Adventures of an Eternal Optimist

Do you prefer to be left alone? Do you wish for smooth, easy travel? Would you like to think that you can have an innocent conversation in the privacy of your home without worrying about who is listening to it?

There is a simple way to accomplish this. Get your name legally changed to Fitzblik Spixwallet.

Think I’m kidding? I am not kidding.

Ask anyone with a last name of Smith. Smiths deal with mixups all the time. All sorts of name-related problems crop up – reservations are mysteriously changed or deleted, people call looking for somebody else, all sorts of small inconveniences magically appear, to make life just a little more difficult. All it takes, for example, is for a person with the same name as you to wreck their credit rating — and you will have a harder time getting credit.

Your name is an index, and when that index is not unique, secondary information is necessary to discriminate between duplicate instances. Sadly, that secondary information is often not asked for, not accessible, or simply ignored, and in those cases, instances of an index are treated interchangeably.

“So what?” you may say. A few messed up restaurant meals or a few extra phone calls are hardly worth the hassle of spelling out ‘Fitzblik Spixwallet’ 10 times a day.

In these days of fear, however, taking the time to cast suspicion on the correct person is unfashionable. All it takes is a name collision – possessing the same name as a suspected terrorist – and you cannot bank on any of the simple things that many people take for granted today. You may be barred from air travel. You may have your conversations monitored. In extreme cases, you may be arrested and held for an indefinite period. Sound unlikely? Well, let’s just say that a simple name collision increases the odds significantly.

“That’s crazy!” you might say. Well I agree with you. It is crazy. The best part is, it provides brilliant camoflage for the bad guys. The bad guys are the only ones who CAN dodge things like the no-fly list, because they’re the only ones who have no scruples about flying with fake passports!

Case in point: Edward Allen.

If you have this name, change it. Whatever you do, if your surname is Allen and you have children, avoid ‘Edward’ at all costs. Why? That is the name of a known terrorist. That name will ring alarm bells in all sorts of places. People that you really don’t want to be showing an interest in you, will be. Now – maybe you figure – that’s ok, I’m not doing anything wrong. You may be right, there may be nothing to see – but they will have to watch you to find that out. The idea makes my skin crawl.

This poor kid found out early what kind of reception he will get every time he interfaces with the government:

4-year-old shows up on government ‘no-fly’ list

The moral of the story: Names are a ridiculous way to determine whether or not a person might be a terrorist. Unfortunately, the gov’t is willing to use names as a crude blunt object to bludgeon the populace with. Perhaps they will get a few terrorists in there – but if you can stay out of the way of the caveman’s club, you will ultimately live a happier, hassle-free, simpler existence.

I saw King Kong the other night.

As I watched the movie, I saw shades of Titanic, shades of Jurassic Park, shades of LOTR, even shades of Serenity (the natives were a disturbing cross between Orcs and Reavers, with all that facial mutilation).

And yes, there were some obvious little nagging issues that didn’t really make sense, such as how they managed to get a massive wet unconscious ape onto their boat, and could they really have had enough chloroform to keep that massive beast sedated the whole voyage back.

Those small things are but trifles. The movie itself was gorgeous – loving care and detail put into the recreation of New York, and painstaking time spent on putting expression into King Kong’s face.

My favorite part of any movie are the small moments, the few seconds where your heart stops, for lack of suitable response to the moment.

See, this (to me) is the difference between fiction and life. In film, all sorts of people work together to create moments, single moments. Immense effort of direction, writing, casting, acting, lighting, props and folio editing will go into the creation of one single space in time – and during that time, the audience revels in that intense emotion. Such moments are painstakingly crafted in books too – like the moment where Dagny Taggart walks into the ballroom on her 17th birthday – radiant, expecting/demanding something that nobody there could deliver.

Real life rarely has these moments. Not that we don’t dream about them, and work hard to try and construct them.

For example, all those girls buying prom dresses for their graduation dance – what are they really looking for? I believe that they are looking for that mythical moment where they walk into the room and the music gets quiet, and all eyes are on them. That is the engineering goal, if you will. The problem is, however, that real life isn’t a moment stopped. Real life is a million moments a second, in full speed, with plenty more moments immediately on their way. There is rarely a time where it all comes together, in front of the right people, at the right time, and even if it does, it comes and goes in the blink of an eyelash. We cannot savour it. We plan for moments, but we live through hours. This is why prom is never quite the dream anyone expects.

