Category Archives: Issues

P2 or Not P2

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Today has been an odd silly day. It started out with an odd fanciful notion to investigate WordPress.org and possibly host it on a Mac Mini. My design was to create a workplace blog, theme it with P2 and whip it out on my coworkers and see how it worked for them. It’s not really a Wiki, we have that, and the Wiki software we use is Apple’s own that comes with their Server OSes, but the blogging component leaves something to be desired.

I saw WordPress.com pushing P2, a theme that fits into WordPress.com or WordPress.org and enables Automattic, the company behind WordPress to communicate more efficiently. My interest was piqued.

So I started with that original idea, then my assistant reminded me that I have a huge monster HP 1U server that I never use and it has Ubuntu on it. I had a little Eureka moment and decided I could work with that. I downloaded the WordPress.org software and went over the installation manual. I got everything edited and in-place and looking nice in the terminal window but couldn’t get the wp-admin/install.php screen to appear so I could finish the WordPress.org installation. I futzed and putzed and figured out I was missing some things, like a different kind of PHP, as well as PHPmyadmin. Once I added all of those various bits I tried it again. No dice. I finally figured out that when I created the “wordpress” MySQL database and user that I botched up the name and host information and didn’t see it until I blundered my way into PHPmyadmin. With that tool I fixed the problem and then everything was fine. I installed JetPack Plug-in, which promptly exploded in my face. JetPack needs to chat back and forth between WordPress.com and whatever machine you are installing WordPress.org on. This server here is firewalled on the wire and can’t be seen by any outside-to-WMU system, so that put the kibosh on JetPack. I still wanted to try P2, so I installed it and it worked like a charm. Then I ran into the same headache I always run into with these systems: SMTP. Here at WMU there is a huge barrier to access any network services, especially SMTP. So how could a WordPress.org P2 blog ever really work right if the server it’s running on can’t ever send out email properly? Oh, I tried to be clever and I failed. I tried to forge a CA, I tried lots of hints to try to masquerade into smtp.gmail.com using TLS, and I tried sendmail and postfix. Bloody hell. I would rather eat glass than have to see sendmail.cf again. I’d rather massage the tongue of a rabid wolverine than futz with postfixes main.cf file again! I mashed my head up against that brick wall until I took a step back and asked myself why the hell I was going to these lengths for something so tangential.

So then it struck me, if we’re using WordPress.com for the heavy lifting for most of our content management, why couldn’t I just create a new blog for our workgroup, slap P2 on it and carry on? That had its own problems. In the beginning I set everything up with Western Express and set my “Gravatar” to be associated with my work email address of andy.mchugh@wmich.edu. All fine and good until you try to use that address anywhere else! WordPress is picky. So I logged into WordPress.com thinking I could change my accounts email address in WordPress, as it turns out, you can’t. You have to go to Gravatar and change it there. It’s not so much change as put in a new address, switch it to primary, then rip out the old address. A lot of work for something that was supposed to be easy. Blargh!

So I got everything switched around and freed my work email address then re-approached WordPress as if I was a new user. I logged in using my work address (which is the most appropriate address for this pursuit) and created an account. I got the automated email verification message and clicked on it. WordPress refused with the error: “Could not create user” and so I emailed support at WordPress for help. Still waiting to get some TLC from the support people as of the writing of this blog-post.

Along with all of this I’m wondering if P2 will be well received? Will my coworkers see this as one more silly thing that I’m making them all use? I’ve pounded Wiki use into their heads, I’ve done a lot of things behind the scenes that none of them see now but will that will also radically change their working lives (for the better I assure you) and then I sit and wonder. I wonder if P2 is a solution that could work for us? If it works for Automattic, shouldn’t it work for us as well? I’m on the fence on this. I’ve whipped out so much new technology on these people, will they accept another massive change to how they communicate or will I be facing open revolt? I see this idea of mine shaped this way:

A private group blog that everyone can log into anywhere they are in the world, obviating the need to use any kind of VPN system as WordPress.com is available ubiquitously. It would enable people to hold online communications, post instantly like Twitter, post without limit to text (unlike Twitter), include rich content such as YouTube embeds and such all the while managing the conversations and using categories and tags to track different sections of our communication infrastructure. I imagine using P2 as I would have maybe used Google Wave if it was matured properly and supported by Google and not killed in its infancy. That we’d use several big tags such as “Donors” and “Help Desk” along with a constellation of other tags and not have to struggle with email distribution lists and missing information and delayed communications, all of that could be eliminated. On the flip side of that argument is “This is one more thing that you are forcing on us and making us learn.” I’m struggling with how P2 could fit in with our lives and whether this is a valid pursuit or just so much “chasing after the shiny”.

