July 2006 Archives

I tried upgrading the host machine from Apache 1.3 to 2.2 today - it went poorly. torres came back easily enough, but getting it to co-operate with snowcrash wasn't fun. I was likely making a mistake trying to integrate my hacked and hacked again httpd.conf into the default 2.2 configs that come with the FreeBSD port (no idea how much they resemble "vendor" configs). I'll now do what I ought to have done in the first place, and set up a machine that mirrors torres then make it work with 2.2, without worries about live data and losing logs and such. I'll try it sober as a judge next time too, when it isn't 30 degrees both outside and in.

Still, I hate giving up on technical stuff.

As a sop to the monkey in me, I've added a disclaimer and contact page. It's really ugly.

A word (or words, I'm not sure) in common use in talking about sports is core. Or corps. I'm not sure what it's meant to be, and that's why I'm posting. I doubt anybody else really knows either, but what the hell.

It goes like this. When talking about Edmonton's roster, for instance, it's often said that "Lowe is building around the core players" and names are named: Smyth and Hemsky, usually. I've not ever seen corps used in that fashion.

Roughly and in this context, core means the key guys. "The central or most important part of something, in particular," says my dictionary widget. Corps means the thing as a whole. "A body of people engaged in a particular activity." Clearly, they have vastly different meanings.

But things get confused when somebody says something like "I think Lowe will try to pull a Buffalo and go with a solid defensive core." Certainly, one could consider guys like Smith and Staios to be solid, core guys. You can build a blueline around them. (You'd rather build around Pronger and Smith, but you takes what you can gets.) But that's obviously not what's intended. Buffalo had a strong blueline *corps* last year, with no real standouts: they didn't really have a *core*.

Except, I guess, one could make the argument that the corps was core: 6 men (or 10 or 50 or whatever it was by the time the Hurricanes knocked them out of the Eastern Conference Finals), none of whom were really the key, and that was their strength. But while I haven't looked, I suspect that ice time was not divided exactly evenly amongst the 6 guys who dressed each game. Some played more minutes (Lydman), while others played less (Jillson). Although looking at the TOI/G figures, their top 4 are all pretty close, although how Lydman and Tallinder can be +14 and Cambpell a -5 is kind of curious-making. They basically had two tiers: 20-24 minute a night guys, and 15-18 minutes a night guys. But I digress again.

I'm going to assume that the language choice - particularly on weblogs and web boards - is simple ignorance or something akin to a spoonerism (what do you call it when you think one word and type another?), but maybe I'm missing something too.

(Edit, nobody ever said corpse. But I suppose poor Cory Cross came close to impersonating one last season.)

I was listening to Martin McKeay's Network Security Podcast this morning (26 July 2006 episode) and he said something early on that struck me:

"People say they want security, but what they really want is ease of use."

I think it's a mistake to separate the two; they're not exactly part of a single continuum, but they're close. If something is not easy to use, then people will work out ways around it, thus obviating the security. Consider that the most secure computer is one that is disconnected from a network, turned off, and physically isolated from anybody and anything. Not very easy to use it though. The easiest computer to use is one with no passwords, no accounts, and anybody can do anything they like to it - not very secure. The goal of security is to find some place in the middle, such that the users don't have to work around your security in order to be able to actually use the damn thing. Force password changes every week? Users will alternate the same two passwords. Disallow that, and they'll alternate three. Disallow re-use, and they'll make them easy to remember: cat. dog. shit. assholemademechangemypasswordagain. Sooner or later, you get to the point where users are writing them down on stickies and putting them next to the machine.

If something is too difficult to use, it's not secure, because nobody will use it. They'll figure out another way to do the same thing, and that other way is likely less secure. Figure out with your users the best way to strike the balance.

That leads into a ranty-type post, and I don't want to get into it right now because I'm still too close to the subject. But I will be talking about service levels, user expectations, and IT responses at some point.

(Edit: tried to send a trackback ping to Martin, no joy. sigh. I mess around too much during the day to want to mess around all night, I must be... gasp... getting old.)

Mental note: Ubuntu 6.06 machine on an amd64 arch wants ia32-libs installed, on top of everything else, in order for vmware-config to complete. Otherwise it gets very sad.

I found the hint I needed here.

Well, I usually don't bother, but I just happened to have been looking at my mailbox when this came in from edmontonoilers.com so I know it likely hasn't already been plastered everywhere quite yet:

MEDIA ADVISORY

The Edmonton Oilers will be holding a media conference at the Edmonton International Airport at 9:00 a.m. on Thursday, July 20, 2006 to announce the signing of members of the team management staff.

WHEN: Thursday, July 20, 2006

I'm going to guess Craig MacTavish is either finally getting a new contract, or they've fired Kevin Lowe to replace him with Ty Conklin, who will simulaneously announce his retirement.

