I signed up for Twitter a long time ago. The box says “What are you doing?,” and I assumed it was for your status. The novelty of posting, “Washing the car” and “Folding my laundry” wore off very quickly, though, so I didn’t stay long. The site seemed like a laughable concept, and something that only egomaniacs who assumed people wanted many daily updates on them would use.

In actuality, I’ve found that it’s not literally your “status.” Think of it more as a one-line blog. I don’t post often (for now, at least), but I’m following a handful of people. (My Twitter feed, and the people I follow.) “People I follow” is a bit of a misnomer, actually: I’m following a few political campaigns and a few news outlets, along with a few real people. It’s actually being used somewhat like the “info bar” I just blogged about wanting: NY Times posts some news articles, for example. (They say it’s more for “breaking news,” thought given that the most recent story there is about a museum buying the building next to it, I’d refer them to my post on what Breaking News means.)

I think I’m going to keep the Twitter app up most of them I’m at my computer. Anyone got any good suggestions?

In the course of the day, there are 10,000 little things I need to monitor. Consider them “events.” A new e-mail comes in. A friend signs onto AIM. A friend IMs me. A new entry appears in /var/log/messages on my server. A friend updates his Twitter feed. A new entry is posted to one of the RSS feeds I watch…

What I want is a little console. It can be something like a command prompt that just sits there scrolling. But what I’d actually prefer is to devote the top ~15 pixels of my screen to a little bar. (Think of the Windows task bar, but smaller.) Whenever an “event” happened, it would scroll across. Small < and > arrows would be on the sides for scrolling. (Ideally, it wouldn’t be a “scrolling marquee” sort of thing, which may get very distracting. But new text would ‘pop in,’ maybe flashing a couple times. For bonus points, I could click on it and get a few more controls: when a new e-mail comes into one of my boxes, I could click a little icon to pop up the relevant mail client. When a friend signs onto AIM, I could have an option to start a chat. And super bonus points for a little “command line,” so I could click on it and type something like “twitter: Playing with this nice new application…” or whatnot. (Ooh, and you could have auto-completion. And support “google: ” or “calculator: ,” and various other little tools. Maybe even just a scrolling notepad, so I could do “note: ” for an impromptu log.)

It’s a shame my programming skills are so web-centric, because it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to write this sort of thing in PHP. (Ironically, most of what it did would be net-centric, but it’d be a desktop application, primarily for Windows…)

Piggybacking on Mr. T’s Lifehacker-esque (a forgotten favorite site of mine) suggestion, I wanted to chip in a tip of my own.

My desk is a big mess. I was working on cleaning it off, and two thoughts collided to give me an idea.

1. I take a lot of notes. I find an IP address in the log files, or I take a phone call and jot down a message for someone, or one of ten thousand other things that need scribbling down.
2. I have a lot scrap paper. Drafts of resumes and letters, shipping forms for things I’m not returning, junk mail…

So I just took an old tip from work… I cut it into quarters, and now have a small pile of it on my desk. No more pieces of paper with 200 different things jotted down on it.

Sure, it’s simple, and hardly a “creative” idea. “Cut up scrap paper with nothing on the back?” But it’s strangely effective. And now I feel organized. (Okay, cleaning the desk might have played a bigger part in that…)

The NY Daily News has a funny piece in which they interview John McCain, a Democrat from Brooklyn. As a Democrat (and as someone who could pass as Obama’s twin brother), he’s voting for Obama.

What made my jaw drop, though, is this bit:

McCain said he first became aware of the Arizona senator when he voted against making Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday.

“I was appalled that someone who shares my name would do something like that,” he said. “He’s not doing what I would do with the name.”

I’ve got a mailserver running on this host now… It still needs some heavy tweaking. However, I thought I’d point out policyd, which is a really neat package. It integrates into smtpd_recipient_restrictions, and I currently have it providing greylisting and some spamtrap mailboxes (though I’m not sure they work). It does much more, too.

It seems that greylisting works well, too. I’ve had 192 people greylisted, which is basically every mail connection that hasn’t been bounced for having a non-FQDN HELO. (Which is a surprising amount.) Only three have made it through, all of them legitimate. (policyd makes it possible for users to opt-in or opt-out of greylisting, though I’m currently the only user…)

Not terribly relevant, but now that I’m using PowerDNS with a MySQL backend, I realized I could easily set up a little process on our firewall to go out and hit a URL here, which updates the record periodically with our home IP. Easy home-grown dynamic DNS!