There are several of my coworkers that I’m nearly certain would go stark raving mad if I whipped just one more thing out on them. I just can’t deny the allure of all of these services, WordPress, DropBox, 1Password, Evernote… that their ubiquity online and their omnipresence in the mobile computing sphere is terribly attractive to me. That a workforce that I deeply suspect will be forced to become more mobile and nimble almost demands that I continue this breathless rush towards the bleeding edge.

So what I really would like is to find anyone other than Automattic who found P2 to be useful. It would gratify me immensely to know that P2 was a ‘game-changer’ and serve also as confirmation that I am on the right path and that this whole charge towards shiny actually serves a true and honest business purpose beyond my wanderlust for novelty.

As always, I would really love people to comment, I’m looking for evaluations, opinions, you name it, every bit helps. I thank you all in advance. 🙂

Hall of Mirrors

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The landscape of social media is a hall of mirrors. There are so many services that I’m on, and they all seem to conflict or collide with partial fits, all have different audiences, it’s terribly confusing. So far I’m registered with these providers:

  • WordPress.com
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Tumblr
  • Posterous
  • FourSquare
  • Ping.FM
  • Instagram

So far I’m approaching these services as individual pockets of social engagement. I really need to decide what I am going to put on each of these services. The trouble comes when you find that all these services have in some limited ways cross-linking. It seems like a waste to share to each of these services but there is an in-built concern that if you close a service you are somehow cutting off real audience or potential audience. If a service is free, then why not use it?

There are some services that definitely are built for certain things. WordPress is great for really long-form blogging. Twitter is great for short-status-update messaging and link-sharing, Facebook has an odd blend of every service – using Notes for long-form blogging, using status updates for short-status-updates, plus all the picture and video hosting you could want which pretty much marks off the next two… Posterous and Tumblr. They kind of float in the nether-space outside of the previous three. Instagram is bound tightly with its iOS App, so it is social but only tangentially so and Ping.FM is more of a tool than an actual destination, so the tangent gets even further out.

WordPress publicizes to Facebook and Twitter, Facebook can be linked from WordPress and Twitter and Twitter itself? Anything can be linked to and from that service. In many ways it comes down (at least for the big three) a matter of audience. There are friends and family on Facebook who aren’t on Twitter, there are people on Twitter that aren’t on Facebook, but since WordPress publicizes to both platforms, it’s the equal opportunity platform.

I suppose my feeling of waste really comes down to Posterous and Tumblr. They seem like utter duplicates of each other. I can’t really say that placing content on either service adds any value, it’s just easy to crosslink them to all the others. Even when it comes to drop-in-one-place-spread-everywhere the two of them are almost identical. Each service champions what they provide, but even still, there is almost no information on why someone would choose Posterous over Tumblr, or Twitter for that matter, when you factor in all the “helper” sites such as TwitLonger, yFrog, and all of those.

There is a part of me that wants to crisscross Twitter and Facebook, but even there I’m conflicted. Not everyone on Facebook would appreciate the “nuclear follow cost” that my Twitter stream commands. I’ve kind of left Facebook to be a destination-dump for all the other services to send to. FourSquare sends to Facebook, WordPress sends to Facebook, as well as all the others except Twitter.

I think this entire segment needs to undergo a consolidation event, where a few winners are selected and their usefulness is clear to see and different from all the others. In the meantime, those that follow me have grown used to how I share information so I presume that maintaining the status quo will keep the boat afloat. I just wish there was a clear reason to select one over the other and resolve this tangle of odd duplication.

Horses and Turkeys

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I’ve often times written about the turkeys in my life. These flightless, technically useless feed-birds also have another connotation. A turkey can also be a lame workplace drag. A human doorstop. Bright as a bag of hammers. Smart as a sack of bricks. These people are witnessed by the statement “Oh God, really? Again!? Wow.”

