Blog Archive: August 2014
Tom speaking at LOPSA-NJ September meeting (near Princeton/Trenton)
I'll be the speaker at the September LOPSA-NJ meeting. My topic will be the more radical ideas in our new book, The Practice of Cloud System Administration. This talk is (hopefully) useful whether you are legacy enterprise, fully cloud, or anywhere in between. Topic: Radical ideas from The Practice of Cloud Computing Date: Thursday, September 4, 2014 Time: 7:00pm (social), 7:30pm (discussion) This is material from our newest book, which starts shipping the next day. Visit http://the-cloud-book.com for more info.
CJ's next problems
CJ Ellis along today with computer and VoIP problems. He couldn't find how to send a message with Gmail, so he had deleted all the important messages he had instead. And he is getting continuous calls on his phone. How is that happening? Called up MyNetFone and spoke to Harriette, with whom I had spoken a couple of weeks ago. This time she was more intelligible and wanted to configure the ATA to reject the calls. On enquiry, it seems that she was going to set a different port to listen on, though that might just be my interpretation. In any case, that means that CJ needs to be there at home, so who knows how that will pan out.
Squid Skin Inspires Eye-Like Photodetector
Squid are color-blind, but may detect color directly through their skin. A researcher is working on a system to detect colored light the way squid do....
Jack White Show Notes
My fifteen-year-old and I attended the August 28, 2014 show at Deer Lake Park in Burnaby, a suburb of Vancouver. Its a terrific venue; a big lawn with a nicely-steep slope so you can see over the mosh pit. If youre not a Jack White fan you can stop reading, but if you are, this is a tour you should catch. My notes on the event, in no particular order, with better pictures than I can take: Its not a terribly long set just under two hours but wow, is there ever a lot of music jammed in. Heres the set-list; I didnt take notes so there were noteworthy moments where I cant remember the song they were in.
Cell Phone Kill Switches Mandatory in California
California passed a kill-switch law, meaning that all cell phones sold in California must have the capability to be remotely turned off. It was sold as an antitheft measure. If the phone company could remotely render a cell phone inoperative, there would be less incentive to steal one. I worry more about the side effects: once the feature is in...
Save up to 55% off on our new book for a short time
The Practice Of Cloud System Administration is featured in the InformIT Labor Day sale. Up to 55% off! Here is the link Buy 3 or more and save 55% on your purchase. Buy 2 and save 45%, or buy 1 and save 35% off list price on books, video tutorials, and eBooks. Enter code LABORDAY at checkout. You will also receive a 30-day trial to Safari Books Online, free with your purchase. Plus, get free shipping within the U.S. The book won't be shipping until Sept 5th, but you can read a recent draft via Safari Online.
ISIS Threatens US with Terrorism
They're openly mocking our profiling. But in several telephone conversations with a Reuters reporter over the past few months, Islamic State fighters had indicated that their leader, Iraqi Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had several surprises in store for the West. They hinted that attacks on American interests or even U.S. soil were possible through sleeper cells in Europe and the United...
MTM: A new TLA
Discussing the National Broadband Network on IRC today, Andy Farkas came up with a new TLA: MTM. What's that? We had a number of guesses. It seems that he meant multi-technology mix , but it can also be expanded to Malcolm Turnbull's Mess . ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Jack White Recordings
Im off to see Jack White play an outdoor concert tonight, so I revisited his last couple of outings, Blunderbuss (which is great) and Lazaretto (which is pretty good). But watch your media! Blunderbuss Its loaded with terrific songs: I particularly like Love Interruption, Im Shakin, and I Guess I Should Go To Sleep. On top of which, a few of them are straight-ahead rockers, and any year which has one of those from Jack White in it cant be all bad. Lazaretto The proportion of winners isnt as high, except for theres Temporary Ground, a totally beautiful sad little ballad, one of the best songs of the year by anyone.
I'm giving away 1 free ticket to PuppetConf 2014!
PuppetConf 2014 is the 4th annual IT automation event of the year, taking place in San Francisco September 20-24. Join the Puppet Labs community and over 2,000 IT pros for 150 track sessions and special events focused on DevOps, cloud automation and application delivery. The keynote speaker lineup includes tech professionals from DreamWorks Animation, Sony Computer Entertainment America, Getty Images and more. If you're interested in going to PuppetConf this year, I will be giving away one free ticket to a lucky winner who will get the chance to participate in educational sessions and hands-on labs, network with industry experts and explore San Francisco.