I think Governor Palin’s candidacy as VP has made it harder for me to explain how I feel about some of the candidates. Obama excited me, in part because he was fairly new. Palin excites me a bit, but also concerns me, in part, because she is fairly new. I didn’t like Biden because he wasn’t exciting, just old and boring, but I almost prefer Biden to Palin, even though Palin is more exciting, because Biden is old and boring. If you’re confused, so am I.

A lot of it comes down to my view of “experience.” I think of it as a continuum. At one end there’s “unacceptably unexperienced,” someone who we would all agree shouldn’t be running for office. But the opposite end of the spectrum isn’t, “Wonderful and experience,” it’s old and crusty. As years ago by, you get more and more experience. But at some point, you cease to become better because of the experience, but start to lose sight of the big picture, of the ability to change things, and of the fact that you’re there to represent your constituent’s interests. (And relax: I’m not going to assert that McCain or Palin are either of these.)

I also believe experience isn’t measured in years, but in what you’ve learned. There are people who work years and years at something and are only ever become mediocre. And then there are people who, in two week’s time, are extremely good at what they do. Time figures in there somewhere, but I don’t think it’s the key variable.

So, using various metaphors (and, at times, similes), here’s my attempt to explain some of my feelings about the candidates. (These are, of course, my opinions, based on my own political convictions and biases, as opposed to universal facts.)

Way back when he first announced his candidacy, Obama really excited me. I was worried because he was fairly new to the scene, but his short track record looked good. More importantly, though, he had lots of shiny new features. As I investigated candidates, I came to like him more and more. Let’s call him the Firefox of candidates: fairly new, but very effective and ripe with improved ways of doing things. I didn’t know what to make of Firefox at first, as it was pretty new, but my displeasure with the incumbent web browser (whether it was IE or Netscape, actually) led me to explore the alternatives. And I found that, while I worried about it being fairly new and not having been “in the wild” as long as Internet Explorer*, I soon realized that this was actually one of the great things about Firefox: it came with improved ways of doing things, and was much more effective at doing them than the stale and crusty solution it replaced. While the IE team spent their days releasing bug fixes and security patches, the Firefox team sat back and thought about what they could do to make Firefox even better. (Alright, apologies if I went overboard with this example.)

Obama got me to see that “new and young” doesn’t necessarily mean “inexperienced.” And he brought lots of excitement and new ideas. So when he announced Biden, I was kind of disappointed, and kind of shocked. Biden didn’t have the “new and improved” badge, didn’t come slickly-packaged, and frankly, just wasn’t interesting.

Shifting away (temporarily) from comparing candidates to web browsers, I’d say that Joe Biden is a 1997 Toyota Camry. It’s got 100,000 miles, doesn’t look great, and really has nothing “exciting” going for it. It still has a cassette player instead of a CD player. You have to use a crank to put down the windows. And if you asked about remote keyless entry or a navigation system, you’d just be laughed at. It’s plain and full. But at the same time, it’s very reliable, has lots of life left in it, and has never let you down. You don’t look forward to getting to drive your 1997 Toyota Camry, but when you go for a ride in it, you know that you’re going to get there without problems. It’s spent the last decade faithfully doing what you bought it to do, and you’ve never had any problems with it.

So then McCain shook things up with Palin. And at first, she really wowed me. She brought the excitement that Biden so utterly lacks. If Biden is a 1997 Camry, she’s an exotic concept car. It’s a very intriguing car, with some neat twists. And as for looks, while Firefox might be slick and attractive, the concept bar is in a league of its own. And much like Firefox, it comes with all sorts of neat-sounding features.

But most concept cars rarely come to fruition, or at least not for a long time, probably taking about 8 years before it’s actually ready. (Okay, that last bit was a pretty transparent joke.) They’re exciting, innovative, slick, and capture everyone’s attention. But at the end of the day, cars are meant to be driven. It’s neat to go see the concept car and what it has to offer, but you need to drive to work in the morning. The ’97 Camry has gotten you there safely every day. The concept car has only been driven on a test track and some back roads near the company headquarters a couple times. When you hear rumors that the car has some major safety problems and the media goes to get a statement from the manufacturer, they give a shifty answer and accuse the media of being on a conspiracy against them.