I have evidence now of turkey-dom in my midst. A lot of my initial irritation is tempered for many of them because at some point in the past they demonstrated some measure that they respected us and our mission within the overarching structure of our organization. The context is one of the horse. You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink.

There is a difference between the way I used to respond to turkeys and how I do now. I’m not just drifting in space without a radio. I’ve got a tether and someone in ground control who gives a damn. So, the turkeys are being rounded up and sent to the nearest metaphorical Tyson packing plant. I’ve got direction, and I categorically refuse to let these particular dullards get me down. Their lives will suck, I’m quite tired of trying to haul them out of the water. They’ve chosen ignorance and we can’t be really bothered with that sort any more. It boggles my mind, the way some of these people behave.

C’est la vie…

Imagine for Safety

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Do you have one of these? let’s imagine that a family of four, easy enough to do, just went to bed. It’s raging outside, snow and ice have made the outside a winter wonderland. What nobody knows is that something is blocking the vents and the furnace and hot water tank are running lean on oxygen to burn the natural gas and instead of water vapor and carbon dioxide, these wintertime necessities are pumping out deadly, odorless, tasteless, and colorless Carbon Monoxide gas. This family doesn’t have a CO detector, they didn’t see any need to pay $20 for one. Tomorrow, if things work out, all four will be dead. Died in their sleep. They might have woken up, with a blinding intense headache and massive lethargy and just closed their eyes for the last time, each and every one of them. No matter how strong or lucky you think you are, this gas can kill you dead. What’s worse is the hemoglobin in your blood actually prefers to hold-on to Carbon Monoxide more than it prefers Oxygen!

So for the love of God, don’t be this family! Buy a detector for your home, for your kids, for your loved ones, for your pets, and at least FOR YOURSELF. STFU and BUY ONE. Fill it with 3 AA batteries and have 3 more waiting near it. If you have a detector, CHECK IT. Even if you don’t have natural gas, why take the risk? These simple detectors are on sale everywhere and if one of these saved your life, saved your child, or saved your beloved pet, how much would it be worth to you?

Don’t wait to become a statistic. March down to your local 24-hour megamart and BUY THIS NOW WITH BATTERIES and SET IT UP! Don’t be that stupid moron who is a sorry headline in tomorrows newspaper, all because you couldn’t bother with the most important detector anyone can have with them.

STFU, GTFO, and RTFM!

Irresistible

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There are some things that I have to actively suppress when it comes to my life, my health, or my continued jail-free existence. I don’t know what it is, but there are some things that fill me with this unusual and unnamable compulsion to explore and fiddle with.

First is this:
Fire Alarm

I don’t know what it is about these. The color, what it means, or the fact that it sets off every alarm in a building. I’ve yet to succumb to pulling one of these for the sheer thrill of it. And I am fully aware of how much of a giant asshole I would be if I pulled it without a fire. I almost always have to put my hands in my pockets to avoid the temptation.

Next:
Power

Yes, this is an automobile power socket, sometimes called an accessory socket or a cigarette lighter socket. For years I’ve had this very odd urge to jam my finger into this socket. I know that a cars 12 volt, 15 amp electrical system is certain death but there is a very small piece of me that wants to just do it. What’s really agonizing is that I have two of these facing me every day in my Hyundai Santa Fé. Over the years I’ve found that if I close one of the accessory sockets with its cap and stuff the other one with an actual accessory plug that this itchy-finger problem simply disappears. Just to head it off at the pass, I would NEVER do any of these things, this is all about the odd thoughts that pop into my head, not the things I actually act on. So put down the crazy-pants spastic reaction bucket and back away.

Next:
6 plus R

This one is purely violent and malicious. I want to drive a car that I don’t care one iota for and push the engine right to the red-line and then throw it in reverse and pound down with every fiber of my being just to hear the transmission endure total annihilation. Related to this is a similar wish, and that requires the car again at red-line and then throwing it into Park and listen to the guts of the machine tear itself apart.

The only problem with this, is that I’ve seen it done on Mythbusters. Turns out modern cars have safety equipment and protocols in place to prevent this very strange procedure from actually working. Throwing a car into reverse at full speed does nothing but put the transmission in neutral, same for Park. Curses!

