I know what time it is!

Ken asked whether anybody knows what time it is. After searching for and going through several pockets watches, I finally settled upon a Swiss Army Pocket Watch a few years ago. They are polished steel and don't really clatter around in your pocket.

Highly recommended.

(Caveat: mine is a bit different than the one pictured. It doesn't have a date display and has a flip cover, much like the current alarm pocket watch; but I don't have an alarm.)

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mail.apache.org is dead; long live mail.apache.org!

Over the weekend, daedalus finally kicked the bucket. It was spontaneously rebooting on us, and the ASF didn't have the capability to reboot it or access its serial console. So, instead of spending a lot of time to fix it (which we don't have anyway and reboots like that typically indicate a hardware failure of some sort!), we decided to promote hermes into production and send daedalus to its final resting place.

We were pushing over 6 million messages a day through a dual PIII/800 with a qmail/ezmlm setup. In addition, before minotaur arrived last year, daedalus was also our primary webserver servicing about an equal number of hits per day. One of daedalus's hard drives had already failed in the last month or so. We've been prepping hermes, a new IBM x345 Series to replace it. But, as it goes, we weren't going to promote it until something like this happened. (Yes, we would like to have been able to do actual load testing and had been discussing it; alas...)

hermes seems to be responding to the load fine. We've added clamav scanning, and may add in SA later. I've got to take hermes down later tonight to disable atime. There will be some growing pains (i.e. we had to kick gump off this morning); but hermes is probably about 4x as powerful as daedalus was - this grants us the necessary headroom to add services like clamav and SA to the mix. This also completes the Collab ISP transition - the ASF is now fully self-hosting via UL and responsible for its own bandwidth.

Kudos to Brian and Noel. Assists to Tris and Fitz for sending daedalus on its way.

RIP daedalus (Nov. 20, 2000-May 9, 2004). She served us mighty well.

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The US isn't losing its scientific dominance...yet...

We were talking at lunch about the story in the NY Times; and I'm not sure that I agree with their premise. However, on /. there is an interesting comment:

"It's the fact that these (NSF) grants are very hard to get, and even top researchers with excellent track records of doing things with funding are not getting grants"

Uh, yah, that'd be us. Our group had funding for about 17 consecutive years; I show up and all hell breaks loose. I swear it's not related. Still, we're waiting to see if we get any funding this go-around. It puts a big cramp in our planning because we know if we get funding, we have a research direction and we will be able to achieve these goals with suitable funding. So, we really can't go down any other paths until we know if we have funding. And, if we don't get funding, everyone in our group will need to do some soul-searching or it'll bounce us all out of P.Q.S. (see below)!

As one of my colleagues has said, "Vote for people who want big bombs and planes. We like them. They fund us." So so so true.

Oh, this is me, by the way: Living with P.Q.S. It's not even funny. Yah, it is, actually.

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Are wildcard imports harmful in Java?

I got into a discussion the other day with a colleague who thinks that fully qualified import Java statements are a horrible idea and that all packages should be imported via the .* idiom (i.e. import java.util.List vs. java.util.*).

My personal experience has been that this is a bad idea as the .'s make it almost impossible to understand the class hierarchy when you try to read the code. I've also been bitten a number of times by inadvertent class collisions. Can anyone shed some light on what the *current recommended practice is? Has the Java community (perhaps the OSS Java community) settled upon an accepted modus operandi for doing imports?

Beers to people at the next ApacheCon if they can shed some light on this. And, yes, I realize this could be a bikeshed, but I don't care...

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Odds and Ends

So, it seems like I'm going to be a blogger like Ken Coar and just do massive brain dumps rather than pithy comments along the way. So, here's some odds and ends that have happened touch all three pillars of this blog:

Went to see the Dalai Lama when he visited UC Irvine two weeks ago. He talked about that ethical behavior comes from the pursuit of positive feelings. He said there are two types of behavior: positive and negative. The bad actions come from the pursuit of negative feelings (hate, anger, jealousy, etc.), while the ethical behavior comes from seeking the positive behavior (love, compassion, etc.). That's cool, but the really intriguing aspect of the Dalai Lama is what an imp he is. And, I mean that in a good way - but here he is in front of several thousand people laughing and donning a UC Irvine visor because the "light is in my eyes." It was, but the way he handled himself is not at all what I expected. The funniest response to one of the questions was in response to, "What do you think about the XV Dalai Lama?" (Note that he's the XIV Dalai Lama.) His response, "Not my problem" while waving his hand goodbye. His English is passable, but he had a translator with him to help produce phrases he couldn't translate on his own. Also, the US Secret Service was there providing security for him. Very interesting to see them in action around the Bren.

Saw the Rangers take two out of three from the Angels. Yay! As my mom said, "You didn't think they'd win any games!" Yet, I was there in my Rangers attire for all three games cheering them on. While there weren't any Rangers fans near where we were sitting in Right Field, I did think I saw some of the friends and family of the current Rangers players - only someone who knew Gerald Laird would have his old number (and he's still in his rookie season - the number from his September callup last year!). (Laird and a few others grew up or went to college in Southern California, so I'm not shocked.) Incredibly, their pitching is still holding up. I also was watching the doubleheader between the BoSox and Rangers last night. Drese and Benoit held their own against Arroyo and Pedro. They are in first place, and I'm wondering how long this will continue...

I'm also a TA for ICS 123: Software Architecture and Distributed Systems. This is why I've been completely swamped. I was only assigned to be the TA after the first week of class - so I've been playing catch-up since then. Even though there are over seventy students in the class, the school is not interested in providing any assistance in grading. I've spent the last two days non-stop grading assignments. It's awful. I also bet there is a workload grievance somewhere I could file. The university is making boat loads of money off this course and does not desire to allocate enough resources to it. They should be ashamed of themselves. The students will be hurt in the long run.

My planning for my trip to Europe continues. I have a flight booked (only $1k from LAX to Oslo via Heathrow - not too bad). I have a hotel while I'm in London (but not yet one for Oslo). I've also arranged to meet in London with a family friend from New England while I'm in London. So, I'll have someone to go play tourist with. Heh. I'll also hope to meet up with some of the ASF guys while I'm in town. Yay! It can't come soon enough.

Oh, and in response to Steven's post, a colleague and I were looking at a document the other day that we had supposedly written and we both went, "We didn't write this. It has grammatical errors." Both of us are real sticklers about that - it turns out that an undergraduate had written that sentence (it was a proposal he had submitted to us and one which we returned back to him after edits) and we both overlooked it. We should be ashamed of ourselves for not catching it earlier.

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