urwhatu

Little known, but excellent option to sudoers file

insults

   If set, sudo will insult users when they enter an incorrect password.  This flag is off by default.

Baby Toupee?!

Surely this is a joke?

Technorati Tags: humor

Facebook Book

I just finished reading "The Facebook Book" by my friend Karel Baloun. It's a tasty blend of like-you-were-there-vignette, easy-going-humor, a hint of salty-engineer, with a large slathering of starry-eyed-startup-wanderlust.

The two-minute summary: at the end of reading it, you literally feel like you worked at the faceboook for the couple of years prior. You know the inside jokes, you know the nicknames, and you know the history of the software, the way the company was built and funded, and, e.g., how darn similar the facebook seems to a lot of other startups that don't achieve anywhere near its success (Game room with an Xbox? Where have i seen THAT movie before? Fancy chairs and on-the-company-caffeine?). Karel captures more than a few salient observations about what the team had to do to stay focused and get the product out the door. E.g., when they had 2.5 million registered members and over a billion pageviews a month, they were still making all site changes as root. Without version control. Yes, you read that right. That's worth thinking about the next time you find yourself in a bickering match about version control for your nobody-even-uses-it-yet website/product (*clears throat, looks askance*). For you Splunkers out there -- for the record, facebook uses Subversion and TRAC. Another thing is the scary drink-the-koolaid level of single-minded focus the company has. As an engineer, page 39's simple recipe for how to get a great application built is worth the ten bucks. And so on.

My favorite sentence in the book, from the chapter "Giving users what they want": "Facebook gives users what they want, which for college students is information about their friends and school mates, for the purpose of, well, um, sex." Perspicacious, indeed! Recommended.

Technorati Tags: facebook

Caltrain and Intel WiMax

Can't wait for this.

Technorati Tags: Caltrain, Intel, WiMax

Linux Magazine Connection Tips (?!) of the Week

These have got to be the saddest Linux tips I've ever seen. For people who are subscribing to Linux magazine? For example, this week

grep is great if you're looking for a fixed pattern. But egrep (a kind of alias for grep -E) is far superior
because it can search for matches based on a regular expression. For example, the command...

$ egrep -w -E '.ink$' /var/dict/words
link
mink
oink
pink
...

... searches for any whole, four-letter word that end with "ink.

So why does this suck so much? First of all, what's with the redundant egrep -E? Perhaps homie doesn't know that you don't have to specify -E to egrep because, after all, grep, egrep, and fgrep are almost always the same binary and just switching their behavior based on argv[0]:

stechert@kirin:~ [1035] $ ls -l /usr/bin/{e,f,}grep
-rwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 204496 Jan 13 11:26 /usr/bin/egrep
-rwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 204496 Jan 13 11:26 /usr/bin/fgrep
-rwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 204496 Jan 13 11:26 /usr/bin/grep

Second of all, WTF is a "fixed pattern"? Obviously, the dude who wrote this doesn't know either because his example works just fine with grep:

stechert@kirin:~ [1036] $ grep -w '.ink$' /usr/share/dict/words
bink
dink
fink
gink
jink
kink
link
mink
pink
rink
sink
tink
wink
zink

He should have read the man page which clearly makes the distinction between basic and extended regular expressions. Why not use an example with infixed OR, optional matching, or something? Make it interesting -- 90% of people I know who use Linux know this stuff rote. How about:

stechert@kirin:~ [1037] $ grep -w '.?ink$' /usr/share/dict/words
stechert@kirin:~ [1038] $ grep -Ew '.?ink$' /usr/share/dict/words
bink
dink
fink
gink
ink
jink
kink
link
mink
pink
rink
sink
tink
wink
zink

See? That wasn't so hard. Or maybe illustrate the difference in how wildcards are specified:

stechert@kirin:~ [1039] $ grep -w '\(.\)in\1$' /usr/share/dict/words
ging
kink
tint
stechert@kirin:~ [1040] $ grep -Ew '(.)in\1$' /usr/share/dict/words
ging
kink
tint
stechert@kirin:~ [1041] $ grep -Ew '\(.\)in\1$' /usr/share/dict/words
grep: Invalid back reference

*sigh* ok rant over -- just had to get this off my chest because this is the second time in 3 weeks there's been some utter foolishness in that newsletter (last time it was some nincompoopery about using 'cd $OLDPWD' instead of just 'cd -').