Next:

This one is a classic. I wish to utterly destroy using a sledgehammer this object. Anyone in IT will instantly recognize this damned machine for what it is. I want to dump it in a field, don safety gear and then proceed to destroy this object with an epic passion.

Thankfully here I don’t have to, the movie OfficeSpace did this for me. I will forever be indebted to their depiction of the violent destruction of this hated thing.

Last but not least:

This is a generalized urge. I see these in lots of places and have to squeeze my eyes closed very tightly and stuff my hands in my pockets. The delirious intoxication from wondering what would happen if you pounded this as hard as you could is dizzying. I’m sure many of these are connected to fire suppression or chemical exposure accidents and would do a serious number if ever I allowed my id to do what it wants, which is to POUND THIS SUCKER AS HARD AS I CAN, with a scream and giggles afterwards.

Again, television has already covered this, Ren and Stimpy did it.

Does anyone else have these secret little urges? Let us know in the comments. 🙂

Stuck on a Theme

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My surprise gift for Christmas 2010 was from Scott, it was an iPod Nano to replace my dead iPod Touch that died months earlier. I’ve been chugging along with my podcasts since then and when I got the iPod Nano, I moved all the podcasts onto that device and started to chew through the backlog of programs.

One of those programs, actually a series of them are the Scientific American series of 60-second science podcasts. They publish a main feed and then sub-feeds according to various disciplines. I’ve been catching up, so I created a playlist and I’ve been nabbing down these 1-minute shows on my drive in to work and my return home at night.

Today I can say that I think I may have had enough with Scientific American. Yes their podcasts are of excellent quality and their reporting is beyond reproach. The quality is absolutely there, however the content and message is about as selective as a berserker with a sledgehammer. Scientific American has a monomaniacal preoccupation with climate change and evolution. 60-second Earth is pretty much 60-second Climate Change Whining, and their main podcast 60-second Science almost pushed me to dump the entire series altogether when they brought up the dire concern of anesthetic gas and it’s relationship to climate change. That the gas that doctors use to put their patients to sleep in order to perform surgery is 1600 times worse per unit of CO2 when it comes to climate change. Really? We really need to start nitpicking THIS? I damn near got to the point where I was going to march into my office, attach my iPod to my Mac and just dump the entire podcast series. I still may. After a while and a thousand miles being beaten over the head about climate change and evolution starts to have the opposite of the intended effect. I’m getting to the point where if I hear another whining voice carrying on about millions of tons of CO2 this and Methane that, that I very well may start rooting to leave this planet a burnt smoking husk when I die! Yeeearrrggggh!

There, I feel better now. 🙂 If they don’t get some new violin strings for their orchestra I’ll be flushing them down the toilet. I can’t wait for the podcast where they discuss the carbon footprint of a bowel movement. Gah.

Facepalm to Headdesk

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I’ve been doing the same thing for about a dozen years. I’ve seen personalities come and go. They have grand designs in the beginning but almost always end up doing some rendition of a perp-walk at the end. I started in what could be described as a maelström of confusion and a general state of DIY-clunkiness. Now I’m not going to actually name anyone or any definite thing, those that know me and know my long-standing straw-men will know exactly what I’m talking about in this article, it’s a metaphorical story after all. If you take an exception to what I write here, then perhaps you should do some of your own personal introspection. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

Imagine buying a car, the place where you buy it has only one dealership in the entire world and you are in luck, it’s only a mile away. Everything you could ever need is hosted by the car company, by the dealership – everything! They’ll sell you the car, they’ll service it, they’ll help you find things to stick to it to make it better – it looks wonderful on paper.