Update: bah, take all the fun out of it.

Agent Rich Winter, said that Sykora didn't want to return to the Rangers and therefore didn't feel squeezed out by their signing of Brendan Shanahan. "We eliminated the Rangers a while back," Winter said. "That scenario wasn't in Petr's best interests to return to the Rangers. So we haven't talked to them."

(source: tsn.ca)

So is that the Royal We?

Of course, speaking of dickery, Glen Sather was never above it either. Mike Hudson, traded to Edmonton for Rich Winter client Craig Muni, was placed on waivers after 5 games. Recall from previous post that he'd been injured when traded. The Maple Leafs claimed Hudson, and next season saw a penalty-filled game between the Leafs and the Oilers. Boris Mironov high-sticked Mats Sundin, and Sather was fuming after Hudson allegedly took a swipe at Oilers dman Fredrik Olausson with his stick. Sather said of Hudson after, "He was never an Oiler - Oilers don't do what he did." (Toronto Sun, 6 November 1995.)

Same Slats said once of Jiri Slegr that he felt lucky to have gotten a third round pick for him.

Hmm, maybe I need to do a "Glen Sather is also a dick" post.

I tried to find a picture of Mike Hudson to use here, but my google photo fu failed me. Maybe I can talk lowetide into helping me.

blackdoghatesskunks was wondering about concrete examples of the dickery of slippery Rich Winter (y, just to make the trifecta). I had been going to respond in a comment there, or else on mudcrutch79's post on a similar subject, but this got really long - mostly because there's so much dickery to be seen. So, in reverse chronological order:

I finally had a chance to take a look at the frustrating machine from a couple of posts ago - pulled the video card out and put it back in again, now it's fine. (The hard disk was fine, although a previous disk from that machine that had apparently failed actually was dead.)

We also took delivery of most of the clusters that I'll be "getting" to set up - 50ish compute nodes and 3 head nodes. No racks or switches for them yet though. Pictures here - we're temporarily housing them in the machine room belonging to an entirely different research group. No technicaly details yet - we don't really know what we're running on them. This is the stuff I alluded to in an earlier post.

I've spent about 15 or so hours the last week setting up vmware server *just right* so that I could experiment with clustering software with the minimum amount of work per reconfigure.

I've documented almost all of it, but I hadn't gotten 'round to backing up the vmware configs or filesystems yet.

My SSH session to the head node virtual machine died just now. Logging in to the host machine, I found out why:

clusterhead01:~> sudo tcsh
Password:
clusterhead01:~# /etc/init.d/vmware start
/etc/init.d/vmware: Input/output error.
clusterhead01:~# df -h
/bin/df: Input/output error.
clusterhead01:~# dmesg
/bin/dmesg: Input/output error.
clusterhead01:~#

So I figured I'd shut it down:

clusterhead01:~# halt -p
/sbin/halt: Input/output error.
clusterhead01:~#

Well, fortunately, as my co-workers can no doubt attest, I'm religious about updating RTs, so at least I've got my thought process as I reasoned out how to do the last few hours of work.

But I hate redoing work. With a passion. Looks like I'm going to get to. The other disk in this system died as I was installing it. This system is one of about half a dozen that were purchased all at the same time, and every single hard drive (Western Digital 160gb) has been replaced at least once. I should have taken the hint.

Grrr.

And why, yes, it is 11 on a Friday night, and I'm doing this stuff. So what? I had a few beer earlier, and I got bored.

Spacek to Buffalo - they'll need him - and Friesen to Calgary (insult to injury). There go two of my bright ideas. Howson's comment on Reasoner was "Michael Peca won't be signing here." So I guess at least one of the rooks will be counted on to step up - good news for one of Pouliot or Schremp. I'm running out of ideas.

So the Oilers have basically gone from a team lacking just a #1 goalie in order to make a really strong push to contend for the next several years, to one lacking clearcut #1/3 defencemen, rooks on the bottom pairing, and and a return to the same checking line they had a couple of years ago in Moreau, Reasoner, and Pisani. The fourth line is just a shambles right now. If Torres goes cold again, they're missing a scoring LW too - although he's a great fourth liner even if he isn't scoring - can he keep that up for 82+ games though? History says not.

This is still a good team, but it'll be at least a couple of years before they're as good as last season's, I think - doesn't bode well for the playoffs next season.

The TSN story is a bit disingenuous though: "Like fellow defenceman Chris Pronger, Jaroslav Spacek wanted out of Edmonton." No, he didn't want out "like" Pronger - his contract was up and he signed elsewhere. By all reports, it was a tossup between Buffalo and Edmonton. Chances are it was the travel schedule that decided it for him, or else maybe his buddy Dvorak's going there too.