But back to King Kong. The artful creation of dramatic moments in a film has a formula attached to it. The camera zooms in, the music swells. But there is still something that has to be there, some intangible thing that makes the heart catch. Well, my heart was catching all over the place during this movie.

The scene where Ann Darrow stands outside the burlesque theatre is masterful. To be honest, any scene with Adrien Brody in it turned my crank… but the scene where he admits to Ann Darrow that he’s written a play for her is a lovely, tender moment. He becomes a non-entity in the latter half of the movie – but I was ok with that too.

And I loved the relationship between the ape and the girl. I loved/hated the moments where she knew that she had inadvertently participated in the murder of something rare and precious and beautiful. I loved the moments where she forced the pattern change from prey to entertainment. I loved the moments where the ape sat, with his back to her, attentive in his postured disinterest.

I love that she went to Kong, when she heard the panic outside.

You see, in the original movies, it was hard to see anything but the greed and the destruction. In the original movies, even the one person Kong loved was afraid of him. Not to mention, it is hard to imagine anyone falling in love with a vain, stupid, vacuous Jessica Lange (yuck).

To me, this movie was not an action adventure film. It was a collection of moments (with a lot of things crushed inbetween). It was moments of wild beauty, and senseless destruction, and forgiveness. It was moments of fear and greed, and consequences that can’t be avoided.

And just in case you haven’t already guessed, I bawled my eyes out at the end. Even though I knew whatt was coming…

I can’t tell you how happy it makes me feel to know that other people feel the same way about Terrorism (http://qntm.org/terrorism.html).

Your software install pisses me off.

It is like walking on eggshells. You are provided with a million and one prompts to allegedly “customize” the Java Enterprise System install, but the truth is, if you stray in the smallest way from the defaults provided to you, you do so at your own, enormous risk. You need a bloody university degree in the components, what they do, and how they work together, in order to make sure that when you specify something to be non-default, you do it in EVERY relevant place, because as the JES install configures all of the zillions of components, you have to supply the SAME data over and over again, so that each component gets properly configured.

It is like navigating a minefield. There is strong, strong incentive to staying on the beaten path.

Here is an example: There is a base DN. The convention these days is to use domain components for your base DN that correspond to your internet domain, ie dc=company,dc=com. Okey Dokey no problem, turns out that is the default proposed by the JES install anyways. My preferred location for my corporate users is in “ou=People,dc=company,dc=com”. Great. Fine.

Except now, I try to configure delegated administration. And it asks, no demands an Organization DN. And what does it want as an organization DN? o=company.com,dc=company,dc=com .

THAT’S STUPID!!!!

I’m not an ISP. I will never ever have more than one organization within my internet domain. I don’t want or need this extra data in my LDAP tree. Why am I being forced to enter this? And god forbid, what happens if I set my Organization DN to be equivalent to my Base DN? Do I want to find out? Will I have to start my install all over again because everything breaks?

So why, you may ask, if I am so pissed off with this install, why do I continue? Truth is, the software itself is great. I last went through an install in October of 2002 – the directory, mail server, and web server have run since then with no maintenance (other than my mail spool running out of disk space), and no downtime. The stuff is bomb-proof.

I know this because I have used it for a long, long time. But what new system admin, in their right mind, would go through this same hell, if they had no prior knowledge of the quality of the resulting system? In October of 2002, it took quite a few tries to properly install the Directory Server, Messaging Server, and Web Server. Now, I’m trying to install those 3 components, plus 3 more: Access Manager, Portal, and Calendar Server. We’re talking a lot of prompts, a lot of interdependencies, and a lot of opportunities to screw up.

It was tough in 2002, but the saving grace was that each component installed into a single directory. As soon as I realized that I had botched something, I tarred the directories up & moved them, or deleted them, and tried again. Unfortunately, it isn’t so simple anymore. Since some dim bulb at Sun Microsystems managed to deprecate self-contained installs, I now have to work with package installs. Package installs are a subject for another rant, another time, but suffice it to say that I am not a fan. They work beautifully for OS bits. Middleware, not so much.

So please Sun, smarten up. I love your software, but for crying out loud, you are murdering your own chances at success. Help us poor sys-admins to showcase your product. Please.