Eroding bad behavior, one small step at a time

Sometimes I find myself wondering what is wrong with the world. Today's case is one of KC (@KdotCdot) - not KC herself, but the reaction to her "Creeper Cards".

I haven't had any experiences with being a target of any meaningful harassment at tech conferences, but that's not terribly surprising; I'm a straight male. I haven't knowingly been the cause of any, either. But the way I phrased that outlines part of the problem: I don't know. Given the number of socially awkward (and socially oblivious) people in the tech community, both male and female, not knowing is at least part of the problem.

I have to imagine that the vast majority of harassment at conferences are fairly minor things; things that are inappropriate, annoying, and frustrating, but at the same time, things that the targets choose to try to ignore. These still contribute to a culture that is hostile and pushes people away.  These are also the things that most anti-harassment policies will only have a minor effect on, because they are, essentially, the cost of trying to be part of the community.

This sucks.

The "Creeper Cards" seemed to be, from my point of view, a great way to non-confrontationally say, "WTF dude" and begin to push back on the culture of bad behaviors by calling it out and making it clear that something went wrong there.

Anti-harassment policies seem to attack the problem from the other end of the spectrum, in dealing with the things that are reported, and by making it more apparent which conferences have organizers that have at least some understanding of the issues in this space. Not everything will be reported; it's well known that throughout society these things are vastly under-reported for various reasons.

So I can't figure out why something so simple as a card that you can use to point out when someone is being an ass, and maybe, just maybe, trigger some rethinking and a change in behavior, would be a bad thing.

The future of networking

Back in January, I read a blog post about Van Jacobson's talk at Linux Conf.au 2006. (LWN's coverage and the slides) This is some amazing stuff. I can't really do these justice - go read. The slides show some amazing numbers in terms of potential speedups through rearchitecting.

What prompted this entry, however, has nothing to do with that. Instead, it has to do with another Van Jacobson talk at Google that deserves attention - namely A New Way to Look at Networking. Where the other paper and talk were about performance, this talk is more about thinking about what's next - what will the ubiquitous network of 20 years from now look like, and how to make it work. (I'll spoil a slide near the end, as a teaser - PGP meets BitTorrent and hitches a ride on an airplane. (Not Pacific Air 121, however.))

Ye Olde Scrum

At work this week there was a very good talk about "Scrum Et Al", given by Ken Schwaber.

Executive summary: Go watch this, if you're at all interested in Agile teams and iterative development, it's definitely worth your time.

What struck me most while watching this, was how much I wished I had gotten around to reading something about it years ago. (I still haven't, but this video is enough to get me interested now.) At my last job, we were doing something informal, but not too far off of this. Quarterly releases, along with a relentless pace of new features, improving interfaces, improving security, improving developer productivity, etc. Seeing this talk reaffirms my belief that the only good way to build software products is iteratively. Being able to say, "I only need to worry about X right now." and sitting down and doing X, getting it done, clean, bugfixed, and then being able to say, "Ok, what's next?", all the while having a product that can be released at basically any time, maybe multiple times, and a simply relentless pace of improvements? This is great! Unfortunately, I don't think very many business majors have figured this out yet.

Git presentations

At Penguicon in April, I gave a basic Git tutorial, and this week at Ubucon I gave a small variation of that talk, where I tried to cover why distributed SCMs are so much better for free software work.

These presentations are both up at http://h4x0r5.com/~ryan/presentations/

Also, Junio Hamano (Git Maintainer), gave a great talk at OLS:  http://members.cox.net/junkio/200607-ols.pdf

Hardware update (belated)

So, eventually, I did figure out what was wrong with my hardware.

It appears to have been nothing more than a horribly overheating processor, and thus, fixed by a simple application of some thermal paste. (65C = bad, generally)

On that note, I now have to decide what kind of upgrading I want to do, and whether or not I build a MythTV box (probably), but at least I can sit on it for a bit until prices drop as rumored in July.

Passwords, argh

With all the things I need to do to get organized around a new job, one of the things I've ended up doing a lot of is creating new accounts.  With new passwords, of course.

What really irks me is that there is *no* consistency in the password requirements, so, even if I wanted to reuse a password for a few things, it would be darn near impossible.

{0,2}capital letters, {0,2}numbers {0,2}lowercase letters, {4-6}minimum characters, {4-8}maximum characters.
The situation has gotten, well, frankly ridiculous.  Maybe Passport (or something similar) wasn't as horrible an idea as it first appeared.

One dead (sorta) computer

Now that I'm moved, and I'm starting to get settled in, finally, I setup some computers tonight.

• Well, my gaming/desktop computer worked fine (actually, haven't booted Linux on it, yet, but Windows is fine.)


• My old webhost/server box is up fine, as well.


• Unfortunately, my primary NFS/file server won't boot.

I get a fun variety of errors:

• Sometimes, I get a recursive fault and the kernel locks (2.6.16, though, I'm not sure it matters)


• Sometimes, I get a "failed to mount /dev/md4, please specify root fs with root=" (etc/paraphrased)


• Sometimes, I get a crc error during "Uncompressing Linux"


• Sometimes, I get an "Invalid format" during "Uncompressing Linux"


• Sometimes, I get partway into boot and a beautiful screen full or random colors and letters flashes, and the machine reboots.

Given how inconsistent the failures are, my gut says "motherboard, ram or CPU", and not harddrive.  (I did really expect at least one harddrive to fail, though.)

The case for this machine did get a nice dent added to it during the move (on the motherboard side, not the other side).

I think I need to make a DSL boot USB key, and see if that fixes it, just to confirm, otherwise, debugging this is going to be a pain.  Damn fileserver shouldn't be the broken machine. :(