Scott Alan Miller :: A Life Online
Thank you SGL readers for taking the time to vote for Andrew West in the Dice Tech Challenge. In the latest challenge in which Andy wrote a web application for tracking and displaying the locations of satellites as they orbit the earth, he has taken first place! He now as one victory and one fourth place finish in the challenge!
Andy is already underway preparing for the next Dice Tech Challenge. This next one does not require a round of voting. We will keep you updated.
We started really trying to get everyone set up with Pavilion Baptist School email addresses yesterday. So far there are less than ten of us able to get email from the PBS addresses. Those of us who have found each other are few and far between. I think that my class, the class of 1994, may be having the most luck as we have email contact between at least six of the classmates and are pretty confident in being able to contact two more. We only had about twenty-five students pass through my class en toto over the years and we never had more than eighteen students at a time. We were the largest class to ever pass through the school. No other class ever hit eighteen and we held that number through kindergarten and first grade (but not with the same roster.) In the end we only gradated one – and no it wasn’t me.
It is amazing to me that when looking online neither Google nor Yahoo seach returns any blogs, but this one of course, ever mentioning ol’ Pavilion Baptist School. Technorati doesn’t even bother to list SGL but I suppose that PBS is only ever mentioned in passing. It is sad to see such a major part of so many of our lives reduced to a few lines on the Internet. No history, no contacts, no nothing. A seach of the name turns up many automated school search engines listing the school as if it still existed but no real information. I don’t even know how to definitively discover when the school actually closed. It just vanished while none of us were watching.
Sadly, even an image search for the school name turns up only picture of or by me. It’s almost as if the school never existed.
One of my goals, but not a high priority one, is to create the Pavilion Baptist School web site. We need to have a central repository of news and contact information. Being from PBS really encourages a lot of people to not be very tech savvy and in this day and age that is the difference between finding lost friends and not. Those of us who have reconnected have done so almost exclusively through FaceBook – which is extra difficult as FaceBook won’t recognize PBS as a school so we aren’t allowed to have a school group through them. Although now that we have official email addresses it might help a little. A few people have found me through my personal web page too but not very many.
I was up bright and early again today. This is a really long week. Oreo was so tired last night that he completely forgot about his dinner and just went to bed without it. We don’t offer him dinner unless he asks as we don’t think that he needs any “extra” food. His weight is under control but he is very sensitive to weight gain and if he isn’t hungry enough to ask for his dinner then he certainly doesn’t need it. He knows how to ask for food when he is hungry and isn’t shy about doing so.
Lots of stuff to do today. Tomorrow is too busy with work and I will be in the office on Wall St. tomorrow so I can’t do the “little things” that need catching up with around here. This weekend we are taking the nieces camping in Watkins Glen so we need to be ready. Today is extra laundry, some light shopping and Oreo needs his flea and tick preventative treatment so that he is ready to face the wilds of Upstate New York.
It turns out that Josh is coming down to Clifton, NJ this weekend with the Empire Statesmen but, obviously, we won’t see him as we will be out of town.
I got a call from Craig today. Craig, who has been missing in action for months now. Turns out that they are expecting in December! We have so many people that we know having babies within several weeks of us. It is really crazy.
Anyway, Craig had some info on a rent controlled apartment up in Inwood (the northern most bit of the island of Manhattan) becoming available so we called and are going over there this evening to take a look at the area and the apartment. We have only ever driven through Inwood on the highway and don’t really have a good idea of what the area is like. It had never occurred to us that getting a rent controlled apartment would even be possible as they are rare and highly coveted. So we are rushing out to see what the deal is. We already know that Oreo won’t be a problem and that there is a grocery store very nearby as well as a train.
We would love to live up in Westchester but we are nervous about house prices right now. They are lower than before but it seems like there is quite a bit of a possibility of the prices falling still before they hit bottom and investing in property in the New York area is not an easy prospect. We definitely don’t want to get trapped having bought something that loses value immediately and then find that we need to move! We would be in rough shape. Renting, even if just temporarily, would be very good for us to give us time to get to know the market and the area better.
Inwood would still be closer to our families but only by about half an hour or so and driving into the city isn’t very easy. The car situation would not be ideal. But commuting for me would be great. Almost as good as it is now and almost as cheap. It would mean that I would have a lot more time at home with the baby – especially if I end up being unable to be at home as much as I am now.