Hacking Traffic Lights
New paper: "Green Lights Forever: Analyzing the Security of Traffic Infrastructure," Branden Ghena, William Beyer, Allen Hillaker, Jonathan Pevarnek, and J. Alex Halderman. Abstract: The safety critical nature of traffic infrastructure requires that it be secure against computer-based attacks, but this is not always the case. We investigate a networked traffic signal system currently deployed in the United States and...
zerofile for Microsoft
Comment from Andy Snow on IRC today: it seems that a program like my zerofile is available from Microsoft as sdelete.exe. It seems that the main purpose of the program is to obliterate the content of an existign file and then delete it, but the -z option (and yes, really -z and not /z) performs the function of zerofile. ACM only downloads articles once.
LISA 2014 OMG
The schedule for 2014 has been published and OMG it looks like an entirely new conference. By "new" I mean "new material"... I don't see slots filled with the traditional topics that used to get repeated each year. By "new" I also mean that all the sessions are heavily focused on forward-thinking technologies instead of legacy systems. This conference looks like the place to go if you want to move your career forward. LISA also has a new byline: LISA: Where systems engineering and operations professionals share real-world knowledge about designing, building, and maintaining the critical systems of our interconnected world.
How sysadmins can best understand Burning Man
So, you've heard about Burning Man. It has probably been described to you as either a hippie festival, where rich white people go to act cool, naked chicks, or a drug-crazed dance party in the desert. All of those descriptions are wrong..ish. Burning Man is a lot of things and can't be summarized in a sound bite. I've never been to Burning Man, but a lot of my friends are burners, most of whom are involved in organizing their own group that attends, or volunteer directly with the organization itself. Imagine 50,000 people (really!) showing up for a 1-week event. You essentially have to build a city and then remove it.
Adversarial Compatibility: hidden escape hatch rescues us from imprisonment through our stuff
My latest Guardian column, Adapting gadgets to our needs is the secret pivot on which technology turns, explains the hidden economics of stuff, and how different rules can trap you in your own past, or give you a better future. Depending on your view, the stuff you own is either a boon to business or … [Read more]
Finishing CJ's computer
Finally the backup was done, so I put the disk back into CJ's computer and booted. Your computer was unable to start\nStartup Repair is checking . My fault. When I had put the disk in the test machine, it started booting from it instead of from the FreeBSD disk. I had powered down immediately, but this suggest that it wasn't quite immediately enough. So I left Startup Repair running. What does it do? Looks like an fsck, and it took about the same time. At the end: Startup Repair cannot repair this computer automatically . What does that mean? Followed various links, but there was nothing sensible there.
Tech Reviews annual science fiction issue, edited by Bruce Sterling, featuring William Gibson
The summer annual features stories "inspired by the real-life breakthroughs covered in the pages of MIT Technology Review," including "Petard," my story about hacktivism; and "Death Cookie/Easy Ice," an excerpt from William Gibson's forthcoming (and stone brilliant) futuristic novel The Peripheral. Other authors in the collection include Lauren Beukes, Chris Brown, Pat Cadigan, Warren Ellis, … [Read more]
CJ's installation and random Microsoft pain
So basically CJ's computer is ready, and I had planned to give it to him today. But how is he going to back it up? The way Microsoft people always do, I suppose: not at all. The least I could do was to make a copy of the disk image. And to ensure it compresses well, it makes sense to zero out all the unused file space, in this case about 90% of the total. With real computers I do this with a little program called zerofile, which creates a file and writes binary zeros to it until the file system is full.
CL XXXI: Forest Light
Our Cottage Life happens on an island mostly covered by temperate rainforest. Not old-growth (thats hard to come by these days); but logged a hundred years back, so the trees are big. Such forests have qualities of light that make me happy but are hard to photograph. This is about as close as Ive come. The undergrowth is usually pretty thick, but there is the occasional glade. Most trees are evergreen: Cedar, Fir, Hemlock. But here and there youll see a Bigleaf Maple; perhaps my favorite among all trees. Their size is remarkable and their leaves catch that forest like like no others.
