Ontic Oren

photo credit: David Reece

If you follow me on twitter, you may have noticed that I slipped in my resignation from Sun. Today, March 14th, is my last day.

I’m embarking on the riskiest of all options - a tiny new startup. We’re looking at how we can address some issues that arise with the use of virtualization and network management. I’ll be doing product mangement, plus whatever it takes (markeing, cooking, cleaning) to make sure we’re a huge success, and maximize the reward side.  [If I've 10x my risk, but also 10x the potential reward, I guess my risk/reward ratio remains constant? I guess I've probably 10x the risk for <10x the reward.]

So why jump now?  For the first time in my career, I’m not running away from an old job. The Sun xVM team, and especially my boss, are doing an amazing job. They are building a great team and a great product. I’ve even managed to recruit two new people to the team in the past week, in spite of my departure! I have no doubt that I’ll be talking with the Sun xVM team shortly on how we can work together.

Proving just how random our lives truly are, I found this job through one of those serendipitous moments. A colleague of my wife asked if she knew anyone for a certain position at this other small company, just in passing, and a month later I’m resigning!  The team, the opportunity, and frankly, the risk, were all to good to pass up.  I’m excited to be scared sh-tless and I’m excited to make something from nothing.

Rich, Rich, and Ken - I can’t wait to join you and the rest of the team on this adventure.

CONGRATULATIONS!

A huge group of people have pulled off the impossible. They have managed to release a developer preview of Open Solaris in October. 8:32PM PST 10/31 shall go down in history!

I immediately downloaded and ran the image in VMware Fusion 1.1RC1 on my 24″ Santa Rosa iMac. Booted fast, and I was running. LIVE CD! Hooray! Ran the installer, enjoyed myself a trivial process, and waited ~20 min for it to finish.

Sadly, there is some weird weird bug that I’ve run into before that all the recent solaris builds, including Opensolaris exhibit - they hang/take forever to boot. Waited ~5 min and it finally started it’s thing. Sure enough, it’s got a nice bash shell, it’s snappy, firefox works, the package system seems to have packages, and it’s even running ZFS by default! I was even going to drop the output from “zfs list” here, but realized without VMware tools there’s no easy way to copy/paste between opensolaris and OSX, and I’m not in the mood to type it all in, nor FTP/SCP it around. So trust me, or just run it yourself!

Took the mandatory screen shot too:

I came up with a ridiculous title and comment for a previous post, but couldn’t bring myself to use it. I can’t bring myself to delete it either. So here it is. Yes, I’m a loser.

ameliorating erudition via the disambiguation of conjoined concepts

please excuse the adoxography by a clear logastellus

(thanks to this long word dictionary)

I eagerly downloaded build 70 of SXCE last night. I’ve been curious to try out the new installer I’ve been hearing about for some time.

Good news: the install was as easy as I could have hoped. It’s pretty, not ugly motif, seems to work well, didn’t ask me inane questions.

Bad news: first, it was slow. 1+ hour. Second, I installed this into VMWare fusion with a 20gb disk and 1gb ram allocated. Install went fine, but now I can’t actually boot the thing! I get the GRUB screen, then nothing - just a blank console with a blinking cursor. Bummer.

Edit: Rumor here is that there’s a bug in SXDE, I’ll post as soon as I find out if it’s fixed.

I AM
71%
MEGATRONTake the Transformers Quiz




That can’t be good. I’m not evil…

For years, I’ve been running my own server where I host my personal site. It’s migrated from a Cobalt Raq 3 to a ServInt VPS today, with many iterations in between. And I’m finally done. The hassels of self-administration now outweigh the benfit in my mind. The final straw occured last week when I ran out of space, and email started bouncing. And queing. Including bounce error messages. When I figured out what was finally going on, I had thousands and thousands of error emails. So now I’m on the outsourcing hunt. I’ve already moved my pictures to Smugmug. Next up, email.

I was expecting this to be the easiest part. I’d just use gmail. After 20 min, I realized one big problem! The POP interface for the iPhone is BAD. First, it doesn’t sync deletes. Worse, it gives you ALL your messages, even if they are auto-taged and archived. I’m on a few high volume aliases, and DO NOT want to recieve every one of those messages on the phone with no bulk delete tools.

Yahoo’s spam filtering was worthless. I’m getting so much spam I can’t find my real email.

.Mac has added server side spam filtering, but it’s worse than yahoo. And they have no server-side filter rules for mailing lists. Tons of spam AND all my alias traffic!

I could sign up for a webhoster, but that still keeps me in the business of some adminstration. Anyone out there have any good ideas?

After going through all these gyrations, my new iPhone is working. I think for the most part I got the run around. Short of it is that activations yesterday were broken, now they’re working. 3 hours wasted. But I’m happish again.

Apparently I’m having IT sagas. My MacBook Pro is now fixed and happy. And then two days ago, I dropped my iPhone. At first, all apeared well. I was on the phone at the time, and nothing happend, I talked away, and was relieved. Later that evening, I noticied that I had dented the case, making it impossible to press the power button. No biggie, it still worked just fine.