Moving into Manhattan would only make sense for us if the cost was really low which is a possibility. We will see more tonight when we look at the apartment. Neither of us has ever looked at a New York City apartment before, let alone a Manhattan apartment. We don’t know very much about rent control either. This might be a great opportunity or nothing that we are interested in at all.
Dominica got home a little before six and we pretty much just got ready to go and left around twenty after. It took about an hour and a half to get from Newark to Inwood. We took the PATH from Newark’s Penn Station to 33rd Street near NY Penn Station. There is probably some trick to the train to train transfer but we just popped up in midtown and walked from the PATH to Penn Station to catch the A Train (Express) up to Inwood (200th and Broadway.)
We looked at two apartments that are coming available up there, a one bedroom and a three bedroom. The three bedroom was a little interesting but, unfortunately, the style of the whole place was totally not our scene. The prices were amazing and the deal really is quite good. For people looking to really live in Manhattan it is hard to beat. For us, though, we would be much happier, we feel, being out in Westchester. The difference in commute time really isn’t that much different.
We decided to save the effort of taking the PATH and to just catch NJ Transit back between New York and New Jersey. NJ Transit is more comfortable and we have now figured out how to get the better trains and it barely costs any more. Plus there is only two stops totally to get us back home so that is pretty easy.
We tried to get a bite to eat at Penn Station in Manhattan on the way home but like everything else down here, it was all closed by the time that we got there. Upstate New Yorkers have such an incredibly skewed view of the world. We are used to so many things being open twenty-four hours a day and we are always told how we are from the “sleepy north” and that Manhattan is the city that never sleeps. Ha! We are so spoiled in Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse, Elmira, Ithaca, etc. Everything downstate closes early. New Yorkers are so trapped in their own little universe that they don’t even realize that they have no more late night services than any random city. Nowhere near what a small, “sleepy” town like Geneseo has to offer.
There was one restaurant still open in Newark’s Penn Station so we ate there. Now it is a seriously sad statement that we were able to get food in Newark and not in New York. Our biggest complaint (well, maybe not the biggest) about Newark is how we aren’t able to get any food in the evenings!
There was laundry, email and a few other things that we needed to do before we were able to get to bed. We were up far later than either of us wanted to be. We were both totally exhausted coming back from New York.
I am on Wall Street tomorrow. Dominica has a baby shower for her friend Elaine at the office so she has some work to do for that to do. After work we are heading north to Frankfort and then taking our nieces camping over the weekend.
Linux is popular in big business today. No longer, and not for a long time now, has Linux been the purview of the geek community but it is a solid, core piece of today’s mainstream IT infrastructure. That being said, Linux is still plagued by confusion over its plethora of distributions. This being the case I have decided to weigh in with some guidance for businesses looking to use Linux in their organizations.
For those unfamiliar with the landscape, Linux is a family of operating systems that are generally considered to fall under the Unix umbrella although Linux is legally not Unix just highly Unix-like. Individual Linux packages are referred to as distributions or distros, for short. Unlike Windows or Mac OS X which come from a single vendor, Linux is available from many commercial vendors as well as from non-profit groups and individual distribution makers. Instead of there being just one Linux there are actually hundreds or thousands of different distributions. Each one is different in some way. This creates choice but also confusion. To make matters even worse some major vendors such as Red Hat and Novell release more than one Linux distribution targeted at different markets, and within a single distribution will often package features separately. This myriad of choices, before even acquiring your first installation disc does not help make Linux uptake in companies go any faster.
In reality the choices for business use are few and obvious with a little bit of research. To make things easier for you, I will just tell you what you need to know. Problem solved. Now if managing your Linux environment could be so easy!
Before we get started I want to stress that this article is about using Linux for enterprise infrastructure – that is, as a server operating system in a business. I am not looking into desktop Linux or high performance computational clusters and grid or specialty applications or home use. This article is about standard, traditional server applications that require stability, up time, reliability, accessibility, manageability, etc. If you are looking for my guide to the “ultimate Linux desktop environment”, this isn’t it. Desktops, even in the enterprise, do not necessarily have the same criteria as servers. They might, but not necessarily so.
When choosing a distribution for servers we must first consider the target purpose of the distro. Only a handful of Linux distros are built with the primary purpose of being used as a server. If your distro maintainer does not have the same principles in mind that you do it is probably best to avoid that distro for this particular purpose. Server distributions target longer time between releases, security over features, stability over features, rapid patching, support, documentation, etc.
