Author: tarus

Milgram's Experiment

Posted on by tarus

I returned home from a trip to England yesterday through London’s Heathrow Airport, and once again I was delayed by airport security. The experience reminded me of the Milgram Experiment, a famous study on how people respond to authority.

In the experiment, there were three roles: a researcher, a student and a teacher. While both the student and the teacher were introduced as volunteers, the true subject of the study was the person in the teacher role, who was given monetary reward to participate ($4 in 1961 or about $31 today). The researcher would explain that the purpose of the study was to explore the affects of negative reinforcement on learning. The teacher would read questions and should the student end up getting a answer wrong, it was the duty of the teacher to administer an electric shock. The strength of the shock would be increased if the student continued to answer questions incorrectly. The subject in the teacher role would be given an example shock at the lowest level before the experiment began.

I was introduced to the experiment in school through a black and white film called Obedience. It must have been in middle school, since I distinctly remember it as a film and not a VCR tape, which is what we had in high school. I can remember sitting in a dark room listening to the whirr of the projector as we watched the results of the experiment.

The teacher and student were separated, and the true subject of the experiment was seated in front of a console with numerous switches. Each switch was supposed to represent a level of shock, from mild shocks in the “green” area on the left side of the console up to extremely strong shocks in the “red” and finally “black” area on the right side (and yes I have no idea why I still see that panel in color when it was a black and white film – perhaps it was described). Now no actual shocks were administered to the student. Instead the panel was tied to a tape recorder that would play back the “student’s” responses. As the shock level increased, the recorded responses would get more desperate, often pleading for the experiment to end. In some variations, the confederate in the student role would even bang on the wall separating them from the teacher. Eventually, the pleading would simply end and be met with silence.

What Milgram found was that a high number of the subjects would be willing to administer shocks at the highest level as long as the researcher told them to do it. One should really experience this film because I was horrified when I saw it. Most of the people, while expressing concern, continued to press the buttons, and I can remember actually crying when one of the subjects simply refused to continue after administering the lowest shock – he was the only one to stand up to the man in the lab coat (at least in the film).

The movie had a strong impact on me and my personal philosophy, and Peter Gabriel even wrote a song about it called Milgram’s 37 with the repeating lyric “We do what we’re told.”

So what reminded me of this experiment at an airport? I’m glad you asked.

I suffer from an eye condition that requires me to put saline solution in my eyes periodically. This becomes more of an issue when I fly due to the dry air in airplanes. Unfortunately, I have to use a special sterile, preservative-free solution that only comes in 118 mL (4 oz) bottles. The bottles are sealed to prevent contamination.

Back when I had only two of my three readers, I ran into a problem transferring at LHR on a trip to Portugal. The liquid limit in Europe is 100mL and they refused to let me through the airport with my solution (even though it is stamped with “TSA Approved” on the bottle). I would say about 50% of the time when traveling internationally someone spots the bottle, but in every single airport outside of Heathrow, including Bangkok and Dubai, the security people have accepted my explanation and let me take it through.

After my last problem at this airport, I sought out the policy that would allow me to take this liquid on the plane. I found this in regard to medicine on the Heathrow website:

Liquid, aerosol or gel medicines in containers over 100ml must be carried separately, together with supporting documentary proof of authenticity, such as a prescription or letter from your doctor.

I had my eye doctor write me a letter explaining the situation and I carry it with me when I travel. Luckily, I haven’t had to use it.

Until now.

As I was going through screening, the lady noted that my saline bottle was above the limit. They had also held my bag for additional screening (I travel with a lot of wires and they sometimes call it a “spaghetti bag”) so I told her that I could produce from that bag a letter from my doctor explaining that I needed that liquid for a medical reason and that it was only available in a 118mL bottle. She sat the bottle aside and called over a supervisor.

Mr. Bally Balkar (an STL or Service Team Leader) arrived and I dutifully showed him my letter. He seemed very confused, although the letter explained in detail why I needed the sterile solution in that particular container. He suggested, as did the lady the last time this happened, that I could go to Boots and get a smaller bottle. Apparently the English system of education tends to skip over the definition of “sterile” or maybe he was out that day. I patiently explained that the whole reason I didn’t do that in the first place, such as I do with other liquids, was due to the fact that the liquid both had to be sterile and could not contain preservatives, and I have neither the equipment nor the expertise to transfer it on my own, much less in the departure terminal of an airport.

