The Berkman Center is an awesome place where you get to rub shoulders daily with movers and shakers in the cyberlaw and cyberpolitics fields. Other perks of working here include a nifty @cyber.law.harvard.edu email address, cool lunch talks on cyberlaw topics (with free food!) every Tuesday, and, of course, decent summer pay for a student who needs a short-term job.

So with that said, I’d like to announce that we are looking for three students or recent graduates to fill the following positions, which can either be classified as paid jobs or paid internships, depending on how the mood strikes you. These jobs are flexible — you need to be able to fulfill the minimum requirements, but if you can do more or have additional interests, we can probably expand the scope to take advantage of your extra skills.

|^. *Web Designer*
$11.50/hr. | This position includes responsiblity for creating new web site designs and site graphics based off a pre-existing style manual and some sample templates. Work will include designing new, visually-appealing sites and graphics for technology conferences, Berkman projects, and other event sites. You would be interfacing with research fellows and Berkman staff, determining their needs, providing sample sketches and diagrams, and creating clean, effective, and appealing web sites that can be implemented in HTML. You should have a good understanding of the abilities and limitations of HTML-based design, but do not need to have any coding experience. |
|^. *Web Developer*
$10.50/hr. | This position includes responsiblity for creating new web sites based off a pre-existing style manual and templates. You should be extremely comfortable coding well-formed HTML with CSS. Much of the work will involve modifying existing desigs for use as WordPress templates and formatting new content for web display. You should also have experience using MediaWiki (the software that underlies Wikipedia). If you have additional design or development experience (such as web site design, graphic arts, or coding for the web) the scope of the job can be expanded. |
|^. *Content Specialist*
$9.50/hr. | This position includes responsiblity for assisting Berkman staff and project fellows in creating and updating web sites including project and conference sites. This position would include some measure of copy writing and editing, so good writing, spelling, and grammar skills are a must. You should have some experience with basic HTML and have used WordPress or another blogging tool. This position will also be working on wikis as well as our in-house content management system. Some time would also be spent cataloguing, capturing, and posting pre-recorded multimedia content, including conferences, lectures, and the like. |

Start and end dates are flexible but should be around June 1 — Sept 1. Please send all resumes and links to zeno _care-of_ cyber.law.harvard.edu

The folks at ONI are adopting some more prudent security measures, including standardizing on PGP keys. This has encrouaged me t once again renew my PGP interest, and generate a couple new keys corresponding to my current email addresses. If you want to contact me securely with almost no chance of government interception, snag my key from a public key server and verify the fingerprint with the following. Do the same if you just want to verify that the messages I send you are really from me, as I am now auto-signing almost everything I send.

table.
| *Key ID:* | B87DED8B |
| *Email:* | zeno _care-of_ agblog.com |
| *Fingerprint:* | E59D BDFC FE19 BEA0 D34B B520 886E 86A5 B87D ED8B |

table.
| *Key ID:* | 84746329 |
| *Email:* | zeno _care-of_ cyber.law.harvard.edu |
| *Fingerprint:* | BC4C A886 B174 11C9 DEA6 CD9B B983 8E89 8474 6329 |

No idea what this is all about? Read and be edified. If you use Thunderbird, this will get you hooked up.

I have a problem — my computer can’t concentrate.

I’ve found a lot of ways over time to make my Mac work better for me. I run a bunch of little utilities and menu bar widgets and such that give me the information I want when I want it and make it very easy for me to do frequent actions, such as control my music, without having to waste time switching between programs. This goes along with my very strong belief that your computer is not working for you unless you have customized it to work the way you want to. In my ideal future, no one would ever ask to use anyone else’s computer because it would be completely incomprehensible, it would be so adapted to its owner.

Anyway, on Friday I wiped and completely reloaded my computer, hoping that it would solve the strange instability issues I’ve been having. Now I’m keeping even more track than I was before of resource usage, trying to arrive at the ideal combination of the utilities I want and the stability I require, along with keeping my memory and processor usage low. It isn’t an easy thing to achieve.