In addition to targeting the distribution in harmony with our own goals we also need to work with a company that is reliable, has the resources necessary to support the product and has a track record with a successful product. Choosing a distribution is a vendor selection process. There are three key enterprise players in the Linux space: Red Hat, Novell and Canonical.
For many Red Hat is synonymous with Linux, having been one of the earliest American Linux distributions and having been a driving force behind the enterprise adoption of Linux globally. Red Hat makes “Red Hat Enterprise Linux”, known widely as RHEL, as well as Fedora Linux. Red Hat is the biggest Linux vendor and important in any Linux vendor discussion.
Novell is the second big Linux vendor having purchased German Linux vendor SUSE some years ago. Novell makes two products as well, Suse Linux Enterprise and OpenSUSE.
The third big Linux enterprise vendor is Canonical well known for the Ubuntu family of Linux distributions. While the Ubuntu distro family includes many members we are only interested in discussing Canonical’s own Ubuntu LTS distribution. LTS stands for “Long Term Support” and is effectively Canonical’s server offering. Their approach to versioning and packaging is quite different from Red Hat and Novell and can be rather confusing.
Before we become overwhelmed with choices (we have presented five so far) we have one here that we can further eliminate. Red Hat’s Fedora is not an “enterprise targeted” distributions. This is a “testing” and “community” platform designed primarily as a desktop and research vehicle and not as a stable server operating system. To be sure it is extremely valuable and a great contribution to the Linux community and has its place but as server operating system it does not shine. Nevertheless, without Fedora as a proving ground for new technologies it is unlikely that Red Hat Enterprise Linux would be as robust and capable as it is.
We can also effectively eliminate OpenSUSE. OpenSUSE is the unsupported, community driven sibling to Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise. However, unlike Fedora which is an independant product from RHEL, OpenSUSE is the same code base as SUSE Linux Enterprise but without Novell’s support. This is a great advantage to the SUSE product line as there is a very large base of home and hobby users in addition to the enterprise users all using the exact same code and finding bugs for each other. Going forward we will only consider SUSE Linux Enterprise as support is a key factor in the enterprise. But OpenSUSE, for shops not needing commercial support from the vendor, is a great option as the product is the same, stable release as the supported version.
So we are left with three serious competitors for your enterprise Linux platform: Red Hat Linux, Novell Suse Linux and Ubuntu LTS. All three of these competitors are solid, reliable offerings for the enterprise. Red Hat and Novell obviously have the advantage of having been in the server operating system market for a long time and have experience on their side. But Canonical has really made a lot of headway in the last few years and is definitely worth considering.
Red Hat Linux and Suse Linux Enterprise have a few key advantages over Ubuntu. The first is that they both share the standard RPM package management system. Because RPM is the standard in the enterprise it is well tested and understood and most Linux administrators are well versed in its functionality. Ubuntu uses the Debian based package format which is far less common and finding administrators with existing knowledge of it is far less likely – although this is changing rapidly as Ubuntu has become the leading home desktop Linux distribution recently.
In general, Red Hat Linux and Suse Linux Enterprise have more in common with each other making them able to share resources more easily and giving administrators a broader platform to focus skills upon. This is a significant advantage when it comes time to staff up and support your infrastructure.
Ubuntu suffers from having a directly tie to a “non-enterprise” operating system that is particularly popular with the desktop “tweaking” crowd. Unlike Red Hat and Suse, Ubuntu is coming at the enterprise from the home market and brings a stigma with it. Administrators trained on RHEL, for example, tend to be taught enterprise type tasks performed in a business like manner. Administrators with Ubuntu experience tend to be home users who have been running Linux for their own desktop and entertainment tasks. This makes the interview and hiring process that much more difficult. This is in no way a slight against the Ubuntu LTS product which is an amazing, enterprise-ready operating system which should seriously be considered, but shops need to be aware that the vast majority of Ubuntu users are not enterprise system administrators and their experience may be mostly from a non-critical desktop focused role. It is rare to find anyone running RHEL or Suse Linux in this manner.
In my own experience, having software popular with home users in the enterprise also brings in factors of misguided user expectations. Users expect the enterprise installations to include any package that the users can install at home and that update cycles be similar. This can cause additional headaches although the Windows world has been dealing with these issues since the beginning.
At this point you have probably noticed that choosing either Suse and Ubuntu leaves you with the option of both free and fully supported versions, direct from the vendors. This is a major feature of these distributions because it provides a great cost savings and greater flexibility. For example, development machines can be run on OpenSUSE and production machines on Suse Enterprise lowering the overall cost if full support isn’t necessary for development environments. You can run labs from free versions for learning and testing or only pay for support for critical infrastructure pieces. Or, if you are really looking to save money or feel that your internal support is good enough, running completely on the free, unsupported versions is a viable option because you are still using the stable, enterprise-class code base.
