The Daily Parker

Bruce Schneier thinks the NSA's plan to fire 90% of its sysadmins and replace them with automation has a flaw:

Does anyone know a sysadmin anywhere who believes it's possible to automate 90% of his job? Or who thinks any such automation will actually improve security?

[NSA Director Kieth Alexander is] stuck. Computerized systems require trusted people to administer them. And any agency with all that computing power is going to need thousands of sysadmins. Some of them are going to be whistleblowers.

Leaking secret information is the civil disobedience of our age. Alexander has to get used to it.

The agency's leaks have also forced the president's hand by opening up our security apparatus to public scrutiny—which he may have wanted to do anyway.

Andrew Sullivan puts it best: "Every now and again, a writer needs to find a new way of expressing the notion that fundamentalism is not actually faith, but a neurosis built on misunderstandings and leading nowhere. And then you just read the AP:"

A northern Arizona family that was lost at sea for weeks in an ill-fated attempt to leave the U.S. over what they consider government interference in religion will fly back home Sunday.

Hannah Gastonguay, 26, said Saturday that she and her husband “decided to take a leap of faith and see where God led us” when they took their two small children and her father-in-law and set sail from San Diego for the tiny island nation of Kiribati in May.

Well, praise be!, Venezuela has a coast guard.

The title comes from this joke, in case you haven't heard it before.

Yes, I know the weather's beautiful in Chicago this weekend, but sometimes you just have to run with things. So that's what I did the last day and a half.

A few things collided in my head yesterday morning, and this afternoon my computing landscape looks completely different.

First, for a couple of weeks I've led my company's efforts to consolidate and upgrade our tools. That means I've seen a few head-to-head comparisons between FogBugz, Atlassian tools, and a couple other products.

Second, in the process of moving this blog to Orchard, I've had some, ah, challenges getting Mercurial and Git to play nicely together. Orchard just switched to Git, and promptly broke Hg-Git, forcing contributors to enlist in Git directly.

Third, my remote Mercurial repositories are sitting out on an Azure VM with no automation around them. Every time I want to add a remote repository I have to remote into the VM and add it to the file system. Or just use my last remaining server, which, still, requires cloning and copying.

Fourth, even though it was doing a lot more when I created it a year ago, right now it's got just a few things running on it: The Daily Parker, Hired Wrist, my FogBugz instance, and two extinct sites that I keep up because I'm a good Internet citizen: the Inner Drive blog and a party site I did ten years ago.

Fifth, that damn VM costs me about $65 a month, because I built a small instance so I'd have adequate space and power. Well, serving 10,000 page views per day takes about as much computational power as the average phone has these days, so its CPU never ticks over 5%. Microsoft has an "extra small" size that costs 83% less than "small" and is only 50% less powerful.

Finally, on Friday my company's MSDN benefits renewed for another year, one benefit being $200 of Azure credits every month.

I put all this together and thought to myself, "Self, why am I spending $65 a month on a virtual machine that has nothing on it but a few personal websites and makes me maintain my own source repository and issue tracker?"

Then yesterday morning came along, and these things happened:

1. I signed up for Atlassian's tools, Bitbucket (which supports both Git and Mercurial) and JIRA. The first month is free; after, the combination costs $20 a month for up to 10 users.
2. I learned how to use JIRA. I don't mean I added a couple of cases and poked around with the default workflow; I mean I figured out how to set up projects, permissions, notifications, email routing, and on and on, almost to the extent I know FogBugz, which I've used for six years.
3. I wrote a utility in C# to export my FogBugz data to JIRA, and then exported all of my active projects with their archives (about 2,000 cases).
4. I moved the VM to my MSDN subscription. This means I copied the virtual hard disk (VHD) underpinning my VM to the other subscription and set up a new VM using the same disk over there. This also isn't trivial; it took over two hours.
5. I changed all the DNS entries pointing to the old VM so they'd point to the new VM.
6. Somewhere during all that time, I took Parker on a couple of long walks for about 2½ hours.

At each point in the process, I only planned to do a small proof-of-concept that somehow became a completed task. Really that wasn't my intention. In fact, yesterday I'd intended to pick up my drycleaning, but somehow I went from 10am to 5pm without knowing how much time had gone by. I haven't experienced flow in a while so I didn't recognize it at the time. Parker, good dog he is, let me go until about 5:30 before insisting he had to go outside.

I guess the last day and a half was an apotheosis of sorts. Fourteen months ago, I had a data center in my living room; today I've not only got everything in the Cloud, but I'm no longer wasting valuable hours messing around configuring things.

Oh, and I also just bought a 2 TB portable drive for $130, making my 512 GB NAS completely redundant. One fewer thing using electricity in my house...

Update: I forgot to include the code I whipped up to create .csv export files from FogBugz.

Today is the 25th anniversary of the first official night game at Wrigley Field. The night before, on 8/8/88, the Cubs turned on the lights—and got rained out:

Cubs right-hander Rick Sutcliffe threw the first pitch. Phillies left fielder Phil Bradley hit the first home run. Cubs second baseman and future Hall of Famer Ryne Sandberg stole the first base.

Officially, of course, none of that happened. Heavy rain interrupted play after 3 1/2 innings and the game was called after a delay of two hours and 10 minutes. Technically, the first night game came the following evening, when the Cubs defeated the first-place Mets, 6-4.

Details, details. Anybody who was there on 8-8-88 will tell you that's the date that counts. And they're probably right. Because that just might have been the most publicized, scrutinized, highly-anticipated, talked-about and written-about regular-season game ever. Especially for a dog-days matchup between a pair of second-division teams.