Setting up Microsoft, again
Into the office this morning to find that CJ's computer had finished its upgrades and rebooted. And, of course, there were upgrades waiting. Tried installing them and got not one, but two of typical Microsoft 8 digit hex error numbers, 0x80070490 and 0x800f020b. I now know better than to try to decipher them, and tried again. Sure enough, this time only one error, 0x800f020bwith a difference. I followed the Get help with this error link and got no less than 8 hitsnone of which referenced the error number: Clearly they thought that they were close enough.
Firefox stupidity
While rsyncing my web pages this morning, saw something surprising: js/ js/Ge-29490ge2.html 17482 100% 14.58kB/s 0:00:01 (xfer#4, to-check=5234/11363) js/Ge-29490ge2_files/ js/Ge-29490ge2_files/ca-pub-5294144413784354.js 108 100% 0.09kB/s 0:00:01 (xfer#5, to-check=5222/11363) ... Had somebody broken in and placed a Javascript exploit? Took a look at the stuff and discovered that it was a web page saved by firefox. Yet Another Example of its complete misunderstanding of file system hierarchies. ACM only downloads articles once.
VoIP ATA configuration
So now I have two VoIP connections, one via a NetComm V210P and the other via a Linksys PAP2T. Theoretically I could run both services via the Linksys, but it doesn't have a POTS input. But it does have the advantage of relatively complete syslog facility, so it seemed good to use it for the VoIP input line so that I could log callers' phone numbers. Reconfigured it and discovered that, although I could call it, the phone didn't ring. What's wrong there? Spent a lot of time examining all the myriad configuration details of the ATA. It's a US model.
Browser memory usage
Lately firefox has been hanging frequently, and this morning I had to restart it several times in rapid succession. It seems that one of the unselected pages in Restore session was the problem. While doing that, shot down all my browsers and npviewer.bin. Shooting down Chrome was a surprise: I regained 10 GB of RAM! As I said on IRC a couple of days ago, if EMACS once stood for Eight Megabytes And Continually Swapping , they should introduce the term EGACS for web browsers. ACM only downloads articles once.
Getting CJ's computer
Yesterday TNT tried to deliver CJ's new computer. Given where he lives, that's quite impressive, but why don't they try to confirm that somebody will be there to receive the parcel before driving an estimated 50 km to deliver it? CJ is very deaf, so he asked me to call them. Did so and got Yet Another Emetic Voice Non-Recognition Disservice. Finally got through to a human by the name of TracyStacey, who told me that she would put in a request for pickup from the depot in Ballarat and call me back. Given that I was about to leave, that didn't help much.
Flamenco Snapshots
Recently, several times per week Ive been spending an hour or two biking. Usually after supper, with Ingress as a motivator. My route home goes by a Flamenco bar; and its absurdly easy to counteract the biking benefits with a couple of Guinesses while I watch the last set. And take pictures. The Kino Café is, to be honest, kind of a dump, and I hope the dancers are pursuing this as a hobby not a profession; the way it works is, theres no cover, but after each set the prettiest among them goes around with a little basket, which gets pretty full of folding money when the bars full, and doesnt when its not.
A year of Android
It's been a year since I bought an Android tablet for real use. I had tried one a year before that, but had not persevered. Now I have been using a tablet for a year. What good is it? The attraction of the tablet is flexibility. It promises: Normal computer functionality, including word processing, web browsing, social networking and all those things you used to need a computer for.
A year of Android
It's been a year since I bought an Android tablet for real use. I had tried one a year before that, but had not persevered. Now I have been using a tablet for a year. What good is it? The attraction of the tablet is flexibility. It promises: Normal computer functionality, including word processing, web browsing, social networking and all those things you used to need a computer for.
My CppCon Plenary (updated)
When we announced the CppCon conference program and I posted my final talk selection, the original plan for my Friday ‘endnote’ plenary was for it to focus on giving an update on future standardization plans. However, quite a few people immediately wrote me to express disappointment that I wouldn’t cover my Modern C++ Style material, […]
My CppCon Plenary (updated)
When we announced the CppCon conference program and I posted my final talk selection, the original plan for my Friday ‘endnote’ plenary was for it to focus on giving an update on future standardization plans. However, quite a few people immediately wrote me to express disappointment that I wouldn’t cover my Modern C++ Style material, […]
Neal Stephenson and Cory speaking at Seattles Town Hall, Oct 26
We're getting together to talk about Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future , a project that Stephenson kicked off -- I've got a story in it called "The Man Who Sold the Moon." The project's mission is to promote "Asimovian robots, Heinleinian rocket ships, Gibsonian cyberspace& plausible, thought-out pictures of alternate realities in … [Read more]
A computer for CJ
CJ Ellis showed up here today, apparently because he had wanted to do some work on our site, but got caught by the rain. Took the opportunity to help him transfer his home phone line to VoIP, which proved more difficult than I had expected. First, of course, I had to set up access for him. CJ's not stupid, but he's 75 years old and has never really learnt anything about computers. For him nothing is intuitive. No point in trying to teach him the fine points of FreeBSD. First, he needs a computer. There's a mob called Computers for Seniors that offers cheap computers for concession card holders.
