What are you proud of?

What are you proud of? – Lifehacker: “A few weeks ago it occurred to me that a sense of accomplishment is pretty important but it’s not always obvious where it comes from…I don’t think there’s any single answer for everyone in every situation, but it’s clear that there are a few common sources. And they seem to match the different roles people find themselves in at work.”

(Via Lifehacker.)

CNN.com – Pink Floyd legend Syd Barrett dies – Jul 11, 2006

Pink Floyd legend Syd Barrett dies: ‘Syd Barrett, who founded Pink Floyd but later lived as a recluse, has died at the age of 60, according to a spokeswoman for the band.

A spokeswoman for Pink Floyd told the Press Association: “He died very peacefully a couple of days ago. There will be a private family funeral.”‘

(Via CNN.)

Help save the endangered time servers

Help save the endangered time servers: “To fight this problem of unnecessary load on stratum 1, and to
make it easier for people to make their systems well-behaved, in
2003 Adrain von Bidder created the all-volunteer NTP Pool project
(http://www.pool.ntp.org).
The pool is a set of freely usable time servers. When a client machine
tries to sync to pool.ntp.org, that machine is referred to one of the
pool servers, round-robin style. This helps distribute the loads to
different servers in the pool.”

And people looked at me strange when I asked what the local NTP server was when I started here. Heh.

(Via Linux DevCenter/.)

Laurent Schneider: raptor early adopter release 4 is out

Laurent Schneider: raptor early adopter release 4 is out: “Well, it is now renamed to SQL Developer.There is now an expected ‘Save password’ checkbox to save the password… apart from the name, it looks quite similar to raptor “

Raptor 4 is out.

(Via Oracle Blogs.)

sysblogd

Ready, Fire, Aim: “I wonder how hard (or useful) it would be pipe FMA events into an RSS (or Atom) feed.”

Basically it’d be a sysblog. See an exception in Syslog, or with Sun’s self-healing stuff? Stick it in an RSS feed.

(Via Sun Blogs.)

Embedded.com – CES: Thumb drives launch apps, media players

Embedded.com – CES: Thumb drives launch apps, media players: “In the war of the thumb drives, Lexar Media Inc. is teaming with Israeli software developer Ceedo Technologies Ltd. to deliver a version of its USB flash drives that can store and launch applications and media players. It is due to reach the market in April.”

Not much use to me, since I can auto-launch most Mac Apps from my Shuffle, but for Windows users this could be great.

(Via Digg.)

Too much WoW…

Actual IM exchange today:

gary 10:06 I officially love Solaris Zones.

Seth 10:06 How many experience points do you get for discovering a Solaris zone?

gary 10:07 900

gary 10:07 It’s a lvl 45-55 Zone.

gary 10:08 But that’s okay, I may only be a lvl 40 SysAdmin, but all my talent points are in the Solaris tree.

gary 10:10 I wonder if that would make my G5 a blue item….

No HDD in NEC Laptop – Gizmodo

No HDD in NEC Laptop – Gizmodo: “Looks like NEC has made the first commercial laptop without a hard disk drive, aimed at corporate customers who need higher security.”

Cool. I might even want to have a lappy like this. Course… It’d have to run OS X. But still.

(Via Gizmodo.)

No More Flock

Okay, it’s a neat idea, but the WebLog Editor contained in Flock isn’t as robust as I’d like. It would be supremely cool if someone (say… Brent Simmons) were to take the ideas behind Flock and build a Mac app using the same ideas with WebKit as the core rather than Mozilla. I know you’d loose the cross-platformness of Mozilla, but this kind of app SCREAMS for the ease-of-use, userfriendlyness of a Mac.

As it is I decided to go back to Safari, along with MarsEdit as the blog editor. Added a little bookmarklet to do the whole ‘BlogThis’ thing out of Safari and it seems to be working well. I really couldn’t stand the blog editor inside flock. Neat idea, but again, I need something a bit more robust. Full props to the Flock folks for a great idea.

Wired News: Outsourcing to the Heartland

Wired News: Outsourcing to the Heartland – So Wired is running an article on ‘Rural Sourcing’, basically moving your datacenter to BFE, (Hey I live in BFE, I can say that.) to reap the lower costs of operating away from large metropolitan areas. I think there’s something in there about outsourcing as well, but there’s one little flaw. The pool of available talent is a bit sparse. I can see Help Desk and the like, but more demanding positions like SysAdmins (maybe) and DBAs, (definitely) are going to be harder to come by. Now don’t get me wrong, I like the trend, as I’m a SysAdmin with aspirations of becoming a DBA, but I’m having issues seeing where the long term growth is for this paradigm.

Maybe once all us computer people become the wrench turners that we really are in the public’s mind we’ll see a crash in the valuation of our jobs and this will be easier.

(Via .)