I freely admit to being a computer geek. It seems, now, I need to admit to also being a consumer whore. (And how!)

Okay, so it’s not that bad. I’ve been looking for an elegant solution that would give me something approaching a low-complexity hookup for the various external drives I’ve been using as my backup solution so far. I’m using two 250GB drives for rotating as “backup media” with Retrospect Backup Desktop to perform rotating backups of my 15″ PowerBook, and will eventually be doing this several nights a week, and including my wife’s Windows PC and PowerMac G3 once I get my desk arranged (which will be another story). I also have a floppy drive that I occasionally use, a Sony USB Memory Stick reader that I use for getting pictures from our digital camera, and a USB keyboard & mouse. I’ve also been giving some serious thought to having another external hard drive around to serve specifically as an emergency boot volume, and would ideally be an exact duplicate of the hard drive inside my PowerBook.

So, imagine my surprise when I saw the MicroNet MiniMate plugged on Slashdot. It’s the perfect companion for a Mac Mini, but, with a little thought, I realized it’s also a good companion for a PowerBook desk setup. It’s small enough that it would sit nicely on top of my external FireWire drive enclosures (this item at NewEgg.com) and provide a powered USB Hub for the floppy and Memory Stick reader. The single remaining USB port would be used by either a PS/2 Keyboard/Mouse USB adapter that I have, or a single USB cable from a KVM I’m looking at getting. And it’s got an 80GB hard drive built into it as well, all for less than what a FireWire Hub, USB2 Hub, and an external drive would have cost me separately.

Seems like a perfect fit. I’ll let you know how it works out once I get it, which should be some time next week.

When your Users Group has its own Library, and the Librarian is sick of lugging around all the books to every meeting, it’s time to make technology do the work.

For several months now, at our Kernel Panic Linux Users’ Group meetings, our Librarian has been absent due to scheduling conflicts, and before that, both he and his predecessor have complained about the troubles involved in lugging around three cases of books to and from the meetings.

After giving this some degree of thought, and knowing that the new web site is based on Plone, I’ve decided that my first active project in some time now is going to be a web-based library system, complete with a borrowing request mechanism and lending tracking. Why? To prevent the Librarian from having to carry all those books, of course. Also, it will then be possible to browse the library’s collection online for the whole month between meetings, and, if I provide a suitable machine for use at the meetings themselves, we can even browse the library there, if we have Internet access.

This is an intriguing project to me, mainly because it’s not really a simple problem, but one that, if solved elegantly, will appear simple to the site users.

Stay tuned…

Sometimes you wonder why a vendor might include a tool which seems so useful but ends up being more of a waste of your time than anything else.

So it was, today, when I found that I needed to install a complete development environment on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Workstation system. “Ah,” I said to myself, “this should be quite simple! After all, Red Hat includes this wonderful utility that lets you select and install software packages after the initial install.”

Hah.

The utility in question is redhat-config-packages via the command line (I have no recollection of what the GUI menu item for it is.) It’s a GUI application for the X windowing system, so I fired it up, pointed back at my Linux workstation’s X display, and set to work. I scrolled down the lists of package groups, exactly as they are presented to you during the system installation, and selected the “Development” and “Kernel Development” groups. I then clicked on the “Update” button, and was presented with a wonderful error dialog, alerting me to the fact that the application couldn’t find a package that it needed.

For those that don’t know, when you purchase a license for RHEL, you get a year’s worth subscription to Red Hat Network, which gives you the wonderful ability to install updates and new packages via the ‘Net. At least in my mind, then, it wasn’t a great leap to assume that the “install new software” tool would utilize this facility. Well, not only is that not the case, but if you’ve applied any updates at all to your system after the initial install, redhat-config-packages simply doesn’t know how to deal with the resulting dependancy issues, apparently because it knows nothing about the up2date tools.