As you can see from the above, I don’t actually have very many apps running at the moment (the list was truncated to remove some small programs required by the operating system). While Safari, which has several open browser windows, may be justified in taking up 178MB of RAM, Quicksilver, my launcher, which isn’t even being used at the moment, takes up a whopping 109MB! iTunes seems a bit high at 65MB, and Adium, my IM client, seems high as well at 43MB, but 38MB for Synergy? Synergy is a simple app that lets me control my music with key combinations. It should be a small, simple add-on to iTunes, not a 38MB behemoth. Same with Growl, at 33MB, which shows notifications when events happen (like new mail arriving, or new songs coming on). And finally, look at QuietMBP! This is a tiny utility that does one thing — keeps my processor usage at a certain level — to deal with a terrible Apple design flaw that causes the MacBook Pro to emit an ear-splitting whine whenever it goes into processor power save mode. 15MB for the privilege of not having headaches may be a small price to pay, but it is still too high. In contrast, we have the Activity Monitor, from whence that screenshot came, which shows me all sorts of useful process information and graphs, all wile taking up only 10.5MB of RAM. I have to assume some of the other examples are simply sloppy programming if a mature app like Activity Monitor can keep its footprint so low.

Keep in mind that I usually have a lot more things running — four or five more utilities, my Mail program, etc. But even with this very minimal set of utilities, you can see why a Mac runs slowly with less than 1GB of RAM. The one good thing I can say about my current situation is that nothing I’m running right now seems to be the cause of the instability. I’ll keep adding back items, one at a time, so that I can isolate what was causing all the grief.

_A Prairie Home Companion_ will be coming to the Boston area in mid-June. Anyone want to go see it? (Why do I sense a deafening silence approaching…)

Berkman and PRX have organized what looks to be a kick-ass conference this Friday and Saturday called Beyond Broadcast. It aims to explore how traditional public media (public broadcasters like NPR, cable access, etc.) can use new media to better serve the public. I haven’t generally been advertising Berkman events on my blog, but this one is near and dear to me. I’m a big fan of NPR in the US and the BBC in the UK, and greatly admire how willingly both of those organizations have embraced the net and changing modes of distribution. I see the net as this really amazing force to complete shake up the existing production and distribution model for radio, television, movies, and the like, and this conference is a great opportunity to see what progress is being made.

It is also insanely cheap as far as conferences go. Take cheap and relevent and interesting and you’ve got one massively sold out event. But never fear, Berkman is here! We are going to be streaming the proceedings live on the web to as many people as our fancy new XServe can handle (and yeah, I’m in charge of that…*gulp*). So check out the Beyond Broadcast site today and if you’re interested, tune in on Friday to see the proceedings. There is even an online questions tool so that remote participants can submit questions to the panelists, and if you’re into the crazy virtual world known as Second Life, you can join us from in there by visiting the Berkman island and crowding into the “virtual” Harvard Law School buildings.

Wow, we’re so cool. 😉

I started filling out my employee self-evaluation form that was apparently due a few weeks ago, but then stopped. It is long, boring, difficult to apply to my situation (and the Berkman Center generally), and seems like a waste of time when there is so much other real work to be done. I’m supposed to pick out which mini-courses on team building, effective communication, organization, leadership, and the like would help me be better at my job. Huh?

When I see old Brandeis mailing list posts referring to the need to move a bunch of web properties to the “Brandeis standard design” for second level pages, it makes me think, well, that I should have been paid more. I mean, people generally get more than $12.50/hour (or whatever it is they were paying me by the time I left) to design something that becomes the University’s standard web template!

Remember back when I promised to write a review of _Veronica Mars_ season 1? No? Perhaps you recall my four other posts gushing about the series. Or maybe you’re one of the people to whom I gave a copy of the season 1 episodes, either as files or as a DVD set? Or perhaps you’re *that one guy who I thought was my friend* who *STILL HASN’T WATCHED THE DVDS I BOUGHT HIM*. But no, you wouldn’t be *that guy*, would you?

Anyway, _VM_ rocks, if you don’t know this by now, and you aren’t interested in watching it, then nothing more I can say here is going to convince you, so, rather than obsessing over a review before finally, finally, finally starting into season 2, I’ve been convinced by Kevin to just get started already. So on the train tomorrow, I’m watching 2×01. And finding out who was at the door.