He called over his supervisor, a Mr. Harry Singh (also an STL), who very solemnly examined my letter and then proceeded to suggest the same things Mr. Balkar had done. At this point I realized that despite my having followed the procedures for an exemption, there was no way that I was going to get that bottle (which, I should point out, only contained about 30mL of liquid at this time) on the plane. I decided to see if either Mr. Balkar or Mr. Singh possessed the ability to reason.

Me: I’m a little confused. I have followed the procedure. Why am I not allowed to carry this bottle on?

STL: Well, this letter doesn’t look like a prescription.

Me: The liquid itself is not prescribed. My use of this particular liquid is, however, necessary for the health of my eyes. And in the US you usually have to surrender the prescription when obtaining the medicine.

STL: But this is not a prescription.

Me: I understand that, but it is a letter signed by my doctor on official letterhead explaining why I need it. Isn’t that sufficient?

STL: But it is a year old.

Me: It’s dated April 15th, 2013, which makes it a little less than 11 months old, but as my condition hasn’t changed I didn’t see the need to bother my doctor for a new letter.

STL: (silence)

Me: I’m confused. You let the family ahead of me through with litres of baby formula and didn’t even swab it for chemical traces, yet you are saying that my doctor’s letter isn’t sufficient?

STL: Well, they were traveling with a baby.

Me: So you are saying that terrorists wouldn’t think to travel with a baby?

STL: (silence)

Me: Here, let me demonstrate the safety of this liquid. (I open the bottle and squirt a bit into my mouth). See?

Balkar: Oh, if you’ll finish that here we can let you go.

Me: (incredulous silence)

As I had now been at security for over 30 minutes and really wanted to leave, I settled for getting the names of the inspectors who denied me and I plan to file a complaint with the airport as well as with my airline. I am a frequent traveler through Heathrow but I’ll change airlines if this is not addressed. If anyone reading this knows of someone else who might be sympathetic to my story, say a UK government agency or a newspaper, please drop me a note with the contact details.

I both pity and fear men like Mr. Bally Balkar and Mr. Harry Singh. I pity their cowardice. In much like the subjects in the Milgram experiment, they were so afraid to make a mistake in the eyes of an authority figure that they would ignore overwhelming evidence that their actions were wrong.

I also fear them, as under a slightly different set of circumstances these are the men who drag families and children into vans in the middle of the night for “re-education”.

We do what we’re told.

OpenNMS, RANCID and Juniper

Posted on by tarus

Just a quick note that I was about to get the RANCID integration working on my OpenNMS instance with our Juniper SRX router.

We used to use a Cisco router but switched to Juniper last year. I hadn’t had time to mess with the integration but a client asked to see it so I decided to see what was involved in making the change.

I changed the password but while it connected, the logs just complained about timing out. I found this helpful post that pointed out that the “root” user in JunOS is dropped into the BSD interface and not the CLI interface.

To fix that, I created a new “rancid” user:

set system login user rancid class super-user authentication plain-text-password

and entered in a new password. Once committed, I edited .cloginrc with the new credentials and then RANCID was able to successfully talk to the SRX.

Review: The Snowden Files

Posted on by tarus

As someone with very strong opinions of the illegal surveillance being performed by the NSA, I was eager to read the account of how they became exposed in The Snowden Files by Luke Harding. I highly recommend it to everyone, especially those people who believe the government exists at the will of the people and not the other way around.

Do note that the book is entitled The Snowden Files and not The Ed Snowden Story. While Edward Snowden does figure prominently, the book is much more about the Orwellian domestic spying machine his revelations describe than the man himself. It has a lot of detail on the NSA as well as organizations such as Britain’s GCHQ, massively funded by the NSA to spy on people both domestically and abroad.

Among my social circles, Snowden is a bit polarizing. There are those who think that he broke an oath when he used his position as a contractor at the NSA to obtain these documents and that the end didn’t justify the means. Other more public figures describe him as “a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison“. However, most of my friends tend to believe, and this book demonstrates, that Snowden is a patriot in the truest sense of the word.