If I’m going to talk about cars, I’m going to talk all about the concept car. But when I’ve got to be at work in the morning, I’ll take the Camry, even though it’s plain.

I suppose there are a few problems with this post. (Not counting the fact that I’m a big fan of Obama and Firefox and probably didn’t hide it…) For one, Obama is Firefox and Palin is a concept car, which doesn’t leave room for a logical comparison. But that leads into the second problem, which is that this post is comparing VPs, not Presidents. VPs are important, for sure, but it’s kind of like choosing an operating system based on its web browser. But I think that the Presidential race is more obvious: the media’s having a field day with VPs because the Presidential candidates were turning into tired news. (And besides, if I were to do one of these on the Presidents, I might end up pitting Windows ME (after running for weeks on a cable modem with no anti-virus or firewall) against Snow Leopard. And that would be unfair. Because Snow Leopard isn’t out yet.)

* It really has nothing to do with my series of metaphors and analogies, but I should note that my displeasure with Internet Explorer stems from the days of yore, and that I was a devoted Firefox user by the time IE6 + SP2 was released. This apparently brought a huge improvement, and IE7 brought a ground-up rewrite (or so it seems), so that most of what caused me to gleefully abandon Internet Explorer has since been fixed. But it’s like going out to dinner, finding half of a dead rat in your meal, getting a refund, taking your business elsewhere, and then having the first restaurant be bought out and start serving good food: even though the problem has been resolved, you’re happy as you are, and not in any rush to go back.

Microsoft’s hiring of Jerry Seinfeld to do a new line of commercials seemed strange, and most “tech news pundits” seemed to have the same conclusion. I like Seinfeld, but he’s kind of “1990s cool,” which is exactly what Microsoft doesn’t want to be seen as when Apple’s done tremendously well at painting them as yesterday’s technology, and as someone who tries, almost pathetically, to seem hip.

I’m still not terribly sure why they picked Seinfeld, actually, but I just watched the ad, and have to agree with CNET’s Reality Check: I might not go so far as to call it “superb,” but I don’t think it was bad. And kind of like what I just got done saying in the comments elsewhere about Chrome, this ad isn’t the “final product.” It’s a first step.

It’s admittedly a little weird. But Microsoft’s marketing department is no stranger to running ads that people don’t get or are just downright bizarre. Seinfeld is walking around a mall eating a churro, when he walks into a shoe store and sees Bill Gates trying on shoes. (Later, Bill is eating a churro, too.) Seinfeld walks in and appears to push aside the salesman, giving Bill Gates much better information about the shoes. As he’s talking, a Hispanic family comes up to the window and comments on the shoes in Spanish, saying the same things about the shoes as did Seinfeld. (Via the subtitles.) The two chat for a while, and at the very end, Seinfeld complains about his computer and asks Bill if they’re ever going to come out with something that works. (Err, without the negative overtones that my sentence gives it.) He tells Bill to “adjust his shorts” (I think that’s what he says?) as a signal if they are. And then… Bill Gates appears to wiggle his butt in response. Many have called this fairly disturbing.

Despite the fact that the ad is pretty weird and barely talks about Vista, I’m not sure that means it’s a total failure. A few thoughts:

