alex.polvi.net

Well, nothing to report. Went fly fishing at Fooly Waters and Steelhead Falls in the crooked river ranch. Seems as if they are between hatches, since the fish were not biting anything. Nobody was catching fish, so I know it wasn’t just me being a bad fisherman. Did catch a sweet sunburn, though.

Looks we are not the only ones that thought it was cool: Slashdot, Spreadfirefox

This would be me if I was southpark character.

Check out Brandon, Corey, Lance, and Beth. Or build your own.

Trying to solve the “what is the osl?” question, I thought up a good analogy for the hosting side of things.

Lets use a football team to explain how I see it. In this case the team is the open source community. Out of all the positions available the OSL is the water boy. We provide a very important function to the team by providing the water and support.

I see apache as the wide receiver that never misses a catch, mozilla as the rookie super star, gentoo as the “secret weapon”, and the kernel as the center. Without the center the whole offensive line would fall apart and the team would be worthless.

This raises some questions. Do we always want to sit on the sideline giving players their drinks and ankle-wraps? Or do we want to play? How could we play? Can we be successful even if we never make a touchdown? We can be the best water handlers in the world, but we will still never be remembered. The players will know us… but do we want more?

I don’t know.

UPDATE

Danny’s comments were so good I wanted to promote them to the main post:

Continuing the player analogy, even on the hosting side, I would equate us more as like a tight end than a waterboy. We’re on the field, getting dirty, and blocking for the receivers so they can make the big plays. But without us, they’d never get open. Besdies, the fans (the community!) love big hits :-)

The folks over at SpreadButter are really building up a community! The first major success is having the poll ported over to slashdot! Go butter!

A few months ago I had the pleasure of mounting 3 HP servers. I prayed it would be the last time we would meet, but it turns out that didn’t work. Now the task is to mount 15 servers all using erector-set like tactics. Mike and I were able to mount 4 sets of rails in roughly an hour, bringing the 5min/screw average down to around 2min/screw. This is unlike other screwless brands were we can have a set of rails mounted in under a minute.

Trying to figure out why HP decided leave rack rails un-engineered I went to the website. Quickly I found out that this was a treat from corporate leadership. Mark Hurd, the current CEO and President, says, “Everything we do must be for the customer. If it’s not, then we need to reconsider why we’re doing it.” So thats right folks, they did it for us! Mike, myself, and all other sysadmins that are stuck with HP gear will be the most dexterous, patient, screw driver able people on the planet! All thanks goes to HP for making customers a must!

Between the hours of 12-6am Saturday morning a group of friends and I “took back the sidewalk” by painting a 24ft x 24ft firefox logo in the middle of the quad. We used 100% earth friendly materials: cornstarch, kool-aid, and water. Our process involved drawing a large grid with yarn and then chalking outlines for the different areas of paint. We only got talked to by campus police once and they were very understanding.

We all had different jobs. Some people were painting orange, some red, and some white. My job was to paint the ocean… instead of using paint brushes we used our hands (for the most part). Thus, my hand is blue.

Crazy fun way to support the community!

Project page: here
Photo gallery: here