The Snowden portrayed by Harding is a rather humble and shy man. Nothing in this story indicates he is a narcissist. Perhaps his brief association with Wikileaks and Julian Assange (a narcissist of the first order) is where the idea comes from, but I think that NSA apologists feel more comfortable portraying him as a man acting in extreme self interest. If that were the case, he would have sold the information secretly and be living out his life in some warm paradise instead of remaining as a “guest” of the Russian government.

The only inflation of his position I found in this story was in the beginning when he describes himself as a “senior” member of the intelligence community. He was, in fact, a rather junior member, and the mere fact that he was able to acquire all of this extremely secret information just goes to demonstrate that the government can’t be trusted with it. I’m pretty much willing to forgive him for that, since had he prefaced his initial press contact with “yo, I’m a contracted sysadmin for the US government and happen to have a treasure trove of sensitive documents” he wouldn’t have been believed.

Critics will often cry that he should have used formal channels to express his unease. This book shows several examples of people who tried to do just that and found their lives ruined and their careers over. It is hard to trust in the system when people like James R. Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, lies directly to Congress and not only still has his job but is not in prison.

While the book is written in a very “matter of fact” manner, parts of it read like a spy novel. One of the more surreal chapters deals with the forced destruction of computers at the London offices of The Guardian. Great Britain doesn’t have a written Constitution nor does it guarantee freedom of the press. So to avoid possible incarceration of Guardian staff, Two GCHQ agents named “Ian” and “Chris” arrive to oversee the physical demolition of the computers used to break the story (of course, The Guardian simply moved the operation to their US offices and while there were similar threats nothing at this level occurred).

Personally, I think Snowden’s greatest “crime” was embarrassing the powers that be. President Obama won his first term on a campaign to overturn the Constitutional abuses of his predecessor and Snowden demonstrated that he not only continued those policies but strengthened them. The British government in this affair comes across as not only petty but pretty much lap dogs to the US intelligence service, with US tax money going to fund the GCHQ. Congress is currently full of self-interested sheep who take being lied to in stride as long as they don’t look weak on “terrorism”. Basically, forget popular opinion, just don’t end up on Jon Stewart.

While I try very hard to avoid Godwin’s Law, perhaps I should mint Balog’s Law, a corollary where all discussions of national security abuses end up referencing Al-Qaida.

Often, power is referred to as a “structure”. In my experience it is much more fluid, and right now it is flowing into the hands of a small minority of people. I know from first hand experience that these people are way more concerned with their own wellbeing versus mine, regardless of the rhetoric they spout to the contrary, and the end result will be disastrous.

There are things you can do to make power flow in the other direction. In general these are things like shopping locally (the more self-sustaining a community is the less they can be influenced by central government) but concerning privacy in particular there are a number of steps you can take to make the NSA’s job more difficult.

Use encryption. It is easier than you think. There are a number of tools that can plug right into your e-mail client. I use Enigmail for Thunderbird. OS X Mail.app users should check out GPGMail. There is even GPG4Win for you Outlook users. Once installed and configured it can be pretty seamless to use. The biggest thing you lose is the ability to search your encrypted mail.

Use as much open source software as you can. The Snowden documents reveal that the NSA has been actively trying to both subvert encryption standards (making all of us less safe from foreign prying eyes) as well as to install backdoors into commercial software. This is much more difficult with open source. Even if, say, Canonical put in a backdoor to openssh-server into Ubuntu, someone would notice that the package they compiled had a different hash than the binary on the server, and an investigation would ensue. Even if you can’t make the jump to an open source desktop operating system, a lot of open source applications (think Firefox and Thunderbird) are available on proprietary platforms such as Windows and OS X.

Also, limit what you share. Remember that if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product, so think twice about your Facebook habits. You can also learn about tools such as Tor that allow your Internet traffic to be somewhat anonymous. I also “sandbox” all of my Google activity within the Chrome browser but do most of my work in Firefox using Firefox Sync to coordinate with all of my devices.

To bring this somewhat “more rambling than usual” post to an end, I just want to point out that totalitarian societies do not happen overnight. Instead, there is a gradual erosion of personal freedoms until one day there is nothing left. Some people I’ve talked to about Snowden reply with “of course the government is spying on me”, in much they same way that getting groped at the airport is now “normal”.