*Tell me nothing. NOTHING.*

And I just got an invite to this…

Name:	Dusk to Dawn Danny Beach Burning
Tagline:	This is a ‘going in’ party.
Start Time:	Friday, April 28, 2006 at 1:00am
Venue:	Wingaersheek Beach (or thereabouts)
Description:	Danny Silverman will run screaming into the ocean brandishing a burning piece of wood

I’m so very afraid…

Its only after lying in bed for almost two hours, mostly on the verge of sleep but never quite able to get there, that I realize, all at once, that it is spring now, that my room temperature is above 68 degrees, and that, therefore, I’m just not going to fall asleep, not until I’m so drop-dead tired tht the heat no longer bothers me.

On goes the air conditioner, and already I feel the darkness descending. To hell with electricity bills.

Here’s a sort of strange question. Tonight after a talk the lack of good bus service made me decide to walk home from work, and in the process I realized that the 3.5 mile distance is probably just right for exercising. I’d love to run/jog to work some mornings when the weather is right. Problem is that I need to take my laptop, a change of clothes, and a towel along. I can’t think of any good way to do this while still being in a position to run effectively. My only thought is some sort of robot that can follow me, or perhaps throwing my bag on a bus and picking it up on the other end. Since my imagination is clearly way outside the parameters of this task, does anyone else have better ideas?

(One potentially obvious one is to take in extra clothes/towel to work on days that I ride the bus. This makes sense, but the question of transporting my laptop would still remain.)

As I try to optimize my computing experience I find myself watching the Mac Activity Monitor and just being blown away by the amount of RAM some applications require. The tiny SSHKeychain utility I use to keep my SSH keys open is currently taking a whopping 49MB of RAM, while the little WeatherDock is taking 26MB and MenuCalendarClock (a little calendar widget, as you might suspect) requires another 15MB. Even my battery monitor is taking 14MB! Seriously people? Seriously? What is it these apps are doing that could possibly require this much memory? Or are they just very badly written?

I went and bought myself a MacBook Pro. This is big news for me because it is a culmination of a lot of computer soul-searching which, for a guy who spends most of his waking hours in front of computers, is a pretty big deal. This is the story behind the path I have chosen.

Continue reading “Serious upgrades”

I don’t often have dreams that I can remember, and when I do remember them, they aren’t generably notable. Thus I awoke with some surprise this morning to realize that I had a dream that was out of the ordinary both because I remembered it and because of its marvelously odd dullness. Without getting into the twists and turns and quasi-indecipherable bits, the two notable aspects involved, first, me waiting at a bus stop for my bus to not come (a very good approximation of, oh, every other day or so in my life) and, second, me randomly meeting up with a couple of celebrities.

What was interesting about this meeting? Well, first off, I’m generally not one who spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about the lives of celebrities, so that they even made dream cameos, so to speak, was odd. More fun though was the context: one of the two asked me about blogging and how to blog anonymously, the second joined in the discussion and mentioned that she already had a blog. Heh. The discussion continued at some lenght about the relative merits of various kinds of blogging and anonymity, and then I awoke.

I won’t name celebrity names, but I will say that one of them recently had a brilliant guest performance on _Grey’s Anatomy_ and the second recently produced an _SNL_ rap video that confused me. None of this came up in the dream, though, it was just some discussion about blogging. So perhaps my job is slowly driving me crazy, I dunno. But it would be sorta neat if the dream recurred and we could talk LiveJournal vs. TypePad vs. WordPress.com tonight. 🙂

At lunch the other day Hal was talking to me about responding to incidents. In sysadmin world, an incident means that something went wrong or was hacked or otherwise misbehaved such that it needed to be fixed unexpectedly. At Berkman, incidents are pretty frequent. Sometimes they happen during the day, sometimes they happen in the evenings or mornings, occasionally they happen late, late at night.

Hal said that it is very important, especially at Berkman, to take full responsibility for what has broken, fix it promptly, and apologize for what went wrong. We’re running all sorts of not-really-tested applications, we’re understaffed for the amount of stuff we’re doing, and we move too quickly to be able to really test and evaluate and audit every nut and bolt of our setup, so it is inevitable that things will break. People are tolerant of that, as long as the person in charge *takes charge*, admits to the error, fixes it, and shares any lessons learned.

I have no problem with this philosophy, I believe it is a good one. Often times things break for various reasons, sometimes completely out of your control, but when you’re the person in charge of the systems, the buck stops with you and, whatever happens, you’re ultimately responsible for it. That’s me. I’m the guy responsible for everything. It’s a role that I’ve been easing into over the past few months. But I’m still not comfortable with it.