When you walk into your new apartment, you see the car in the driveway and it looks quite unusual. It still has a car-like shape but the fresh weld-points where unusual non-car-like things and things that perhaps might go on a car if designed by a desperate mechanic appear. You find out that the paperwork from the dealership is burnt in some places and has unthinkable stains in other places. The car runs, sort of, but every once in a while it shocks the passengers and makes them visibly tremble. Years go by, you trade in the DIY wreck and over time you get the impression that even after buying a new car from the dealership and agreeing to play by all their rules that they really are quite occupied doing other things. One day you wake up, blink and rub at your eyes and notice that there are lots of other cars parked in your neighbors driveways. You’ve fought tooth and nail and you’ve got a premium luxury vehicle that carries your passengers on a cloud of happiness and you are quite satisfied as long as you only see your driveway. If you look around you notice Trabants and Yugos and Horizons littering your neighbors driveways and you don’t understand how so many people can fit in such awful vehicles and you just stop thinking about them. You have faith that somehow life goes on for everyone, whether they are being stuffed into a Trabant or a rusted-out Horizon.

Your dealership has expanded now, not only does it do cars, but everything else. Not only should you use the dealership, but your told you must use the dealership. You notice a crack developing in your driveway, and the new paving company is the dealership. You let them know the crack is there and growing and then you don’t hear anything from them. Years go by, four of them, and then after having enough you walk down to city hall and you complain about the dealership, the next day the entire crack is gone, and you notice the color of the pavement is different and then that feeling sets in. Something is wrong. You are finally happy so you shut your trap and hope you don’t have to wait another four years for help.

Over the intervening years you go to the dealership, you suffer little wounds each time you walk in their doors, after a while, and since nobody else is yelling loudly, you imagine that the rather lousy dealership is just how things are and your dissatisfaction melts into a kind of muddy attitude. Your once springy step is now pretty much a dreary trudge. Life goes on. The dealership remains standing tall, and then you notice that your sink trap, which you’ve asked to have looked at, has remained ignored for three whole years and some time. You’ve made do, you’ve gotten your work done, the sink does work but not exactly how you’d like it to. The dealership really doesn’t have doors anymore, it took wire cutters to its phone lines and the postman has no idea how to get in to make deliveries. The only way that you can communicate with the dealership now is with a tattered clutch of semaphore flags. When you grab your manual and your flags and try to get messages to the dealership, you feel foolish and that perhaps you’re just wasting your time. You’d put the flags in a foot locker and forget all about them, but you need the dealership, so you continue to make foolish motions knowing that nobody is probably looking at you or your flags.

I used to be angry with the dealership. I used to rail against them, question their professionalism. I’ve even entertained the thoughts in my own head that perhaps the dealership is just simply incompetent and they can’t help themselves. Now I just find myself alternating between facepalm and headdesk when face to face with the dealership.

Somewhere deep down, with all this nebulous awfulness, you suspect that caring too much, being too involved will eventually make you sick. You start fantasizing about getting in your luxury car and never leaving it again. Never thinking about the sink trap, never thinking about the driveway, just losing yourself in the light-blue-and-smiles happiness of being inside your luxury car. That if you wait it out long enough in the utopia of your own making, that somehow the dealership won’t be there anymore and you can get out of the luxury car and start making progress again.

West Hills Snark

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I just got a big beautiful 12 page paper mailer from West Hills Athletic Facility. It’s an athletic club that the University bought that nobody I know actually goes to because it’s too expensive. It’s like any other athletic club, looks good on the outside, smells awful on the inside, it’s overpriced and I’ve got no interest in it at all. It’s good to know they have cash to burn on these big mailers. What would be more convenient for everyone and save them lots of money is if they’d just ship out PDF files in email, save the paper costs, the printing costs, and enable me to place the from address into my junk mail list and have it sent to the great bit-bucket in the sky. A win for West Hills’ advertising budget and a win for me and everyone else who doesn’t want to have to find something like this in their campus mailbox just to immediately toss it in the recycling bin.

I suppose I could just clearly print on a sticky-note on our campus mailbox a list of all the spammy bits of debris that we elect to not get. That’s an idea! 😉

Java

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I’ve written before that my feelings for technology are strong and passionate. I regard Apple with a nearly perfect halo of saintly perfection despite all the Chinese workers committing suicide and some of Apple’s darker acts in regards to the iOS App Store, but despite all that they are still as pure as driven snow in my eyes.

Not so with Sun Microsystems’ Java. It’s not that I hate Java in and of itself, actually I appreciate Java for what it has accomplished with the tools available. What I hate is tangential but squarely placed against Java. Here at work we have two really big monolithic database systems. The first is our in-house alumni database, Millennium. The second is SunGard’s Banner Student Information System.