On Pancakes
Sometime in 2004 I started making traditional Sunday breakfasts, featuring pancakes and bacon; and never stopped, so theres a tenth anniversary coming up. Ive learned enough about them now to offer tips both on them, and on what you put on them. Which matters, because pancakes, un-topped, are kind of boring. Mix it up. As in, try different mixes, both noveau-organic and traditional-home-style. The differences are surprising. Maple syrup! Normally everyone buys Canada #1 but health-food stores will have other options; some of the darker shades with numbers that arent 1 have deliciously smoky flavors. Most mixes and recipes have a lot of baking powder aimed at giving you big thick fluffy pancakes.
Saint Hilda
Also known as Hilda of Whitby; shes the protagonist of Hild, by Nicola Griffith, which I just read and enjoyed hugely. Only I didnt know Hild was Hilda while I was reading it. What happened was, Charlie Stross had Ms Griffith on as a guest-blogger, and she posted Who Owns SF? which led me to an impulse buy. Its an odd, long, first-person book, with a different sort of rhythm. I was going to write not much happens but since its full of religion and sex and politics and war and commerce that would be crazy. What I think I mean is, you spend the whole book inside Hilds head and she doesnt change much as the years and battles and faiths and lovers pass.
ATA: finally
Over to CJ's place this evening to connect up the ATA. It worked, fortunately. Now he's going to have to learn to live with another paradigm. Hopefully it won't involve me in too much work. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Telstra: super up-to-date
Advertising from Telstra today to inform us that the National Broadband Network is now availableless than nine months after the event. But that's nothing. Look at the address: Cliff Taylor sold me the house in July 2007, and he hasn't been seen here since. And they've misspelt Kleins Road as Kliens Road . I'm a Telstra customer, for pity's sake! What incredible corruption do they have in their databases? Admittedly, it's not even the second time, but at least the third.
Simple bucket-ized stats in awk
Someone recently asked how to take a bunch of numbers from STDIN and then break them down into distribution buckets. This is simple enough that it should be do-able in awk. Here's a simple script that will generate 100 random numbers. Bucketize them to the nearest multiple of 10, print based on # of items in bucket: while true ; do echo $[ 1 + $[ RANDOM % 100 ]] ; done | head -100 | awk '{ bucket = int(($1 + 5) / 10) * 10 ; arr[bucket]++} END { for (i in arr) {print i, arr[i] }}' | sort -k2n,2 -k1n,1 Many people don't know that in bash, a single quote can go over multiple lines.
Configuring CJ's ATA
Called MyNetFone about CJ's unconfigured ATA. This time I spoke to somebody who told me he wanted to start a remote desktop on my PC . That's interesting simply because not all versions of Microsoft support it. But no, it wasn't really a remote desktop, that's just what he called it. Instead he wanted to use TeamViewer. Problem: I don't want people messing around on my computers, and while TeamViewer is probably relatively safe, I always run it on pain, my XP laptop. And I had left that with CJ. Reluctantly fired up dxo, the Vista box, and installed TeamViewer on that.
VoIP ATA hell
CJ's ATA, a Mitron MNFMV1, has arrived, and I promised to install it for him. Basically that means plugging it in. And sure enough, it came online and an IP address to the laptop (pain) that I had plugged into the LAN port. All plug and play. But the SIP light didn't light up. How do you diagnose that with a black box? Fortunately pain (now eucla, running FreeBSD) knew the device address, since it's the Internet gateway. So: point a browser at it? Sure, and it wants a user name and password, which MyNetFone didn't supply. admin/admin? Yup! And how about that, the thing hadn't been configured.
