I haven’t been posting a lot recently, so I thought I would just kind of outline a little of what has been going on recently.

Some members of the RAS installed the weather station on the roof of Ryerson today (I wasn’t involved in the efforts today unfortunately). In addition, the web view now works (not me again), which I started on. It is still temporary, but it is currently up. I will be assembling a better website, which will be more permanent. I was fearing we wouldn’t be able to get it onto a POSIX operating system, but then wview came to the rescue. I will put up some pictures soon. It was really great to see it finally on the roof. It was some random idea I had a while ago, and it finally materialized.

The biggest news for me today is that I was accepted to Google Summer of Code on the Globus Toolkit. I will be working on a diagnostic administrator interface framework; essentially, it is more Python+XML work, but with Globus. This will also be the third summer in a row that I have done XML work with people based at a national lab (Globus is based at Argonne–not the same as actually working there for the summer, but I will be visiting soon). I will also be working at the Maclab, which should be fun and a chance to do some real work on projects there.

A lot of people are leaving the maclab at the end of the quarter, so I will end up with quite a bit more on my plate it looks like. After the last two weeks or so, I look foreword to that less. Over the last break, I converted many of the servers to Leopard Server, Apple’s latest rendition in bloated bad design. From that experience alone, I lost all respect for Apple (there wasn’t much there in the first place). What kind of upgrade on a server edition of the Operating System overwrites the most basic of configuration and files on upgrade? This last week, our web/dhcp server went down at the same time as our print system, our two most vital systems. From what it looks like now, DirectoryService, the LDAPesque utility that Apple now uses for local accounts as well. epically failed, and I do mean epic. There are some other problems as well; the actual cause is still allusive, but we at first presumed hackers, which can’t be ruled out. The print system? As far as we can tell, the problem is that Leopard is a horrid piece of shit that ruins every piece of software it touches. The implementation of CUPS on it is horribly broken (to a vast extent), despite the fact Apple owns it! I will spend more time in the short future on a series of posts that outlines my points of hatred for it. Dealing with the problems rated pretty high on my rankings of stressful events, and there is still work to be done.

Together with another failure, this time from NSIT, I think I know fully grasp an important life lesson: assume incompetence. NSIT made a pathetic effort to announce that they were going to switch the LDAP server from OpenLDAP to a Sun-based implementation . Apparently, they had a test server, but they neglected to give the address out, or test it on their own machines. NSITE/USITE has its own Macs, even another Maclab (I think of it as the bazarro Maclab; the imaging work is handled remotely, the none of staff know much computers from what I hear, there are few users, and the software is up to date), of which at least some run Tiger. No one tested these to see if logins would, you know, work. Anyways, all our tigers failed to login after the switch. It turned out to be some check box on some security page (in fact the only check box on the security page), for which it took 7 people 48 hours (I think that’s with few breaks in it) to find the fix. We decided to let them deal with it as it was their problem. Incompetence really explains this whole thing well. When we were switching to Leopard on the servers, the ServerAdmin presented us with a catch-22; it was impossible to save setting on one page without saving the settings on another, but it was impossible to save settings on the other one without first saving the changes on the first. What accounts for this flagrant error in the GUI? Why incompetence of course! I experienced a similar sort of situation on a Sun box I work on; everything program I used seemed broken. I e-mailed the sysadmins for a while at which point this golden rule struck me. I ended up compiling any program that failed to work on something. For example, there was some weird error with make. so I compiled and installed gmake to my home directory, and it solved all my problems. I suppose it is not fair to just call this incompetence; laziness should be added in there somewhere.

Some other stuff has been happening, but that makes for a decent mind-purge. It’s nice out again! I can where sandals and shorts comfortably!