• If Microsoft came out with an ad in which Jerry Seinfeld stood around talking about the great features of Vista, it probably would have been a failure. You maybe could have made it a little bit funny, and worked in some jabs at Apple. But I think it would have been viewed as trying to copy the Mac vs. PC ads. And frankly, hearing a listing of Vista’s features would probably be boring.
• The hard sell, in my opinion, is a bad idea anyway. When was the last time you saw an ad for Coke that talked about its preferable flavor?
• In a way, I think it’s just the sort of “maintenance marketing” that companies at the top of their fields can get away with. For a long time, Apple dominated ads, and seemed to become more and more popular. Meanwhile, we didn’t really hear much of anything from Microsoft. It almost seemed like Microsoft was sinking while Apple grew. So I think another thing this ad accomplishes is just reminding us that Microsoft’s still in the game. If I was an investor, I’d be very happy.
• The oddness, although, well, odd, drew me in. Why is Bill Gates at a shoe store? Why is Jerry Seinfeld eating a churro while wandering around a mall by himself? Why is Jerry apparently an expert on shoes, and why does Jerry take over the sale of the shoes for Bill? Why is Bill Gates depicted as shopping at a budget shoe store anyway? Why is there a Hispanic family, speaking in Spanish, talking about the shoe Bill Gates is buying? And, more importantly, what does any of this have to do with Windows, or even Microsoft? It’s almost a little bit of mystery and suspense. They could have tried to answer some of those questions, perhaps, but they got me to watch it. Twice.
• People seem to have a tendency to view Microsoft as an evil corporation. Besides the fact that Apple doesn’t have too many people who think it’s evil (though it definitely has some, and I think it’s a growing crowd), they also have the advantage that Steve Jobs is a very prominent, fairly-likable spokesperson. So the involvement of Bill Gates, I think, was actually a brilliant move. Especially because it turns out that Bill Gates is a pretty charismatic guy. I’m not terribly sure why, but some quality about him almost reminds me of Mr. Rogers. Especially in this ad, he comes across as someone we can relate to, and someone who’s pretty friendly. The ad wasn’t about boosting his image, of course, though it definitely does. But in doing so, I think it puts a face to Microsoft. (And a positive one, at that!) They’re not an evil corporation, but instead, they’re friends of Bill Gates, who buys shoes at a discount shoe store in the mall, eats churros, hangs out with Jerry Seinfeld, and works on improving computers for you and I. I think this is where it succeeds the most.
• There’s a bit of humor. It’s hardly as funny as Cake Wrecks or Borat, but intense humor doesn’t belong in an ad. But you get a little bit of Seinfeld’s quirkily-humorous personality, mixed with a little bit of a good-natured humor about Gates: like when he presents his discount card, proudly mentioning that it’s a Platinum card, and when you see that it bears a goofy picture of him about the time he started Microsoft.
• It’s (presumably) the first of a series. I have a hunch they were more just trying to “introduce” Gates and Seinfeld as characters in this one, and that subsequent ads will at least make passing references to Microsoft and Vista.

As I’ve mentioned before, this “new server” is actually a virtual machine. In the past, Andrew and I each maintained a dedicated server of our own (after I found a great deal years ago and convinced him to sign up for the same package at the same place), but a whole bunch of little things happened in sequence to convince Andrew and I early this year that it made sense all around to move to a single ‘workhorse’ server and run stuff in virtual machines… So instead of each having an aging Sempron with 512 MB RAM, we now share a dual-core 2GHz P4 system with 2GB RAM, and each run our own server inside a Xen virtual machine. (And, incidentally, shortly after we made up our minds to do this, our old hosting company decided to almost double our current prices… The old machines were mediocre hardware when they were new, but a 2-year-old mediocre server is a piece of junk today… So when they increased prices to something that would have been a bad deal when they were new, it made the decision to jump ship even easier.)

Anyway! The old system had 512MB RAM, plus a one-gig swap partition. (Think “paging file” if you’re a Windows user. It’s the same thing.) While this would be downright unacceptable on a Windows Vista desktop with iTunes streaming music and Firefox open with 11 tabs as I have now, plus Photoshop in the background… It’s not bad for a server. The majority of the RAM tended to be semi-free, just used for caching files until something needed it. Apache+PHP+MySQL+postfix+sshd+ntpd certainly used plenty of RAM, but the truth is that 512MB was plenty. And in the extremely rare case that I was low on memory, I had the 1GB swap partition to fall back on: it hurt performance, but it almost never happened.

Since we often have a handful of virtual machines running on this new one, we tend to use small memory sizes: there’s no since in an experimental system with nothing running on it consuming much in the way of system resources. The problem is that this virtual machine got launched running 256MB, which is at the lower-end of what’s acceptable. I’m sitting with about 10MB free, and launching some things (like the wp-admin/ backend!) can push it to the maximum. I also don’t have a swap partition (though it looks possible).

So I ran into something I’d never seen before: oom-killer, the Out-of-Memory Killer. It’s a sort of last resort that the Linux kernel will call, to free up some RAM when there’s absolutely nothing else it can do. (You need at least a nominal amount of RAM free for core functions.) It appears to be carefully structured to be fairly good at choosing the “least bad” thing to kill. (That might be why I haven’t noticed it!) It’s kind of neat to look at a bit, as it’s one of those “last resort” things that I never knew even existed.

