Scott’s Blog

I just finished reading Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow. I read a lot, in the order of a couple of hundred books per year. Many books are promptly forgotten, but this is one I’m going to add to my re-reading pile. I’m also going to buy a few copies and give them to a few people. For those who are into reading e-books, the electronic versions of many of Cory Doctorow’s works are freely available from the author’s website, published under a creative commons license, like my blog. That right there earns my respect, and I’m presently perusing the rest of Cory Doctorow’s catalog.

I’m always having these discussions with my wife about this discomfort I have with the idea of surveillance societies and the loss of privacy (ironically, considering how much information about myself that I voluntarily publish). The book Little Brother is a fictional story about what gives me the willies about the attitude “I have nothing to hide, so why should I care if they video me everywhere, read my email and wiretap my phones?” I think that attitude is based on a logical fallacy, that privacy only has value to people who are hiding something. That’s called a false dichotomy. Privacy is valued by people who are not criminals and do not have a guilty conscience too. Otherwise, why do we have curtains? If you have the “I have nothing to hide” attitude, I suggest you read this paper on the fallacy of that idea, written by George Washington Law School Professor Daniel J. Solove. Click the link and scroll down to find several links to the actual PDF of the paper.

Surveillance societies give up essential freedoms in the name of safety. Unfortunately, the sacrifice of freedoms is generally in vain, because the increased surveillance of citizens does essentially nothing to prevent crime or terrorism. Search with Google. There are many many articles and reports indicating western societies are no safer from terrorism than before September 11. In fact, many think we’re worse off, and now we have the added fear of misuse of all the surveillance information by the authorities.

If, like me, you are Canadian, you might think that there’s not much surveillance going on in our country. If that’s the case, do a little experiment. When you’re out and about, think about every instance during your day when your location or activity is recorded by somebody or some automated system. Do you go into a store? You’re on video. Do you buy something with credit or debit? Somebody knows what you bought. Use cash? If so, what about your Safeway Club card or Save On More card? They still know what you bought. Buying online? Same thing. What about traffic cameras looking at your license plate as you travel around town? Somebody could know everywhere you’ve been, and when. Now read Little Brother, and think about the picture of your life that all those little points of surveillance that could be constructed if a single authority were able to combine all that?

Really, I’m only a little paranoid, and I freely share a lot of info about myself. However, as is famously and often stated, just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

Sleep well.

I’ve been getting questions in the comments on my blog about our Deltek Vision system now that it’s been in and in production for a while. Instead of answering them in the comments, I thought I’d do a new post.

First, I’ll describe what we’ve settled on for our hardware deployment. We run Vision completely virtualized on two different VMware platforms, in a three-server configuration. We have a SQL Server 2005 server running Windows 2003 Server Enterprise edition as a VM on VMWare ESX Server on a dedicated blade server. We have a Vision reporting server (Actuate) running Windows 2003 Server Standard edition on ESX Server on a blade server that is shared with other workloads. We have a Vision Web Tier server running Windows 2003 Server Standard edition on VMWare Server (the free server virtualization product) on a SuSE Linux Enterprise Server host that is shared with other workloads. All physical servers use shared storage in a fibre-channel SAN.

The reason we settled on ESX Server for SQL Server 2005 is that under load, we couldn’t get SQL to behave properly in VMware Server. We tried various different setups, different filesystems on the VMware Server host, and in every instance SQL Server behaved in a flaky unpredictable manner, failing in various ways.

The reason we settled on ESX Server for the reporting tier was because we wanted to have a second ESX Server to run the SQL Server VM on in case the first ESX Server died, so we needed it anyways. Otherwise the Vision Reporting tier runs fine in VMware Server.

The end user interface is provided by the web tier which is just an IIS server in VMware Server. It is plenty fast enough for us. We have about 600 users give or take a few. This server is pretty lightweight, all told, and we could probably get away with running the web tier and the reporting tier on the same box, but that would limit our expandability, and we’re growing fast.

All in all, everything has worked great for the last year. My caveats are that you want to strongly consider running SQL Server either in ESX Server or on bare iron. The rest of Vision, at least for a company of our size, works great virtualized on moderately powerful server gear (ours is a couple of years old already).

You don’t generally run into performance issues, unless your accounting people are running big batch jobs or you are running maintenance routines or backups. If you can run all that off-hours, then you can get away with smaller hardware than if you have to do stuff like that during the day. If you are small (a couple of hundred users) you could probably run on one box, but I would recommend server-grade gear, not repurposed desktops. SQL Server is finicky regarding disk I/O and you want to be sure you have a fast disk subsystem. I would also consider the Vision hardware recommendations to be minimums. We doubled the recommended RAM and processor speed and it has worked out well for us. Plus it gives us room to expand. We were under 400 users when we started this.

I went to the University of Alberta Sports Wall of Fame dinner last night, with the swimming alumni crowd. It was a big event with over 900 people in attendance, and raised a lot of money for U of A Wall of Fame scholarships. I took a couple of photos of our table and will post later.

It was good to run into Sam Cooper, Gavin Martinson, and pretty cool to meet Lori-Ann Muenzer at the event.

Congratulations to all the new inductees.

This past weekend was my 40th birthday party. Lots of my friends and family were over, and much beer was consumed. Much beer remains however, because despite the great quantity and variety that I bought in preparation for the party, lots of people also brought beer. My daughter informed me this evening that there are 73 bottles, six cans, and a bubba-keg of Heineken left. I’m going to have to have another party to get rid of the rest.

