Lentigo

Okay, so I’ve not been good at keeping up here. I do plan on writing up more stuff soon, though. I’ve been studying for my GIAC GSEC re-cert and have come across a few ideas for things to research and write about after I take the test.

December 22nd and most of my shopping is done. I hate doing this stuff at the last minute but I do it every year so I must not hate it enough.

I had an interesting experience last night while shopping. Early in the evening I received an TXT message from my one of my monitoring sites indicating that our production server was down. After having great experiences with Debian servers over the last couple of years this box had experienced some heartburn from a recent kernel update and I figured the burn might have returned. I was not notified of the site being down again (the monitoring script runs every 15 mins) so, after 20 minutes, I figured I was in good shape or my monitoring script — recently rewritten — was broken. Ugh. As luck would have it there’s an Apple Store in the mall. I went in, found a row of lonely looking iPod Touches, grabbed one, and called up our site. The Touch was already connected to the store’s Wi-Fi and our front page popped up in just a few seconds. I loaded a few other pages on the site to make sure everything was hunky-dory, made sure to leave PK’s website set as the home page for that Touch, and continued on my way. Thanks the the Apple Store I was able to get some network monitoring and guerrilla marketing in as well as shopping.

And newly moved from my old MediaTemple GS back to my trusty Linode. I like the Linode much better. Now to get to work on a theme for this site so these bi-annual posts will look nicer.

Some wins and losses this evening. On the losing side was my last SANS class. I’ve been taking their SANS+S course for preparation to take the CISSP exam. This particular class is taught on-line using a Java-based classroom product called Elluminate. It’s always taken a bit of work to start it up on my PowerBook and I generally expect to have to kill and restart it a few times before it gets a good connection back to the mothership. Tonight was worse than usual, requiring a reboot — thankfully fast on a Mac — and hunting down and deleting old Java Webstart cache files. By the time I got it sorted and got into my class it was already 30 minutes in and too late to get into the flow. I had a lot I wanted to get done this evening anyway so I bagged the class; I can listen to a recording later and get caught up. I’m in no wild hurry to get my CISSP so will be spending a couple months studying up and take the test this summer. I already hold a current SANS GSEC cert and the subject matter isn’t wildly different.

On the win side I think we’ve finally gotten Chris’ blog moved from MediaTemple to a dedicated server. It’s a largish site that, was getting killed by performance problems with the (mt) GridServer system. I think the full site “rebuild” is just about done so he should be back in business in no time. I hope it finishes soon, I’m tired and want to sleep.

The gs sounds good in theory, but in practice it’s been a disappointment and I think needs another six months of testing and tweaks before it’ll be ready for prime time. I won’t be around then, I’m going to be moving this site back to my trusty Linode as soon as I get the time.

Hope just send me a link to the LOC’s Full National Recording Registry of the National Recording Preservation Board. I think the contents are as hip as one can get and I’m going to see how many of these I can find on Rhapsody and build a few choice playlists.

I picked up a new toy for myself for this last holiday season, a Nokia N800 Internet Tablet. It’s very cool. I bought it mainly to listen to streaming media and to keep up with e-mail and RSS feeds when not at my computer — which so far means lying in bed.

The experience has been pretty good so far. I’ve moved all off my personal e-mail and feed reading to Google services, which offer plain XHTML interfaces if you know how to find them, and they work really well. Actually Google calendar doesn’t work at all, which is a bummer, but I’ll see if I can find a N800 iCal reader and subscribe to my calendars there.

Media has had its ups and downs, but I’ll have to write about that another time, too tired now. This post will be a test of using the tablet for blogging — the whole thing has been written using the on-screen keyboard. It will take some getting used too, but it’s quite workable so far.

As part one of attempting to get back to blogging at this site I’ve upgraded it from Drupal 4.7 to Drupal 5.

The old theme was quite ugly so I switched the system default to Drupal’s Garland theme and changed the colors to that sort of mix of sunburn and suntan than Lentigo suggests! This looks better than the themes I’ve come up with in the past so I think I’ll stick with it.

This will have to be it for my first update in almost a year as my battery — both computer and body — are about to run out.

We put together the following altar to celebrate family and friends passed...

The clueless-ness of big content owners is just amazing...

Fox shuts down Buffy Hallowe'en musical despite Whedon's protests:

Cory Doctorow: Fox has shuit down a plan to perform a fan version of the Buffy musical episode, Once More with Feeling, even though creator Joss Whedon has asked them not to. Jason Schultz has written a great analysis of this here.

Is this the kind of copyright policy we want? Those are tougher questions. Just as artists are an engine for creativity in our culture, so are fans. An artist on their own can make a work of art, but only fans can make it mean something in our society. Fans take art and translate it into culture. They invest in it, obsess over it, share it, and spread it to others. They turn it from an isolated item into a means of communication. (For more on this, see danah's posts here and here where she breaks it down more eloquently).

But where is the recognition of this reality in copyright? Well, before the digital age, it was often in the idea that copyright was a public right and fandom was a private series of acts. Copyright would control public distribution of works and fans would collect them and share them and discuss them in private. More importantly, they would do so without making "copies" of them; instead, they would trade physical goods and have verbal conversations. Some would make costumes or their own art based on the subject matter, but those were generally kept private or only exhibited at limited forums like Comic Cons.

Do the marketing departments of Fox, Disney, etc, have any say over the actions of their attack-lawyers? Do these organizations even have marketing departments any more? I remember taking marketing classes way back in college but I must have missed the day where we were taught that attacking one's best customers is an effective sales driver.