It doesn’t have to be that way, and sometimes it takes brave people to point that out.

Review: Dell "Sputnik 3" Ubuntu Edition

Posted on by tarus

I’m in the market for a new laptop, or at least I was. My first generation Dell XPS 13 is getting a little long in the tooth and I really could use a little more screen real estate. I decided to order the latest third generation XPS 13 after trying out the second generation Lenovo X1 Carbon. After all, it has a nicer screen, Haswell, and since it still ships with Ubuntu 12.04 the hardware ought to be supported, at least with Linux Mint, my current desktop distro of choice.

When talking about laptops, it is hard to not make comparisons to Apple. While I think Macbooks are overpriced and too proprietary, they are nice machines and for the most part “just work”. I just wish I could buy something as good that runs Linux well.

The Sputnik 3 could have been that laptop but I had to send it back due to pretty severe LCD backlight “bleeding”, especially along the bottom edge. It was very apparent when I was booting up to install Mint, but my pictures don’t really do it justice. Here you can see a sort of “half moon” bleed on the left side:

and here is a similar area on the right:

Since I knew I couldn’t live with it, I decided to send it back and just stick with my older laptop awhile longer. While we have a small Macbook available to me that would probably run Mint just fine, I just can’t bring myself to use Apple products when they are so determined to use their marketing clout to prevent competition. I can’t go a day without reading about another example, such as the one I just read about Apple pulling a bitcoin app from their store.

I’d rather deal with “old shiny” than to give up my freedom like that.

Review: Second Generation Lenovo Carbon X1 with Linux

Posted on by tarus

As a Christmas present to myself, I decided to get a new laptop. My second generation Dell “Sputnik” Ubuntu Edition is getting a little long in the tooth. The screen resolution of 1366×768 is a little confining, and I’ve never been in love with the trackpad.

Now, while most of the folks at The OpenNMS Group are Mac users, the freetards in the group tend toward the Lenovo X1 Carbon. As Eric says, when it comes to Linux laptops you can’t go wrong with Lenovo.

Well, apparently you can.

While I ordered my unit in late November, it didn’t ship until the new year. I got the shipping notice the same day they announced the second generation X1 carbon at CES. Since I wanted the new shiny, I called Lenovo (their customer support is located in nearby Raleigh and is awesome) and returned the unit before it arrived. I then ordered the new model with the the extremely high density “retina” display. It arrived last week and I started playing with it this weekend.

In short: do not buy this laptop if you like Linux.

While sleek and stylish, the first thing they broke is the trackpad (one of my main reasons for switching). Instead of discreet mouse buttons like most Thinkpads before it, it is a single unit. I found it very hard to get used to using the “pseudo” buttons. Plus, it is mechanical and it feels really clunking when you press down on it.

The next thing they broke was the keyboard. While I’m not sure if the top row is OLED or just OLED-like, the functions keys are now programmatically displayed and gone are things like volume and contrast (those do exist when booted to Windows 8). And while I don’t know if this is new, but the “backspace” and “delete” keys are right next to each other which I found annoying, as I would often hit the wrong one.

But I could live with that, as it is only a matter of time before someone starts doing something cool with that technology and I could get used to the keyboard. Here is why I’m sending it back:

  • Suspend Doesn’t Work: Well, technically, resume doesn’t work. The system will suspend, but the OLED top row never dims and the laptop just starts heating up as something is obviously still running. The pm-suspend.log shows an error free shutdown, but once “suspended” you have to hold down the power key until it turns off and then reboot.

    UPDATE: I got this to work, sort of. Once Hibernate worked I ended up using this post to determine the issue was with the xhci_hcd (USB3) driver. I disabled it and now suspend works. However, the network doesn’t come back nor do the function keys.

  • Hibernate Doesn’t Work: Since this is a solid state machine with something like an 8 second boot time into Linux Mint, I’d be okay if I could hibernate instead of suspend. However, hibernate is just a shutdown with no warning to save your work.

    UPDATE: I got this to work, sort of. Removed the encryption on the swap partition and then updated /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume to match the new UUID and then “update-initramfs -u” to re-read that file. The resume isn’t always flawless (when run from the command line the mouse never came back and once I had to bounce the network).