What do these two pieces of software have to do with Java? Well, that’s the core of my agony. The two have to be used at the same time, but one needs Java 1.5.10 and the other 1.6.3. It’s impossible to expect people to understand Java versioning and when they accidentally upgrade their Java installation with 1.6.3 or later for Banner use, their Millennium client goes completely out-of-spec and makes their lives a living hell, mostly with stupid script errors as code written against 1.5.10 scrambles at the cliffs-of-insanity of 1.6.3 or later.

What is our solution? It’s ugly but it works. We split the software by virtualized operating system. Two XP’s running side-by-side, one with Java 1.5.10 the other with Java 1.6.3. It isn’t elegant, and it starts me thinking about why exactly Java is in any of these products to start with. For Banner it’s pretty clear, Banner is written against Oracle and the client software is exceptionally poor, it’s called jInitiator and I feel ill and tremble even when contemplating it. It’s the kind of software that I fantasize about staking to the earth and watch the sun rise as it burns and screams, hissing and spitting giant gobs of ichor everywhere as it slowly burns to dust.

Millennium isn’t as bad, but there is Java still. Why? It could be wholly a W3C compliant application, I mean, that’s where it’s headed, and if you want fancy bits you could always use JavaScript or even AJAX tricks to do the same things that they have Java doing. Thankfully I’ve bullied the authors into promising that by version 9 of the software, that Java will be a sad sorry memory.

So it’s not really that I’m angry at Java, but I am angry at these companies that write in ways that permanently fix a version of Java on a machine and that only invites issues like viruses, security breaches, and these horribly gross incompatibilities and there is nothing I can do to address them other than apply virtualization technology like a cure-all salve. It’s quite like hunting fleas with a BFG. Annoying.

So for those out there who are thinking about using Java to make your software shiny or somehow cute, just skip it. Your customers won’t really appreciate what neat shiny you can bring to the table and the admin tasked with keeping it all together will thank you for one less versioning nightmare to have to deal with. I blame Java because without it, my life would be much easier. One just has to wait for things to get better, at least there is hope.

 

Bats In The Belfry

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Maintenance Services has been doing some drilling in my office building and apparently upset a bat. My boss caught him in a box and moved him down to the basement where it’s dark and quiet, we’ve hope that he’ll find someplace to hang and sleep, and if we’re really lucky he’ll slip back into hibernation.

This of course is a hope of mine. It got me thinking about what people might do if they find out there is a resident bat in our building. What bothers me the most is when people immediately rush to “Lets Kill It” and spend exactly no time thinking about how we share this world with our animal companions, we don’t rule over it. I know this runs against what is written in several holy books, but I’ve never been one for those sorts of things, I respect my own instincts and my own beliefs than those “given to me” in some silly old book. I’m sure I differ in my opinions from a lot of people, whenever there is an animal caught after attacking a human the response is always the same, they kill the animal. It’s almost a reflex. This even happens when humans invade areas set aside for animals, like zoo enclosures. Nearly every year you hear a story about some inattentive parent who lost track of their child and the child scaled the enclosure to a bear exhibit and was mauled by the bear or killed. The response is almost always the same, “Kill the monster!” and this bothers me on a very fundamental level. I don’t do anything to hide the fact that I don’t think very highly of my own species and if one of us is stupid enough to invade an enclosure then mauling is the least they deserve. The animal doesn’t deserve to die for human stupidity.

Tied in with this, I received a message about how the US Congress was considering a bill to let the northern states conduct wolf culls and that really upset me. Haven’t we damaged enough of our world or do we need to do some more damage based on our greed and gluttony?

When it comes to animals, I really don’t see us as being any more worthy of survival than them. I see the world as belonging equally to every species, we just impose a will and think somehow we are more worthy than wolves or bears or birds. Based on population alone, the value of a single human being is 1 out of 6.8 billion. Compare that to say a wolf pack where there is 1 out of a thousand left and you can see which is worth more.

Next time you face an animal and there is a choice to be made, please select the humane trap-and-manage route and never ever the kill route. We share this world, we are not its dominators. Anyone who preaches that we are the master of this world should consider how easy it is for nature to kill us off in droves with storms and floods. We aren’t on top, the world is.