The thing that baffled me was that someone had all this information that we’d never heard of. Literally, I didn’t know this company existed until they sent us this letter and our information existed on their computers for purposes I’m still trying to understand.

Well, we got the account number changed and we’re spending the next week or two connecting with people and businesses that need to know the new one.

What’s ironic, I think, is that I spent the morning yesterday speaking to a group of people on social networking. That, as educators, they had an opportunity to teach their students about apprpropriate uses of facebook by modeling it and that sharing some information online is not bad and allows them to connect with this student generation.

However, I believe that this current generation lives in a glass house; that information for them and communication is something that happens within the context of a larger community.

The problem comes though is that a weakness with that idea is the inability to be alone. In college some of the most valuable times for this extrovert were up at Cedar Campus, InterVarsity’s training center in Michigan, spending Sunday afternoon’s being quiet and alone–an activity that required that I not interact with people or technology.

I think this is where experience and a different viewpoint become valuable. Managing information online is becoming more of a dance. Reveal too little and you lose your ability to, in a very 21st century sort of way, “connect”. Reveal too much and you lose your identity.

Well, I helped out Chapter Focus Week this year (InterVarsity runs week long camps at the end of each Spring semester for training and planning for groups for the next school year) and got into some discussions with some friends from NIU and we had some really in depth talks about how we fit into the body and how might IT people be better used or even visualize what they can do for the Kingdom and the idea was floated about having a tech exchange, if you will, where needs can be met with skills. People who otherwise wouldn’t be connect to InterVarsity, the particular ministry I help out in, could reconnect with their alma mater or even the movement in general. Students who are already moving towards a degree can cut their teeth on projects they might otherwise have not known about and InterVarsity chapters can benefit as a whole, and hopefully people can have a fun time doing it.

One of the things I had always appreciated about my time in InterVarsity has been the opportunities I have had to participate, to include my particular skillset (whether it be web design, sound, or geek-fu in general) and to help; it’s been fun, challenging and I’ve always came away learning something. I’ve literally prayed over computers (you laugh, but have you tried it?) and watched God do some amazing things in the field of technology. In short, it’s been a growing experience.

On the same end, I know there is an unending need for skill and there are knowledge gaps that occur when information isn’t passed on. Like a doctor, there seems to be no shortage of ‘sick’ computers. Where does that meet? I think Romans 12 offers a suggestion. IT people are a part of the greater Body and have a vital role to play in advancing God’s kingdom. We can help. So, in the spirit of Open Source Communities, I’d like to propose Body Sourcing; allowing IT people who are a part of a community a chance to help out.

I’ve created a facebook group ‘IV Students/Alumni with IT Skills’ as hopefully a start to this. If you’re not on facebook (and why aren’t you?), get on, and if you’d like to contribute, or even benefit from it, join the group and we can get a dialogue going. Either way, please tell your friends because it’ll be as good as the community that comes to it and by all means have a good time .

 - Yesterday was technology day.  We ended up severing ties with our dear ‘friends’ Verizon; we switched to vonage.  Along with that, I followed the instructions on their site and made our house into a closed loop.  If you cut your physical connection to Verizon, you can plug your vonage router into a phone jack in your house and suddenly all of your phones are vonage phones; it’s very cool.  We also bought an iMac this year; yes, an iMac.  Last night, after some struggle, I finally finished configuring it (it always is a struggle in a paradigm shift). We are owners of a computer manufactured by Apple…wow, I said it. I hear admitting it is a first step.

 - Lord willing, we’ll have some big news to announce soon. Pray for us if you think about it, we’re trying to make something logistically work that will be…big.

 - Along with that, Sunday was one of those Spirit filled days at Church where God really affirmed alot of things in our hearts.  The talk is available here, and it was about God’s will for us, and death and doing your life well.  Great stuff; we sang ‘We Rest On Thee’ afterwards, which, if one could have them, is our theme song as a couple (like Over The Rhine’s music, that song factors in a couple of key moments for us in our marriage).  Anyway, couldn’t sing the second or third verse just for weeping; the Pastor led and I have to wonder what he was thinking. It’s a balm to have God really challenge, convict and encourage you all at the same time. 