  • Backlight Doesn’t Work: I like having a backlit keyboard. You can see the backlight come on when booting, but it never comes on when running under Mint.
  • Fingerprint Sensor Doesn’t Work: While I don’t know how much I’d use this, the model in this laptop by Validity Sensors (USB device ID 138a:0017) isn’t supported under Linux yet.
  • Weird Power Issues: Sometimes the unit fan turns on for no real reason, like something with Linux and the power management are out of sync.

I took this laptop on a road trip and was very unhappy with all of the effort I had to put into a system that was just supposed to work out of the box. At one point in time I changed a BIOS setting that wiped out grub (I had left Windows 8 on the system in a partition) and Windows Bootloader took over and wouldn’t let me back in to Mint. I finally based the whole thing just to see if that might help (I had to turn of secure boot to get Mint on it in the first place and thought maybe some weird UEFI issue was at play) but it didn’t improve things.

So it is a very sad day for those of us who looked to Lenovo to provide us Apple-quality laptops for Linux. Snatch up those Generation 1 models while they last or check out the new Dell “Sputnik 3“, but don’t buy this laptop.

Austin and the CAC

Posted on by tarus

It’s been a busy week for me as I had meetings in Sunnyvale followed by a trip to Austin to participate in a Rackspace Customer Advisory Council (CAC) event.

I’m not sure why I was chosen to be on the CAC. While I have been involved with Rackspace since April of 2002 (nearly 12 years – sheesh) we only have one server there. We are looking to deploy a number of new products and we’ve chosen OpenStack as our technology and Rackspace as our provider, but we are in the development stage and haven’t deployed any of it, yet. But it is always fun to come to Austin so I was happy to be able to visit.

I arrived on Wednesday just in time for a networking event. We had a choice of a visit to the hotel spa for a massage, or beer.

Guess which option I chose?

About ten of us got into a van and were driven to the Austin Beerworks. This was my kind of beer tour: it started with us sitting at the bar and then it pretty much stopped. I started off with a red amber called “Battle Axe” and then moved on to “Black Thunder”. I was sold on its description as a “German-style Schwarz” beer, and it was pretty tasty (I really liked the Battle Axe as well). Unfortunately, some good conversation got in the way and I talked too much (imagine), so time ran out before I could try the Sputnik. It was worth it, since a lot of that conversation was with Carl and Nick from Simply Measured, and it was cool to learn about how they were using Rackspace to implement their solution.

At the evening event at Perry’s Steakhouse I was happy to see that John Engates had made it up from San Antonio. I last saw John on CBS News when he was talking about issues with the healthcare.gov website. As a thought leader on hosting he was called to DC to provide input on fixing that site’s performance woes.

As we were catching up, a very energetic man came up and joined our conversation. He turned out to be Robert Scoble. Of course I’ve heard about him for years, and it was a pleasure to finally meet him in person, and yes, he is as crazy animated as his reputation suggests. When it came time for dinner I ended up seated between the two of them, and I likened it to being the creamy filling in a geek Oreo.

John had just taken delivery on a new, bright red Tesla Model S, so I begged a ride back to the hotel. While I think electric hybrids like the Prius are cool from a technology standpoint, the Tesla is cool from a car standpoint first and technology second. The controls and instruments are accessed almost completely through a touchscreen, and you can control everything from what music you want to listen to through ride height using it (only the buttons for the hazard lights and the glove box are analog). Plus the thing is insanely fast with zero lag – press the pedal and it snaps your head back. With a measured zero to sixty mph time of 4.2 seconds, it is slightly faster than David’s stock Mustang GT.

Want.

On Thursday we got to work with a series of presenters who discussed existing and upcoming Rackspace products. I’m not allowed to talk about them due to NDA, but I’m very interested in Rackspace’s hybrid cloud model using OpenStack. I like the control and security of a private cloud but I look to the public cloud to handle peak traffic. While getting the two to work was a little kludgy six months ago, they have done a lot of work to streamline the process.

Scoble did a talk during lunch about his new book the Age of Context. It seems worth checking out, although I think I’ll pass on getting the $3650 Meta Pro goggles in lieu of Glass.

