Chris Farris

Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage | Backblaze Blog. Hint: My birthday is coming up. 🙂

Startups in 13 Sentences Ramen Profitable Keep Your Identity Small The whole list of essays

I found this essay on Paul Graham’s website. Here is the link. I’ve quoted it for posterity.

One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they’re on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.

There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

So a few months ago I started thinking about virtualization and the future of my profession (System Administration). So much of the hassle we have involves software compatibility issues with libraries and the code that runs on it. My thoughts were that is would be much easier if, instead of big OSes with lots of services running on it, we had a micro-distribution running just a single application. A DNS or Mail server could be shipped as a virtual appliance with some form of hooks for shared storage via NFS or MySQL for its configuration information.

Not sure if this is documented anywhere, my link for 3.5.x is incorrect in the procedure. To enable SSHd on ESXi 4.0: At the console Hit ALT-F1 type “unsupported” it will not be echoed back to you you’ll see a passwd prompt. Enter the root passwd for that ESXi host. vi /etc/inetd.conf Uncomment the line begining with “ssh tcp” ps ax | grep inetd

http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/ESXi_PXE_install.html For Ubuntu you need the tftpd-hpa package as the install.tgz file is larger than atftp will allow.

I’ve decided to consolidate all my blogs into one place. I plan to shutdown geeklog, I don’t update that very often. I’ve not decided what I’ll do about VitalPowers. I’ve stopped using my LiveJournal and only check it once every other day to keep up with the friends who still use it. There are plugins to cross post WordPress to LJ, and I may continue to do that. Most of my active blogging is being done on Facebook.