Red Hat, as a vendor, does not supply a freely available edition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Instead, they make their code repositories available to the public and expect interested parties to build their own version of RHEL using these repositories. If you are interested in a freely available version of RHEL, look no further than CentOS.
CentOS, or the Community ENTerprise Operating System, is a code identical rebuild of RHEL. It is identical in everyway except for branding. CentOS is completely free – but unsupported. CentOS is used in organizations of all sizes exactly like a free copy of RHEL would be expected to be used and many businesses choose to run CentOS exclusively. As RHEL is the most popular Linux distribution in large businesses and as the commercially support version is rather expensive, CentOS also provides a very important resource to the community by allowing new administrators to experience RHEL at home without the expense of unneeded support.
Choosing between the Red Hat, Suse and Ubuntu families is much more difficult than whittling the list down to these three. In many cases choosing between these three will be based upon cost, application demands, existing administration experience and features. It is not uncommon for larger businesses to use two or possibly all three of these distributions as features are needed, but most commonly a single distribution is chosen for ease of management. All three distributions are solid and capable.
Another potentially deciding factor is if your enterprise is considering using Linux on the desktop. While RHEL can be used as a desktop operating system it is generally considered to be substantially weaker than Suse and Ubuntu when it comes to desktop environments. Because of this, Fedora is generally seen as Red Hat’s desktop option but this is not supported by Red Hat nor does it share a code base with RHEL causing support to be somewhat less than unified even though to two are very similar.
For mixed server and desktop environments, Suse and Ubuntu have a very strong lead. Both of these distributions focus a great many resources onto their desktop systems and they keep these components very much up to date and pay great attention to the user experience. For a small company that can manage to use only one single distribution on every machine that they own this can be a major advantage. Homogeneous environments can be extremely cost effective as a much narrower skill set is needed to manage and support them.
In conclusion: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Novel Suse Enterprise and Ubuntu LTS, in both their supported versions as well as in their free versions (CentOS in the case of RHEL and OpenSUSE in the case of Novell, Ubuntu uses the same package) all represent great opportunities for the data center. Do not be lulled into using non-enterprise Linux distributions because they are cool, flashy or popular. Linux lends itself to being in the news often and to generating excess hype. None of these things are good indicators of data center stability. The data center is a serious business component and should not be treated lightly. Linux is a great choice for the corporate IT department but you will be very unhappy if you pick your backbone server architecture based on its popularity as a gaming platform rather than on its uptime and management cost.
I was reading an interesting article today about Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, England, United Kingdom. Ashdown Forest is popularly known as the forest containing the famous Hundred Acre Wood where Christopher Robin [Milne] would go to play with his friends Winnie-the-Pooh, Eeyore, Piglet, Kanga, Roo, Owl, et. al. During the writing of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, author A. A. Milne created a map of the Hundred Acre Wood which has subsequently been used to identify most of the primary locations from the books (“Winnie-the-Pooh” and “The House at Pooh Corner.)”
In 2001, archival footage of a school pageant that took place in Ashdown Forest in 1929 was discovered. Footage from the area was very rare as most had been destroyed over the years. This is the only known footage of the region from the era. After close examination, it was discovered that Christopher Robin Milne was, in fact, one of the children in the school pageant! This is now the only visual record of Christopher Robin actually in the Hundred Acre Wood. Christopher Robin would have been eight or nine years old in the film. He died five years before the films discovery.
While Christopher Robin spent his life in the UK, Winnie-the-Pooh, Eeyore, Kanga and Tigger were donated by A. A. Milne to the publisher E. F. Dutton (who published the hardcover editions that Dominica and I just bought yesterday) in the 1940s. Dutton then, in 1988, donated the stuffed animals to the New York Public Library’s Donnell Library Center branch in midtown Manhattan where they remain today behind bullet-proof glass.
One of these days I want to make a trek to the Donnell Library Center to see Winnie and friends. It is a pretty interesting piece of literary history and to have it so close at hand would make it a shame to not take advantage of the opportunity.
Oreo had to go to daycare today. He has a vet appointment this afternoon to look at his grass allergy and skin condition. He really has to go because he needs more medicine for his itchy belly before we take him camping this weekend in Watkins Glen. Besides it is about time for a normal checkup anyway.