My problem is a simple one, and it gets to my control-freak nature: I want to know everything that’s going on everywhere. I want to know what’s doing what where and why and when and how. This is the proper approach, I’m told, at least in an ideal world. Everything affects everything else, and one little misconfiguration can be the hole the hacker needs to break in, or the proverbial feather that brings everything crashing down. And because we are running a variety of old systems that have grown organically over several years, I’m still not comfortable with what we’ve got going, and so I’m not comfortable taking the responsibility.

When will I be comfortable? When everything has been freshly installed somewhere new, according to the procedures I outlined, with me directly involved in the process. And that’s not to say that my procedures and approaches are at all better than what we have. All it means is that I’ll know exactly what each machine is doing, and, as much as possible, each machine with be configured identically. Creative destruction is what I’m doing, the inevitable churn, and I think in the end we’re going to be in a better place.

And so I’ve been cleaning house ever since I got here, and gee has it been exciting. I’ve learned tons of new things, I’ve messed up tons of systems, and I’ve created tons of great new stuff as well. And we’re getting there. Slowly, with much effort and quite a few missteps and all kinds of unforseen circumstances, we’re getting there. And what I’ve been learning about more and more recently is how important it is to document processes and setups and to test, test, test before deploying anything. That means taking time to create a similar setup on a staging server, run the updates, see what broke, roll it back, fix it, run it again, et cetera until you’re 100% confident, then send out the email scheduling the switch, then do it at the appointed time, and then test it and, if necessary, back out the changes and leave it for another day.

It’s a plodding approach that goes against so much of what I stand for, and clashes with everyone else who wants everything done better and faster, but it is the only approach that really makes sense. More and more I understand why central IT at major organizations is so inflexible and moves at such a glacial pace. And I’m not going to say that I agree with this all the time — I think the bureaucracy that surrounds many small decisions is incredibly overblown and wasteful — but I am starting to really understand how they get the way they do.

The most interesting take-away from everything I’ve learned so far, I believe, can be summed up in four words: *Rich Graves is God*. Rich, you may remember, is that quirky guy who came into Brandeis to implement some new directory stuff and ended up pretty much building UNet, the software and server infrastructure that drives the university network, from the ground up. Probably a hundred times, and I am not exaggerating, I have seen something at Harvard working one way or another, and I’ve either known how they could make it better, because it was better at Brandeis, or I haven’t known, but by looking at the Brandeis documentation and Rich’s bboard posts, I’ve discovered how it *should* be done. Email. Spam filtering. Computer registration. Web space. User file storage. All of these things are better at Brandeis than at Harvard. And on the few occasions when I’ve suggested changes in line with how Brandeis did things, I’ve been met with only silence (see note).

By obsessively documenting and explaining and responding on message boards, Rich created an electronic paper trail that guides me today, even after both he and I have left Brandeis. And as much as he has been my greatest teacher in the field of system administration, I say, thank you Rich. And since I didn’t mean to turn this little rant into fan worship, I guess I should end now.

I honestly didn’t see myself becoming a sysadmin after college. I probably wasn’t qualified for the job that I was given. But as much as I’ll bitch about my work on the days when things are particularily bad, I really love that this is where I ended up. And that’s why I wake up every day excited to go into work and face the next challenge that the computer fates have seen fit to fling my way.

*Note:* I have received a note from a gentleman from the Harvard department that runs CAMail in which he told me they would be considering a modification to their virus filtering based on the suggestion I gave for how Brandeis handles a particular problem. Awesome!

I was teetering on the edge of sleep when I heard a loud, low drone. It took me a few seconds to sort of become awake and place it — a large plane was flying overhead. Hmm. And then I jumped out of bed and went to my window, but didn’t see anything.

I’m used to large planes flying overhead, happens all the time at home. It took me a bit to realize that, as far as I can remember, I’ve never heard a plane fly over Medford. Especially not at 12:30am. The unusualness of the sound in this context was enough to wake me up. I wonder what it was doing up there.

Slashdot just posted another story about how potential employers are googling applicants for jobs, and people need to be wary of what they post online, what it says about them, etc., etc. As if this were somehow new, exciting, strange, or not common knowledge. I know, I know, people post on MySpace and Facebook and wherever without thinking about the consequences, and to those people I say, *wake up and face reality*! I’ve certainly posted things on line, years ago, that I’m less proud of today, but in the year 2006, there’s no excuse for this sort of thing.

