Consultant Says Buffalo Needs To Overhaul Parking System - Really?!?!

http://www.buffalonews.com/cityregion/story/548555.html

So let me get this straight. The city currently has a "Parking Board" yet they needed to hire outside consultants for ~$95,000 to tell the city that they should take over control of all parking and pay a Czar $140,000 a year to figure out a way to "improve" parking - because the City has a great track record of being efficient and getting the job done! We can't trust the private sector to handle our parking - that's what tax dollars are for!

Back To School

After about 4 years, I'm going back to UB to take CSE 422. I wanted to take this class while an undergrad, but unfortunately lacked the available time.

I'm looking forward to learning more about the FreeBSD kernel internals and improving my C coding skills. I'm hoping that we'll also get deep into ZFS and DTrace - but I'm assuming that these topics may not get as much attention as I would like. I guess that's why I have free time :-)

Review : Zenoss Core Network and System Monitoring

I recently read "Zenoss Core Network and System Monitoring" by Michael Badger and from Packt Publishing. I was excited to hear that there was a book available that covered the Zenoss monitoring system in a more structured and step by step method (as compared with documentation found online). When I began with Zenoss, the documentation was very high level and left much to be desired. This generally caused me to spend a lot of time on IRC, in the forums, and trying to figure out what to do with the simplistic documentation that existed. This book is exactly what I was looking for when I started to venture into the world of Zenoss, and was a nice review for someone (like me) who is comfortable with the system. The book does a real nice job of giving an overview of the system architecture, then steps through each stage of an example installation and configuration, device and event management, generating reports, user management, transforms, etc.

I would also recommend this book for anyone who is new to network and system monitoring, as the book goes into the details of installing and configuring SNMP, WMI, Windows Event Logs, and Syslog.

This book is a must have for anyone who plans on using Zenoss or anyone that is wondering if Zenoss is the right monitoring solution for them.

You can find the book here.

2009 Resolutions/Goals

Every year I like to asses where I am and where I want to get to. Below are my (high level) goals for the upcoming year.

* Master ZFS, DTrace and FreeBSD
* Give a presentation at a conference
* Sail on a regular basis
* Win a speedskating race
* Become proficient with an audio programming language
* Start a side business
* Start up regular meetings again for Buffalo Perl Mongers
* Maintain this blog with useful/interesting content (unlike its current condition)

Stocked Up The New Humidor

I just stocked up my new (Napoleon II) humidor that I got for Christmas. It looks a lot more sparse after moving from my 40 count. This one holds 150 cigars - which should suffice.

Libertarian Misunderstanding

This blog entry references the following blog post:

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/01/fundamental-problem-with-libertarianism.html

I think this guy is confusing neo-conservatism with Libertarianism. He talks about corporate welfare and unnecessary military spending through Republican presidents (none of which have followed true conservative or Libertarian policies). If this dude knew the difference between the current Republican Party and Libertarian Party, then he wouldn’t use them interchangeably. He also confuses corporate welfare with helping business (which of course fuels jobs and the economy). I’d like to know what companies are funding these “Libertarian Think Tanks” (especially big businesses who benefit from corporate welfare). Libertarians are against corporate welfare, which can’t be said for current Republicans and Democrats.

See how this guy interchanges Libertarian and Republican, and makes them appear as the same (which can’t be farther from the truth):

“There's already a lot of money in Libertarian think tanks; it comes from business. The explosion of dedicated Libertarian volunteerism necessary to transform the United States has yet to materialize, even though the Republican Party has harnessed an explosion of socially conservative volunteerism in the service of the same business interests that benefit from Washington's "Libertarian" bullshit factories. Money from business interests provides the only real political pressure pushing policy in a Libertarian direction.”

This guy needs to learn about Libertarianism and the Libertarian Party.

* NOTE - It appears that there are others who agree with me (and in much more detail):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=428785

ZFS - The Greatest Thing I Never Knew About

After hearing a lot of really good things about ZFS, I decided to give OpenSolaris and ZFS a try. After running into some issues with my install media, I decided it would be more fun to play with ZFS on FreeBSD. I began to dive in, but need to get myself some more SCSI drives.

At any rate, ZFS looks awesome. Better scalability, I/O, easy creation/manipulation of storage on the fly, redundancy, self healing, etc, than any RAID filesystem out there. This is very high level, but I plan on getting more indepth in the near future - time to buy some hardware!

For more info:

http://2007.asiabsdcon.org/papers/P16-slides.pdf

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/whatis/

http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFS

http://youtube.com/watch?v=o3TGM0T1CvE

Email Hates The Living!

This past summer, at YAPC::NA, rjbs gave a great talk describing the idiocy of email RFCs and the headaches they create for people trying to write software that deals with email. It's too bad the camera was zoomed out too far, because it's staggering to see some of the "valid" headers.

Email Hates The Living Video

Here We Go Again!

...and thus begins yet another attempt at maintaining a blog.

Wish me luck!