We go in faith, our own great weakness feeling,
And needing more each day Thy grace to know:
Yet from our hearts a song of triumph pealing,
“We rest on Thee, and in Thy Name we go.”
Yet from our hearts a song of triumph pealing,
“We rest on Thee, and in Thy Name we go.”

\

In case, you can’t see it, the sticker on the top says ‘This computer is never obsolete’ – right above the sticker that says 533Mhz Celeron (a rather older, slower computer).

Basically, if you pay them 99 dollars every two years, they’ll upgrade your computer for you (written in fine print).  The humor opportunities are endless when you involve marketing people .

In a nutshell, it’ll be a while before our shop goes to it.  I’ve been running it for about a month now and I’ve been underwhelmed (have I said that?  I distinctly remember saying that…).  For a business customer, there are some signficant issues with the interface. Also, it greatly dissapoints me knowing what was not in Vista and yet it still took them like 5 years to get the thing out of the door.

After a growing look at the OS, the best and worst thing it has going for it is that it changes the interface signficantly.  Paradigms are shifted as well in that some commonalities to previous versions of Windows are now gone.  Chief among them is the idea of drives.  Your C drive and all network drives a bit more hidden in the interface, and I’ve still yet to find a way to map a drive efficently (maybe I’m missing it?).  Run is missing as well, which really irks me.

I’ve been going through a number of programs that are not uncommon to a normal user and there are a number of issues that I’ve been running into in getting them to work.  One such example is iTunes/iPod; when an iPod is plugged into the system, it initially wants to scan it for errors and, in my experience, caused some disk issues on the iPod itself.  iTunes has been a bit more cagey than it normally is. 

Then there’s the issue of missing components.  I’ve been waiting for the update to NTFS, a 10 year old file system, for a while and from the sound of it, the planned FS that was going into Vista was going to be great, but they just simply didn’t have time. I trust that much of what they did have time for was security issues. 

Overall, as I’ve said before, it’s pretty and cool looking.  The worst part about this release is that there are stable, viable alternatives out there (including Windows XP) that do the job better than Vista.  Steve Balmer said in an interview last night that they plan to have 200 Million copies of Vista in production this year; we’ll see.

To me, it reminds me somewhat of Windows ME only with the NT Codebase.  I can only hope I’m wrong…

One thing I noticed though is that making a concentrated effort to read has really helped me feel productive on days that it just seems as though I live on the Computer/Network.  It’s really a refreshing project to make reading a priority (all my reader friends out there are laughing right now). 

Sometime soon, I’ve got to get a list of the books that are on my shelf from Urbana (many of which are of InterVarsity Press’ new inprint ‘Likewise‘).  On top of those, there have been a couple of other recomendations that I’m going to take up like ‘A theology of the body’ by John Paul II.

I’m currently going through my friend Paul Grant’s book, ‘Blessed are the uncool’ and I have to say it’s really quite good.  A further review will come, but essentially what he’s doing is deconstructing the idea of ‘cool’ culturally and what cool’s ultimate purpose is and the problems that come with it.  It’s made me rethink how I see some pieces of technology, for example, and how cool markets itself in the IT profession rather effectively by exploiting my demographic’s need for ‘the new’. 

For example, Windows Vista has been running on my desktop at work for a few weeks now and I’m finding that I dispise it in the worst way.  Typically, I like to try it new Operating Systems on my desktop prior to releasing them to others or preping for supporting them and Vista has taken over that spot.  The thing I’m finding is that it’s actually harder to do normal tasks and that I’m turning to my XP box more and more just to do basic things.  ‘Explorer’ is ridiculously cumbersome and there is no easy way to access network drives.  Ultimately, it will be the future, but it’s not MS’s best Operating System by any stretch. 

But here’s the thing, it looks cool.  That fundamentally disturbs me.  What disturbs me even more is reading reports of the countless features that were evicerated from the OS in order to make it out the door in time.  Preferrably, I would rather have a better functioning product than a new paint job. 

I’ve always believed that as a Christian I’ve longed excellence (and often I fall short, but that is another story), but reading Paul’s book really has helped clarify where quality is often replaced by cool.

Apple’s efforts to do quality are often opressed by their desire for cool.  A good example is the XServ RAID, which I’ve talked about ad nauseum on this blog but still remains woefully undermarketed by Apple.  The thing is that it’s probably one of their stronger products by far, including the iPod.  It’s too easy, it seems, to market cool rather than quality or even mask the two together.

