stfw. Trivially modifiable to use a GUI browser. Bonus points for asking the admin to install it in /usr/bin…

Pretty cool — somebody new to blosxom got interested in its internals and how it works, and ended up creating a web-based annotation of the source code, in a couple different forms. This should be a good resource not only for people trying to understand blosxom, but Perl idiom in general.

Richard Smith has the lowdown that will help the hardcore geeks decide where to cast their votes: a compare’n'contrast piece on the web server platform choice and security of the Kerry and Bush campaigns. No big surprises: Kerry on Apache/Linux, Bush on ISS/Win, and security rather poor on both.

I am of course joking when I say this will be the deciding factor for the hardcore geeks. Hardcore geeks get into that “information wants to be free” thing, which puts them pretty squarely at odds with the secrecy-obsessed Bush administration.

Well, the DNS appears to have propagated (at least here at home and at the couple other places I can check), and I got some time tonight to throw down some conceptual scaffolding — so if you haven’t already, take a look at the Sysadminery wiki. If you’re one of those admin-type people, that is.

Big week. I wish the stuff I read didn’t come out so bunched up, time-wise; the heavy weeks don’t make up for the lean ones.

Sleeper: All False Moves TPB: Second collection of the series. A deep undercover agent has been cut off from his organization, orphaned inside the criminal syndicate that he’s investigating — and he’s starting to “go native”. Oh, and all the criminals (and the agent) have super-powers. It’s an interesting, albeit dark and ultraviolent read.

Conan 5: Conan continues his attempts to escape the lotus-bloom prison of Hyperborea. Not sure how much longer I’ll be sticking with this one; the art isn’t doing much for me, and I got most of my fill of Conan reading the Howard books 20 years ago.

Astonishing X-Men 1: Director’s Cut: Save your four bucks unless you’re a huge, huge fanboy. Despite what the “director’s cut” subhead on the cover might lead you to believe, this is the exact same story as the regular first issue, with the addition of a few extra covers, character sketches, and a bit of script.

Astonishing X-Men 2: Whedon is moving fast — lots of plot development here. Cassaday’s art is, as usual, fantastic, but I’m really not happy with the freakish snout he’s hung on Beast. sigh Ultimate Beast gets killed off, and Astonishing Beast looks like a Shar-Pei. Where’s the blue furry love?

Wanted 4: I was starting to wonder if this was ever going to come out. Things are building towards a climax, as our anti-hero begins to question whether being an all-powerful super-villain is all that it’s cracked up to be.

The Authority: More Kev 2: Mostly back story and scene setting, but done in the classic Ennis “lots of gore and freakish sex” fashion.

The Losers 13 I really like the art in thisseries. Lots of effectively used negative space stuff — very reminiscent of “100 Bullets”, but distinct.

30 Days of Night: Return to Barrow 4: The vampires begin to attack in an unexpected fashion, and Templesmith shows that he does have colors besides black, grey, and red in his palette. Very effective, and very nice.

The Goon 7: This ended up in my pulls, presumably because my pull list includes “anything Hellboy” and this is a Mike Mignola co-penned tale. The cross-over mechanism is cheesy (no surprise), but once that’s out of the way, interesting mayhem ensues. The Goon looks interesting enough that I might pick up a collection at some point; not so interesting that it’ll get added to the pull list.

Okay, the wiki alluded to a couple posts ago is live now. While we’re waiting for DNS to propagate so that sysadminery.com will work, the site is accessible at sysadminery.com.hg.sabren.com. Have fun, play nice.

Righteous indignation and ignorance of your subject matter are a potent combination. In ‘Role Fragmentation: Divide and Conquer - Why IT Administrators Have Become All-Powerful Demi-Gods‘, Robin Sharp sets out the thesis that the whole problem with software development today is that the developers aren’t given enough leeway, don’t get enough respect, and have to spend far too much of their time dealing with those arrogant pains-in-the-ass, admins. From reviewing the comments on the site and in the /. thread, it appears that this view is not uncommon among developers — and the opposite view, best expressed as “this job would be great, except for the damnfool developers!”, is pretty common in the sysadmin set too.

Now, being an admin myself, I’ve run into both of these perspectives a few thousand times — to the point where I’ve come around to the viewpoint being articulated by the few sane voices in the threads: there are spectacular examples of idiotcy on both sides of the fence, widespread amounts of just-competent-enough-to-not-get-fired-itis, and a few shining examples of competence working together to keep the whole show limping along.

In thinking about this, I noticed a curious difference between the developers and the admins: the developers realize they have a problem, and are trying to fix it, or at least talking about ways to make things better. You’ve got Design Patterns, Anti-Patterns, eXtreme, Agile, and/or Pragmatic Programming, and all the rest of the methodologies du jour. The Portland Pattern Repository’s Wiki (aka WardsWiki) has an absolutely astounding amount of peer-reviewed thought on the art and practice of computer programming, and it’s getting bigger by the day.

But whither the sysadmins? There are a few books available — Frisch’s ORA classic, Kirk Bauer’s recent book on automation — but those tend to focus on specific details and documentation, not abstract principles and patterns. There’s some overlap with best practices from programming, but there are also things unique to sysadminery. Why isn’t anybody talking about those? I can see a great need for something like WardsWiki, but devoted to systems administration, rather than programming. I have registered sysadminery.com; I’m going to set up a wiki just as soon as I save this entry. We’ll see what happens next.

I seem to be taking part in lots of conversations about changing organizations here lately — with friends, who are struggling with trying to decide whether to change their current organization, or change to a new one, and with various groups of people at work, some that I supervise and some that I only interact with and advise. Lots and lots of change in the air — either because it’s summer, or an election year, or maybe because the cicadas came out. Anyway, when I stumbled across the Change Your Organization Diary on WardsWiki, I read the entire thing, even though I really had other stuff I should have been doing. It’s a fascinating anthropological document. I recognized a lot of my organization in some of the things the author writes about; if you work in any aspect of IT, it’s likely you will too.

If you don’t want to read the whole diary (it’s a good 20 to 30 minute read), you should at least glance at the Change Your Organization Tactics. I think I might just print those out and distribute them selectively…

Steve talks about
the CSPI’s take
on “fresh mex” chains.

I eat a fair number of burritos, but I’m not a huge fan of
Chipolte — too much rice, not enough salsa variation. I generally
opt for the chicken, because I’m aware of the fat content of the beef
choices. I’ll bypass Chipolte or Baja Fresh in a heartbeat, however, if
CalTor is a possibility –
superior hot sauce selection, spunky staff, and the ability to order your
burrito in a “small”, which is just right for lunch. So, basically, I
agree with most of the stuff in the CSPI report, but there’s a
particular piece of advice I want to quibble with:

Chipotle’s Chicken Burrito Bols–burritos without
the 340-calorie flour tortillas–are CSPI’s only recommended
“Better Bites” at Chipotle. A Bol with chicken, black beans, lettuce,
and salsa [no rice, sour cream or cheese! - seb], has just 430
calories and four grams of saturated fat. Rice instead of lettuce adds
about 200 calories.

Emphasis mine

Kids, the tortilla is the burrito. This
low-carb-craze-fueled “naked burrito” movement is marketing crap,
nothing more, nothing less. Your “Burrito Bol”? Dude, that’s
a salad. Nothing wrong with having a salad for lunch;
I do it myself from time to time. Just don’t try to fool yourself into
thinking that you’re having something from the burrito
family. Burritos come in tortillas.

Geez, now I’m all hungry.

Today’s diary
entry has some new pictures of TheBaby, getting her cute on. Enjoy.