Yesterday morning, I went to unplug the phone, and saw my little phone stuck in an infinite reboot state. Apparently the pushed power button was making it unhappy:

With a dead iPhone, I promptly made an appointment at the Apple Store for that evening. In the meantime, I had a totally unusable phone. So I started to have fun. When I would see people I knew, I would throw the phone up in the air and let it crash down (clearly, I was already thinking I needed to buy a new phone). The look in people’s face was PRICELESS. This could be great street art - stand on University Ave in Palo Alto, and have someone film passer-by’s expressions as I “drop” the iphone very very hard. Amazingly, one of the drops fixed the button, though then the screen wouldn’t work anymore.

That evening, I went into the Apple Store and got a new iPhone. And the fun started… Took it home, and activation wouldn’t work. All i got was:

Called up AT&T, waited on hold for 15 min, was told to go to the AT&T store and get a new SIM. Raced over with 5 min to go before they closed, and then proceed to wait 30 min for the SLOW SLOW people in front of me. Get home, pop SIM in, same error. Call again, debacle insues with me hanging up by mistake when I meant to press speaker after waiting for 30 min. AMAZINGLY, AT&T rep I’m speaking with calls me back 15 min later on my wife’s phone (part of my family plan) to tell me the progress he’s made! Even though I hung up on him, he kept working the problem. THANK YOU AMAZING ATU&T rep. Too bad they couldn’t fix it.

Finally get escalated again, to a guy who writes down word for word the error message, and tells me that iPhone activations are all wonkey, everyone is having issues, and they’ll call me. I point out calling me will be hard without a phone, but give them my work number anyway. They can always leave VM.

It’s now been about 18 hours since I first tried to activate my second iPhone, but I continue to have the same error. If I don’t hear from AT&T tonight, I guess I’ll have to play the phone tree game again…

Me and IT haven’t gotten along so well this week. On Tuesday, as I was busy working away on my Macbook Pro, the HD starting making a “loud nasty sound” (as per the apple repair order). Suffice to say, the HD is dead, my data is gone, and Apple has my computer. Issues:

1. Went online to reserve some time to get the computer fixed. >24 hours to the next appointment!
2. Called apple support. Waited 10 min on hold, to find my options include:
1. Reserve time at a genius bar
2. Have apple ship me a box, then ship back my computer, wait > 1 week
3. Go to a local authorized repair center - the closest of which is Micro Center
1. Call micro center
2. Have the phone ring in circles for ~ 5 min straight
3. Give up on that choice
3. Walked into Palo Alto Apple Store hoping
1. Find they did actually have a reservation that day
2. Grab it!
3. Wait 30 min, don’t buy anything!
4. Give my computer to the awesome (seriously, she was great) “genius” (I hate that name, it’s really arrogant - leave it to Steve) who turns it on and notes that it’s making a “loud nasty sound”.
5. They don’t have the HD in stock (160GB 5400RPM) and sadly though they’re ordering me a new one, they can’t repalce it with a 7200. Understandable, but a bummer.
6. Genius calls around to all the local stores, where EVERY one of them makes her wait ~ 5 min to see if they have a HD in stock
7. Stanford does!
8. But it’s on hold for someone else…
9. Give up, have her take my machine, prepare my self for a 1 week wait without a laptop
4. Check my backup, which I kind of knew had failed last time I ran it, but was out of time so was just going to run it again this week…

And then, on top of that, as I’m using my SunRay, I get a notice that I need to change my password. Seems that Sun has a 6 month password policy. So despite the fact that my password is 8 letters randomly generated (D1n%F,6P - and no, I don’t have the same password at multiple sites, so typing this won’t do you any good) that I have NEVER typed in the clear, that I have NEVER written down, I now need to change it. So I do. And the systems now have me locked out. Call the resolution center, who informs me it takes 24 hours EXACTLY to change passwords. So I can’t find out if I’m an idiot and misremembered my password (which is likely frankly) for 5 more hours. In the meantime, I have NO computer (I’m at home still), no email, no backup, no files, so basically, no work. Sigh. Thank god my email (when I get access to it) is IMAP, and all 10,000 messages are on the server.

So the point, besides ranting? IT is HARD. Business expectations in IT are WAY harder than consumer. Even a insanely great company doesn’t have it nailed (1 week for a HD replacement!?) Little things add up to huge costs. There’s a need for the basics in systems management in all our lives. Tools still aren’t perfect.

I’m a lemming, and bought an iPhone on Friday. And I’m a fairly happy lemming. I’ll leave the stories for later; for now, some notes of interest about the thing:

• It reports all crashes back to Mr. Steve. Check out /Library/Logs/Crash Reporter/Mobile Device/YOUR iPHONE NAME/
• Email is not a primary focus for this thing.
• Unlock screen shows SMS and missed calls. Doesn’t show any indication of email
• Needs a unified mail inbox, or better way to switch. Four taps is annoying
• Works great with my Ice-Link in the car. iPhone gave a standard error message about “not made to work” but I hit no, and all worked great. Music was playing, Olivia was able to use the other features of the phone no problem at the saem time. CAn’t browse music on the iPhone while playing. Best part - how it handles incoming calls! Music fades down, and ring is played through car speakers. Answer normally. Speakerphone didn’t seem to work. Ideal setup for a BT headset.

Finally, I’ve now crashed it twice. No power button or battery to pull kind of freaks me out. In fact, my iPhone was just sitting dead and blank for he past 2 min, then by itself the screen just turned on and now all seems well. Watchdog - don’t fail me!