Of course, the cool thing with Xen is that you can alter a machine’s memory allocation as it’s running, since the virtual machine’s OS, in the eyes of Xen on the physical hardware, is just another process. I need to look futher into this, as my attempt at raising it from 256 to 384 MB (and setting “max-mem” to 512MB to see how giving a range works) appears to have left my virtual machine with 270MB of RAM, which is an odd result. I think the guest needs a bit of support to know that it’s running inside a virtual machine that has just given it more RAM, though why the memory grew a little bit instead of not at all isn’t entirely clear to me right now…

I happened across the Wikipedia page on Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, which is unintentionally hilarious in describing the “plot” of Borat. It also reveals some details that make the movie seem even funnier:

“IMDb states that during [the filming of the movie] Borat’s antics led to police being called on Cohen 91 times.”

“No Kazakh language is heard in the film… Sacha Baron Cohen speaks Hebrew in the film, while Ken Davitian, who plays Azamat, speaks the Eastern dialect of Armenian. They also use several common phrases from Slavic languages: Borat’s trademark expressions “jagshemash” (jak się masz) and “chenquieh” (dziękuję) echo the Polish (or other related languages) for “How are you?” and “thank you”.”

“In most cases the film’s participants were given no warning on what they would be taking part in except for being asked to sign release forms agreeing not to take legal action against the film’s producers… Prior to being considered for appearance in the film, all potential participants were required to sign long release forms agreeing not to take legal action for any defamation of character or fraud carried out during the film’s production.”

“There are conflicting reports regarding the feelings of the participants in the scenes in which Borat and Azamat stay at a guest house owned by a Jewish couple. The British tabloid The Sun claims that a scene depicting cockroaches running around in their home has hurt Mariam and Joseph Behar’s business in Newton, Massachusetts. The couple were quoted as saying, “This is very insulting. They never told us they were going to do this. It is really terrible.” However, the Salon Arts & Entertainment site quotes the Behars as calling the film “outstanding,” referring to Cohen as “very lovely and very polite” and a “genius.” The Boston Globe also interviewed the couple, saying they considered the film more anti-Muslim than anti-Semitic and had feared that Cohen and his ensemble might be filming pornography in the house.”

“Cohen reacted to [news of the myriad lawsuits filed against him as a result of the movie] by noting, “Some of the letters I get are quite unusual, like the one where the lawyer informed me I’m about to be sued for $100,000 and at the end says, ‘P.S. Loved the movie. Can you sign a poster for my son Jeremy?'””

And as for the movie’s reception in Kazahkstan? “Kazakhstan has not banned the film but has urged that it not be distributed… The Kazakhstani tabloid Karavan declared Borat to be the best film of the year, having had a reviewer see the film at a screening in Vienna. The paper claimed that the film was “…certainly not an anti-Kazakh, anti-Romanian or anti-Semitic” but rather “cruelly anti-American … amazingly funny and sad at the same time.””

I commented before on how the DVD itself was made to appear pirated, but this is the icing on the cake: “The DVD is described as a “prerecorded moviedisc for purpose domestic viewing of moviefilm” and the viewer is warned that “selling piratings of this moviedisc will result in punishment by crushing.” … Also, when one selects the Hebrew language option, one is informed that the room is surrounded and not to unfold one’s claws or shape-shift.”

I usually try to shy away from posting things that will go flying way over a normal (non-dork) person’s head. But I won’t this time.

18:11:31.771334 arp who-has 192.168.1.75 tell 192.168.1.79
18:11:31.771415 192.168.1.79: myob kthx bye ~192.168.1.75

A portion of that ARP exchange might not be fake.

Also,

18:13:33.764345 arp who-has 192.168.1.79 tell 192.168.1.79
18:13:35.764838 arp who-has 192.168.1.79 tell 192.168.1.79
18:15:31.524395 arp who-has 192.168.1.79 tell 192.168.1.79
18:15:33.524734 arp who-has 192.168.1.79 tell 192.168.1.79
18:15:35.525201 arp who-has 192.168.1.79 tell 192.168.1.79

We’re all familiar with gratuitous ARPs, I’m sure. But I’d like to coin the term narcissistic ARP, for unnecessarily-frequent gratuitous ARP-ing. (Not arping, but ARP-ing.)

And for those of you who understand 0% of this post, congratulations. You’ve just tested negative for Asperger’s.