General Rant, More to Come Soon (I hope)

Journal TTK Ciar's Journal: General Rant, More to Come Soon (I hope) 3

Journal by TTK Ciar on Sunday February 05, 2006 @04:20AM

General Rant

Lots has happened .. and I haven't had time to write. Where to begin?

Work! Work is familiar territory. I spend enough time there. I will start there.

My long, dark midnight in the Collections Department is breaking. We have hired a Manager of QA, who has kicked some major, major ass, and freed me from the constant firefighting which has consumed all of my time for the past few months. I'm spending about half my hours actually developing software (ooooh!). :-) It feels wonderful.

It's just in time, too -- John, the Director of Operations, came back to work after a short (but all too long!) leave of absence. He takes the problems facing the organization very seriously, and pulls resources from anywhere and everywhere to solve them. Since I'm one of the resources at his disposal, he has assigned me some solutions to work on. Wow, now that I've written that out, it doesn't seem like such a wonderful thing, but really, truly, I am elated -- he "owns" the problemset in which I am most interested, and for which I applied to work at The Archive in the first place.

For instance, I've been developing new functionality into the software I use to track the data "items" on the three data clusters, so that I can answer questions about what's where, and what isn't where it's supposed to be, how quickly we are filling up the servers with different kinds of items, and (perhaps most importantly) what is supposed to be the same between the clusters which isn't. I haven't been using my ItemTracker system to do this; that system is still not in production. I've been using an ad-hoc collections of perl scripts which operates on flat files of columnated data, which build up different perspectives of the data, starting from raw "manifests" -- simple lists of all of the items on each host in every cluster (as generated by the dy utility) which are automatically generated every night and uploaded to a central server.

Right now I'm building these perspectives and generating reports as needed, but at John's request I am automating it, so that these reports are generated every week without human attention, and made available via a web interface. Once that's working, I am hoping to spend some time working on ItemTracker, which will not only make new kinds of information available, but also allow users to describe the kinds of reports they want, and have them generated on demand without me.

Switching gears a bit, Brewster sat on a panel at last Friday's Commonwealth Club of California meeting, where he and other relevant individuals talked about the future and present of book digitization. I didn't deliberately time it this way, but I happened to get out of work and into my car (my car! more on that later) to go home just as the meeting began, and got to listen to it on the radio on the way home.

He was a little muted, which surprised me at first, but as the meeting progressed I started to see why it might be a good idea for him to withold some information and conceal some of his zeal. Some people are really upset about book digitization, and view it with suspicion if not outright hostility. Publishing industry professionals see it as a threat to their future profitability, authors are concerned about potential infringements on their copyrights, and the lawyers are circling like sharks smelling blood in the water. Right now those lawyers are making their passes at Google, and I don't blame Brewster a bit for not wanting to attract their attention. Furthermore, most of the books The Archive has available for download are from the Million Books Project, which was a huge learning experience in how not to scan books. The quality of most of these is horrible, and I can understand him not wanting to give people the wrong idea about the books we're scanning today. The quality we're getting out of the Scribe is nothing short of amazing.

Oh yeah, my car! I finally, finally, finally got a car, to replace the 1999 Toyota Corolla I totalled last November. The main reason it took so long is because it had to have a manual transmission. I'm addicted to the stick. But manual transmissions are getting really hard to find! Moreover, I wanted a car with a maintenance record that Consumer Reports liked, and that got good gas mileage for my commute. I finally found what I wanted in a Fremont used car lot -- a black 2001 Honda Civic.

I've been driving it for a couple of weeks now, and I'm really happy with it. It's a bit noisier than I would like (lots of engine noise, and no room between the engine and the firewall to add soundproofing -- still pondering this), but it gets 33 miles to the gallon (vs, the Corolla's 35), has more than enough zip, and has a toy I've never enjoyed in a car before -- a cd player.

So, I dug out the dusty binder that contains my entire cd collection and put it in the car .. there isn't much to it, since I've always had tape players in my cars, and most of the music I like is on tape, and tape players are less expensive than cd players anyway, so why not take advantage of my existing investment and buy a tape player to replace a broken tape player, rather than buying a cd player? So I haven't bought many cd's.

Here's what I do have: NIN: pretty hate machine, NIN: broken, NIN: downward spiral, Stabbing Westward, Gravity Kills, Eagles: Hotel California, Pink Floyd: The Wall, Sisters of Mercy: Greatest Hits, Ministry: Filth Pig, Aerosmith: Get a Grip, Faith No More: King for a Day, Ozzie Ozbourne: Ozzmosis, Depeche Mode: Violator, Psychedelic Furs: Midnight to Midnight, Duran Duran: Decade, Tears for Fears: Tears Roll Down, Led Zeppelin: II, Pet Shop Boys: Discography, Pet Shop Boys: Very, Garbage, Def Leppard: Vault, No Doubt: Tragic Kingdom, Alice Cooper: Hey Stoopid, Blondie: The Best of Blondie, Berlin: The Best of Berlin 1979-1988, Roxette: Look Sharp, White Zombie: Astrocreep2000, White Zombie: La Sexorcisto - Devil Music, Rage Against the Machine: Evil Empire, Marylin Manson: Coma, and Eurythmics: Greatest Hits.

I want: more Ministry, Ozzie, LedZep, Marylin Manson, .. and I want my Foetus on cd! I have been missing Foetus a lot during my commute. I've been listening to No Doubt, Garbage, and Ministry instead. I'll see what I can find on Amazon!

There's something else, too -- this is the first time in something like ten years I've actually owned my car. My last two cars, I got on finance, and totalled them just as they were getting paid off. But this one we simply bought outright. It's not the bank's car, it's my car. I own it, I can drill holes in it if I want to, and I really, really want to put a bumper sticker on it.

Preferably a bumper-sticker with an Anarcho-Capitalist message, which has proven remarkably difficult to come by. I've poured through Cafe Press and similar sites looking for one, but mostly I've turned up stickers being sold with Anarcho-Syndicalist or Anarcho-Communist messages. (Which is pretty entertaining, if you think about it!) I wouldn't mind a more generic anarchic message, and found a few which resonate with my personal convictions (like, "There's No Government Like No Government"), but none which would go over very well if seen in The Archive's parking lot -- we rely a lot on government contracts and grants, and certain important persons working there are of the conviction that our government is the only means by which certain charities may morally or pragmatically be provided to those who need them. This may sound out of character for a self-proclaimed anarchist, but I am loathe to ruffle any feathers.

That's all the time I have for tonight, but I hope to get back to this journal soonish. There's much more on my mind.

-- TTK

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