jcm's blog

Update: Ok. So, as people point out, it’s a joke site. I blame Joe for showing me the link – I trusted the source too much that time

So, Joe just showed me this wonderful FUD on Evolution Propaganda. It’s brilliant. Absolutely and utterly shite, like all the best religious writings, but it’s got all the markings of the highest callibur nutticism.

That’s right. We’re all using Macintosh computers to secretly subvert the good wholesome religious zealoty nutjobs everywhere. As he points out, Open Source is all about communism too, because who would honestly believe it could be just about making software available to all mankind? Instead, we should go listen to what self-proclaimed religious whackjobs tell us God tells them we should be doing, because people who hear voices from God are sane.

So, there you have it. Now go be a good little conformant and stop using Apple Macintosh computers immediately, for the devil has truly taken hold of blah blah blah. I can’t even find the energy to joke about this any longer – but go read the article if you want a good laugh. Then, check out those pesky HTTP headers coming from that website:

GET http://www.objectiveministries.org/ HTTP/1.1
Host: www.objectiveministries.org

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2006 08:57:45 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) mod_throttle/3.1.2 DAV/1.0.3 mod_fastcgi/2.4.2
mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a PHP/4.4.2 mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7e

Yes, he’s writing about the evils of communist Open Source software while simultaneously the hosting company he uses is running evil communist Open Source software.

Jon.

So I got fremont.jonmasters.org and london.jonmasters.org installed and they’re on their way to being setup. I decided to play with SSL/TLS encrypted openvpn tunnels so I’m building private (short session, non-shared keys) VPN peerings between these machines (and other virtual machines) in order to build a shared global jonmasters.org filesystem. I’m not decided whether I’ll run GFS or hack something more me together via FUSE layered over NFS (because I can’t build kernel modules on every one of these virtual machines) but the goal is that my mail delivery system get more streamlined (rather than the hacks in place right now) so that each host serves as an equal priority MX delivery MTA for *.jonmasters.org and delivers into the same Maildir, with multiple redundant backups.

Distributed mail backups. That’s kind of the system I have now, but the implementation is not quite as clean – I want a very robust email system once I turn off this kit on my home ADSL and get to the point that email should have reached a long time ago anyway. Ideally, I’ll end up with all email sitting on encrypted volumes using a key that’s not committed to disk any place and exploit e.g. FUSE/LVM snapshotting capabilities to keep instantaneous backups. But that will take a while to get right. In the mean time, there should be no single point of delivery failure for my email, since email doesn’t have a single point of transport failure. In any case, I must also soon stop using gmail too. It was supposed to be temporary – I don’t really want them going anywhere near my mail with their Googly appendages.

I need to write a HOWTO at some point, too.

Jon.

I never used to like buying so many random books, but as time moves on and one grows older, it’s something that becomes more enjoyable. I have a (slightly insatiable) appetite for knowledge that tends to leave me continually frustrated – I probably also have some kind of attention disorder considering the way my interests will swing from one topic to another. But I like being how I am, just it takes some getting used to never fully being satisfied. Here’s the Amazon purchases/arrivals from the last week:

• Mac OS X Internals. Can you believe Amit finally wrote a book on it? Well, he did, and this one is going to kill my free time once I have some free time to devote to it! This guy is seriously smart and seriously likes PowerPC – we’ve been in occasional contact for the last couple of years. Since I know the editor on that book too, I’m even more convinced.
• The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. After all, I want to support this guy in his quest to actually build/buy his pirate ship. I think that’s an insanely cool thing to do, and I think the whole FSM concept is a good one too. I’m going to especially enjoy reading this in the company of right-wing religious types who can’t take a joke, if I find some.
• Principia Discordia. Since I’m on the trail of more interesting religions, I figured I might as well read this classic too.
• The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Boating and Sailing. I need to re-learn a lot of this stuff. I’ve got my eye on a couple of other titles too – and once I move, and spring approaches, I’ll look into finding a local sailing club in Boston/Cambridge that I can get involved with.
• Born on a Blue Day: Memoir of Aspergers and an Extraordinary Mind. I like this guy (Daniel Tannet) because of his ability to explain his “condition” to the world around him. I’ve seen the recent UK documentary a couple of times and discovered his blog too.
• The Qur’an. I’ve never read it (we would say “Koran”) and figured that it was a good idea to try to understand the beliefs and values of Islam since I’m constantly frustrated and annoyed at the actions of the many extremists who take it all out of context.

