Derailment
A Train Of Thought That Jumped The Track

I'm getting excited about the speaker list at Surge 2010. Lots of top talent, and all will be talking about challenges faced, mistakes made, and lessons learned in building scalable systems. I am particularly looking forward to hearing Bryan Cantrill talk about building enterprise solutions from commodity components, which is a big part of what I do at OmniTI.

Bryan has some fascinating stories from his days at Sun Microsystems, and he's an amazing speaker who has been described as "Tigger on speed". I'm hoping for a reprise of his characterization of a hard drive that unexpectedly reset when a high LBA was requested.

The original meaning of the word nightmare referred to the feeling of suffocation caused by an evil spirit. I like etymology, especially the way it illuminates changes in meaning over time. Americans are suffocating under the weight of endless "security" measures with no end in sight. Will we ever again be able to keep our shoes on at the airport? Will we one day have to be screened in the nude before taking any public transportation? Where does it end?

Maybe it will end if we stop our worst-case thinking. It's a reflex when we think about security, especially for those in positions of authority who are thinking about their accountability should "the worst" happen. That's how we end up with rule after rule, weaving a blanket of "protection" that suffocates the liberty it is meant to safeguard. That's my nightmare scenario.

I'm planning to attend Velocity 2010. I've never been before, and I'm looking forward to learning new things and meeting new people. Devops is a popular term, and we live it at OmniTI, so I'm excited about bringing back knowledge to improve it in our operations and development teams.

Weapons of Mass Dilution and the threat of New Age terrorists. Brilliant! Eerily accurate with respect to the security response:

"Meanwhile, new security measures at airports require that all water bottles be scanned to ensure that they are not being used to smuggle the memory of an explosion on board a plane."

Multiple axes of humor.

It's over. A disappointing end to a record-breaking season for the Caps, at the hands of the lowest-seeded team in the East. Montreal got spectacular goaltending from Jaroslav Halak down the stretch that kept them in the games where the Caps heavily out-shot them. Game 7 had stout defense on both sides, but the lack of power play production was the Caps' downfall. You simply cannot win in the playoffs scoring so little on the man advantage.

Coverage summary

Dennis Clarke noticed something interesting in a trailer for Disney's upcoming TRON Legacy movie. A glimpse of an "old" computer interface shows what looks like a window running "top" and another window containing a semblance of "uname -a" from a Solaris machine.

Reminds me of spotting nmap in Matrix Reloaded.

Good news for Habs fans, not so good news for Caps faithful. Last night was a pretty disappointing result despite a high volume of shots on Halak. There's a good summary and links to coverage at Caps Nut.

Sony has announced that it is ending production of the venerable 3.5" floppy disk. Additional coverage at Ars Technica.

Things like this cause me to wax nostalgic (a sure sign of advancing age, at least in Internet terms,) but I'll simply recall that my first OS (MS-DOS) came on something like 3-4 floppies. We also thought the boot-sector viruses that often rode around on floppies were a terrible scourge. If only we'd known what was to come.

A lackluster offense (until the third period) and amazing goaltending by Halak. It's a cliche that elimination games are difficult for the series leader to win, but we've got to snap out of this habit of getting behind or we'll have no energy left.

Another solid game for the Caps, taking the series lead to 3-1 with a chance to put it away at home on Friday. A nail-biter through two (Varly's glove should be bronzed when this is all over) but explosive offense in the third was the difference.