Calgary signed Tanguay too - so much for the RFA idea there.

Perusing hfboards and the comments on other weblogs, I'd have to say that I think Chris Pronger accomplished his mission yesterday. For a week, his wife got a thrashing. He holds one press conference and tells everybody - between the lines, granted - what we already knew, and now he's back to being public enemy number one. Smart man, he is.

Quite why many people seem to think getting booed or being hated in Edmonton - or any other city - really matters to him is beyond me. Everybody ranting and raving about how he should look out watched the San Jose series, where he was booed. He's been booed before in other cities. He's been getting run his whole career: first because people wanted to see what he was made of, more recently because they knew the answer to that already and wanted to send a message or carve off a piece of glory for themselves. Cheechoo laid as good a hit on him as you'll ever see, and Pronger gave it right back the next game. He doesn't care. If he did, he would have long ago curled up and died.

Don't get me the wrong way - if things go sideways for the Ducks next season, I'll admit now that I'll be feeling a vicious sense of vindication then. And I'm not too big to admit that if he never wins a Norris or Hart again, and his team never makes he Finals again, that I'll be quietly pleased.

But he's an ex-Oiler now, and as others have said, they've moved on after losing better players and better leaders than big #44. He's made the best of a bad situation, and so will Lowe's team. Players come and go, trophies are won and lost, but the big Oil Drop lives on, and that's all that matters.

uwstudent (via The Record) has a brief story on some stolen laptops here at UW. Doesn't look like there's much personal data on there, but this line: "The personal information in the computers is password protected and is not retrievable" (from Martin van Nierop, who's not really a techie so I assume it was given to him from somebody else) is a red flag. What sort of password? What assurances do the people whose information got stolen have that the data really is safe?

I'm disappointed, I'd have liked to have thought that our world-class institution would be a world leader in terms of fessing up when things go wrong. I guess what it really means is we'll follow along with the rest of the world. That line's getting to be as bad as "going out and giving 110%" is in sports.

Edit: 570News has a story on this too. Same story: "UW says the data is protected by a password and is not retrievable."

Where are the Oilers now, post-Pronger? Well, one of the guys I'd been hoping Lowe would target was Aaron Ward, but he's apparently now a Ranger along with fellow ex-Hurricane Matt Cullen, so so much for that. Somebody else (Lowetide?) had been mentioning Mike Grier, but he's a Shark now.

Signings so far: Fernando Pisani for 4 years at 10MM. That's a lot of dosh for a guy who scores like he does, but failing to keep Pronger happy means the Oilers are scrambling for a feel-good PR story. He has the abilities to score 20-25, I think - he'll need to make full use of them. History's against him, but then again, it always has been. I'm neutral on this trade; I think Lowe might be regretting the last two years of the deal in 2008, but the jury's still out.

Dwayne Roloson for 3 years at 11MM. Another guy with history against him makes good. If he was a few years younger, I'd be all over this, but he's 37 and coming off a fair-to-middlin knee injury. I think Lowe lost his mind a bit on this deal, but time will tell here too. He could be Marty Brodeur, or he could be Ed Belfour.

Sigh, I had this post mostly done and I misclicked, then Firefox ate it. Doing my best to recall what I'd said.

First, the second half of today's big news, doesn't warrant its own post: Steve Yzerman has hung them up. See ya later Stevie, we'll miss you, but I think it was the right decision.

Free agency. First, non-Oilers signings, big name ones and others that caught my eye.

Seems like all the big noise has been made - for now, at least. GMs are probably collecting their respective breaths and reloading for maybe another spree, maybe not, but the big names are mostly gone.

More to the point as an Oilers fan, and what prompted the posting, was Pronger has been traded. To Anaheim, unfortunately for Western Conference teams, although the return was... decent, I suppose.

I've added an "Other Weblogs" sidebar. For now, it's just hockey weblogs; I'd promised one of them a link, if nothing else. I'm using MT-Blogroll, got it from the list of plugins at movabletype.com. It wasn't the most intuitive setup, and it seems to cough up an error at insert-into-db time unless I use the quickadd link first, but then it doubles up, so I can't win. (The database error doesn't seem to hurt the actual addition to roll thing.) Baby steps.

Back to a pseudo-Oilers paintscheme. I'm pretty sure that was well over a week.

As I said to at least Wade, the raison-d'etre for the black and red scheme (and perhaps here too, but I'm too lazy to check), I hate to say it but I thought the red and black looked better. I have an excuse to stick with it though, at least partially: my alma mater's colours are black and red as well, although perhaps not that shade of red.

I've got some thoughts on the crazy start to Free Agent Feeding Frenzy, but I'll post them later, if they're worthy of it.