“Yahoo.com hates us. Suggestions”

There’s an interesting thread (“Yahoo.com hates us. Suggestions“) over at the mailop mailing list. I’ve encountered almost every behavior from Yahoo! Mail servers that is documented there. Unfortunately the mailop archives are not open to the public, so you need to subscribe first.

In our case, when we deal with Yahoo! Mail delivery problems, it is almost always a case of infected machines (sometimes even a handful) sending spam …everywhere. So whenever we observe long delays while delivering to Yahoo! Mail or many many messages waiting to be delivered, we always seek for the infected. Thanks to feedback loops that are implemented by the (really) big email hubs, we also get early warning on such matters. As a matter of fact, Yahoo! Mail also runs a feedback loop, but it requires DKIM, and since we’ve stopped using DKIM (dkim-filter crashed frequently on our systems) we rely on the rest of the loops to be kept …in the loop. It seems to be working OK so far.

serverfault

New assignment for apprentice: Try to answer one question per day from www.serverfault.com

(Note: Asking questions also counts.)

System Administration requires a diverse set of skills that (still) most pick up on the job in a reactive way: Problem occurs, learn what is needed to solve it; if we like the subject dig deeper too. Serverfault is one of those places where people in the profession go for help. Reading questions and answers helps, but answering something helps more. Actually writing an answer (or a question) includes that extra effort that differentiates between it may be solved this way and it is solved this way. Plus there is a whole community that can correct in no time any errors in your answers. You do not even have to know the answer. Just pick up any question you find interesting enough and try to find an answer. The diversity of the questions asked on serverfault makes it virtually impossible to not find at least one (even remotely) interesting every day.

Just pick one. Any. Failure is an option. You do not have to be sysadmin1138 to answer a question, but you can surely become one.

Are “systems people” really necessary?

A good friend forwarded me a (handwritten) manuscript by E.W. Dijkstra entitled Are “systems people” really necessary? Giorgos pointed out that it might already be archived in the E.W Dijkstra Archive. As a matter of fact it is EWD1095 [handwritten version here in pdf].

It is a classic EWD document, straight to the point, properly impolite and asking the right questions. Great advice for career and personal growth.

The 15 seconds per day rule

@dtsomp wrote:

Damn, this ‘Rule of 200’ actually works. http://bit.ly/b3J1dL Thanx @hakmem.

There exists an even better rule which I’ve briefly mentioned before. I found about it via a comment made by John D. Cook:

I read somewhere that you can finish nearly any project if you work on it 15 seconds every day. The trick is “every day.” And if you do put in 15 seconds, you’re likely to put in more. Or more realistically, maybe you commit to 15 minutes a day. Same idea. Overcoming inertia is everything.

Usually when I fail to finish a project, it’s because I go for days at a stretch giving it *zero* time, not because I work consistently but progress too slowly.

Adobe Digital Editions E_ACT_TOO_MANY_ACTIVATIONS error

After reformatting my desktop (and installing the world) I was bitten by the “too many activations” error while trying to register my Adobe-ID. I lost about an hour chatting to the web support staff, with no sucess. I resorted to Adobe forums, where Jim Lester provided a helpful answer:

Support through ADE is not offered via phone or Web Chat support. It is only offered through submitting a web case (http://www.adobe.com/support/digitaleditions – click on ‘Submit a web case’). Avereage resolution time for these cases runs about 3 days.

Note: you have 6 activations (for computers, and then 6 seperate activations for devices) and each time you reformat you lose your activation

I submitted my web case and in less than 24h I got a friendly email informing me that I was OK.

Being Geek

I finished reading “Being Geek” by Michael Lopp. I am sure that Panagiotis (one of my “Your People“) will appreciate it more than me. For the first 20 chapters or so I got increasingly bored (to the point that I switched to reading another book). Then in the middle the book changes pace and provides valueable advice on how to prepare yourself before delivering a presentation. The author argues that there exists no good advice on how to write a presentation, I urge people to read Tufte‘s work, or at least “The cognitive style of PowerPoint“. Then the book becomes boring again.

While the book tries to be a personal growth / career book, it deals so much with interdepartmental politics and intrigue that it is no wonder people work overtime. Their regular worktime is spent not on what they are supposed to work on, but on forecasting fault and making sure it is delegated to others. I’ve got two more issues with the book. First, either it is full of grammatical and syntactic errors, or it makes use of so many American idioms that it is difficult to be read by someone for whom English is not a native language.

Second, I am highly irritated by the liberal use of the word engineer and its interchangeable use for computer scientist and programmer. There are people who are none, one, two or even three out of three, but the terms are not interchangeable. My absolute worst was when the author implied that engineers are not good project managers. Oh really? An Engineer knows his science, understands deadlines, knows that has to deliver a withing the budget solution and can manage people. Sorry Rands, I have an army Engineers to prove this. For example, Civil Engineers do this for a living in Greece and in the process manage people (and teams of people) of multicultural, multilingual and varying educational backgrounds. The fact that one can engineer solutions, does not make one an engineer.

I should have listened to Ozan. So why did I buy the book? Kudos to O’Reilly for providing cool bargaining deals on their eBook offers! I bought it in a buy one, get one free offer. Then why did I recommend the book to @stsimb? The book is not without value. I simply found it hard and tiring to decipher it. On the other hand I know @stsimb for ~15 years and can understand that there exist books that he might like while in fact I definitely did not. Given that I read most of the book while in the bus, this was not a total waste of time.

The (n-th) return of the Database Machine

Once there were Database Machines. Talk to your favorite database person and they will tell you that this is an outdated idea. It is so old, that it can be served again as new and innovative. @mperedim remembers that I predicted that right after Oracle bought Sun. I am neither a market analyst nor I have predictive powers. It is just that Oracle has tried this before: Unbreakable Linux just a few years ago and with Sun hardware and Solaris in the 90s (It also happens that they had tried a lot of things with Sun before, like trying to move all their development desktops to Solaris x86. Or working with Sun on the NC which is no different than today’s netbook paradigm, or the X terminal of the early 90s or even the dumb terminal). So with a 20-year amnesia cycle in CS why not reintroduce the idea? Enter the Sun Oracle Database machines.

Oracle wants to sell such machines. It eliminates support (contract) complexity. Oracle needs a base Operating System that it can control its development and a hardware platform that can be optimized for what Oracle does best. Now clients can buy turn key solutions from Oracle just like they do when they buy IBM. Picture this: Two Linux machines, with Oracle 10g installed exchanging every kind of traffic except sqlplus. Whose fault is this? Oracle’s? The Linux vendor’s? It turned out to be a weird combination of the hardware. And this was discovered because the DBA and the System Administrator under the same employer decided to solve the problem (I was the System Administrator involved). Imagine two different vendors and the client trying to solve the problem: I would expect a lot of finger pointing instead of actually finding the solution and/or workaround.

Oracle now has the opportunity to market the product as a cost saver (“You only need an army of DBAs, not an army of DBAs and an army of systems administrators for different operating systems. Oh, and by the way our patching process just got simpler, you need to call only us”). While in fact a solution’s complexity is unaffected, support contract and communication complexity for the client is simplified. This looks better than buying IBM (or Microsoft) to the person that signs the checks.

Now if someone can make WebKit work with Emacs and we will have Lisp Machines resurrect…

PS: You do not believe in CS amnesia? In “Getting started as a PhD student” Matt Welsh writes: “you should never read anything from the 1960’s or 70’s or you will realize that it all has been done before”.