Technorati Tags: linux magazine, nincompoopery

No, THIS is the Definition of Ironic

The Long Tail, a book by the guy who's announced the end of the hit, is headed straight to number one. Many declare it his best day ever.

Lack of Openness Causes Teen's Death

For the last few weeks, Japan has been in an uproar over the death-by-severing of sixteen year old Hirosuke Ichikawa. The sad thing that's missing from a lot of the print-based news articles (versus NHK's nightly news show) is that the elevator was regularly serviced, but that the third party maintenance company blames the problem on the fact that they were handicapped in their ability to diagnose and repair the elevator because the Schindler elevator company was reluctant to share technical details about the elevator with them (or to sell proper repair parts). The upshot of the latest articles is that Schindler elevators are experiencing over 300 accidents per year, at a rate about 3 times worse than its peers.

While the consequences are usually less severe, this is analogous to what we see with closed software, too. I wonder how long it will be until we start seeing companies providing open solutions for equipment like elevators? Now that I can build my own CNC machine, all I need is open sourced CNC instructions, raw materials, and open source control code to have a fully-open elevator. Wouldn't you rather ride in an elevator whose control system has been flushed of shallow bugs? I would.

Technorati Tags: open source

Mac OS X Internals

I ordered this book over a year ago. It was originally going to cost around $35 (which is what I ended up paying as a result of the pre-order). It's now about $65 on Amazon and when it arrived it was over 1600 pages. When Vito brought it over, he said "your unabridged dictionary has arrived". I haven't read it yet, but I get the feeling somebody's editor was on vacation :-).

Technorati Tags: OSX

Blurb Clickership

"We're grateful for the traffic, but I'll be interested to see how the NYT's readership measures against a real media giant such as fark.com." - from today's language log entry.

True readership is often harder to perceive (and prove) than clickership. Fark, slashdot, and digg provide just enough blurb to help you decide whether or not to click through. You don't get the need-to-know from the "article" itself. NYT is different. I often don't have to click through to get the author's point, so I don't. Since the Times doesn't provide stats on their articles (why not?), site owners measure its influence using their own logs, which are heavily biased against self-contained writing. Two bits of advice NYT: 1) make stats public so people get it or 2) create your own "blurb" feed.

Technorati Tags: blurbs

How Turd Polishing Brought Hollywood to the Valley

This comment by Theo de Raadt succinctly both captures and dismisses the hype that pervades so much of technology development:

"I don't have a problem with Linux; I just don't use it. Nor do I think it is newer and better or brighter or has less calories; everything we build is turds, we just move them around or shine them or have a different view on which way they should be rolled. I'm just tired of the various evangelical approaches being taken by so many of the Linux users and developers."

Would that more people had such an appropriately measured opinion of software. In a world where one of our leading lights (Yahoo) is run by an ex-studio-exec, internet/software development is starting to look more and more like the glistening, saccharine, fluorescent hard candy of Hollywood. Ruby on Rails is not going to be the difference between whether or not your startup is going to survive. Nor is your ability to mash up with some web service out there. Those trends will definitely sell books and magazines though. And they will improve conference attendance. And the newly anointed leaders of the latest fad will be more than happy to accept your idolatry. In Hollywood, it's all about survivor and reality shows. In the valley, it's all about social networks, trendy languages, and web services.

Meanwhile, the hard/worthwhile stuff is being done in DARPA grand challenges, or by folks like Theo de Raadt, or in any number of spotlight-free back corners.

Technorati Tags: Programming