In fact, this was an issue right at the initial release of RHEL 3, and at least one bug was filed with Red Hat over this issue over a year ago. Search for “krb5-libs unlocatable” on Google and you’ll come up with a number of people complaining about this very problem.

Why bother including a utility that is likely going to fail under expected use profiles? Back before it was so easy to update a system, sure, including a utility that based all it’s package installation and dependency tracking on the CD’s used to install the OS made sense. However, when you expect your end-users to update their systems as you release fixes and patches, shouldn’t your users expect your tools to take that into account? And why let the bug linger for over a year without so much as a comment?

Really, how hard would it be for redhat-config-packages to check with up2date to see if what it needs can be fetched via Red Hat Network? Why should I have to figure out all the individual packages on my own, just because the tool that would otherwise do it for me doesn’t know how to handle anything other than what was on the install CDs?

This was quite maddening.

Proof positive that MIT students have too much time on their hands, or at least spend too little of it on their studies.

It must be things like this that distract MIT students to such an extent that undocumented immigrant high-school children can kick MIT’s ass.

Actually, that statement was entirely unfair to those high-school students. But my point is that if maybe MIT students didn’t focus on things like USB disco dance floors, they wouldn’t be out-smarted and out-engineered by studends supposedly four years behind them.

How many of us are trapped in that cycle of “If I only had the time,” and when we finally do get time, never manage to get around to what it is we want to do?

I certainly hope I’m not the only one, because that would make me feel like a complete slacker. How many of us, though, frequently hope to tackle projects of admittedly large scope, but consistently write off any free time we do have as “too little” to accomplish anything worthwhile? I’m fairly certain this is why management types come up with things like Gandt charts and milestones. I’m also fairly certain that if I took the time to analyze exactly what it is I’d like to do and broke those projects into their logical steps, I’d actually get somewhere.

So, then, that must be the trick to it all. I need to actually write down what it is I want to do, and define that as the final goal. I need to decompose that final goal into the logical tasks and set milestones for myself. I need to provision time to work on these tasks, and track the time I do spend.

In short, I need to actually manage myself and my time. Who knew that doing work on your own required a manager? Granted, you are your own manager, but if you can’t manage yourself, find a new manager. Or send your current manager to some training seminars.

I got to listen to my wonderful wife complain to no end about the quality of a web-based calendar system, apparently released by a very large and well-known vendor. It’s quite eye-opening that such a large and well-respected vendor could release something that would inspire such invective from such a pleasant woman. This leads me to another important item that seems to go oft-overlooked: it has to be usable by the people you intend to give it to. Yes, that seems immediatly obvious. If it is so obvious, though, why do so many developers ignore it? Why do so many columnists in the IT field harp on it so much?

Probably because it’s not fun. It’s not coding. People have “stupid” ideas about how an application should function, or people want features and behaviors that are too painful or simply too annoying to code for. It’s much easier just to code the functionality you think should be there. In my own work as a sysadmin, I frequently find that when I create a utility for others to, I get requests for improved or new features that I’d rather not care to implement. Call it professional laziness, but probably not in a good way.

So, why am I wasting your valuable reading time telling you all this? Well, I suppose it’s because I’m trying to psych myself into working on a few projects that I’ve had lanquishing in my head for the longest time now. Maybe I want you to share your ideas on getting a project started and keeping it moving. Maybe by getting this out of my head, I can move on to something closer to the actual project work.

Besides, this is my Brain Dump.

Even the grandest of projects must begin with a first step, something small to set in motion something large. I’ve got quite a number of what I feel are great ideas in terms of software projects that would be genuinely useful to real people tryign to do real work. The trick is actually getting started on one of them.

Take this journal, for instance. I’d been considering starting up a “professional” journal for some time now, but I’ve never actually taken that first step of actually starting it.

I’m hoping that after this first step of starting this journal, I’ll be cajoled into keeping up with it (unlike my personal journal) at least every other day, if nothing else to vent about the stupid things that spark my ire (and motivated me to register unnerving.org in the first place.)