by David Creemer : 2005/05/26 : Categories humor : 0 trackbacks : 0 comments (permalink)
Waiting for the Doctor
I had a second visit to SOAR (Sports Orthopedic and Rehabilitation) this week to check on my back, which had been in quite a lot of pain. A friend had recommend this clinic, and Dr. Joel Saal in particular. After arriving early, checking in, and then going to an exam room, I then waited 40 minutes in a windowless, magazine-less tiny room for the doctor to arrive. Outside I heard things like "Is Dr. Saal here yet?" "Tell him to go right to room #2 when he gets here", etc.
Normally I wouldn't use this forum to complain about this sort of thing. Except this is a private clinic which can manage their patient load; and this was the second time the same thing happened; and when I asked if a 40 minute wait (past the scheduled appointment time) was acceptable, three nurses all grimaced and noded their heads with sad looks on their faces, saying "did you tell Dr. Saal? You should tell him." Apparently this is normal, patients are complaining, and it's not getting through to the right person. At one point, one of the staff mentioned that they didn't know what to do about this problem.
A long time ago, I read (or at least skimmed) Gallwey's The Inner Game of Tennis. I think I remember one lesson from that book (but it could have been another) about just relaxing and observing a single important factor, rather than thinking carefully through the task and trying to get all of the sub-details right. I think a follow-on book discussed this exact situation -- patients complaining about long waits (past the appointment time) at a medical office. The "solution" proposed was simple: just write down the amount of time each and every patients is made to wait. Eventually the problem took care of itself. I hope SOAR can apply this or some other lesson, but on my next visit, I'll be sure to bring a book!
by David Creemer : 2005/05/10 : Categories life : 0 trackbacks : 3 comments (permalink)
Multi-computer-monitor setup
I'm faced with a bit of an embarrasment of riches -- I have two nice machines on my desk at work, as well as a fantastic Dell 2005FP 20" LCD panel. One computer is an IBM Thinkpad T43p, the other is an Apple iBook. The iBook is my personal computer, and I generally bring it everywhere with me and find it the most comfortable to use. The Thinkpad runs Ubuntu Linux 5.04, and is used for developement and system administration tasks. Though Mac OS X is "just" UNIX under the hood, I find the package management and system administration of Debian-style Linux to be more in sync with the way I develop and manage systems and web applications. Yes, I know that there are things like Fink to superimpose package management onto Mac OS X, but it's not the same as having an OS built around apt-get.
In any event, I need to fluidly move back and forth between these two environments. There are of serveral solutions to this, and I tried most -- two sets of keyboards and mice, KVM switches, VNC, x2vnc and so on, but I finally settled for the time being on NX / FreeNX, setup mostly as described here. NX is essentailly a terminal services implementation from NoMachine available also in open source form. So now my Thinkpad runs more or less closed -- just booted to the Linux console. My iBook connects to the 20" LCD panel and (with the help of this excellent hack) has a huge Mac OS X desktop. The NX client runs essentially full-screen on the 20" LCD and I have one keyboard and mouse to run it all. This seems the best of both worlds -- I can continue to "live" in Mac OS X which my fingers have memorized and which manages multiple monitors exceptionally well. If I move the mouse to the NX client window, I'm instantly "in" my Ubuntu GNOME desktop, happily developing away. The performance of NX is really very, very good.
To complete it all, I needed a good USB keyboard and mouse. The mouse part was easy -- it seems there are lots of decent models to choose from. But the keyboard aisle at my local Fry's is a distaster -- 30 different models, all junk. Most have crappy keys and 30 extra buttons, switches, levers, dials and wheels for "controlling the Internet and Music" bla bla. I just want that feels good and doesn't cost a lot! The a funny thing happened -- I went to the "Apple" section, and found the $29 Apple keyboard which was exactly right.
If this setup continues to work as well as I hope, I'll pass the Thinkpad along to a coworker, and substitue a beefier desktop PC for the Ubuntu developement host and NX server.
by David Creemer : 2005/05/04 : Categories technology : 0 trackbacks : 3 comments (permalink)
Setting Up Shop
I'm at a new (tiny) startup now, and decided that since I'm in charge of the technology (more or less), I try to start things out right.
We're relying heavily on open source software both for our internal IT infrastructure, and for components of the product we're building. I've been a fan and user of Debian Linux for a long time -- it's stable and easy to maintain. However as many have noted, the current stable release of Debian (Woody) is getting a bit long in the tooth. Sarge will be here real-soon-now, but in the mean time I can't wait.
So like many others in this situation, I was drawn to Ubuntu and haven't looked back. We've install the 5.04 Hoary release on three workstantions and two servers so far with excellent results.
Adapting the directions from this Howto and this one too was straightforward, and without too much trouble we now have LDAP-based single sign on for network accounts, file serving, wiki and subversion authorization, and email. Very nice!
Having done all this on commodity PC class server hardware, and also having worked for a while in Apple's Mac OS X Server engineering group, I can say that all this would have been much easier under Mac OS X Server -- the GUI administration tools are very well done, but to be fair I suppose I should compare with Red Hat or SuSE's commercial offerings.
There were a couple of annoyances along the way. Ubuntu doesn't seem to have an Apache2 mod_auth_ldap available. I could have just built it, but I also wanted to learn a bit about the Python LDAP module. One apt-get later, and I had mod_python and python-ldap installed, and wrote a 20-line script to do Apache2 LDAP authentication:
from mod_python import apache
import ldap
def authenhandler(req):
pw = req.get_basic_auth_pw()
user = req.user
# open connection to server -- change as necessary
l = ldap.open( '127.0.0.1' )
base = 'ou=People,dc=example,dc=com'
try:
# attempt to auth bind to the server
l.simple_bind_s( 'uid=' + user + ',' + base, pw )
return apache.OK
except ldap.LDAPError:
return apache.HTTP_UNAUTHORIZED
***
highlight file error
***
After acquiring, installing, and configuring PC's and laptops running Ubuntu Linux, Windows XP Pro, and Mac OS X, I find myself using Ubuntu for my servers and development platform, and my Apple iBook for everything else. Though Mac OS X is UNIX at its core, I find it easier to develop on a platform very close to our production environment. The iBook G4 12" however is just a heck of a great personal computer. It's tough, light, very functional, and Mac OS X is dream to use. My old 15" Aluminum Powerbook had a great screen and other nifty features, but it seems fragile by comparison.
by David Creemer : 2005/05/02 : Categories technology python : 0 trackbacks : 1 comment (permalink)