Data Center Cooling Done Differently
Over the last 10 years, there has been considerable innovation in data center cooling. Large operators are now able to operate at Power Usage Efficiency of 1.10 to 1.20. This means that less than 20% of the power delivered to the facility is lost to power distribution and cooling. These days, very nearly all of the power delivered to the facility, is delivered to the servers. I would never say there is no more innovation coming in an but most of the ideas Ive been seeing recently in data center cooling designs are familiar.
Data Center Cooling Done Differently
Over the last 10 years, there has been considerable innovation in data center cooling. Large operators are now able to operate at Power Usage Efficiency of 1.10 to 1.20. This means that less than 20% of the power delivered to the facility is lost to power distribution and cooling. These days, very nearly all of...
My London Worldcon schedule
I'll be joining thousands of fans and hundreds of presenters at Loncon 3, the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention, later this week. I hope to see you there! Weds, Aug 13 * 18h: Group signing at Forbidden Planet, Shaftesbury Ave, with Chris Achilleos, Madeline Ashby, Gregory Benford, Adam Christopher, Wesley Chu, Phil & Kaja Foglio, … [Read more]
The Moon With No Mirror
What happened was, we came home late and there was that Supermoon beaming through the trees. So I screwed the big ol 400mm Tokina onto the Fujifilm camera and got a pretty decent picture even though there was quite a bit of haze. Its so much easier when youre not using an SLR. Ive done this before, with a 2007-vintage Pentax DSLR and a zoom stretched to 210mm. But it was hard, involving guesswork; and a lot of Lightrooming. With an EVF its just no pain. Since I dont have a tripod mount for the big lens, I decided I better shoot pretty fast.
New ammunition against telemarketeers
On IRC today found this post from Chris Blasko (and not Chris Bahlo) about how to get your own back on telemarketeers: convince them that you're from their IT department and there's something wrong with their phone. Offer to fix it for them and get them to reset their phone to factory defaults. The more I think of this, the more fun it seems. In the example the perpetrator was connected to the marketeer, not the more usual other way round. But that doesn't make as much difference as I thought. Hypothetical conversation: TM (Silence, sound of nose-picking) Helllo, how are you today?
New DevOps meetup starting in New Jersey!
As you know, I live in New Jersey. I'm excited to announce that some fine fellow New Jerseyians have started a DevOps Meetup. The first meeting will be on Monday, Aug 18, 2014 in Clifton, NJ. I'm honored to be their first speaker. More info at their MeetUp Page: DevOps and Automation NJ Group Hope to see you there!
Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2013
The Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge has published the 2013 Journal Citation Reports . Following similar studies I performed in the past sever years ( 2007 , '08 , '09 , '10 , '11 , '12 , '13 ) here is my analysis of the current status and trends for the impact factor of computer science journals.
Next planning permit amendment
Spent quite some time trying to fill out a form to amend my application for a planning permit. Filling out the form should be simple, but I was hindered by various software issues. The form is in editable PDF format, and I have already filled one, so it made sense to amend that form to fit the new data. But no, for some reason I couldn't change it, only the original. Make a copy? That didn't work either, though I confirmed that the content of the copy was identical. Permissions, maybe? This is using Acrobat reader on Microsoft against a file mounted via Samba on a UFS file system.
Legal Advice
Hey, are you operating an app or a Web site? If so, are you among the (large number of) people (for example, Instagram) who connect via http: instead of https: ? Heres some advice. Set up a meeting with someone on the Legal side, and get them to sign off. Explain to them like this: Were offering our service in whats called plain-text mode , which means that someone with a WiFi sniffer, or employees of our ISP, or overseas hackers, or the NSA, or the local cops near where our servers are, or where our customers PCs and phones are, can see what our users are sending us and what were sending them.
Got Yer Space Opera Right Here
I refer to Cibola Burn, the latest from James S.A. Corey . Im going to quote myself on Space Opera from a 2013 piece that highlighted Coreys Expanse series, of which this is #4: Gleaming silver ingots of engineering poetry reaching up out of gravitys mud carrying humanitys sparks into spaces blackness... and blowing each other up! Well, yeah; this is like that; and if you like that sort of thing, youll like this. Our Story: A plucky band of hardscrabble homesteaders stake out a piece of the rugged (interstellar) frontier and then a big resource-extraction operation starts showing up to brush them aside and begin extracting.
