Please note - this is a backup of my LiveJournal account, just in case LiveJournal up and dies on me.

Straight No Chaser - 12 Days of Christmas

Paris For President, Paris Hilton, Official Music Video, HQ

You gotta see this Paris Hilton for President video

ZFS coolness

I just loaded 2008.05 open solaris on my laptop. Found that the
Broadcom wireless didn't get recognized (no surprise, linux doesn't
like it either, apparently Broadcom doesn't like anyone but
Microsoft). Anyways, found ndiswrapper, but apparently I require a
slightly newer kernel. So, how do I update? Well, I found this page:
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/indiana/resources/rn3/image-update/

What's really cool is that in OpenSolaris with ZFS, when you need to
do certain updates you essentially "branch" your filesystem, apply
changes to the branch (in those instructions earlier I was using build
86, so I had to do all of them), and then 'activate' that branch. The
old one is still there, and I could easily roll back if needed.
Imagine if you could do that after installing Vista. "Ah, crap, this
runs too slow. I need to rollback. ... ... Oh, what do you mean I
can't rollback? Ah, crap." Messing up a critical config file could (if
you use the beadm command religiously) be minor - just rollback. Think
Microsoft's Previous Versions for files and System Restore, but for an
entire filesystem, accessible from a bootdisk.

--
Chris Wiegand

Amendment 47 – Unions and Right To Work

Because I’m sure everyone really wants to know my opinion of this amendment, here it is: I’m for it.

I’m for it for two reasons: 1) while I was a contractor at Lucent (later Avaya after the split), I saw, first-hand, the laziness of workers who were sufficiently far up the union ladder that they no longer needed to work – they just showed up and did whatever they wanted. The company couldn’t fire them (except VERY slowly), and one person in particular I depended on, and he was very slow to respond to anything because there was nothing I could do about it. I can compare this to my current job, where if I don’t perform I’m out the door. Unions protect all the workers – good and bad.

But 2) my second reason is that I cannot in good conscience require a worker to give up money just to help fund some political campaign that the union boss likes. That, to me, is borderline theft or fraud. In addition, the union boss (or “manager” as they sometimes like to be called) has 0 productivity – he doesn’t help me code, or design databases, or manage servers. He even interferes with my ability to manage people (should I have any underneath me in any way).

I can understand why, in some trades (mostly blue collar) unions may be a great way to go, but let’s keep them competitive – if union membership brings real benefits then people will want to join/form them. Otherwise people will go elsewhere. That way I can go work for non-union shops where I know I can can a worker if they are consistently non-productive.

Phone numbering plan expansion

North American Numbering Plan Expansion – this is interesting. Looks like someday they’re going to extend phone numbers to 12 digits here in the US/Canada area (and a few other places too). Cool how they can use the ‘new’ 4th digit to detect if it’s new dialing (0/1) or old dialing (2-9). This is going to be EXPENSIVE – they should probably get moving on this now, IMHO.