Anyways, it was great fun, and I really enjoyed getting together with friends old and new. Today I keep finding all the name tags that Jenn made up for everyone that say “Hi I’m with Old Fart” stuck in various hidden places around my house. Thanks guys!

Here’s the party, in 3 minutes. Surprise you guys, you were on candid camera.

I just finished my usual last-minute tax filing and payment. This year I have 2 hours and 30 minutes to spare. I used UFile for the third year in a row. For anyone who does paper tax returns, I highly recommend getting with the 90s and doing your taxes electronically. UFile is super-simple to use. You enter your name and SIN, your spouse and kids’ info, and then just follow the steps, adding each form you got from your employer, RRSP vendor, sports club, dentist or whatever, and it automatically calculates the best way to apply your deductions between you and your spouse, and calculates your refund or amount owing. Then, if you have a CRA passcode, you can NETFILE your taxes right away and you’re done. My bank even lets me pay my return’s amount owing by Internet banking. Everyting is quick and simple, and it cost me twenty-six bucks.

I’m trying to post a blog posting from a text editor called TextMate on my Mac. If you can read this, it worked.

I bought an HP EX470 Home Server for Jennifer and her workmates to use as a backup target for their systems at work. It looked carefully factory-packed in the box. I took it out and went to set it up, and noticed that the tape holding the plastic bag wrapped around the actual server box had been un-stuck previously. Uh-oh, I thought.

I booted the thing up, connected an XP virtual machine to it (I have all Macs at home), and sure enough, instead of asking me what to name the server and what I wanted the password to be, it asked me to login to the server that was already configured. The London Drugs dudes had already had the machine out, and set it up, and then when they repackaged it, they didn’t reset it to factory settings. Now I have to recover it back to factory with the restore disk before I can configure it the way I need it.

I have a large milestone birthday coming up. I’ve asked people not to bring gifts to my birthday party. I just want to get a bunch of my friends together and socialize (and drink beer, of course) especially in light of recent events.

Since there are always one or two people who have to give a gift anyways, and considering this summer’s mega blockbuster geek movie extravaganza, movie passes would be welcomed.

I’ve been living through some tough incidents this past year. On April 23 2007 my dad died. We’re still feeling the effects of it, but now at least we’re past the series of firsts without dad (first mothers day, first birthdays, first Christmas) and we know what to expect.

We visited my dad’s grave on the 23rd. We removed the foot of snow from his memorial, and Mack and Emily each left a letter to dad telling him about the great things they did in the last year. I think it was therapeutic for them. I have this blog, which is my therapy, I guess.

I had a tough time dealing with my dad being gone, and so far it’s only gotten a bit easier. The toughest part for me is being at the pool a lot. My dad was always there at the pool when I swam, and now that my kids swim so much and play water polo, I’m at the pool all the time for them. When my dad was still alive, he was always there watching my kids too. I still walk into the pool and look across to the stands trying to pick him out.

Anyways, another swimming season is about to start, and in many ways I’m looking forward to being at the pool for my kids. I know my dad’s memory will be there too, but I’m trying to turn that into something positive in my mind.

In the past year, three men who influenced my life in significant ways have passed away. A year ago my father, who taught me everything important about family and helped me determine my values, passed away from illness. He taught and motivated me to become the man I am today.

In October, Allen Williams died in a plane crash. He was the father of one of my closest childhood friends, and the person who introduced me to the profession of engineering. He influenced my choice of education and his company was my first employer.

A little over two weeks ago, Reagan Williams, Allen’s son, also died in a plane crash in an astronomically unlikely duplicate of his father’s accident. Reagan was one of my closest childhood friends, from age 10 onwards. We swam together on the Olympian Swim Club and afterwards on Keyano Swim Club and then U of A Varsity Swimming. We experienced many rites of passage together, including sibling rivalries, first girlfriends, first breakups, swimming milestones like making nationals, winning national medals, breaking records together on relays, going to university in the same field of study, summer jobs, partying, and all the stuff that you share growing up. We also occasionally fought like brothers (but not as much as he did with is actual brother Sheldon). Even when I went to work in Calgary and we didn’t see much of each other for a few years, we still kept in touch and got together when we could. Whenever we reconnected it always felt to me like we had just spoken yesterday. I was proud to have Reagan as one of my groomsmen at Jenn and my wedding, along with Mark and Dean, the other two of my closest buds. For years I’ve thought of Reagan as family.

He was the most fun-loving and funny people I’ve known in my life so far, and he excelled at living life. He was a big goof as a kid, and I never lost that mental image of him even to this day, despite his lovely wife, committed fatherhood, respectable suits, and his influential nature in his business. He helped make many events in my youth fun and memorable, and always played the largest role in all our mutual adventures.

During the past couple of weeks while coming to grips with Reagan’s accident, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with many of Reagan’s (and my) early friends, and also with ones he made more recently in his life. A common thread in our conversations was that it really seemed like Reagan was the glue that held so many of us together. With him gone, it will take a herculean effort to maintain all the personal connections that he was at the center of, and no single person will be able to pull that off. I intend to do as much as I can to make sure that I stay connected to all those friends.

During a chat with Tanja (Oswald) Nelson on Facebook (who was my first girlfriend many years ago and best friends with Reagan’s first girlfriend Jill (Hayden) Jackson), I said this about Reagan, and it really expresses what I and many others feel about him: Everyone who met him thought of him as a friend. I think nobody but his wife Mandy could claim to be his best friend, but many people would say he was the best kind of friend. I feel privileged to have known him and I hope to stay in touch with Mandy and see Reagan’s kids grow up. I would appreciate the opportunity to help in some small way to let their boys know what a great person their father was.