More sloppy error reporting
Copied a video file to teevee tonight. I had difficulty watching it: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/0) /spool/Videos 10 -> mplayer Careful-He-Might-Hear-You.1983 MPlayer SVN-r35933-snapshot-3.2 (C) 2000-2013 MPlayer Team Playing Careful-He-Might-Hear-You.1983. File not found: 'Careful-He-Might-Hear-You.1983' Failed to open Careful-He-Might-Hear-You.1983. OK, that's not so surprising in itself, but I didn't type in the name: I started it and let the shell complete the file name. And ls(1) showed that the file was there. After a bit of head-scratching, found: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/0) /spool/Videos 12 -> file Careful-He-Might-Hear-You.1983 Careful-He-Might-Hear-You.1983: regular file, no read permission It seems that cp(1) sets the permissions to --------- while copying.
TPOCSA Book Tour announcement!
I'm excited to announce my "book tour" to promote The Practice of Cloud System Administration, which starts shipping on Friday, September 5! I'll be speaking and/or doing book signings at the following events. More dates to be announced soon. 2014-08-18 New Jersey: DevOps and Automation NJ Group 2014-09-04 New Jersey: LOPSA-NJ Chapter Meeting 2014-09-15 NYC: Velocity Conference NYC (book signing Wed) 2014-10-01 Philadelphia area Linux Users' Group (PLUG) 2014-09-23 Austin, TX: SpiceWorld Conference 2014-09-24 Austin, TX: CloudAustin Meetup 2014-11-09 Seattle, WA: Usenix LISA (attending all week) Soon to be announced: Denver CO (October), Netherlands (November) Still looking for opportunties: SF/Bay Area This book is the culmination of 2 years of research on the best practices for modern IT / DevOps / cloud / distributed computing.
On Hating T-Mobile
If you are a visitor to the USA, you can expect TMO to be stupid and abusive. Background Youre visiting America. You probably do this more than once per year. You need Internet. Youre willing to pay for it. In certain countries (my experience is with the UK, Spain, and Germany) you can buy a reasonably-priced SIM in or near the airport. For example, there are vending machines at Heathrow where £20 will get you one thats good for a week or two. These SIMs, of course, dont care in the slightest what kind of device you put them in. The good part For a visitor, TMO offers prepaid plans that are not-bad-at-all; a few bucks a day for enough data.
CL XXX: Lensing
The great thing about interchangeable-lens cameras is well, interchanging lenses. In particular while kicking back in Cottage-life mode. Fujifilm X-T1 + 400mm I already wrote about getting a Fotodiox PK-FX adapter, and finally couldnt resist clamping on the antique Tokina SL-400 F5.6 onto my Fujifilm X-T1. The combo looks absolutely ridiculous. Its perfectly hand-wieldable without a tripod, by the way. It lets you take arty stuff like this: Those are big mountains in the background. But I think the design goal is this sort of thing, a half-grown eaglet in its nest. His or her parents visit regularly to supply food; these occasions are accompanied by much screaming and flapping.
Why I don't use Facebook
In the evening, discussed with Chris Bahlo how we find things on the web. I go to some trouble to correlate my own content, and for others Google is the clear favourite. But we know that Facebook also keeps things forever. But for whom? The NSA? It's not easy for normal users to find things there. A case in point: a couple of months ago Jordan Hubbard put names to some photos on a photo, including mine. Most of them were deliberate falsifications, but that was part of the fun. The issue was: how to find the posting? A Google search for hubbard lehey mckusick facebook brings up a number of hits ( 23,300 , if you want to believe it), including several of this diary (one claiming a date of April 7, nearly two months before the event), but nothing from Facebook.
Online course: An Introduction to Operations Management starting soon
U Penn's Wharton School of Business has one of the best Operations Management classes in the world, and for the last few years it has been available as a MOOC. They've announced a new session starting on September 29 2014. I've been watching some of the video lectures and Christian Terwiesch is an excellent lecturer. What is learned in the class applies to system administration, running a restaurant, or a hospital. I think that system administrators, DevOps engineers, and managers can learn a lot from this class. Sign up for An Introduction to Operations Management or just watch the videos. Either way, you'll learn a lot!
Internet for CJ
CJ Ellis along this afternoon to get help connecting to the Internet. His real concern is not so much Internet connectivity as telephony: with MyNetFone he saves so much money compared to Telstra that it covers the price of the Internet connection as well. It'll all get connected next Friday. Now where can we find somebody to teach CJ about computers? ACM only downloads articles once.