Anyway, the article made me decide to google myself, something I haven’t done in quite a while, and the results were pretty favorable.
# AgBlog. Welcome. Here you are.
# Amazon product page for _The Devil and Daniel Silverman_, a book that is not related to me in any way, but that I did buy at some point, although I haven’t read it.
# My Berkman profile page, slightly out of date right now.
# My Flickr photo stream
# My old Brandeis home page, which probably won’t be up for much longer, once Brandeis gets around to closing my account.
# My very few contributions to the OpenACS forum.

And only after *all of that* do we get chief medical officer Daniel Silverman of Princeton, Danny Silverman the actor, a Danny Silverman at UCSB, and then a few more scattered references to me.

What do you find out about me from googling me? That I have a blog, that I went to Brandeis, that I take pictures, that I like open source software, that I had a brief interest in the Rhythmbox music software a few years back, that I wrote a couple messages to a mailing list about wearable computers, that I work at Berkman, that I had a judiciary case in the Brandeis student government court about something having to do with free speech, and that I had a hand in something called Finnegan. None of this stuff bothers me, in fact I’ve written about all or almost all of it right here on this web site. I think my online profile is pretty much under control.

Surprisingly, there is no mention whatsoever to my exploits in high school nor my article on Salon.com. For shame, Google, for shame.

Iowa has passed a law heavily restricting where convicted but released sex offenders may live in the state, specifically restricting proximity to schools and day care centers. Counties and cities have now started an arms race to see who can pass the most restrictive laws, making housing near parks, pools, libraries, and bus stops off limits as well. The former criminals have been forced to live concentrated in a few rural areas or move out of state entirely (and often far away from family and friends), causing the surrounding states to pass their own laws to keep the people away.

Now more and more of the sex offenders — many of whom were convicted as teenages of statuatory rape for having sex with underage girlfriends (note that it doesn’t work the other way around, girls having sex with younger boys is perfectly legal in Iowa) — have no place to go, and as a consequence are slipping off the radar, not registering with sex offender registries (thus violating another law), and, in some cases, being forced to live homeless in parks, cars, or under highway overpasses.

I’m not going to give any caveats like “of course these people are bad, but…” I think such statements are silly and counter-productive. Almost everyone is in favor of catching and punishing (and/or reforming, depending on your political bent) criminals, and people in general also acknowledge that crimes against children are in some ways more “wrong” and “evil” than crimes against adults. However, if you are going to release someone from prison with the assumption that they are reformed and can once again become a functioning member of society, only to heavily restrict their movement, and their rights, and then to alienate them from their communities by labelling them and putting up signs and tracking them with GPS bracelets and going around to local families to warn them, and on top of that legislating in such a way as to make it *almost impossible* for them to live quiet lives without once again *breaking the law*, you are giving these human beings no life at all.

The response of some lawmakers to the inevitably problems with these laws, including sex offenders disappearing from the registration databases and living concentrated in a few rural areas, is an even more extreme form of “not in my backyard” thinking that advocates more restrictive prison terms. Which I guess makes sense, when you think about it. Force the people into a situation where it is almost impossible for them to avoid breaking the law so that they can be rounded up and thrown back in prison despite not having done anything else wrong. Some people might call that entrapment, might call it evidence that we do not have faith in humanity, that we intent to punish forever people who made a mistake in their youth. In Iowa they call it protecting the children.

I’ve finally finished watching _The Prisoner_, which got progressively more strange in its last four episodes, concluding with an episodes that makes absolutely no sense unless one completely disconnects it from the 16 that proceeded it and think of it, not as a science fiction continuation of the series, but at some strange amalgamated literary/symbolic wankfest by series creator Patrick McGoohan. Realize that (which took me until near the end of the episode), and then I needed only one further clue to get the final “message” of this show — the door to No. 6’s flat in London opening as he drove off. And that, as they say, is that. Unlike the marveloulsy interprative “Restless” episode of _Buffy_ at the end of season 4, the ultimate episode of _The Prisoner_ cannot sustain more detailed analysis. Which makes sense, perhaps, when you realize it was written in 48 hours.