The theory was, of course, that night games would help the club. How have the Cubs done since? Well...they've played more night games, at least. They've probably helped make the neighborhood a party zone, too. It's hard to remember the Wrigleyville of the 1980s, which looked a little like Detroit does today.

The Cubs' next night game at Wrigley is next Monday. They have, at this writing, a 40% chance of winning.

I've started playing around with Orchard, an open-source content-management system, as a replacement for this blog's infrastructure (and as a replacement for other things, like inner-drive.com. It hasn't been all skittles and beer: Orchard has serious issues running on Microsoft Azure Cloud Services, though it runs fine on Azure Web sites.

It turns out, my employer is moving to Umbraco, a different open-source CMS. So it makes sense to try that out, too, as I'll have to support Umbraco at work anyway—meaning I can learn it during work hours instead of after.

Working in my few free hours after work, of course, makes this decision take longer than I'd like. That, and I don't want to do this again for many years.

So no major changes to report yet, but I'm getting closer.

The National Transportation Safety Board has released its final 2012 statistics:

Part 121 commercial airline operations remained fatality-free, and general aviation accidents were virtually unchanged. In the general aviation segment, the number of total accidents was 1,470 in 2011 and 1,471 in 2012. Fatalities decreased slightly, from 448 to 432, and the accident rate per 100,000 flight hours declined from 6.84 to 6.78. On-demand Part 135 operations showed improvement, with decreases across all measures, the NTSB said.

Part 121 refers to the section of the Federal Aviation Regulations (FARs) involving scheduled commercial passenger service. What these statistics mean is, in 2012, you had a better chance of dying doing anything else than flying on a commercial airliner.

...and the Cubs still haven't won 50. With a 49-63 record going into tonight's game, after having lost 8 of the last 10, the team still has the mathematical possibility of losing 100 games this year.

Here's the chart:

Sad.

After a year at sea, a sailor returns to his home port and walks into his favorite bar, and everyone turns to stare at him because his head has shrunk to the size of a grapefruit. Finally, one of his oldest friends asks him what has happened. And the sailor tells this story:

"We were at sea, and it was fine weather with a fair wind, and there wasn't much to do that day, so I decided to do a little fishing. I felt this immense tug on the line, and when I reeled in my catch, what had I caught but the most beautiful mermaid in all the seven seas! "And she said to me, 'Mr. Sailor, sir, please, won't you let me go! I am a magical mermaid, and I can grant you your very fondest wish if only you'll release me.'

"And so I said to her, 'Well, Miss Mermaid, ever since I went to sea, I've had only one dream: to make love to a mermaid. So if we can go below...'

"But she interrupted me, and said, 'Alas, Mr. Sailor, I'm sorry, but that's the one wish I can't grant, because as you see, I'm a woman from the waist up, but I'm a fish from the waist down.'

"And so I said to her, 'Well, that's OK, Miss Mermaid. Why don't you just give me a little head?'"

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Security guru Bruce Schneier warns about the lack of trust resulting from revelations about NSA domestic spying:

Both government agencies and corporations have cloaked themselves in so much secrecy that it's impossible to verify anything they say; revelation after revelation demonstrates that they've been lying to us regularly and tell the truth only when there's no alternative.

There's much more to come. Right now, the press has published only a tiny percentage of the documents Snowden took with him. And Snowden's files are only a tiny percentage of the number of secrets our government is keeping, awaiting the next whistle-blower.

Ronald Reagan once said "trust but verify." That works only if we can verify. In a world where everyone lies to us all the time, we have no choice but to trust blindly, and we have no reason to believe that anyone is worthy of blind trust. It's no wonder that most people are ignoring the story; it's just too much cognitive dissonance to try to cope with it.

Meanwhile, at the Wall Street Journal, Ted Koppel has an op-ed warning about our over-reactions to terrorism:

[O]nly 18 months [after 9/11], with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, ... the U.S. began to inflict upon itself a degree of damage that no external power could have achieved. Even bin Laden must have been astounded. He had, it has been reported, hoped that the U.S. would be drawn into a ground war in Afghanistan, that graveyard to so many foreign armies. But Iraq! In the end, the war left 4,500 American soldiers dead and 32,000 wounded. It cost well in excess of a trillion dollars—every penny of which was borrowed money.

Saddam was killed, it's true, and the world is a better place for it. What prior U.S. administrations understood, however, was Saddam's value as a regional counterweight to Iran. It is hard to look at Iraq today and find that the U.S. gained much for its sacrifices there. Nor, as we seek to untangle ourselves from Afghanistan, can U.S. achievements there be seen as much of a bargain for the price paid in blood and treasure.

At home, the U.S. has constructed an antiterrorism enterprise so immense, so costly and so inexorably interwoven with the defense establishment, police and intelligence agencies, communications systems, and with social media, travel networks and their attendant security apparatus, that the idea of downsizing, let alone disbanding such a construct, is an exercise in futility.

Do you feel safer now?

I can scarcely imagine how much a team of Thames Water maintenance workers enjoyed removing this:

Last week, officials at Thames Water removed a 15-tonne lump of lard from a trunk line sewer beneath the London suburb of Kingston. It was the fattest fatberg ever recovered from the London sewers, and by extension, probably the largest subterranean grease clump in U.K. history.

"A fatberg," says Simon Evans, media relations manager at Thames Water, "is a vile, festering, steaming collection of fat and wet wipes." Fatberg creation is a vicious cycle, according to Evans, who coined the term. "Fat clings to wipes, wipes cling to the fat," he explains. "They are the catalysts in this horrible fatberg game."

And—you know you want to watch this—Thames Water released video of the thing:

So remember, folks, don't flush your bacon grease or your wet-wipes. Or condoms, but that's another story entirely.

Also, this is probably the first literal use of the "Kitchen Sink" category in Daily Parker history.