I’ve been trying to come up with a 5 year plan for those things that I want to achieve now that I’ve decided to settle down with one job for the time being. Although I have less personal time, I am about to embark on an interesting journey and want to combine that with a lot of other tweaks in my personal life. For example, I’m on an aggressive diet at the moment and want to re-establish my interest in climbing, cycling and other activities. I want to learn to sail (again), take up fishing, learn to fly, go on more crazy adventures – and other stuff.

Jon.

So I got my approval to work in the United States. That came with a folder a half inch thick worth of supporting evidence that was necessary in order to convince the powers that be. I now need to go see some people and have some poking and prodding before (hopefully) they will issue me with a magical rubber stamped piece of paper in my passport and I can move. At this point, the clock is ticking – it’s likely that I’ll be out of here within two months at this point.

I’ve got a lot of fun ahead of me. I don’t have a US Social Security Number (SSN) and I can’t get one until after I move, but I probably can’t get a US bank account without an SSN either. And nobody really wants to let a house/appartment to you if you don’t have a US bank account… so I asked a friend and got the reply I expected – namely that I’m going to have a month of pain after I move. Figures. I don’t actually expect this to be easy, but I’m hopeful that I won’t get caught up in too much needless paperwork and legal red tape crappiness.

In preparation for the move, I’m moving my mail and other stuff onto machines that aren’t at home. I can’t move stuff onto dmesg and panic directly, because I need some kind of SLA to exist – so those machines are secondarying for me from this point in. Instead, I’ve setup a couple of new virtual machines with linode, Bytemark and so on. Some virtual machines like fremont.jonmasters.org and london.jonmasters.org are in the process of being made ready for this stuff. They’ll then host email and round-robbin on web content.

Jon.

So, I’m “back” in the UK after a couple of weeks the other side of the pond. The more often I do this, the more I realize how totally I don’t feel I belong in this country – the UK’s a nice place to visit, but I’m done with living here. For me, the only issue is whether I ultimately settle in the US or in Canada. The former is preferable for high tech jobs, but the latter is politically and socially more conducive to my way of thinking. This is important, especially when you just decided that being an atheist isn’t nearly as cool as being a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster – pirates rule! So I ordered a copy of the Gospel of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and am incidentally also waiting for permission to make “Linux is evolution, not intelligent design” t-shirts. As soon as I get approval, I’ll stick some up on cafe press.

I had a revalation at OLS. This wasn’t purely alcohol related, but I realized that I really do want to build my own cutter ship and sail the seas. It’s something I’ve been saying that I want to do, but now I’ve decided that these things don’t happen unless you start somewhere. So, I’m going to have the proceeds from a certain book go into a fund for making this dream a reality – it’ll take more than that to actually build the thing (I’ve ordered a couple of books on boat building and will need to take a lot more lessons in sailing as I’ve forgotten a lot of what I learned) but it’s a start. I’ve so far found at least one person who wants to sail with me, so that’s cool too. Motto: it’s very dangerous to offer me compelling justification

Canada was fantastic. Did I mention that it’s one of the greatest countries in the world? I think I did, just a few times. In fact, I’m going to do another weekend trip sometime soon since I think October/November is just a little too far away to be over in North America again. I hung out in Montreal and Ottawa for most of the time around and during OLS. I saw a bunch of talks, hosted a BOF on drivers, had a lot of ideas, talked to really cool people, consumed 12 shots of coffee in a day, had 6 whiskeys and 10 shots on another day, generally didn’t sleep much for a week, and realized that OLS is just getting cooler as the years pass. Sure the programme could do with more work next year – but who can honestly say that’s the only reason for turning up?

Noise cancellation headphones rock. I picked up a pair at Logan the other night (right after having a double extra order of Clam Chowder at Legal Sea Foods – the folks there were totally understanding of my need to stock up before my return to the land of the quaint and boring) from a store where the dude who sold me this impulsive buy recognized the iPod Linux bootloader on my iPod – turns out Mad Dog goes there quite often too. Funny. Anyway, I’m now able to turn off the annoying world around me, thanks to the power of a little signal processing and basic audio theory applied to a gadget that should have been installed in every Jet Liner about a billion years ago anyway.

Did I mention that Canada rocks?

Jon.