The other thing that has been frustrating me of late has been the growing number of inappropriate pieces that wind up on the site as well. 

Having to deal with all the stories marked NSFW (Not Safe For Work – you can guess what that entails), the multiple blog links (that usually go down under the strain) and the just crap that has show up late has me wanting to get my tech news elsewhere .

For you non geek readers, it’s been either slashdot.org or digg.com for the last 8 years giving regular tech news to the masses; it’s Publisher’s Weekly, if you will, for the publishing industry.  The problem with digg though is that is primairly user-driven content; it lives and dies by it’s readership.  Since it’s gotten a bit bigger, it tends to attract the lowest common denominator coupled with the site branching out into regular news has done it’s share to dillute the core audience.

Well, we’ll see where it goes; it’s done it’s share of not being impressive lately .

The problem is that most of the people on facebook have not idea the sensitivity of the information they post online.  On of my friends joined one of the groups complaining about the private information that is now easier to find when on his profile just lines below his stating that facebook was creepy was his home address, cell and home phone numbers and birthday; all information that is more useful in stalking, or identity theft, than what groups the person is involved in. 

Comm. theory says that people tend to blackbox mediated communication and that when they communicate online regardless of the site they believe that it is either only viewable by them or that only their friends will read it.  The truth is that most things you write online are forever committed to the Internet’s memory, if you will, thanks to sites like google’s archive and the wayback machine.  What I find interesting is that the feeds off of facebook are simply illuminating that fact for the throngs of people who are less than careful about what information that they are putting online; it’s essentially comparable to looking at yourself in a mirror and realizing that you died your hair purple, have ‘fool’ written in black crayon across your foor head and seeing a ‘kick me’ sign on your back.

Perhaps this will cause people to either flock away from facebook or think a bit more cautiously about what they post online.

p.s. This post is a feed into facebook as well; the original site is http://talk.bearla.com.

You may remember the purpose of this is to give a bit of a primer and ethnography, of sorts, from a primairly Microsoft, IIS world to a Linux/Apache world.

Well, recently the second server came in and I’ve been getting heartbeat up and rolling.  The complex thing about this is that the nics that service the shared IP address must be in the same slot and referenced the same (i.e. eth0) otherwise sadness will occur. 

After the fold, a brief overview of heartbeat and a plea for questions.

Currently, I have two front ends servicing a shared IP address and an apache instance (see here for more detail).  Heartbeat2 is running in between those two boxes on a crossover cable and privately addressed IPs.  A third connection services the rsync link to a privately addressed staging server with the staging server only accepting connections between the front ends. 

What’s nice is that once I figured out that the nics that share the resources needed to be in the same slot and once the heartbeat was running over a crossover cable, life was strangely easy.  Apache was trivial to setup since I just followed the instructions in the link above.  There are several good links off of that site and you would do well with exploring it if you’re in need of that information. 

In regards to heartbeat, I can’t emphasize enough that STONITH should be used for the cluster.  When I was creating some other resources before I turned it on, the box whigged out and decided to not come back up; STONITH fixed that.

Also, one final note on rsync.  I want to share my rsync command because I discovered a few things.  First, if you set AD permissions on a directory on your staging server and rsync it over, the perms will not copy successfully.  You must throw the –owner no and –group no parameters in there so that the rsync server won’t touch ownership on the frontend.

With that said, here’s my rsync with notes as to what each line does (borrowed from overtone.org’s long defunct article):

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/rsync –password-file /root/bin/rsync.pass \ #my password file I created for the rsync user
                     -avz user@1.2.3.4::share #avz \ (recursive, verbose, compressed) user@1.2.3.4 (user@staging server) and share is the rsync share I setup
                     –address 1.2.3.5 \ # the private interface on the front end I’m using to communicate with the staging server
                     –exclude /directory \ # a directory I’m excluding from the copy because I was having problems getting it up there
                     –owner no \ # put to keep the front end’s permissions from attempting to be copied over.
                     –group no \ # put to keep the group ownership from being changed
                     –delete \ # anything different?  change it.
                     /srv/www/htdocs # the directory I’m copying.

Even though this will go on into production shortly, please e-mail me if you have questions about my setup and want to emulate it; the people I’ve talked to with this have all been extremely helpful and I want to further the love.