My morning was extremely slow. I am on the early shift all week and typically the mornings are pretty slow but today was far slower than usual. There was barely a single thing happening from six thirty until the “normal day” began at nine.
Later on in the day, though, things went from slow to really crazy. It got so busy, in fact, that I was unable to even get any lunch. I got stuck in the office until almost seven thirty! It was nuts.
Dominica and I were both going to be getting home quite late today so we decided to just eat on our own. She got Burger King on the way home and I just grabbed pizza at the plaza near the World Trade Center with the statue of the financier in on the marble bench.
Oreo’s vet appointment went well. He is in good health and everyone at the vet’s office loves him. He makes friends so easily. He has a growth or something on his tail which is why he had this visit, in addition to needing more antihystamine medication. They took a sample of the growth but the vet does not think that it is anything to worry about. He had tail issue before he came to live with us which is why, according to some of his records, he has no tail of which to speak. It was removed when he was young because of some growth. So we want to make sure that everything is alright.
We watched about two episodes of Third Rock from the Sun but that was about all that we could get through. I got called to do some additional work at the office around ten thirty which kept me busy long enough that Dominica was pretty much asleep when I was done. This week is really wearing us out.
I managed to get a bit more sleep last night. We went to bed around eleven and I listen to half an hour of a talk from the SuperNova conference and then went to sleep. it was a bit interesting because the talk that I listened to was discussing technological innovation in the Mohawk Valley in the nineteenth century.
Oreo was still really tired today and very itchy still from his weekend in the grass. We decided to have him stay home again today because he needs time to sleep and for his skin to hear. Going to daycare would just take more energy out of him that he needs for his body to repair itself. He was pretty excited when he figured out that he was spending the day with his daddy.
Dominica started the Hewlett-Packard Linux 101 class today. The class doesn’t officially begun until next week but she is trying to get a jump start on it and had me download Red Hat’s Fedora 9 so that she could do an install with it as the HP Linux classes are based on Fedora.
Today we got our very first items for the forthcoming baby. We got the Winnie-the-Pooh collection by A. A. Milne in hardcover. All four books, When We Were Young, Winnie the Pooh, The House on Pooh Corner and Now We Are Six. Normally we would have waited to buy baby stuff but we are up to the stage where we are supposed to be reading to the baby so we wanted something to get started with that is nice stuff that will be long lasting and something that our child will always want to own. So our child already owns four books!
Also arriving today is the first Business Analyst book on my reading list: Writing Effective Use Cases. As I am suddenly very responsible for BA education I am taking it upon myself to read, and to some degree define, the ultimate Busness Analyst Reading List. Everyone seems to agree that this and the BA’s UML book top the list so I am starting with those. You can’t go wrong with Alistair Cockburn and I am looking forward to this book.
My day at the office ended up being so busy that I didn’t even manage to have lunch. I started trying to get lunch around one thirty and it was five before I even knew what happened. I was on a conference call solid from around one thirty until five which really ate away the day.
Dominica decided that tonight she would be cooking so it is vegetarian corn dogs, corn on the cob and macaroni salad for us. I was really tired after my incredibly long afternoon of supporting a single issue for hours – hours past my “end of day” since I am on the early shift this week. That will wear you out pretty quickly.
We watched some of the fifth season of Third Rock from the Sun and relaxed for the most part. At one point, probably around ten in the evening, I took Oreo out for his usual walk around the block. When we went outside we noticed that all of the streets were blocked off around our building and that the sidewalks were covered in electrical and lighting equipment. A large tour bus sat on the street. It was all very strange.
As Oreo and I walk across the street to Airlee we noticed that the half of the building not used by Airlee for their cafe had all of its signage replaced with “Mars Cometh – One Night Only”, a velvet rope was set up and a red carpet was down and a security guard was sitting on a stool in front of the building. This caught me by surprise as this building has been empty for the entire time that we have lived in Newark and no work has been being done on it.
I asked around and learned that Commerce, behind our building, is being used for the filming of the upcoming movie The Perfect Age of Rock and Roll. So Oreo and I got to walk through the set just as filming was about to begin. Working on Wall Street means that I see television and film shoots all of the time but this was pretty neat as the filming is literally happening just a few feet outside of our living room windows and part of the movie is in a building that I eat in several times a week.
Long ago I walked through the filming of Blues Brothers 2000 while I was in Toronto with Kelley’s Heroes for the Santa Clause Parade. That was either 1996 or 1997.