I also got reminded that I really need to check out the Chef project. Both Rackspace and most of the attendees are heavy Chef users, and it seems to be edging out Puppet in the enterprises I’ve come across.

Thursday night saw sleet, freezing rain and some snow descend on Texas, so the Friday session was a little lighter on Rackers than was planned (since many of them were going to drive up from San Antonio that morning). It was cool to see that Nathan Anderson , who was a programmer at Rackspace when I started with them in 2002, is now is a position of responsibility, even if that responsibility involves the billing interface. (grin)

It was a fun time, and it made me excited about the possibilities available using the Rackspace platform. Hats off to Sandra, Aisha, Cara and the whole Customer Experience team for a nice conference.

Nagios News

Posted on by tarus

My friend Alex in Norway sent me a link to a Slashdot story about the Nagios plugin site being taken over by Ethan Galstad’s company Nagios Enterprises. From what I’ve read about the incident, it definitely sounds like it could have been handled better, and it points out one of the main flaws with the “fauxpensource” business strategy.

I assume that at least two of my three readers are familiar with Nagios, but for the one who isn’t, Nagios is one of the most popular tools for monitoring servers, and it has been around just as long as OpenNMS (the NetSaint project, the original name of Nagios, was registered on Sourceforge in January of 2000 while OpenNMS joined in March of that year). Its popularity is mainly based around how easy it is to extend its functionality through the use of user written scripts, or “plugins”, plus it is written in C which made it much easier for it to be included in Linux distributions. A quick Google search on “nagios” just returned 1.7 million hits to 400K for “opennms”
A few years ago Ethan decided to adopt a business model where he would hold back some of the code from the “core” project and he would charge people a commercial licensing fee to access that code (Nagios XI). If your business plan is based on a commercial software model, then your motivations toward your open source community change. In fact, that community can change, with projects such as Icinga deciding to fork Nagios rather than to continue to work within the Nagios project framework.

Enter the Nagios Plugins site.

To say that Nagios Plugins was instrumental to the success of the Nagios application would be an understatement. Back when I tracked such things, there were way more contributions of both new plugins and updates to existing plugins on that project than were given to the Nagios code itself. The plugins community is why Nagios is so popular in the first place, and it seems like they deserve some recognition for that effort.

Trademark issues within open source projects are always tricky. Over a decade ago a company in California started producing “OpenNMS for Mac”. Even though we had OpenNMS on OS X available through the fink project, it required a version of Java that wasn’t generally available to Mac users (just those in the developer program). However, that version was was required to allow OpenNMS to actually work at scale, but this company decided to remove all of the code that depended on it and to release their own version. Unfortunately, they called it “OpenNMS” which could cause a lot of market confusion. Suppose a reviewer tested that program, found it didn’t scale, and decided to pan the whole application. It would have a negative impact on the OpenNMS brand. After numerous attempts to explain this to the man responsible for the fork, I had to hire a lawyer to send a cease and desist order to get him to stop. It was not a happy experience for me. When you give your software away for free, the brand is your intellectual property and you need to protect it.

So I can understand Ethan’s desire to control the Nagios name (which is actually a little ironic since the switch from NetSaint to Nagios was done for similar reasons). He has a commercial software company to run and this site might lead people to check out the open source alternatives available. Since they are based on his product, the learning curve is not very steep and thus the cost to switch is low, and that could have a dramatic impact on his business plan and revenues.

At OpenNMS we treat our community differently. We license the OpenNMS trademark to the OpenNMS Foundation, an independent organization based in Europe that is both responsible for the annual Users Conference (coming to the UK in April) as well as creating the “Ask OpenNMS” site to provide a forum for the community to provide support to each other. They own their own domains and their own servers, and outside of an small initial contribution from the OpenNMS Group, they are self funded. Last year’s conference was awesome – the weather notwithstanding (it was cold and it snowed).

OpenNMS is different from Nagios in other key ways. At its heart, Nagios is a script management tool. The user plugins are great, but they don’t really scale. Almost all of the OpenNMS “checks” are integrated into the OpenNMS code and controlled via configuration files which gives users the flexibility of a plugin but much greater performance. For those functions that can’t be handled within OpenNMS, we teach in our training classes how to use the Net-SNMP “extend” function to provide secure, remote program execution that can scale. OpenNMS is a management application platform that allows enterprises and carriers to develop their own, highly custom, management solution, but at the cost of a higher learning curve than products such as Nagios.

Now that doesn’t make OpenNMS “better” than Nagios – it just makes it better for certain users and not for others (usually based on size). The best management solution is the one that works for you, and luckily for Nagios users there are a plethora of similar products to choose from which use the same plugins – which I believe is at the heart of this whole kerfuffle.

The part of the story that bothers me the most is the line “large parts of our web site were copied“. If this is true, that is unfortunate, and could result in a copyright claim from the plugins site.

To me, open source is a meritocracy – the person who does the work gets the recognition. It seems like the Nagios Plugins community has done a lot of work and now some of that recognition is being taken from them. That is the main injustice here.

It looks like they have it in hand with the new “Monitoring Plugins” site. Be sure to update your bookmarks and mailing list subscriptions, and lend your support to the projects that support you the most.

Glasshole

Posted on by tarus

Back in December a friend of mine I met through OpenNMS offered up a Google Glass invite. While I have privacy concerns about the whole thing, I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to play with the technology, so I accepted.

Well, it took awhile, but this week Google got around to offering me the opportunity to become an “Explorer”. After putting in my code, the Glass was added to my Google Wallet shopping cart and soon on its way via overnight shipping to the office.

Unfortunately, I ran into a problem right out of the gate. Apparently Glass doesn’t fit my head. While the picture above looks pretty normal, in order to actually see the screen I have to do this:

And that is painful. I soon had a vicious headache that stayed with me until I went to bed.

The way the Glass display works is pretty cool. It sits in front on the right eye and consists of an optically clear rectangular solid (made of plastic I believe). I’m going to call it a “cube” for lack of a better word, even though it is twice as wide as it is tall so it isn’t officially one.

The left side of the cube is mirrored, and the LCD is actually located on the right side, perpendicular to the long side of the rectangle. In the middle of the cube, at a 45 degree angle, is some sort of optical material that serves as the actual “display” – light from the LCD on the right passes through it, hits the mirror and then gets diverted toward the user’s eye.

The right earpiece is also a touchpad and you can interact with the device by swiping your finger along it. You pair it via Bluetooth with your phone, and that allows the Glass to have network access, although you can connect it via Wi-Fi as well.

But to be honest I never got to play with many of the features simply because I could not see the damn screen very well. I called the support line to see if there was anything I could do to adjust the screen on the glass downward, much like the “heads up” display on my wife’s car can be adjusted vertically, but unfortunately if you can’t get it to work by adjusting the nose piece you’re out of luck. You can rotate the display slightly left to right, but that wasn’t my problem.

The return process seems pretty easy. I called Google and they are sending me a box and shipping label. Once they get it and confirm it is not damaged, they will refund my money (and considering that the only thing I took out of the box was the Glass itself I’m not expecting any problems).

To say I’m disappointed is an understatement. If the display could just be a little lower in my line of sight I would have experimented with it a great deal. I’ve even taken it out of the box no less than three times during the writing of this post to see if some adjustment would give me some relief, but all I got was a headache.

I hope the return box shows up soon so I’ll quit trying to play with it.

Welcome Ken!

Posted on by tarus

As you might imagine, things have been a little hectic around here this week, so I almost forgot to share a great piece of news.

Ken Eshelby, a longtime OpenNMS user and frequent attendee at the OUCE, has joined our team as a consultant. I am excited to be working with him, as in his previous job he did one of the most amazing OpenNMS customizations I’ve seen.

I asked him for a picture and this is what he sent to me. Not sure of the context …

I'm CEO Again (sigh)

Posted on by tarus

It is with a heavy heart that I have to announce that Ron Louks, our CEO, will be transitioning to another job.

He has been given an opportunity that he just couldn’t refuse: to own the devices division of Blackberry, and if anyone can turn that company’s fortunes around, it’s Ron.

Plus Ron, being Canadian, feels a certain national pride in making Blackberry a success. It’s definitely a challenge but I can’t think of a better person for the job.

Ron will still be involved in OpenNMS as a Board member and will continue to work to help us execute our business plan.

All of us at OpenNMS wish him the best of luck.